"Mad dogs and Englismen go out in the midday sun," or so Noel Coward told us in the thirties.

But it wasn't in the noonday sun, but in the rain-soaked twilight expanses  of Dartmouth Park, West Bromwich, that I discovered and delighted in the phlegmatic, marvellous, madness of the English teenager of the sixties.

Occasion was a rock groups' contest which capped last Saturday's washed-out West Bromwich Youth Carnival.

Under lowering skies, more than a thousand youngsters squeezed into the bandstand forecourt to hear their local favourites compete for a 20 guineas prize.

There they stood for three solid hours, while dank, chilly  night crept in.

What would we have given to be indoors and warm! But not so the youngsters. Their enthusiasm for the proceedings seemed to us almost indecent.

The music was little compensation - some was positively painful! One little Brierley Hill group, indeed, achieved an atonality and lack of rhythm unique, I would conjecture, in the history of beat music.

Yet their dreadful efforts were greeted only by a massive good humour. After all, they had done their best.

Was this madness? The world might think so, but I found among those youngsters a crackpot English sanity that warmed by bones by its blaze.