‘Tramping all over your crops?’

‘The crops are up. The land is lying fallow. This would be a golden opportunity to earn a little extra from it.’

‘I thought I heard you say it was going to be a free festival.’

‘It would be free to get in. But people have to eat, don’t they? And buy their cigarettes and beer. We would set up stalls to cater to their every need.’

‘Exactly who is this we you keep talking about?’

‘Well, naturally you will want to get involved. After all, you are my biographer and amanuensis, are you not?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘I keep a careful record of everything you get up to.’

‘Then there is nothing more to be said. I’ll leave all the booking of the bands with you. Get somebody big, the Beatles, or the Rolling Stones, or someone.

I looked at the Doveston. And the Doveston looked at me.

‘Shall I see if I can get the landlord’s son?’ I asked.

Actually things went a great deal better regarding the booking of bands than I might reasonably have expected. As the summer came on, bands who would normally have charged a royal ransom for their services began to come over all lovey-dovey and start playing gigs for free.

We now had a telephone in our house and one morning in July, I replaced the receiver after taking a long—distance call from foreign parts.

‘Captain Beefheart’s coming,’ I told my mum.

‘Captain who?’ she replied.

‘Beefheart,’ said my father. ‘Otherwise known as Don Van Vliet, an avant-garde musician with a four-octave vocal range, whose seminal album Trout Mask Replica is still hailed today as being one of the most original pieces of work ever produced in the rock canon.

I took my dad quietly aside. ‘Just one or two small details,’ I said. ‘Firstly Trout Mask is a double album. And secondly it doesn’t come out until 1969. I think these things probably matter.’

My father nodded thoughtfully. ‘Captain who?’ he said.

Actually the good captain was unable to make it, but the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Big Brother and the Holding Company were still up for the gig.

‘Mark well my words, my friend,’ said the Doveston, when I told him, ‘Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin will both be dead from drugs in a few years from now.’

I shook my head. ‘You might have been right about the Mexican quarter,’ I said, ‘but that is quite absurd.’

I must confess that I was rather miffed when, a month before the festival, both Jimi and Janis had to pull out for unspecified reasons. I would no doubt have sunk into a state of utter misery, had I not been feeling so full of love.

‘About your boy and his band,’ I said to the landlord of the Flying Swan.

With just three weeks to go, the Doveston called a special meeting of the festival committee at his flat. I had been to the Doveston’s flat many times before. In fact I had helped him move in, being given responsibility for many of the heavier pieces of furniture. It was a pretty fab flat and I offer a description of it now to set the scene for what was to become one of those ‘moments in history’.

The Doveston’s flat occupied the entire top floor of Hawtrey House, one of the six new flat-blocks that had been built on the site of the old ethnic quarters. Each of these flat-blocks had been named after some titan of the British silver screen. There was Hawtrey, James, Windsor, Williams, Sims and McMurdo. McMurdo was a bit of a mystery and I couldn’t think of any famous actor of that name. The only McMurdo I knew was Councillor McMurdo, head of the town-planning committee.

So it obviously wasn’t him!

When the old streets were demolished to make way for the new flat—blocks, their residents had been rehoused elsewhere. It was intended that they would all get new flats as soon as the building work was completed. But I suppose there must have been some clerical error, or the council must have mislaid their new addresses, or something, because none of the original residents of that area ever came back to Brentford to live in the flat-blocks. Young, smart, out-borough types, who wore suits and had jobs in the City’ moved in.

The Doveston moved in also.

He was very lucky, as it happened. The top floor of Hawtrey House should have been divided into three separate flats. But it seemed that the council must have run out of money, or something, because the dividing walls were never put in and the Doveston got to rent the entire floor for the price of a single flat. He told Norman that an uncle of his had put him on to it. Norman told me that he couldn’t remember this uncle’s name, but he thought it had a Scottish ring to it.

It certainly was a pretty fab flat.

Its décor was all of the modern style. Lava lamps, bean bags and curtains of bead. Colourful rugs lay all scattered about. The floor was gloss-painted, the blinds were of reed.

By now the Doveston had accumulated an extensive collection of books dedicated to the subject of tobacco. Many of these bore the distinctive stamp of the Memorial Library upon them, but I did not comment on this.

There were, however, a number of items in the flat which I did comment on. There was a most exquisite jardinière, which I had first seen in the conservatory of Jon Peru Joans. A leather-bound and studded teapot, from which tea had once been poured for me in the House of Correction. And a beautiful box, wrought from skin, that I felt certain was the very one Professor Merlin had shown to us in his caravan, nearly a decade before.

When I asked about the provenance of these objets d’art, the Doveston was vague in his replies.

The sheer spaciousness of the flat gave it an air of grandeur. Its broad windows overlooked the borough, offering romantic vistas. The smell ofjoss sticks (the Doveston created his own) filled the air with heady fragrances and the sounds of sitar music, issuing from the Doveston’s new hi-fl, added that certain something.

I would have been quite sick with jealousy, had my mother not taught me that ‘jealous boys all go to Hell, where they have to look at Heaven all day through the wrong end of a telescope’.

The Free Festival Committee consisted of myseW Norman and Chico. Chico had survived a recent shooting and now worked full time as the Doveston’s chauffeur. The Doveston’s first car was a battered Morris Minor that Chico had converted into a low-rider. Since then the Doveston has owned a great many cars, but he never learned to drive himself.

We sat upon bean bags, smoking the cigars we were offered, and spoke about how things were going. The festival was to take place on the weekend of the twenty-seventh ofJuly, which, by coincidence, was the Doveston’s birthday.

‘Speak to me of bands,’ said the Doveston.

‘Right,’ said I. ‘Bands, yes indeed.’

‘So?’

‘Yes, right.’ I cleared my throat. ‘Right, yes, absolutely.’

‘You have actually booked some bands, haven’t you?’

‘Oh yes. Well, not actually booked, as such. Which is to say that there’s nothing down on paper. No contracts or anything. But I—’

‘But you what?’

‘Chico just punched me in the ear,’ I complained.

‘Bands,’ said the Doveston.

‘Yes.’ I rooted a crumpled list from my kaftan pocket. ‘Well, I couldn’t get any big names. They were all too busy, going on their holidays and stuff like that, and a lot of them seem to have buggered off to San Francisco.’

‘So who have you got?’

I read from my list. ‘Astro Lazer and the Flying Starfish from Uranus. Rosebud Lovejuice. The Seven Smells of Susan. Wompochumbassa. The Chocolate T-Shirts and Bob Dylan.’

‘Bob Dylan?’ said the Doveston. ‘You got Bob Dylan?’

‘Yes, his dad said he could have the Saturday off.’