Cosmo's Strand

My son Cosmo Davenport-Hines was an undergraduate studying English and film at King’s on the Strand from 2005 until 2008. His tutors there have told me that he was a brilliant pupil in his first two years. His zest, his piercing intuitions, his leadership among his contemporaries, his gentle percipience about people, the arresting and precise way he spoke, his wittiness – all these were for a time undiminished in seminars. He was an omnivorous reader, who found joy in many kinds of literature, from Shakespeare’s sonnets down to Bill Burroughs. When he died he was carrying in his back-pack a copy of David Egger’s novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He had lived in London until the age of thirteen, then spent five years at a boarding-school in Hampshire, and by the age of eighteen was eager to return to the city. He was avid for the London music scene, and longed to be a cool, glamorous young guy sauntering through dark streets. He was six foot two, slender, beautiful, and knew he could captivate. He wanted to be sharp and clear in places that were nebulous. He wanted to be swift and sure. There was tremendous charm, but no self-promoting smarm, about him. Irony was his armour for London. The outlandish, when seen by him, seemed important. Weirdness, when described by him, made people smile. I remember in his first year at King’s how excited he was by the Strand. He loved the onrush on the pavements, he loved eye-contact with the one person in a hundred who wasn’t hastening by with scared eyes downcast towards their feet. The exchange of looks amidst the jostling crowd was what he liked. He used to come home exhilarated by the humanity of the Strand: the chaos of self-obsessed people, and the rare chance of discovering some of their stories. Strangers made him curious: they let him accost them because he looked unthreatening and radiated unselfish sensitivity; he seldom asked direct questions; he listened to what they wanted to say. At least, this was how it was the beginning, with Cosmo, back in London, ranging along the South Bank, scoping down the Strand. Cosmo began experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations in 2003, when he was seventeen. By 2007 they were obliterating his memory, estranging him from friends, ruining him. He kept them as a deadly secret. Although I know about them now, from notebooks and diaries that he left behind, I had no idea in his lifetime (nor did his teachers in the Strand) that psychotic delusions were conquering his mind. He believed that he had psychic powers enabling him to read other people’s thoughts by staring at them; that his destiny was to revolutionise the vocabulary with which people spoke and wrote; that people were made by words, and not words mouthed by people. Every coincidence seemed to be part of a chain. Ultimately he believed that he had sold his soul to the Devil: that he was the anti-Christ. He continued to look cool and beautiful, unless you looked into his eyes, which were sometimes very scared, and sometimes very lonely. Stephen Spender wrote a poem beginning, ‘I think continually of those who were truly great ...’ Thirty years later Thom Gunn wrote another poem: 'I think of all the toughs through history,/ And thank heaven they lived, continually./ I praise the overdogs from Alexander/ To those who would not play with Stephen Spender.' Cosmo did not think continually of those who were great or tough. He was very gentle, and in his last years he thought continually of those who were lost. He found them on the South Bank, and on the Strand. His university course effectively ended on 20 March 2008, and two nights later he went wandering among the lost souls of central London. I do not know where he was: perhaps the Strand, maybe not. Here is what he wrote afterwards, crazed in parts, but lucid enough: Ended up playing harmonica with a homeless Dude called Will. He kept boomeranging into Somerfield to buy more Lambrini. He struck up conversation with a kindly town-dweller who donated cigarettes there was a shy Indian looking girl at the stop, she wore no coat despite the torrential dew & wind. So moved out of the place to some Mosh bar, started talking with a gaggle of students, one called maybe Lindzee-Mae or maybe Anna-Ray, ‘You must be on LSD’ she said, tried to be normal and civil to her, she wanted me as a cartoon. Went on one knee to kiss her to prove I wasn’t gay, she called security had me kicked out, so took a left to find Will in an alcove. We hunkered down, we played harp to the lost shoals. Folded the blanket over & went to sleep, felt curiously normal lying next to each other, tied to corporality against the elements. Shook awake after an hour by his friend taken to a new alcove. He realizes someone had taken his Olde English Cider, nearly hit me, looked through my backpack. Nothing there. Bought him some new ones. We sat in a lush posh soap box entrance, 5 or 6 of us, main fixture characters. Anton – his mother had been a wanted criminal and he’d gone to America, he’d grown up there a bit. He was probably most willing to talk about his past but Will kept saying you shouldn’t ask too much about each other’s past; it’s etiquette. I should be more forceful. Balance between going odd places & not getting beaten up is a balance to be learnt. He was encased in a nylon cocoon, poking his head out to yell his ASBO status at taxi hagglers. Nikki, she was the most gentle by far, so soft & young looking. ‘You’re like a fish out of water’ she said as I left ‘like they said I was.’ She mothered them. They all mothered each other, like a pact. They rapped ‘Homeless crew.’ These people felt they belonged on the streets. Like me they had a hollow, a desire to be cast aside by the known warmth, to take comfort in the home sickness, nostalgia for first separation, some sort of tantric disenfranchisement from civility. The Strand: the traffic corridor that no-one wants to halt in, except the fractured people who stop to sleep. The Strand: the Venn Diagram where two circles coincide – the Savoy Hotel and Cosmo’s homeless crew.