The Birthday Party

John can’t come to your party because he doesn’t like jelly.

That was one of the earliest rejections I was to suffer in my life. This excuse was delivered politely by John’s mum to my own mother on the doorstep of our house. John himself was stood behind his mum. John was saying nothing.

I’m not sure what age we were then, but I’m picturing us as small children. Peanuts-sized. He could’ve been Linus or Schroeder. Inevitably, I am Charlie Brown.

I wonder why John didn’t like jelly? And did he or his parents assume we’d force feed him the stuff against his will? In retrospect it feels like a neat excuse. The sort of bizarre thing as adults you’d make up to extricate yourself from a social engagement you didn’t want to attend. But seven year olds are too innocent for such deceptions.

John’s parents went on to open up a record shop – The Golden Disc – on the main road near to the church and the school I attended as a child. It was where I purchased most of my formative record collection when I turned sixteen and had my own disposable income. Record shops were everywhere in the 1970s and 80s, the golden age of music. The Golden Disc became a local chain with shops in several locations across Southend.

Eventually John and his sisters all had jobs there and though we parted company at eleven when we went to different senior schools, I would still see him occasionally when buying records. I never got to the bottom of that jelly mystery, but maybe there was never any mystery to solve. I guess he just didn’t like jelly.

I had a few birthday parties. I think they stopped once I finished junior school. As though that represented a cut off point. Or I’d become old enough to arrange my own if that was what I wanted. (And inevitably I’d be too lazy or too self-conscious to arrange anything for myself.)

I remember my brother’s parties. Games in the back garden. Someone had broken a window in the greenhouse when a hopping race or something equally physical had got out of hand. I think my own parties were more sedentary. At one I’d been given a model dinosaur by my parents. It felt like a grand, expensive toy that had to be put together like Lego but was more intricate like an Airfix model. I didn’t want the other children to look at it, play with it. I was worried it would get damaged. I was probably a bad host.

The last birthday party I attended was in my first year at high school. I was invited on a trip to London, to the science museum by one of my friends. This was his birthday treat and I suppose I should have been honoured to be one of only three chosen guests to be chaperoned by his dad to London for the day. Southend High School was a grammar school – you had to pass an exam (the 11 plus) to go there. It wasn’t a public school though, but I suppose it had pretentions to be like one.

Andrew and his other friends all came from Thorpe Bay – the posh part of the town, full of stock brokers, bankers and men (and perhaps some women) who worked in the city. I was out of my class in this company. A year earlier one of my best friends had been a brash, Polish boy from a rougher, Catholic, working class immigrant background. I fitted awkwardly somewhere in the middle, not quite comfortable in either setting.

The trip to London was fine. I remember feeling self-conscious about the cheap and cheerful snacks I’d been given by my mum to share on the trip. In the end they stayed in my bag and I ate them later on my own in my bedroom.

*

The Birthday Party is probably the most famous of Harold Pinter’s plays. I definitely had a Pinter phase at quite a young age in my life. His plays were often televised back then. They were good. The jagged moods of the protagonists, the carefully placed silences and pauses in the dialogue, these all appealed to me. Often nothing much happened, but everything carried a heightened sense of tension. Something would happen. That something would most likely be violent.

I’m not a theatre goer and as established elsewhere, for the bulk of my adult life I had no access to the TV. The Pinter phase passed. I’d seen all his major works. I couldn’t easily see them again. It would be interesting to rewatch them now. To see if my perceptions will have changed. To see if I still find them as powerful.

I often have these same thoughts about Kafka. It must’ve been quite young when I read The Castle and then The Trial and then worked through his short stories before eventually finishing up with Amerika. I even read his letters when they were published. I consumed everything there was, aware of course that he had left clear instructions with his best friend to destroy all his manuscripts upon his death.

The Castle was a grind to work through. The Trial had similar themes, but executed them in a more concise form. The shorter works were mixed. Some rambled to no particular point. But Metamorphosis was dark and original and A Hunger Artist was the one that had the biggest impact for me. The original short story that comprises the first chapter of Amerika was great too, so that even though the rest couldn’t match it, I still always felt a greater fondness for that book than the two other novels that gave Kafka his reputation.

Kafka is like Pinter, someone I could return to now and reassess from a new perspective. The problem is there are so many other writers I could’ve been reading alongside Kafka back then that I am only now discovering. You can’t read everything and that’s just the way it goes.

*

The Birthday Party were a punk band from Melbourne, Australia. They took their name from the Pinter play. They were the second incarnation of Nick Cave’s first band. (Originally they were The Boys Next Door and there was a more polished, new wave feel to their early recordings.) The Birthday Party were beautifully unhinged. They had that Pinter sense that something violent could break out at any moment. And often it did. They were never destined to be around for the long ride. But they achieved much in their short lifespan.

Nick Cave has gone on to have a long and varied career – not just for his songwriting, but also for books and poetry and film scripts and film soundtracks. After The Birthday Party he was always centre stage, it was his name either literally or metaphorically above the door. But in The Birthday Party there was also Rowland Howard. He was the guitarist. He wrote songs too. These creative tensions, alongside the energy and frustrations of youth and the inevitable shed load of drugs, all made for the combustible whole that made The Birthday Party so memorable.

I was just about the right age for them. Too young, alas, to ever see them live, but old enough to have consumed their albums before Nick Cave moved forward to the next stage of his career. I still have a fondness for these records that supersedes all the other things Cave has done. The noise and the fury, the unhinged sounds that threaten to eat up your speakers. The beauty of the quieter moments when set against these. I’m sure they were hard times to live through and they may not hold much interest to Cave himself, but they are worth revisiting. Celebrating even - maybe once a year.

Just like any other birthday.