Carl Halling

Carl Halling: The Story Continues

The Memoirs of Carl Halling.

The revised version of "Outside the Gates of Sultan".

Farewell, Lauderdale Tower, hello, Bristol Old Vic!

One man's crisis in the early 1990s

In early 1990, I lost my position as a teacher of English as a foreign language in an Oxford Street language school where I'd spent almost two years, the concluding two of a decade somewhat redolent of the '20s and '60s in terms of its glamour and profligacy.

"Genesis of a Gentleman", the first of a series of seventies-themed pieces, is an account conceived as accurately as possible of how I came to be conditioned by my environment in the early 1970s...

My Chiswick childhood was a long time ago...

Upon a time there was a college, a beautiful college...

The following story is not so much a story, as fragments taken from spidery writings with which I filled four and a half pages of a school style notebook in what is likely to have been the year of 1977 and artfully glued together.

Always near blowing it, living in the fast lane...

In the summer of 1979, following a year at London's prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama, my career as an acting student came to an end.

The following piece has its origins in the dying days of January 1993.

77 was a darker year than its immediate predecessors as I see it.

I have lost the fundamental restlessness.

A seventies dandy locked outside the gates of Sultan in the middle of the night.

In the summer of 1972, it was mutually decided between my longsuffering father and the authorities of Pangbourne, a nautical college that it was best I leave after a year in the fifth form and four years in the college itself.

My father was born Patrick Clancy Halling on the 28th of August 1924 in Launceston, second city of the Australian island province of Tasmania but largely raised in Sydney.

1976 was the year in which I came increasingly under the sway of the fifties, a decade far less congenial to my rarified tastes than the Bright Young 1920s, and yet I was thirsty for change.

Adapted, edited, reassembled with slight alterations in favour of verity of time, and of punctuation, from an autobiographical work or rather works with various titles written, destroyed, re-written, re-destroyed...

If my fifty year old memory serves me faithfully, it was some weeks after returning from the Ocean Youth Club trip to the Baltic in the summer of 1975 that I sailed with the RNR to La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast of France.

In late 1977, with the purpose of training to become a radio officer I joined the Merchant Navy College (in Greenhithe, Kent), the latter, no longer existent, having merged with the Thames Nautical Training College HMS Worcester in 1968.

In early 1990, I lost my position as a teacher of English as a foreign language in an Oxford Street language school where I spent almost two years...

Following my initial triumph as an actor in the winter of 1980 in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Bristol Old Vic, which moved to the London Old Vic in the summer, I accepted the position of sales assistant in Bentall's china department in Kingston-on-Thames...

Sporadically throughout the 1980s, I catalogued my existence via notebooks, cassette tapes, odd scraps of paper and so on...

The following piece has its origins in the dying days of January 1993.

Physical healing is in my view part of the Atonement, which is to say God's saving work for humanity through Christ's life, death and resurrection...

In the early part of 1994, I embarked upon the concluding stages of the Post Graduate Certificate of Education...

Following my premature exit from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in the summer of 1979, I enjoyed a reasonably extended period of success as a professional actor...

The following piece has been adapted from a page of diary notes, or unfinished and unsent letter, dating from pretty well exactly twenty years ago, which is to say Christmastime 1986, and composed during my brief tenure at the University of Cambridge...

The following piece which I have elected to call "Birthday Boozer, Solo Dancer", was compiled on the 21st of May 2006, using, as raw material, a few hastily scrawled notes commemorating a birthday recently celebrated in the early '90s...

Sporadically throughout the 1980s, I catalogued my existence via notebooks, cassette tapes, odd scraps of paper and so on, and recently, I decided to transform some of these rough diary entries into literary works...

Concerning the French Romantic poet Alfred de Musset (1810-1857), and the mysterious emptiness he felt as an immensely attractive and talented young nobleman enacting his gilded youth in the fashionable quarters of the tumultuous Paris of the 1830s.

The ensuing piece was fashioned using my usual methods, which I have described in scrupulous detail elsewhere. It is based on notes I recently unearthed, and almost certainly dating from the early 1980s, '82 perhaps, or '83.

Perhaps it was the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who first gave expression to the concept of an avant garde of artists on the cutting edge of innovation by asserting that "Poets are the unaknowledged legislators of the world"...

I took the Metro to Montparnasse-Bienvenue, where I slowly sipped a demi-blonde in one of those brasseries immortalised by Brassai...

Dear... I haven't been in touch for a long time. Sorry. The last time I saw you was in St. Christopher's Place.

I love... not just those I knew back then... but those... who were young... back then...

When he made his first personal appearance in the dirty alley on someone else's rusty bike, screaming along in a cloud of dust it rendered us all speechless and motionless.

I was born in the autumn of 1955, close to the undistinguished source of west London's famous Goldhawk Road