Victoria Mary Clarke: ‘I worshipped and adored Shane to his very last breath and beyond’
Victoria Mary Clarke told Shane MacGowan to ‘f*** off’ when they first met in a London pub, when she was 16, but still found herself drawn to this shy, charismatic man. She pays tribute to the partner she knew and loved
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Your support makes all the difference.Nobody wants to write a eulogy for the love of their life, and I didn’t think I had it in me to write one for Shane. I fully expected to be one of those wives who throw themselves in the coffin and refuse to go on living. I worshipped and adored and cherished that man, to his very last breath and beyond.
I fell in love with Shane MacGowan when I was 16, in a bar in Temple Fortune in north London. He walked up to me and demanded that I buy his friend Spider a drink for his birthday and I told him to f*** off.
I was mesmerised by his audacity, and I stared at him all night and thought about him all of the next day and the next, but I had no idea what was happening to me. Later on, when I saw him sing at the Wag Club, I was hooked for life and I never stopped to ask myself if it was a good idea, if he would make a suitable boyfriend. The deal was already sealed and possibly had been before I was even born.
The Shane that I shared my life with was many, many different things. He was shy and also charismatic, thoughtful and also infuriating, serious and also hilarious, brilliant and also cluelesss, humble and also arrogant, a health freak and also a junkie and a million other things that most people never got to see. But Shane was not just a multifaceted human being, he was also an idea, an archetype, the embodiment of a movement, and a moment in time.
If he hadn’t been London Irish in the late Seventies and early Eighties, if he had spent his entire life on a farm in the Midwest, he would not have spoken to the people that he spoke to with the same precision and effect. I was raised in the Irish countryside at a time when Irish traditional music was sacred and Irish republicanism was volatile. Being Irish for me was something to run away from.
I emigrated to London to try to meet Boy George and Bananarama, to immerse myself in the world that I saw on Top of the Pops. But Shane brought so much emotional, political and sexual potency to his presentation and delivery in The Pogues, with their “Streams of Whiskey” and their “Dark Streets of London” that all the other pop stars were for children.
When I met Shane, fame and glamour felt like important ambitions to aspire to. I was self-conscious and pretentious and I had a strong desire to feel superior to anyone who didn’t look cool and who didn’t hang out with the right people. I was positively phobic about rejection and disapproval. Being embarrassed in public was my personal hell. But Shane dragged me into his underworld, into King’s Cross squats and drug dealers’ flats and sleazy early houses. Everywhere we went he made his presence seen and felt and he demanded to be vilified by anyone who felt in the mood for it.
We were jumped on and attacked on the streets so often that it just seemed part of a normal night on the town. He devoured drugs and alcohol with determination and ferocity as if his life depended upon them, and there were times when I wanted to chain him to a radiator or handcuff him to try to stop him from scoring.
When we went on planes it always felt like a miracle if we were not thrown off them. He would set fire to hotels and vomit in restaurants and most of his suits were full of holes. But he never cared what anybody thought about him. He had a sense of self-worth and of the worth and beauty of all of humanity, no matter how low down and dirty they were, that bulldozed through my pretences. He forced me to change my perspective. And I am eternally grateful to him for everything that he changed in me.
Love is a complex thing. If you let yourself love you automatically make yourself vulnerable to the loss of that love. But at the same time as creating room for a gaping hole in your heart you can also discover that your heart is more ingenious than you realised, and the more you stretch it, the more capacity there is for love. And what begins as romantic love can grow into something that transcends life and death. You can find yourself feeling as if the love that started out as just fancying a guy in a pub can be a force that embraces all of it, the living and the dead. God Bless Shane.
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