Jeff Young’s memoir – a sequel of sorts to 2020′s Ghost Town – is a travel book that’s ultimately about the inescapability of home. Young recalls the journeys he took across Europe as a young man in prose that captures the myth, magic and bleakness of his experiences. His thoughts invariably return to his home city of Liverpool, to the strange alchemy that occurs when his memories mesh with familiar streets and buildings. Above all, the book is a touching tribute to his late father, Cyril, whose illness and death are described in a deeply moving coda.
Young’s father was a printer who, in an early scene, comes home from a night shift, his hands dark with ink, and finds his son about to quit an office job in favour of lighting out for the Continent. (As a portrait of the kind of paperback and LP-fed working-class bohemianism that lasted from the sixties via punk well into the 1980s, the book is second to none.) His father was also a collector of objects, many of which he enterprisingly sold from door to door, later opening a junk shop.
Of his mother, Young writes that, “my nana warned her not to marry him because he’d keep coming home with all kinds of stuff nobody wanted. Sure enough, soon after the marriage, he came home from an auction sale with a leather suitcase full of loose buttons. My mum cried, thinking Nana was right.”
Young’s world is the flea-bitten underside of cities: Paris, Berlin and especially Amsterdam. He sleeps rough; he becomes ill; he works in menial jobs until fired. He and his girlfriend resort to petty theft; the walls of their squat are full of mice. Gone in search of the hippy dream he had read about in books he finds it has gone sour. In Amsterdam he meets the Beat poet Gregory Corso, a decrepit presence, and procures a clumsily dedicated autograph. His portraits of his companions are suffused with love yet sharply etched. He is nostalgic but far from unsparing.
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Young retains much of the rapt poetry of the Beats and has a special line in the well-crafted image: “we broke off shards of ice from the edge of the water where the river meets the sea and skimmed them across the undulating surface, black triangles spinning in the darkness”. A dedicated collector of memories, images, objects: like father like son.
Karl Whitney is a writer and critic
