27/07/2026
One Coffee, Four Hours
Paul Ernest • 25 July 2026 plus extras
A timid boy
We started going to the Witches Cauldron around 1960. I was a timid sixteen-year-old then — not much confidence around girls, or around people I didn’t know. My diary from that year, which I’ve kept, is full of it: the loneliness, the obsession with girls, the neediness of an immature mind. And here was a place I could go to regularly and fall into conversation with all sorts of people, from all sorts of levels and stations of life — kids of twelve or thirteen, the precocious ones, up to people in their twenties. All of us, in our different ways, looking at a new way of seeing the world, finding out who we were, having fun, looking for partners and mates — but most of all talking. Talking, and being listened to; being made to feel you had something worth hearing. Which is something you don’t get much of at home, and certainly not at school.
The place
It was a coffee bar in Belsize Village, a couple of minutes from Belsize Park tube. It was owned by Reg Conrad — and his wife Daphne — who also ran a second place, the Loft, up in Belsize Park, and who, blessedly, never chased us out. That was the whole economy of the thing: a coffee cost a shilling and you could make it last four hours. If you were flush, a plate of spaghetti Bolognese or a Risotto Conrad, named after the guv’nor, set you back half a crown. There was a cellar too, opened up around 1963 for music and dancing — a likely dive to disappear into. And the Witches was only the centre of a small constellation — the Moon and Sixpence on College Crescent, open till two or three in the morning; Club 01 on Haverstock Hill; the Loft — so an evening could drift from one to the next. There was also the Belsize Taven, across the road from the Witches, if you fancied a pint. That was a shilling for a pint of mild, one and ten pence for a pint of director’s bitter. Not that we did drift that often. Mostly it was from the Witches to a party, especially Saturday nights. If we were up on speed, we might stay at the Witches until it closed, and then the Moon and Sixpence until the wee hours.
Talking, talking
What we did there, above everything, was talk — proper conversations, about politics, about the films that were on, about the music that was coming, about the books people were reading and the poetry, the nature of poetry, who was writing what. So many things, all of it part of an expanding universe of understanding, and of being. People who seemed to like you; people who might, now and then, brush you off — but fundamentally it was enhancing, edifying, building. Over the four years or so that we went regularly, several times a week, my friends and I, it carried us from sixteen-year-olds to twenty-year-olds — a vital stretch of adolescence, filled in. I was not a fast developer, emotionally nor socially, the way some were, and the Witches gave me a kind of scaffolding, a support system, while I caught up.
Downstairs, the music
Upstairs you talked; downstairs, when they had converted it, you danced. The cellar was opened up for music, and that is where the jukebox lived — that is where we went to dance. I can see myself now in my high-heeled Beatle boots, stamping along to the Dave Clark Five’s “Glad All Over”, which has a rhythm made for exactly that. Mostly we preferred good recorded music to anything live — Motown above all, and all sorts of great rock and roll and blues, ‘Smokestack Lightning’ by Howlin’ Wolf, so many other tracks many listed on the Witches website. Most of the music before the so-called British invasion of the US. Some of our acquaintances would walk around with a guitar in a soft case slung on their back, ready to play at the drop of a hat at a party, the way you see in the films of the time; but down in the basement it was the records that ruled, until after our times when it became a live music venue.
I had strong feelings, mind, about what was cool, what was allowable. I could be moved by Roy Orbison singing about loneliness or love and, at the very same moment, feel it was somehow illegitimate to be so moved. That policing of my own taste was the superego at work — what is culturally allowed and what is not — and I have wrestled with it for a lifetime. What was “in” was the rock and roll of the fifties: Little Richard, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, some doo-wop like Dion and the Belmonts and the Coasters — and, underneath it, the Chicago blues off the Chess label, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and Sugar Pie DeSanto. Even Lonnie Donegan, for his vibrant energy and his link back to folk, and the skiffle he was the doyen of — though skiffle by then was peripheral, background to everything else. We mostly stopped going around 1964, when the place changed and the music took over; there were live bands in that small basement later, but by then I was only dropping in.
No foot-binding
It was a place where you were validated — where you could try things your parents might have disapproved of, much of which I’ve documented elsewhere. But most of all it was a place with no external moral constraints, no judgement, none of the frameworks that seemed so strong in Britain then, that held you in and stopped you — the way a Chinese foot-binder stops a foot — from growing in the directions that felt natural to you. It was a place of freedom: of thought, of expression, of going somewhere together. And of course we went to hundreds of parties, drank a great deal, got thoroughly disinhibited — and that too was part of growing up, getting out from under the inhibitions, the superego, the constraints that the social world and the schooling and even the unconventional parents laid on you. You became more of your own self. That could be self-indulgent, of course; it could be self-damaging; it could go wrong in all the ways I’ve set down elsewhere. But it could also help you shape yourself, and it gave you a choice in who you talked to, and in who you became.
A thousand acquaintances
The sheer number of people was extraordinary. My friend Tony Barnett once put his finger on it. One Friday night, about nine, aged seventeen, he walked into the public bar of the Old White Bear in Hampstead and found it packed — sixty-odd people — and it struck him that he knew every single one of them, and knew them well; he said he’d never since met anyone since whose adolescence came close in those terms. It was the same for me. We knew hundreds of people; we had a thousand acquaintances, maybe more. Because you might talk to up to fifty people in an evening, and go two or three times a week, and they were never quite the same fifty, the spread was enormous — a spread I have never matched since, and nor, I think, have most of the others who were there. Someone would burst in shouting that there was a party at such-and-such an address, and we’d pile off in whatever transport was going. Roger Silverman, looking back at the roll-call of names years later, called it a galaxy of rogues and rebels, loonies and crooks, poets and artists and addicts — all of them brilliant in their own entirely individual ways.
The most formative years
It was a wonderful melting pot — children of intellectuals, children
of working-class families, children of immigrants, all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds, all of us working out who we wanted to be, what interested us, what image we wanted to project, how we wanted to speak and be heard. It was a hugely formative four years. Perhaps the most formative four years of my life — though perhaps that is true for most people, from sixteen to twenty, when you are becoming who you will be, or at the very least laying down the really deep foundations.
The intellectual life of the Witches.
What we did, more than anything, was talk. And it was not gossip: not who did what at the party, who was with whom, what booze we found in the liquor cabinets and drank, who came late and who did what, but intellectual matters, the books we were reading and pressing on one another.
Borges, the Argentine, recommended as wild and mind-opening. Sartre’s Nausea. Against Nature by Huysmans, that echo of end-of-century decadence. The Beats above all: Ginsberg’s Howl, Ferlinghetti’s Pictures of the Gone World, Kerouac’s On the Road, Corso’s Gasoline, Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and all the literature that preceded and fed them. The transgressive ones: John Rechy’s City of Night, Celine, and Jean Genet, the thief and prisoner turned playwright, and Beckett. Contemporary novels too, the ones just catching on, Ian Fleming and Eric Ambler. Edgy works, works of the imagination, and books on drugs: Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, Robert de Ropp’s Drugs and the Mind. Books on magic: Aleister Crowley, the Golden Dawn; magus-poets like Yeats; the Freemasons and their ceremonies.
The French poets: Cocteau, Saint-John P***e, and of course Rimbaud, that symbol of creative youth, and Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, all the decadence and the drug-haunted literature, the story of the Assassins - the hashishin. So many things discussed.
Then there was the music. All the pop we valued, Tamla Motown, Barrett Strong’s Money; and I remember when Little Eva’s Loco-Motion came out, around 1961 or 62, it knocked me sideways when I heard it at Club 01. So many amazing sounds: Yakety Yak and Charlie Brown by the Coasters, Love Potion No. 9, by the Clovers. And the blues, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters and Leadbelly; skiffle, Lonnie Donegan and the Vipers. But the classical too, the music that inspired us, Bach and Monteverdi and Scarlatti, the baroque and the early music. Stravinsky, and the moderns like Massiaene, Varese, and so on.
And the films. The Everyman in Hampstead was then a repertory house, run by the father of a friend from the Witches, Alice Fairfax-Jones, a solicitor by day, who put on seasons of all the great classic films. An Eisenstein season, Strike and Alexander Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible. A Nouvelle Vague season, Godard and Truffaut, Breathless and The 400 Blows. I remember seeing Last Year at Marienbad and being completely blown away by its anti-narrative structure, which to a scientific mind was incomprehensible: not a single beginning and a single end, not a question and an answer, but a context and a labyrinth of directions heading away from it, none of them reaching an end. A Kurosawa season, Seven Samurai, Sanjuro, The Hidden Fortress, Throne of Blood, his Macbeth, and Ikiru, only lately remade. Wajda’s Polish trilogy, Kanal among them. Ray’s Apu trilogy. A Bergman season, Wild Strawberries and the rest. John Ford, who made Stagecoach. Ozu, Tokyo Story. Renoir’s Regle de Jeu. It was a whole education in cinema, just going there. We loved the Marx Brothers down at the Playhouse, bottom of Pond Street, and we would go to the late show of a Hammer horror in Golders Green at half past ten, after a few pints, not exactly high cinema.
And the jazz. What was going on in America: traditional jazz, Louis Armstrong; then bebop, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley; the freeform that was just emerging, Don Cherry, Albert Ayler, and the thirties and forties, Billie Holiday, and those wonderful orchestras, and that tenor saxophonist, Lester Young.
Exotic religions, Buddhism, early Christianity, mysticism, conspiracies, the Illuminati. Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and the left-field systems that tantalised and haunted us. Tibetan Buddhism. The Cloud of Unknowing, and the poems of Saint John of the Cross. The conversation was mind-bending, mind-stretching, endless, enlarging: the meaning of life, what it was all about.
So many things to discuss when you are young and your intellect is working away thirteen to the dozen, and you are looking for meaning as well as looking for love, looking for joy, looking for connection. It was not just parties and pleasures and excesses. It was companionship and mutual exploration. A lot of the people there would be poets, some more pretentious than others, some quite accomplished, though I do not know many who got published: Julius Holly, John Martin, and others. Writing was a huge vocation, the most important thing in the world to them and to us.
And photography. Tony Barnett had his 35mm Werra camera, only £18 with proper Weiss lenses; Pete Sayers, later became a professional photographer; Carmichael, whose photos documented the whole Witches era and grace the web site. I took a few with an expanding Voightlander with large negatives, mostly in Paris 1961. I gave the camera to Tony Jackson because he was interested in photography, although he went on to become a self-taught painter and pianist, playing regularly at the Groucho Club. Steve Goldblatt was another photographer who was also interested in film and later became a top Hollywood cinematographer. The rest of my collection of photos was culled from the others or taken in photobooths. All of these photographers apart from Carmichael, were school mates from William Ellis. And I haven’t even mentioned Phil Howe who spent his whole career as a filmmaker nor Brandy Thumim, Peters half brother, plus Steve Moss who studied at film school.
Then you might go off to the library to borrow records to listen to, classical or folk, or to find books. I remember pursuing the history of modern art through Mondrian, from his early art-nouveau paintings and his pictures of a tree, the tree growing gradually more abstracted until the rich symbolic thing becomes a host of interlocking separate lines on a field, and the sea becomes an array of pluses and minuses abstracted from the waves. That was his entry into his better known rectilinear colour reactangles, such as ‘New York Boogie-Woogie’. He was a beautiful epitome of the move from realism through impressionism and expressionism and symbolism and art nouveau to early abstraction, and then to full, absolute, total, clean abstraction. And seeking out all the books I could find on drugs. I even pinched ‘Martindale’s Pharmacopaeia’, you could look up all drugs in it.
The Witches was not just parties. It was a place of intellectual ferment, of growth, of connection, of building bridges and meeting interesting people and understanding, a great potpourri of ideas and disciplines and questions, of transgressive ways of seeing and thinking, of eye- and mind-opening talk. Most of all, it was a place of friendships, forged through close togetherness, electric meetings of minds and the sparkling sharings of times.
