Elizabeth Hand: Wylding Hall

And I am not downplaying Lesley’s contribution. She and Julian, their harmonies on “Windhover Morn” were exquisite. And she wrote three of the songs. But any one of us might have been replaced in the studio. Julian? Never.

Will

That Wednesday or Thursday I went down to the pub to ask the barman if he’d seen Julian. He had not. I asked about the girl, if she was a local girl from the village. He said he’d never seen her before, but that she might have been someone’s daughter, he just didn’t know. There were a couple geezers at the bar, but when I asked them about the girl, I got the fish-eye. One of them said something like, that’s what you get hunting birds out of season. I assumed he meant the girl was underage.

That freaked me out — I thought maybe the town elders had lynched Julian for going off with one of their kids. And that very well may be what happened. I didn’t stick around the pub after that.

Ashton

Will told us he thought one of the locals might have done something to Julian. That was the first time I thought that maybe this wasn’t going to end well.

Lesley

I waited a week, then rang the police. I will never forgive myself for not going to them sooner. But I was so angry at Will and Ashton and Jonno, especially Ashton, and I didn’t want to do anything that would give them any cause whatsoever to call me a hysterical female.

And I was angry at Julian, too — enraged and heartbroken. And that girl. If I had seen her, I would have throttled her.

The police did nothing. The sergeant actually laughed when I spoke to him on the telephone.

“Eh wot, love, you want us to mount a search for your boyfriend? Might be you should search for another bloke!”

The next day I made Jonno drive me to the police station in Canterbury. We went in and tried to file a missing persons report, but the police wouldn’t let us. In retrospect, we should have gotten dressed up — we looked like what we were, a couple of scruffy hippies. There was no way they were going to take us seriously.

When we got back to Wylding Hall, I told Will I thought he should call Julian’s parents — he knew them. He said if he did they’d freak out and he didn’t want to worry them for no reason. I told him it looked like there was definitely a reason. But he didn’t do it.

That’s when I rang up Tom again and told him that Julian still hadn’t returned, and I thought he should call Julian’s parents. He said he would, and he did, but he waited another week. By then it was too late.

Tom

It’s true, I did wait. I know how bad that sounds, but I saw no point in having them worry needlessly. Kids were always taking off back then, hitchhiking to Katmandu to find themselves. Julian told me once he wanted to visit Morocco to see what a different, more ancient culture was like. It would have been absolutely in character for him to do something like that without telling the rest of us, especially if there was a woman involved.

But I finally did ring them up. It went as you would expect. Julian’s father was very stiff-upper-lip, not unconcerned, but he thought that Julian very likely had decided to take a trip someplace. He was less sanguine about the girl. They were conservative people, Julian’s mum and dad, wait-for-marriage types.

His mother didn’t fall apart, but I could hear from her voice that she was distressed, especially when I told her that Julian’s car was still at Wylding Hall.

“Why wouldn’t he have taken the car?” she asked. “It makes no sense to me that he wouldn’t have taken the car.”

Next morning they called the police.

Lesley

The police did fuck-all to find Julian. They listened to his parents, and I’m sure they were more polite to them than to us, but they just kept saying he’d most likely gone off with some girl, and one day they’d show up back home with a grandbaby in tow.

Eventually, they did file it as a proper missing persons case. I don’t how long it was before they did that — several months at least. You could find out by checking the police department in Canterbury, if they keep records that far back. If they keep records at all. Fuckwits.

We were all back in London by then. Jonno was in touch with Billy Thomas, and Billy said there had been cops out to Wylding Hall. They questioned him and his grandfather — poor Silas! I asked if they’d questioned the men at the pub, but Jonno didn’t know.

They questioned us, eventually. Especially me. God’s own irony there: I was the only one thought he’d met with foul play, and I end up being the one they suspect of it. Course they didn’t find anything at all, with me or anyone else.

I think his parents kept hoping he’d come back. I don’t know as they ever had him declared dead or whatever it is you do. I mean, what would anyone do? It’s such a horrible thing, never knowing.

They’re both dead now, some years ago. He was their only child. They took great pride in the album, I know that. I only met them that once, when it was released and Tom had a party at the Moonthunder office. They were very nice, very normal, upper middle-class. That was in October; he’d only been gone two months, and we all still thought he’d be back. It was too awful to think anything else.

Jon

I really did think he’d come back. I still do — I know, it’s crazy, but I do. He always wanted to go to Morocco, we talked about that a lot. He had that album Brian Jones did before he died, The Pipes of Pan in Joujouka : mad old Arab men in the desert, playing flutes and drums. Ancient-sounding music. Julian and I used to get stoned and listen to it in my room. No one else could stand it, but Julian loved it. It sounded like music from the dawn of time, like what you’d get if you set a time machine for the Dark Ages.

To me, it seems entirely possible that he ran off to Morocco or Tangier and decided to stay there, like Paul Bowles or William Burroughs. Smoke hash all day, hang around the souk, play the oud. Julian would love that.

Will

That girl — there was something disturbed me about that girl. I’m with Lesley on that one.

Years later, Tricia Kenyon told me she’d seen a ghost at Wylding Hall that time she came down and interviewed us. She described it to me and I said, Good Christ, you saw the girl! She said that’s why she’d finally told me. When I asked her why she hadn’t said anything sooner, she just shook her head.

“No one would have believed me,” she said. “And besides, what difference would it have made?”

And you know, she was right on both counts.

Will

When Julian left, that was the beginning of the end. We didn’t know it right away — we kept thinking he’d reappear, and things would go back to the way they were.

But everything changed after that. It wasn’t just that we missed him, although we did. We needed him. Without Julian, there was no Windhollow Faire. There would be no second album. None of us was thinking he was gone for good, but we knew we couldn’t record the album without him.

But we couldn’t afford to wait. Tom had been talking us up back in London. Patricia Kenyon had written that piece for NME and they were eager to run it — they didn’t want to wait till the album was released. Tom was tearing his hair out; he’d booked studio time for us. And even though it was his studio, time is money. He wanted the new album to be out by the end of the year, so it would get a boost from Christmas shoppers.

None of us had gotten any kind of advance for a second album. Tom was out of pocket for the lease on Wylding Hall and all of our other expenses as well. We were all totally, utterly skint. And Tom was reluctant to throw any more money our way, especially as it looked like Windhollow’s second album was going to be delayed, if it was recorded at all.