Nick Drake Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘It was an idyllic childhood,’ adding: ‘It was exciting living abroad, but the really wonderful thing was coming back to England – seeing snow for the first time and being able to drink water straight from the tap. I remember thinking that was extraordinary.’
    When, that same year, the American writer T.J. McGrath interviewed Rodney and Molly Drake at Far Leys, he asked them about Nick’s childhood. ‘Well,’ said Rodney, ‘he was always very fond of listening to music’. The voice is bright and well-enunciated, a voice of authority, upper-middle-class, worn and shiny like a much-used cricket bat. The pride in his only son’s achievements shines through.
    â€˜As a baby he was always conducting,’ added Molly, ‘whenever the music started. He always said he was going to be a famous conductor.’ Rodney remembered Nick being frightened as a child by a piece by Sibelius,
The Swan Of Tuonela
. Written in 1895, the tone poem had its origins in the Finnish epic which tells of the young hero Lemminkäinen, who journeys to the North Country in search of a wife and dies in the attempt, but is brought back to life by the magical powers of his mother. Sibelius used a solitary cor anglais to represent the swan, which glides on the black waters that surround Tuonela, the land of the dead.
    â€˜He was very fond of classical music. He listened to a lot …’ Rodney continued sadly. ‘I don’t know about the early days, but going right to the very end, the night before he died, he was listening to one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.’
    When I asked Gabrielle Drake about growing up with Nick, she spoke of the sheer joy of their childhood together at Tanworth: ‘We came to live in England when Nick was about four and I was eight … My dad was offered a job in Birmingham, and if you served out in the Far East, you had to retire earlier, so he knew he was looking for somewhere to settle over here. We were a very close-knit family, a very happy family. I had a most wonderful childhood … Nick and I were sort of opposites, we never had rivalry. I always used to think that Nick was a great deal more talented than I was. I was devoted to him. As we grew up, I became terribly proud of him.’
    Once settled in Tanworth, Nick and Gabrielle grew up, safe and prosperous, insulated and content, in the calmly Conservative Britain of the 1950s. Gabrielle remembers Nick composing songs even at this very early age: ‘When he was three or four, two of his great passions were cowboys and food. I can remember two songs he wrote then,one was a song about a cowboy in a book, called “Cowboy Small”: “Oh Cowboy Small, Oh Cowboy Small/All the other cowboys, call Cowboy Small”. The other song was about celery and tomatoes.’
    Prime Minister Harold Macmillan took the opportunity of a booming economy to remind the nation that they had ‘never had it so good’. Consumer durables were the tangible proof, and cars, television sets and record players were beginning to be visible across the strata of British society. Further highly visible evidence of the boom came with the advent of commercial television in 1955. Besides breaking the BBC’s stranglehold, ITV offered the public the opportunity to view, in their own home, advertisements telling them just what was available out there to buy. Many feared it was the end of civilization as they knew it. But for the Conservatives, such manifest prosperity ensured an uninterrupted span of government lasting from 1951 until 1964.
    The Empire which Rodney Drake and myriad other loyal servants had so diligently served was withering. The demands for independence which followed the end of the war had persisted long into the 1950s, and Macmillan was enough of a realist to discern the ‘wind of change’ sweeping through the African continent. The final flourish of Imperial dignity, and the