The Place 2 Be: Nick Drake

Cambridge

I visited Cambridge, Nick's university for 2 years, in August 2001. These are my memories of that visit.

We arrived in Cambridge in the morning and parked our car on Chesterton Road that runs parallel to the northern part of the River Cam. Walking into the university district in the centre of the city I grew to envy anyone who has had the privilege of attending any of the colleges of this university. The history of the place is incredible with past students including Bacon, Darwin, Newton, Henry VIII, Cromwell, Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Nick Drake, and many many more. The inexplicable splendour of the architecture is equally stunning: just walking along Trinity Street and viewing the mix of Georgian, Edwardian and Tudor houses and shops that face the colleges; the colleges themselves, especially St. John's (with gatetowers like those of Hampton Court Palace), Clare, King's, Trinity; the Corinthian columns of the imposing Fitzwilliam Museum. Wonderful.

The street market was open in the centre where there was a CD stall with a Nick Drake section pleasingly in prominence. I bought a further copy of Time of No Reply, this time for my brother-in-law's imminent birthday, who has promised himself this CD for years but has yet to savour the sonic surrealism of Clothes of Sand.

Having spent enough time in the city centre we returned to the car to top up the parking ticket and start looking for Drakeisms. By a sheer fluke we found that we had parked the car just 20 metres from Carlyle Road where Nick stayed while he was at Cambridge. Not too dissimilar to the houses around Hampstead where he also had digs, it was easy to imagine Nick staying there. Opposite Carlyle Road is the black, latticed Chesterton bridge that spans the river Cam and over Jesus Weir and Jesus Lock leading to Jesus Green. It is inevitable that Nick walked over this bridge to visit his co-students at Trinity college and elsewhere and it was a little spooky walking over that bridge and along the same river bank myself - equivalent to the feeling of walking down that same passage leading to Hampstead Heath as famously pictured on the TiA cover with Nick and the dog.

Walking along the river bank we hired a punt and glided down the beautiful Cam, under the Bridge of Sighs, and along the willowed banks whilst joking about the ducks and drakes that paddled on the river beside us. For me, this experience dispelled any notions of River Man being about Charon ferrying the souls of the dead across the five rivers of Hades (Acheron, Styx, Phlegathon, Cocytus, and Lethe). Whilst we can analyse and uncover supposed meanings in our heroes' works, Occam's Razor often cuts through to the one version of the truth, and that is invariably the simple one. As John Ruskin said: "Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours".

The River Cam / River Man synergies are profound. Punting down this river through this idyllic setting, as Nick must have done on several occasions, perfectly compliments and complements River Man: the syncopated rhythm of the song echoing the waters lapping on the Cam's banks; the "fallen leaves" of the willows floating on the river; the "lilac time" flowers on the banks like the "Just now the lilac is in bloom..." of Rupert Brooke's The Old Vicarage written at nearby Grantchester; the "all night shows in summertime" of the Cambridge May balls; the "summer rain" that drenched us as we first set out on the punt; the stifling effect that Cambridge allegedly had on Nick's ambitions signalling "the ban on feeling free" and where he "hadn't done the things he ought".

Leaving the town by car later we drove past Fitzwilliam College where Nick studied. Rather than the red-brick building reported in the Nick Drake biography by Patrick Humphries, we found it is a brown-brick building undeserving of its grim portrayal in the biography. Whilst no match for the heritage of the centuries-old colleges in the heart of Cambridge, this is not a bad place. I remembered two ex-colleagues who had been students at Fitzwilliam in the late '60's. They told me that they had the nickname of "billy-goats" (Fitzwilliam = Fitzbilly = billy-goats). One couldn't recall Nick and I lost contact with the other before having the opportunity to ask him.

On we drove to the American cemetery at Madingley where Nick first played Three Hours from London to Robert Kirby. This is a very respectful place commemorating those Americans who died in Europe during the second World War and I can imagine how spooky Robert felt when he first heard that song, at night, in these still but ominous surroundings. Walking along the great wall naming those who were missing in action I stopped at the spot that commemorates Robert and Walter Drake from Texas and New York where Drake himself must surely have stopped and contemplated.

We drove south out of Cambridge to our hotel, and through Brooke's Grantchester, and on the way passed a school named The Leys School, echoing Far Leys, (Nick's parents' home), coincidentally opposite a road named Bateman Street, echoing Tanworth-in-Arden's Bates Lane, (the road on which Far Leys stands), further signalling how one can find significance and meaning where there is none, or none was intended.