Nick Drake Read Free

Brontë family over three generations. These discoveries, and his comments as the doctor who knew Nick Drake as a small boy, may perhaps have some bearing on Nick’s short, sad life: ‘The causes of mental disturbances are usually multiple,’ wrote my uncle, ‘and in addition, the patient reacts to his own disturbance in his own way. One also may think of the patient suffering from society, and society may suffer from the patient.’
    Journeys into the mind are now commonplace, but at the time Uncle Jim began his medical studies Freud had yet to enter the mainstream. His world, and that of Nick’s father, Rodney Drake, sprang from a sense of tradition and moral certainty: a belief in the right of Empire and the duty of the British to serve that Empire. For men born as the twentieth century turned, there was little doubt and few questions.
    In a letter written a few years before he died, my uncle asked me if I knew the work of a singer called Nicholas Drake; remembering the conversation about Val Doonican, I was relieved that I didn’t. But he wrote again about this singer when a record called
Fruit Tree
was released, and it was then that the connection was made. A connection between a man born into the strict sepia world of an Edwardian manse and a lost child of more uncertain times.
    Thanks to my uncle, James Wallace Lusk, there is a long unbroken link from the launching of the
Titanic
to the life of Nick Drake – a life begun in a Burmese hospital and ended in a quiet Warwickshire village.
    The gravestone lies beneath an oak tree, just off the path which leads from the church to a gate into the open fields surrounding the village of Tanworth-in-Arden. The churchyard overlooks a curl of hill, the clipped fields sweeping into woods beyond. The horizon is topped by trees, and then dips down towards Danzey Green and Pig Trot Lane. The canvas-coloured headstone is weathered and worn, the inscription faded and, after little more than twenty years, surprisingly hard to read. But edging close and squinting, you can discern the epitaph: ‘Nick Drake, 1948-1974. Remembered with love.’
    The passing years have seen Nick joined by his father Rodney (1908-1988) and his mother Molly (1915-1993). To the casual visitor, the Drakes’ grave is simply another family plot, bordered by those of the Winwood family, of Mary Kathleen Whitehouse, the Tibbies family and Edward Rogers. There is something strangely comforting and consoling about a stroll around an ancient English country churchyard in the sunshine. There is some of Philip Larkin’s ‘awkward reverence’, but there is also history in every square foot of turf.
    On a sunny day in mid-October, the graveyard of Tanworth-in-Arden’s parish church is silent and undisturbed. The only sound is that of the wind, lightly whispering through the leaves of the oak, tinged with autumn brown, which are slowly falling to carpet thegraves. St Mary Magdalene is no bad place to end your days. Little disturbs the calm of the village. No car alarms shatter the serenity. And from inside the church the sound of Bach floats across the quiet churchyard; eternal music cascading gently into the silence.
    Just above the organ’s keyboard is a plaque which reads: ‘The sesquialtera stop was given in memory of Nicholas Drake and his music by his family in 1977.’ Chris Langman, who was playing the organ that day, interrupted his Bach to demonstrate the stop. ‘It’s not the most obvious choice,’ he said as the empty church echoed to the high, keening sound. It was an eerie, solitary, ricocheting note. A lonely sound.
    Outside, in the fresh autumn air, lie buried hundreds of souls, many whose whole lives were bordered by the boundaries of this tiny Warwickshire village. St Mary Magdalene has provided the final resting-place for many since it was built in 1330, and Nick Drake’s is not the only famous name: the motor-racing