Essex? It’s not the end of the world – but you can see it from here –

Adrian May

The word ‘bohemian’ is a mysterious one which is often used to describe those of unconventional appearance or a free-thinking artistic lifestyle. If you have ever worked or moved in the world of the arts, sooner or later you will come into contact with people, or groups of people to whom the description ‘bohemian’ applies. The bohemian world, too, may seem a strangely egalitarian one, for you are just as likely to find wealthy bohemians as you are hard-up ones.

Bohemia, however, was and still is a real place. It’s right in the middle of the modern day Czech Republic and its capital is Prague. The Bohemian whom you’re mostly likely to have heard of is King Wenceslas, a well-regarded Christmassy figure who ventured out on a snowy night to deliver food, wine and fire wood to a needy peasant.

Nobody is really sure how it is that people of artistic or unconventional bent came to be called bohemians, but for now we’ll go with the explanation that many years ago, the French employed the word when referring to exotic gypsy travellers from eastern Europe.

As a young chap who’d stumbled downstairs to semi-adulthood in the late 1960s, finding only the stubbings-out of hippie culture left on the breakfast table, I was attracted to the notion of bohemianism.

For me bohemianism appeared to be possessed of a ragged grandeur. It was a akin to a finishing school with Anais Nin as matron and Keith Richards as its janitor.

Yet, where was Bohemia? Was it in the dilapidated Victorian house up the road from me, rented out to an unkempt art lecturer with John Lennon specs and his partner, whose long hennaed hair was tied up in a silk scarf?

How would a spotty messenger boy like me, with my pudding basin haircut, ever get to know these impossibly distracted people?

That’s the thing with bohemianism, there’s no recruiting office. There’s no Isadora Duncan figure beckoning at you seductively from an Art Nouveau poster: “Think you could regularly let your friends down and disappoint your family? Then join the modern Bohemians.”

No, there’s nothing like that. Becoming a bohemian’s more like running away to join a travelling circus. When they leave town you just drift along with them until you eventually become one of them.

And then you’ll discover the reality of it: those nights of debauchery and song, so often accompanied by leaky roofs, lack of money, regular rows and frequent moving on.

Dr Adrian May has written a book, Ballads of Bohemian Essex. He told me that after the last war many bohemian types moved out of London to Essex.

It was cheaper, freer and there was more space. Sixty or 70 years ago, too, you could rent a run-down farm cottage, live on an old barge on the Blackwater or the Colne and generally muddle along somehow, without anyone bothering you.

Dr May, who now teaches creative writing at the University of Essex, has been a singer, poet and musician for most of his life. Both of his grandfathers sang comic songs. His mother played the ukulele and piano. His father was a poet and journalist who, shortly before the war, moved the family from London to rural Essex.

They lived in a rambling rented farmhouse, which lay down a long unmade road. May’s ‘spent’ youth, as he calls it, was in Braintree. Now in his early 60s he decided to get to grips with the subject of Bohemia in Essex.

Unconventionally, he decided to write most of his accounts in rhyming, scanning verse. This was a brave audit.

Most modern poetry is of course, ghastly. It doesn’t rhyme, it doesn’t scan and nearly everyone – myself included – quite understandably, hates and fears it.

Much of Adrian May’s poetry, however, is poignant, funny, highly readable and unexpectedly educational at times.

After a while, you tend to forget that you’re reading poetry and instead, find yourself blundering around Ballads of Bohemian Essex as if each piece were yet another room of a house which you’d accidentally walked into. May re-examines his bitter-sweet youth, its sultry nights and broken-hearted days almost as if he were performing an autopsy.

And then, suddenly, he’s older and wondering – with acceptance rather than indignation – where all the time has gone: “If someone calls me an old git, implying I’m heading for dust – We’re both in the same direction, mate. But overtake if you must.”

This bohemian business though? Was Bohemia ever in Essex – or in particular, Braintree?

As much as anywhere, is my guess. I can remember a musician from Braintree, now long dead, and his funny stories.

Once, he told me that he was in trouble with his wife: “I woke up looking at the wrong wallpaper – again.”

Essex, with its flat fields, its long lanes and its rough-hewn drunken market towns, was as good a Bohemia as anywhere. Bohemia is wherever there are mums or dads who play and sing in the pub.

It’s where someone manages to sell a painting and then has a party which starts on Wednesday afternoon and ends whenever the money’s gone.

In Bohemia, when it rains, everyone knows which places on the landings to put the buckets and saucepans.

It’s all silk scarves and no bitumen – that’s Bohemia’s trouble.

Ballads of Bohemian Essex by Adrian May is published by Wivenbooks.