OR Boy: A Norfolk Punk Spills the Beans

… there is just one thing I should like to say, about those monuments they have erected to the men that fell in cruell and greedy war. They have put on them ‘For God and Cuntry’. The People think wen they read them words that a good God ment that his human beins should be murdered for the lust of Nations, and there greed…. Now they talk about disrament, yet still the cuntrys go on making killing mashiens for the purpose of murdring there fellow men. It may be that I do not hold with monuments.

—I Walked by Night

Have you ever read I Walked By Night; Being the Life & History of the King of the Norfolk Poachers, written by ‘himself’, edited by Lilias Rider Haggard? It was first published in 1935, and consists of the anonymous autobiography of an English country boy written in his old age, looking back on his life through the later nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. It is probably the most famous of the East Anglian rural memoirs, due to the attractive power of the textual voice. The unorthodox writing style, spelling, and sometimes dialect language—I thought when I first read it in deepest north Norfolk in the frozen winter of 1984, fresh from my degree in Englit and hiding from my future, that it was touched with a minor modernist aesthetic.

Gaoled as a youngster in Norwich Castle for doing ‘a bit rong’—full of the old stories he’d heard about ‘the horrors of tranceportation’—the I-narrator remembers the unfairness of  how ’the Justice of the Piece’ and the ‘Maderstrates’ could ‘send a Boy to Prison for killing a rabbitt’. As he concludes of that episode: ‘I know that they soured me to the Laws of the Land’. (In a wonderful capture of how to write spoken Norfolk, he spells the word naked ‘naket’; a hawk is a ‘hork’.)

George McKay 1983

My copy of I Walked by Night, the 1948 ‘bound cheap edition’, is a hardback with a lightly embossed set of small animal footprints in a corner of the front cover, difficult to see.

In a short preface, the editor (daughter of the Victorian novelist H. Rider Haggard) explains how the book came about: ‘It is entirely his own work, but it is not as it appears here, as it was in no way consecutive. It came to me on letters and on scraps of paper, in old exercise books, on anything that was at hand…. I have done but little pruning; most of my work has been arrangement of material so as to make the book a narrative, with the incidents in their right places’.

Well reader, I have been given what is in some ways a not dissimilar memoir, though it is one about the punk rock movement in Norwich and Norfolk in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and much shorter than I Walked By Night. Here is how the MS came to me. In 1996 I was doing some press publicity for my first book, Senseless Acts of Beauty, and in an interview with the Eastern Daily Press or Evening News from Norwich, I happened to mention in passing that I might one day like to write more about radical East Anglia. In the newspaper article that became something like ‘His next project is a book called Radical East Anglia’, and a surprising number of people read that statement and got in contact with ideas and suggestions, and offers.

A scrappy collection of papers arrived, via someone who knew someone who knew me,  with a cover sheet saying OR Boy (the title needs to be spoken aloud, the letters of the first word spelled out, to get the joke). At that stage I’d  only written one book, but someone out there seemed to think I’d be capable of editing their own messy memoir, shaping it into something slightly more coherent. I was flattered and curious, and, when I started reading, excited. Now I was walking by night!

In their youthful earnestness, or their overwritten stylelessness, or their attempt at mythic depth, or their effort to write the musical landscape of the countryside, these writings really appealed to me. I thought (still think) they should be published, but they were not, nor, to date, have been. I now have the agreement of the author to make them available here, on this website. On one condition: the author’s continued anonymity. The plan is to ‘publish’ one chapter at a time, in order, over the course of a year or so.

Are you ready? Are you interested? We’re starting soon.

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George McKay in conversation with Penny Rimbaud, of Crass anarcho-punk collective, 2008   

‘Germany got Baader-Meinhof, Britain got punk’—Crass, 1977. Discuss.

Film of Penny Rimbaud, key artist in the British anarcho-punk movement and prime mover behind the band Crass, in conversation with Professor George McKay, University of Salford. Society & Lifestyles: Subcultures & Lifestyles in Russia & East Central Europe conference. Organised by the University of Salford and the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), 4-6 12 2008 Old Fire Station, UNIVERSITY OF SALFORD.

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‘”I’m so bored with the USA”: the punk in cyberpunk’, essay in Roger Sabin, ed. Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 49-67 

Then was America / We went there … /All the English groups act like peasants with free milk.—The Fall, ‘C’n'C S.mithering’

… There was something of an antagonistic relation between Britain and the United States in the punk side of popular culture, as seen in the song ‘I’m so bored with the USA’ by the Clash, a boredom which understandably lapsed when American stadium rock success and, later, Levi’s advertisements came along. Anarcho-punk band / collective Crass are typically more direct, concluding one song which presents American airbases, fast food and popular culture as facets of a cultural and military imperialism: ‘ET go home, Mickey Mouse fuck off’. There are more interesting narratives than these, though. Here’s the Fall again, with one of Mark E. Smith’s ‘crap raps’….

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Review of John Lydon  autobiography, ROTTEN, in Popular Music (1995, 14:2, 279-281)

Am I a walking contradiction?… Oh yes, I’m not. —Johnny Rotten

Read the review ….