Page 2

I was a big man yesterday but boy you oughta see me now
Well I talked big yesterday, but boy you oughta see me now

I bragged too long that your love was strong
There'd never be another guy
But you said more when you whispered your goodbye
I was a big man yesterday but boy you oughta see me now

I said that I was through with you
I didn't need you anyhow
I said I didn't need you then
But boy you oughta see me now

Those bragging words that you were mine
Of that there was no doubt
So empty now that half my life's walked out
Half my life left me yesterday
And boy you oughta see me now

If you will just forgive me dear
I'll never break another vow
I broke so many yesterday
And boy you oughta see me now

I couldn't see it yesterday
But now I know it's true
The only thing that made me big was you

I was a big man yesterday but boy you oughta see me now
If you could only see me now
You should see me now





Chapter 12. THE HOUSE IN MEAD ROAD


     Mick Rickards and I met at Mead Road Infants School when the Bradley family moved back to Chislehurst. He was in the class above me and, as the school was an old Victorian House, I used to see him during break times when they opened the shutter doors between the two rooms on the ground floor. We used to grin and wave to each other, and the next term, when I moved up a class, Mick had a space next to him, so I grabbed it.

     Mick and I hit it off straight away. We never fell out all the time we knew each other which was about twenty years up until the last time I saw him in 1973. He used to wear those corduroy suits at infant’s school with the windcheater top, elastic cuffs and zip front. Mick had a green one and a brown one and I always thought they looked the business.

     Living in the same street, we played together quite a lot. He had an imagination that dovetailed neatly into mine when it came to fantasy games like cowboys when his ‘mouth-gun’ noises were second to none. Sometimes we’d play Dan Dare because Mick had a Dan Dare gun.
&
nbsp;    “I know what you’re thinking. Did I fire 106 shots or was it only 105? To tell the truth, I’ve kinda lost track myself, in all the excitement. And being as this is a genuine 7s 6p Lone Star cap gun from Woolworth’s, the most powerful cap gun this side of Bexley, and would blow your eardrums clean away, you gotta ask yourself a question. Is it tea time yet? Well, is it, punk?”

     BANG, BANG

     No one died like Mick Rickards. He was brilliant. A real pleasure to plug or blast or stab in the many blood soaked games we played. He’d clutch his stomach with both hands and fall onto his knees, (even if you shot him in the head) the terrible pain described by the twisted expression on his face, his teeth clenched in agony. He’d stay on his knees for a moment as the agony on his face worsened, then slowly twist sideways and collapse onto his side before finally rolling onto his back, spread-eagled - dead as a door-nail. Sensational.

     This routine later won him the part of Julius Caesar in a 4th year school production of the murder scene from Shakespeare’s play at Edgebury. The conspirators had wooden daggers and lemon squeezers full of tomato ketchup, which they sprayed liberally about with great enthusiasm. And did Mick know how to do his dying? You bet - except falling as he did onto bare floorboards, he must have inflicted some serious pain to his kneecaps.

     Sam Peckinpar would have been proud of our performance what with all that blood and mayhem. The dialogue didn’t count for much, not to the players, and Chick Cheese just had time to spit out the words:
     “Speak hands, for me,” before leaping forward to make the first plunge with his wooden dagger.

     This wasn’t a costume piece but a ‘modern’ production with grey trousers and white shirts, which were pretty soon splashed with copious amounts of the best Caesar’s blood half a gallon of HP sauce in concealed lemon squeezers, could supply. By the time Mick was on his knees clutching his chest, the familiar expression of agony spread across his face, he was wearing a red shirt with white bits splashed on it.

     Finally, not that it was needed, it was: “Et tu, Brutus?” as the last dagger was driven home and Mick fell forward for the big goodnight. A hush really did fall over the audience, like a damp blanket.

     I never got to be part of the mayhem and had a very insignificant part as a servant with two lines of equal insignificance delivered from one knee, stage left. I did get a chance to study the audience, however, which was visibly stunned in disbelief at what they’d just witnessed.

     The performance was a competition entry at a drama festival at the Rose Bruford Drama School in Sidcup. We were competing against several other schools and eventually came 4th, though this small measure of success, I suspected, was influenced by what the judges feared the bloodthirsty cast might do to them if they weren’t awarded some kind of recognition for their efforts.

     LIFE’S A STAGE

     Leonard Parkin, the young visiting Jewish drama lecturer at Edgbury who’d instigated the whole thing, was more than pleased and was grinning from ear to ear as we left the stage. I got the impression that he’d deliberately set out to upset the establishment apple cart and was delighted at the result.

     Len, as he allowed us to call him, was very theatrical himself with his 3 piece suit, long black curly hair and suede chucker boots. He’d amazed the class with his own acting ability, demonstrating his expertise one day by throwing down a challenge that he could act out any part or character we cared to throw at him. Just his incredible demonstration of a laughing man was enough to have us eating out of his hand. Leonard Parkin was a very clever bloke who gained the respect of what must have been a fairly formidable class 14/15 year olds.

     Being quite square and solid, Mick was by far the strongest boy I knew and could throw a punch like you wouldn’t believe, not to mention a cricket ball for about half a mile. He also had this ability to throw it vertically so that it almost disappeared from sight. He taught me the technique and though I could never throw as high, I’m still quite impressive today - well, to a child anyway.

     From Mead Road, Mick and I went on to Red Hill together and then to Edgebury where we were merged with a load of kids from Mottingham, a notoriously tough district. They beat up most of us, at one time or another - me regularly because I was small and had little bodyweight with which to defend myself. Strangely, they never beat up Mick.

     A couple of the bigger ones tried to their cost. Mick used a devastating technique when push came to a bit more of a shove. The protagonist soon became a victim and would be grabbed at whip-like speed in a headlock, hurled to the ground then turned over onto his knees, exposing his back.

     Mick would then deliver a piston-like kidney punch straight down like a pile driver and render the victim immobile with agony. Then, if Mick was feeling a touch turgid, the poor bastard would be finished off with a couple of his crippling forearm smashes that he’d perfected from watching wrestling on the telly.

     Don’t get me wrong. Mick was one of the kindest, most genuine, gentlest lads you could ever wish to meet. It just didn’t do to upset him. Maybe his red hair had something to do with it. Later, at about 14, he joined his Dad’s cricket club and then became captain of the school team as well as a terrifyingly efficient, and deadly express train for the rugger 1st fifteen.

     There was no one, not child or adult, who could convincingly pretend to be brave when facing Mick’s similar approach to bowling. For someone who erred towards largish proportions, he had an astonishing turn of speed from the pavilion end. The stumps didn’t just fly out of the ground, they were splintered into matchwood...along with many a batsman. Mick Rickards caused grown men to give up cricket.


SFX: door opening
Mr Glum: “Allo, allo, allo! What’s goin on ‘ere, then?”
Eth: “Ooh, Mr Glum. You gave me quite a turn bursting in like that.”
MG: “But I always burst in like that, Eth.”
E: “Yes, but it’s usually much later on when Ron and I have had a chance to, you know, get going.”
MG: “Just thought I’d pop in early for a change on account of the fact that I always seem to miss whatever it is the 2 of you ‘ave bin up to.”
E: “Like what, prey?”
MG: “Well, I thought you might have got your kit off, for a start.”
E: “KIT OFF! Aren’t you a about 40 years previous with that one, Mr Glum?”
MG: “I always was a tad previous.”
E: “You can say that again.”
MG: “I always was a tad previous.”
E: “Isn’t there something you’d rather be doing as I haven’t…got my kit off, as you put it?”
MG: “Do me a favour! Anyway, where’s Ron?”
Ron: “I’m over here, Dad, behind the sofa.
MG: “What’re you doin’ dahn there? Playin’ with your trainset, I’ll be bahned.”
Ron: “No, dad. I’m revising.”
MG: “Revisin’? But you already know your 2 times table, Ron…well, I know you ‘ave trouble with 2 elevens…”
E: “ Mr Glum, it’s obviously escaped your notice that in the 14 years Ron and I have spent together, between us we’ve managed to coach him through 16 O levels, 10 A’s, a BA in Physics, and an MA in politics and physiology.”
MG: “It’s the first time I’ve ‘eard abaht it.”
E: “Yes, well I think if you’d taken a bit more interest…”
MG: “I’m always interested in Ron furtherin’ his career opportunities, but I must ‘ave overlooked certain aspects of it, though I can’t think why.”
E: “Perhaps, Mr Glum, it has something to do with the 3000 gallons of brown ale you’ve consumed during the time Ron’s been studying.”
MG: “Nah, see ‘ere, my girl…”
E: “Anyway, something else you haven’t noticed, as you put it, is that Ron is about to qualify for a PhD.”
MG: “Ah, I see. Nah you’re talkin’. I always said an ‘eavy goods liscence would come in ‘andy. Well done, son. This calls for a celebration. Nah, where did I put that spare barrel?”




* * * * * * * * * * * *



Dom dom dom dom dom
Dom be dooby
Dom dom dom dom dom
Dom be dooby
Dom dom dom dom dom
Dom be dooby dom
Whoa whoa whoa whoa

I love love you darling
Come and go with me
Come home with me
Baby I'm to see
I need you darling
Come and go with me
Whoa whoa whoa whoa

Come come come come
Come into my heart
Tell me darling
We will never part
I need you darling
Come and go with me
Whoa whoa whoa whoa

Yes I need you
Yes I really need you
Please say you'll never leave me
When you say you never
Guess you really never
You never give me a chance

Come come come come
Come into my heart
Tell me darling
We will never part
I need you darling
Come and go with me
Whoa whoa whoa whoa

You never give me a chance

I love love you darling
Come and go with me
Come home with me
Baby I'm to see
I need you darling
Come and go with me

Come on go with me
Dom dom dom dom dom
Dom be dooby
Come on go with me
Dom dom dom dom dom
Dom be dooby
Come on go with me
Dom dom dom dom dom
Dom be dooby
Come on go with me



Chapter 13. 1953 AND ALL THAT


     It was in 1953 that Mick Rickards and I first caught sight of one another across that corridor, and a lot of important things happened in 1953. We got our first telly; Blackpool beat Bolton in the FA cup - Stanley Mathews V Nat Lofthouse. Today’s players can’t dribble like that, except perhaps, when they’re pissed; Hillary and Tensing Climbed Everest; the Queen was crowned and Nigel Drew showed his willy.

     I remember it was 1953 because our teacher at Mead Road Infants, Mrs Adamson, a pleasant hawk-faced lady with tightly-curled raven black (2 birds in one sentence) hair and even curlier blue glasses, was helping us construct a huge 3 dimensional Coronation Crown on one of the walls.

     We all had to bring in sweet wrappers for the jewels, and we made the ermine out of cotton wool dobbed with black paint. The thing was about 4 ft across and very impressive. So was Nigel Drew’s willy - a little less than 4 feet across, but he thought it was none-the-less impressive enough to exhibit it to all and sundry. The girls who didn’t have brothers ran for cover. The rest just laughed - maybe girls would always laugh at Nigel Drew’s willy.

     Mrs Adamson had stepped out of the room and had been gone for about 15 minutes - ample time for a bunch of 6 year olds to get completely out of their trees. Mayhem would accurately describe it. Desk lids were banged, rubbers were flung about, - that’s erasors, not prophylactics. Everyone was screaming and shouting and then when things were reaching a crescendo, our Nigel stood on his chair, lifted his right brown corduroy trouser leg, and introduced us all to his little friend whom he waggled about enthusiastically.

     Thelma Palmer subtly informed Mrs Adamson of the event as soon as she returned to the classroom:

     “Nigel Drew showed his willy,” she shouted as if through a megaphone.
     “We’ll have no more talk like that.” said Mrs A, moving right along. I’ve often wondered if exposing himself was going to be a long lasting habit of Nigel’s, or whether it was just a bit of off-the-cuff inspiration - or should I say, down the leg?

     ROSA

     Opened in 1901 as a school, Mead Road Infants was really an old double fronted house with a huge garden, which became a playing field where they built a corrugated hut housing 2 classrooms and the main hall, which doubled as a gym. It was a very pleasant place to be and seemed to be summer all the time.

     Every Friday afternoon was toy time. You could take whatever you wanted into school to play with, except loaded firearms. One week was small toys for half the school and the other half took big toys in. Next week we swapped over.

     The headmistress was Rosa Klebb, the Russian Colonel from ‘From Russia With Love,’ - the old dragon with the poison knives in the toes of her shoes. She was disguised as Miss Bartholomew, who looked like she’d been at the school since it was built. Rosa always wore a brown tweed suit, stockings that you couldn’t see through, little brown lace up boots, and non-descript flesh-coloured national health glasses. Her hair was scraped back into an untidy bun with two huge tortoise-shell slides with wispy bits of hair falling out all over the place.

     She was a short, bony 5 ft 1 and wore those long, droopy, down-to-the-knee bloomers like my Nan wore. How’d I know? You couldn’t miss ‘em when she sat down. I wasn’t looking for them believe me - I thought, even at 6 years old, they were horrendous things.

     Rosa had the voice of an English-speaking Bugs Bunny, sort of abrasive, with the texture of sandpaper. She marched everywhere rather than walked. A hush fell over the gathering when she entered a room, and I think the staff was more scared of her than the kids were.

     She played, or rather attacked the piano in assembly every day, pounding the heel of one of her jack-boots on the floorboards to keep time (we’d’ve got a nasty fright if her poisoned knives had popped out of the toes!) and singing the hymns in a screechy, falsetto voice that rose well above everybody else.

     There was a concrete yard between the corrugated hut and the main house that you had to cross to get to the main gate. There’d been a downpour one afternoon and I came upon the biggest, most attractive puddle I’d ever seen right in the middle of it. I could have walked round it and was probably going to, but I falterered at the edge and tentatively touched the sole of my right brogue gently on the surface.

     “Neal Bradley! What on earth do you think you’re doing? How dare you!”

     Rosa’s blood-curdling scream was unmistakable. I half turned and froze solid, my foot still dangling over the puddle. She came goose-stepping across the yard and grabbed me by the arm.

     “We’ll see what your Mother has to say about this.” and she frog-marched me to the front gate where Connie was waiting. Rosa delivered a lecture on discipline, the price of shoes these days, irresponsibility, and possible sentence for my crime, which I think, was bed without any tea or crucifixion.

     Connie seemed to listen attentively, and then thanked Rosa and we walked away. I waited for the tirade I was sure was to come. Half way along the street, Connie spoke. Boy, was she angry.

     “Silly cow. It’s none of her bloody business what you do with your shoes. They’re all worn out and you need a new pair anyway. Don’t tell your father - he’ll be up the school after her. Here, have a bag of liquorice”

     All in all, I enjoyed my time at the little school, and on sports day at the end of the last term, I ran a dead heat in the 80 yds with Graham Stacey who’s mother had a really important job (so both he and she thought) as head of the kitchen at Red Hill, and we were both presented with gold Coronation pencils by none other than Rosa Klebb herself. She was half-smiling,still in her brown tweed suit and mini jack-boots on what was a very hot day.

     I suppose she wasn’t all Nazi, KGB or SPECTRE, and probably very dedicated in her own way. In any event, I kept the pencil for many years.

     THE WEBB

    Miss Webb, a large woman who looked like she belonged in a Wagner opera with her red hair tied around her head in plats and a bun. She wore tent-like flower-print dresses that gave her the appearance of a floral geometer and carried one of those pathetic police type whistles that don’t have a pea on a red ribbon round her neck which she blew to little effect at the end of what we called playtime in those days, and then announced in a falsetto much like Rosa’s singing voice:

     “I have blown a whiss-ol!” (Sounded more like rissoll) Imagine the second syllable of the word up a half tone from the first and you’ll get the general idea.

     THE MONSTER MASH

     There always seems to be a Miss Williams at mixed Schools. They’re always good looking with dark hair and slim figures. My son’s form teacher in the last year at his prep school was one. She was a dark-haired stunner with cream, porcelain skin and a voice to die for.

     There was a Miss Williams at Mead Road. Same description, except she seemed very tall to a 5 year old, though she probably wasn’t. She always wore black a lot with a tight cardigan or polo-necked sweater, which accentuated her very pointed breasts to great effect even to infants.

     In the 1950’s, bras were constructed to the shape of aircraft noses and I wonder now if there was a conscious co-relation between this and the fact that Howard Hughes, designer of some of the world’s most famous flying machines, including the Catalina Flying Boat, also designed the first cantilever bra to support the celebrated chest of Jane Russell.

     Mead Road Miss Williams taught the very bottom, or babies class, which for some reason seemed to attract some very fiery little brats as pupils. One was Peter Baddrick, an appropriately named bullet-headed little thug, his bonce shaved at the sides, a blonde thatch on top.

     VERY BADDRICK

     Peter Baddrick was a very early skinhead who at the age of 5 was described by staff and pupils alike as a nasty little fighter. Already he seemed to be making a career out of terrorising everybody in sight, probably including his mother.

     Our class teacher, Mrs Hern, was ill one day and some of us were sent next door into the care of Miss Williams. Baddrick was already in trouble when we crossed over and was standing next to Miss William’s desk, obviously in disgrace judging by the grimace on his chops.

     Miss Williams was sitting on a chair at the front of the desk reading a story to the class. Baddrick was supposed to be facing the corner of the room but kept turning round to offer threats to anyone who happened to be looking his way.

     “Ull pinch yer. Ull ‘it yoo. Ull fix yoo up. Kiknmunchitdfingywidmefistyoubog!”

     And then he’d start theatening everyone.

     Now and then, Miss Williams turned him away from the class and was in the process of turning him back round for the 65th time, when Baddrick suddenly whirled round and delivered a perfect straight right to her left breast with all the force a 5 year old thug could muster, which in his case, as a thriving psychopath, was quite considerable. Her breast and its pointed nose cone momentarily crumpled in the impact.

     Every man comes to know in his life, the excruciating agony produced by his testicles coming into contact with an immovable object, like the crossbar of a bike or the toe of a football boot. Judging by the way Miss Williams reacted; the same kind of pain is caused to a woman when her breast is used as a punch bag.

     She stood up, grabbed Baddrick by the arm and lifted him right off the floor. She thrashed him to within a millimetre of his life, cascading slap after slap on his legs, arms and behind. When she’d run out of energy, she thrust him nose against plaster into the corner of the room where he spent the rest of the afternoon screaming the old Victorian house down.


     She’d never get away with that today of course, and would most likely be charged with assault. Baddrick would probably get away with breast punching, the cause of which would be blamed on the wrong type of diet or not enough Christmas presents, poor lamb.

     Baddrick picked me up in his mini van about 15 years later when I was hitchhiking from my girlfriend’s house in Orpington. I’m not sure if he recognised me, but the piched-faced, squinty-eyed ‘one funny move and I’ll rip your heart out and feed it to my pet piranas’ expression, told me he hadn’t changed that much. I decided to keep the conversation to the minimum and pretend I was dumb. I was quite relieved when he stopped the van at the bottom of my road and let me escape unscathed.

‘That’s none for the pot with Lions Quick Brew’

HC: “Sooty. Dorn’t do thut!”


* * * * * * * * * * *



Wop-bop-a-loom-a-boom-bam-boom tutti frutti
au rutti tutti frutti au rutti tutti frutti
au rutti tutti frutti au rutti tutti frutti
au rutti wop-bop-a-loom-bop-a-boom-bam-boom

Got a gal named Sue
She knows just what to do
She rocks to the east
She rocks to the west
She's the gal I love best

I got a gal named Daisy
She almost drives me crazy
She knows how to love me
Yes indeed, boy you don't know
What she does to me



Chapter 14. THE BIG BANG OR HOW I ALMOST NEVER BECAME A GUITAR PLAYER

     How did I come to blow myself up? Easily.

     On the prairie, this side of the stagecoach, (the side nearer our house) was an uphill cricket and football pitch which doubled as Lords or Wembley. The games were organised by Cochise, aka Ken Pugh. Cup Finals were played in the muddy marshland of the autumn months and Test Matches fought on the hard clay in the summer. In cricket, uphill bowling was preferred as down hill was considered too fast and there was nothing to stop the ball when the wicket keeper frequently missed it. At the top was a garden fence as backstop which took care of the problem.

     There were never enough of us for proper teams so every one batted for himself while the rest fielded. You had to be pretty quick to bag your own role model fantasy player before Ken, who was up with all the current heroes, bagged him. He was a handy uphill bowler, naturally, and would announce his player and commentate on the action while he performed it.

     "Loader. Bowls like he's chucking a hand grenade," he said as he ran up to the wicket.

     Ken would adapt his style according to the characteristics of the player he was imitating. I'd never heard of Loder but was convinced he did bowl like he was chucking a hand grenade, and if he didn't, then he should've. The matches didn’t always end like cricket matches should. Sometimes there was no winner, only a load of losers. Often, the ‘wally’ who owned the stumps and ball and maybe the bat, too, would suddenly uproot the stumps, grab the ball, snatch the bat and go home.

     The Test Team became a bunch of kids again standing at strange unrelated distances from each other on a muddy patch of wasteland on an incomplete council estate in 1954. They’d probably go home too.

     The main actors in these frequent melodramas were Clive Richardson, Roland Hayes and Brian Bateman. With Clive and Roland, the departure was usually tearful. Somebody had usually upset one of them by claiming LBW or something as ludicrous or making a crack about their hopeless batting techniques.

     Clive, a red-headed sports fanatic, was often the victim of Mickey taking but Roland at three years older, and a quite a big lad, was considered by most to be Ken Pugh’s natural right hand man should have been above such displays of un-cool.

     Brian Bateman, on the other hand, treated his departure from the field of play more as a display of admonishment for the entire gathering from his level of assumed superiority, as if he’d put up with them for long enough. Bateman's assumption of being slightly above the level of mere mortal led him somehow to become head choirboy in St. Aidens’s Church which was built at the end of Gravelwood Close a few years later.

     This was no mean achievement as Brian Bateman was tone deaf and couldn’t sing a note, but he did have the ability to control some of the more unruly kids from the estate who’s mothers had insisted that they joined the choir.

     Their boredom couldn’t be contained by the choirmaster, Norman Harris, who was far too nice a man to deliver the clip round the ear that was needed to break up the mayhem the odd little psychopath often instigated. Brian Bateman had no such scruples. A fairly pompous git, a trait which no doubt stood him in good stead when he attended Bromley Grammar School, he was tall and fair and it was easy to picture him looking quite comfortable in an SS uniform.

     “Right. That’s it. I’ve warned you enough times. I trouble you for my bat,” he’d say, as he withdrew the stumps, “and don’t bother coming to my house for tea, Martin.” (I don’t suppose Martin fancied tea with the SS anyway.) The huffy Brian would walk back to the pavilion in the next street.

     This was the year of the great Ashes series in Sydney when England won them back from the Aussies with the team captained by Len Hutton. We had a great captain, too. Ken Pugh. He must have been good. He let me bowl.

     At 6, I was pretty uselss to begin with, but after studying Tom Ryall's impressive looking bowling action I became quite good - never fast, but always accurate. Sometimes, the ball would drop short and roll slowly up to the wicket. The batsman would step out and take a wild swipe only to have the ball roll under his bat and kiss the stumps enough to just topple the bails gracefully from their perch.

     This was always infuriated the batsman . It was a technique I was to hang on to for years and used in 1985 when I played for an advertising agency against the Chelsea Building Society. I bowled out their two county ringers in the same over and they were pretty peeved.

     Clive, Roland and Brian were neighbours and all lived in the row of houses whose gardens backed onto the stadium. Perhaps the cause of their outbursts was to do with something in the water. Ken, who as ’leader’ wasn’t prone to this type of behaviour, always tried to calm things down and rationalise the situation, usually to no avail. Perhaps he wasn’t really Dan Dare after all.

     Clive, a die-hard, loyal supporter of Charlton Athletic FC to this day, became an accomplished sportsman, especially as a tennis player, and a highly respected authority on R&B and soul music, running his own radio show and publishing a book about his musical passion, "Really Sayin' Something - Memoirs of a Soul Survivor", in 2010.


     KA-BOOM

     In the summer of ‘54, I’d left the infant’s school at Meade Road and was waiting to start a new life in the promised land of Red Hill Junior School. On a particularly showery day in August, the Test Match had been called off for about the 5th time. I bought an iced lolly from the Mr Whippy van and took a stroll over to the ‘Oval’ to examine the wicket after the rain had stopped. It was deserted.

     I hung around till I’d finished the lolly and then strolled back towards my house. I lived at 120 Imperial Way directly opposite Gravlewood Close, on the corner of which, on a piece of ground bordered by curbing stones, was a workman’s camp: a hut, a small yellow cement mixer, a couple of old oil drums and a brazier.

     Usually, there was an Irish watchman but he obviously wasn’t around as a group of kids were playing around the brazier. I recognised Roger Haywood and his brother Peter from further up Imperial Way, and another couple of kids from the adjoining Street, Slades Drive.

     Next to the brazier was a yellow oil drum and the kids were finding twigs or sticks and poking them through the hole at the top of the drum where the cap should have been. The sticks were carried to the brazier, which was on full glow and poked through one of the holes in the side. The sticks caught light immediately, due, it was believed by the excited gathering, to what was in the drum. Not so.

     There wasn’t any liquid in the drum. It had been full of Paraffin the workmen used to encourage the brazier to burn. It was full now, but of kerosene gas. This proved to be really lucky for me. Had it been even half full of it’s original contents, I wouldn’t here to tell the tale as I would have been barbecued better than a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

     In my 6-year-old wisdom, I figured that a more spectacular effect would be achieved by poking a stick into the brazier first, then into the yellow drum. I wasn’t wrong. I don’t know how many times the eyelids blink every minute but it’s quite frequent.

     The frequency didn’t save my eyebrows, lashes or fringe but it saved my sight. Apparently, the crucial blink happened in exact synchronisation with the explosion. I remember the twig and the blue flame curling from the end. I remember the black hole at the top of the drum and the flame passing across it. There wasn’t a bang. It was more of a boom, sort of far away.

     Or was it a WHUMPH! Or a KABOOOM? Whatever, there was white smoke everywhere, and when it cleared I could see my hand. Well, it looked like my hand, but it was brown and had onion peel hanging from the fingers. The pain kicked in with an enormous shock. Pain like I’d never felt or thought it was possible to feel. There was a high-pitched noise coming from somewhere. I was screaming blue murder.

     It wasn’t until quite a few years that I realised just how lucky I had been. At, Edgbury Secondary School, It became a trend one November for a bloke to make his own fireworks. Not many blokes tried it, but the ones that did generally lost one or two fingers.

     One boy in the 3rd year lost the whole bottom part of his right hand. He’d considered it quite a good wheeze to pack an old bike frame with a mixture of weedkiller and icing sugar which went off before he had time to even reach for the matches. Like me he was ‘blinking’ lucky not to have lost his sight. It was just meant to be a firework but members of the IRA had long considered it a really effective bomb for dismembering Brits and Prozzies with.

     There were exaggerated stories later about the kerosene drum involved in my own bomb flying up in the air and coming down through the roof of the watchman’s hut. This wasn’t true, because the drum was beneath my hand when the smoke cleared. But you know how kids like to expand on the truth and anyway, I thought it made the incident sound more spectacular.

     30 feet from the explosion, an elderly widow cleaner was at the top of his ladder. He was soon at the bottom of it. He half fell, half scrambled but gathered himself together instantly. He rushed over, swept me into his arms and carried me across the road to where my Connie was already at the front door, yanked out of the kitchen by the sound of the explosion and what must have been a terrible sixth sense.

     I don’t know what Connie had been studying in terms of first aid or whether it was only in later years the idea of sprinkling flour onto a fresh burn was discovered not to be entirely efficient when it comes to cooling things down. Still, I suppose that baking and flour do seem logically to go together.

     There followed an excruciating journey to hospital in, at least, one of my favourite cars of the time. Actually, it wasn’t of that time at all, but was from the pre-war era: our window man’s 1938 Ford 8. It broke down about half way there. The intrepid window cleansing person, to pay lip service to to-day’s PC movement, thrust himself dramatically across the bonnet of a slowly passing dark green Standard Vanguard, another of my favourite cars of the time, and persuaded the driver to continue the journey.

     In the casualty department of Eltham Cottage Hospital, my hand was plunged into a bowl of liquid and left there for half an hour while I was given pain-killing injections and the damage was assessed. I had third degree burns to the back of my hand and minor burns to my forearm.

     The hand was immersed in the magic jolop every day, apparently to soak off a whole layer of torn, burned skin and to prepare the virgin layer beneath to meet the air in the outside world. The remainder of the time, I was the proud possessor of a huge white, crepe bandage boxing glove which I did feel made me look a bit unbalanced.

     This was my first hospital experience and of nurses in their flouncy blue uniforms which I found strangely attractive and comforting. There was also a smell hanging in the air, which wasn’t altogether unpleasant.

     Staff nurse Plum was in charge of the ward. She was a pleasant but tough woman of about 25 and stood no nonsense from the other two or three boy patients or prisoners as Rodney, a 14 year old with a broken leg, referred to us. He also called our charge nurse Plum to her face but she took it in good grace and gave as good as she got referring to Rodney as fatty.

     I was in a corner bed by a window and next to me was a posh boy called David who kept referring proudly to his forthcoming op. When the day of his ‘op’ arrived, they gave him some pills, which eventually made him drowsy, and Plum turned up and asked him if he was ready to go to the theatre. I was immediately envious and wondered what film he was going to see. I decided to keep quiet. Not even a rattling good Tex Ritter film was worth having to have an ‘op’, whatever an op was.

     As soon as I was fit enough to play cricket in the hospital gardens with a stick and a load of bruised crab apples, I was allowed to go home. After a few days, the bandage was taken off and the new skin exposed to the air. It was incredibly delicate and tore easily.

     Unfortunately and typically, I walked backwards into a pavement sapling which had a rusty wire cage around it, whacked the hand, and managed to get a piece of rust in the wound for good measure. Of course, it became infected and the index finger turned septic and swelled to twice its size.

     After spending my 15 shillings of 7th birthday money (more money than I’d ever seen, let alone have passed through my fingers) on a rubber tomahawk and a small plastic Dan Dare figure which looked 95% less like Danny Boy than Ken Pugh did, I visited the doctor and was instantly dispatched to Bromley Cottage hospital to have my finger lanced - unfortunately not by a Comanche chief, but a frightening looking bloke in a surgical cap and gown with only a rubber mask full of ether gas as a weapon.

     I started at Red Hill Junior School a week later with my index finger still wrapped impressively in hospital issue Elastoplast. I was gratified to notice that Red Hill’s fabulous Miss Williams, as my new class teacher, was sympathetic and told me not to press too hard with my new pencil and that if my finger got too sore, I could read a book instead of writing out the alphabet in my new exercise book.


‘Puffed Wheat: A swinging way to start the day’

Larry The Lamb: “Oh, Ernest, I’m so gla-a-ad to see you.”
Ernest the Policeman: “Hello, my little woolly friend. What seems to be the trouble?”
LL: “I’m really worried. I keep thinking I’m somebody else.”
E: “Really? And who is it that you keep thinking you are?”
LL: “Uncle Ma-a-ac.”
E: “What, the bloke who plays all them records on the radio every Saturday morning?”
LL: “Ye-e-es, the very same.”
E: “Dear, oh dear, oh dear. That sounds very serious. What a terrible to do. Have you tried standing on one leg and blowing your nose?”
LL: “Do you think that would help?”
E: “Probably not, though it is very good for hiccups, so I’m told. We could try putting a key down you neck.”
LL: “What would that do?”
E: “Not a lot, but it would be quite fun.”
LL: “Here comes Mr Grouser. Perhaps he might have a suggestion. Hello, Mr Grouser, Sir. I wonder if you can help me. You see, as I was just telling Ernest, I keep thinking I’m somebody else.”
Mr Grouser: “It’s DISSS-GRACCCCCEFUL! DISSS-GRACCCCCEFUL! It shouldn’t be allowed. Impersonating someone is against the law. Constable, arrest him immediately.”
E: “Oh, I can’t do that, Mr Grouser, Sir. He’s only a harmless little lamb.”
MG: “That’s just a disguise. Can’t you see he’s really Uncle Mac?”
E: “Well, bless my soul! So he is. This really is very serious. Very serious indeed.”
LL: “But I’m not Uncle Ma-a-ac. I just think I am.”
MG: “A likely story. It’s DISSS-GRACCCCCEFUL! DISSS-GRACCCCCEFUL! Constable, do your duty or I shall report you to the Mayor.”
E: “Right you are, Mr Grouser, Sir. Now come along, Mr McCuloch, Sir. Just slip your hoofs…I mean mits into these ‘ere handcuffs and we’ll get you down to the police station in the blink of an eye.”
LL: “But…but…I ha-a-aven’t done anything wrong.”
MG: “NOTHING WRONG? NOTHING WRONG? You’ve played the ‘Laughing Policman’ every week for the last 25 years on that programme of yours.
It’s DISSS-GRACCCCCEFUL! DISSS-GRACCCCCEFUL!

* * * * * * * * *






Eye, yi-eye-eye-eye
Yi-eye-eye-eye
Ya-ya-ya-ahh

Little darlin', oh, little darlin'
Oh-oh-oh where a-are you?
My love-a, I was wrong-a (la-la-la-la-la-la)
To-oo try to lo-ove two
A-hoopa, a-hoopa, hoopa
Kno-ow well-a that my love-a (la-la-la-la-la-la)
Wa-as just fo-or you, oh only-ee-ee-ee you
My darlin', I NEED you (la-la-la-la-la-la) to call my own and NEVER do wrong. To
hold in mine your little hand (la-la-la-la-la-la). I'll know too soon that ALL is so grand.
Please, hold my hand

My dear-a I-I was wrong-a
To-oo try to lo-ove two
A-hoopa, a-hoopa, hoopa
Know well that my love-a (la-la-la-la-la-la)
Wa-as just for you, oh only-ee-ee-ee you






Chapter 15: THE GARDEN OF EDEN.


      Red Hill Junior School was built in 1949 and opened in 1950. It’s a fresh, modern-for-its-day, reddish-brown brick, single-storey affair with one upstairs classroom above the only bay-windowed room at the front of the building next to the main entrance, which was Miss Atwood, the headmistress’s headquarters. This ivory-towered fortress of a classroom was where the school’s elite, class 4A, could practice their probable future roles in life, and look down in contempt on lesser mortals.

     These were the ‘certain passes’ of the 11 plus, or scholarship, as it was then known, the passport to Grammar school, a proper education, university and a leap away from the drab, ordinary existence of the working classes, as they probably saw it, and their parents certainly saw it.

     The rest of the kids were billeted in classrooms in the long finger of a corridor stretched out beside the playing fields that snugly accommodated two football pitches in winter and two cricket pitches and a running track in the summer.

     The designer of Red Hill School was either an extremely gifted and advanced 7 year old or just a very enlightened architect who really understood children and their needs. The building was 60% glass with huge windows and French doors in each classroom that opened onto individual patios so that in summer, classes could be held in the open air overlooking the playing fields.

      The place was always flooded with light even in winter, which gave the environment a great sense of space and a feeling of wellbeing. I suppose if I wanted to be really pretentious, I could liken the place to a huge greenhouse where all the young souls sitting at the tiny desks and chairs inside were nurtured and grown under ideal conditions, but I won’t.

      On a hill by the asphalt playground on the other side of the main corridor was a long hut containing 3 other senior classrooms next to the school allotments. A couple of teachers who were in charge of gardening, Mr Miller and Mr Wileman, often ponced about in gum boots and carried one of those long canes each that they used to encourage bean or pea plants to climb up.

      No, they didn’t threaten the beans - they merely stuck the cane in the ground and the plant did the rest. Amazing when you come to think about it. The boots and canes also gave them an air of authenticity, like they knew what they were doing, that they were close to the earth, at one with nature - all that kind of stuff. Very commendable, I always thought.

      (Nick-named ‘Tommy Hart’, after a Ted Heath hit of the day, TOM HARK, the gardening teacher at Edgebury Seconday School, used the same props. He was a short bloke and the cane he carried was a good deal longer than he was, the tops of his gumboots reaching almost up to the tail of his tweed jacket. He was a nice man, a champion of the underprivileged, and form teacher by choice in the lower streams - the underdogs, as he saw them.)

      DOE-EYES

      In my first term at Red Hill, I was introduced to a new sensation: a strange, unexpected attraction to of one of those girl type things. Her Name was Adrian Allen. Tall, dark-haired, long-legged with white ankle socks and those horrid, brown, featureless, lace-up Clarks school shoes many of us were forced to wear but which on her delicate feet, appeared as Cinderella’s slender glass slippers to this love-struck 7 year old.

      Adrian had a longish pointed nose which probably explains why I’ve been attracted to longish pointed noses on women ever since. My first real girlfriend, (and that wasn’t till I was the ripe old age of 16,) had one; my wife has one; Steffi Graff, one of the most beautiful women (for a German) in my view, ever to prance about the hallowed turf, is also particularly well endowed in the hooter department.

      Being 3 years younger than this 10-year-old apparition, I figured that if I got close enough, I’d probably come up to her chest, the prospect of which in years to come would’ve proved to be an inexplicably exciting place to be, but for then would simply be up to her chest. I told my sister about my passion for Adrian and my sister told Adrian’s best friend and Adrian’s best friend told Adrian.

     What followed was a chase around the playground ending with the chasee being cornered and caught hold of by the jumper. I wish I could say that I’d been doing the chasing but I have instead to admit that I was the one being chased by this fair maiden who attracted me like a monkey grabs nuts.

     Beyond the bounds of all reason, I tried to get away. I didn’t make it and my jumper got stretched to twice it’s size as Adrian, being a lot taller and faster than me, caught hold of it at the back and held on while I carried on running in mid-air. Being chased by her was very exciting but being caught by her was near Nirvana, except I’d never heard of such a thing.

      “Is it true, Neal?” she kept saying, as I struggled to free myself. “Is it true?”

      Is what true? Is the moon made of green cheese? Is Winston Churchill really a woman? What? Am I simply blown away by your very being? Does the very sight of you make me feel all peculiar in my chest, stomach, and another unexplainable place that I wouldn’t dare tell my Mum about in case there was something very wrong with me?

      Did I like all these weird sensations? Did I marvel at the length of her legs, the curve of her neck, the way her feet pointed inwards when she walked? Did I wonder what brought about this sudden, delightful invasion of my senses? Did I wonder at that hot glow of fire in my belly because I didn’t know what it meant? Was I happy?

     I said “Yes.” and she let go. I was off like a greyhound out of the trap. Why the hell was I running away to? I can still offer no rational answer. What if I’d said no? Would that have increased my chances? My chances, of what? Life is so mystifying at the ripe old age 7. What if I’d realised that this was my first insight into the apparent tangle of contradictions that was to enthral and frustrate me for the rest of my life. Would I have kept running and never stopped? Like billions of other blokes, I still don’t understand women, but then I’ve only been on the planet a mere 58 years.

     That was the closest I ever got to Adrian Allen who never chased me again. I’m sure there must have been a great lesson in there somewhere to prepare me not to make a similar mistake in later life, but at the time, just being chased by this inscrutable brown-eyed gazelle was enough.

      My passion for Adrian didn’t last. At 10 she was too old for me. And there were too many other distractions, like Toni Ashby; Dianne Reid; Lesley Drury; Jane Skinner; Hazel Bridel; Susan White; Ann Westerby; Carol Oldman; Pamela Deadman; Janet Hill; Ann Crawford; (Adrian’s best friend,) and several other passing visions whose names are too many too recall.

      Of course, I didn’t have inkling what all these feelings meant, but at that age I wasn’t asking any questions, just enjoying the whirling feeling in my gut, though I didn’t find out anything about sex until I left Red Hill 4 years later and went to Edgebury.

      I’d heard the word fuck though, and Michael Scarborough, a kid in our street who was a couple of years younger than me, once told me it had something to do with touching a girl’s private parts with your willy in a field somewhere. I dismissed this as a strange and incomprehensible concept, though it did cross my mind that perhaps Nigel Drew had known something I didn’t back at Mead Road Infants that time when he displayed his tackle in front of the class.

      JUST GIVE ME THE FACTS

      It was John Wallis, a boy the size of a grizzly bear for 11, in form 1A at Edgebury Secondary School For Boys, who prised open my eyes and let the blinding sunlight in like the flash of a nuclear explosion. I think I’m still suffering from the fall-out.

     It was when we were dressing up in costumes prior to going on stage to perform a French Christmas nativity song in 1957 in. Wallis was wearing an old 30’s dressing gown handed down from a rich family that my Grandmother worked for as housekeeper, and loaned to him for the occasion. He also wore a turban which actually made him look like a fat, pregnant Mottingham housewife rather than a mystical, Eastern Wise Man.

     He ambled over to where I was putting on another dressing gown with a gold dragon embroidered on the back and a bright turquoise silk lining, that my Dad, Alf, had brought back from China. I looked like Suzie Wong or was it Suzie Wrong?

      “Hey, Brads. Do you know where you came from?”
      “Yeah. Chislehurst.” I said, wondering why he should think I didn’t know where I was born.
      “Nah. I mean how you got made. You know, babies and that. D’you know how they get there?” he grinned, “How women get pregnant?”
      It was a good question and one that I didn’t think there was any particular mystery about, but one that nobody had ever put quite so directly.
      “When a woman wants to have a baby,” I began, concentrating on securing my Suzie Wong belt to hide my embarrassment, “she eats certain things...”

      As soon as I uttered these words I realised how absolutely absurd they sounded.
     “Like what? Toast and Marmite?” Now he was laughing. I ate a lot of toast and Marmite myself, always had, and it dawned on me that Wallis might just be taking the piss.
      “Well, I’m not really sure.”
      “I betchore not. I’ll tell you how you got made. Your Dad fucked your Mum. That’s how.”

      If I’d been a foot taller and weighed another five stone, this remark deserved a smack in the chops that I was sure no one would’ve begrudged my supplying. The thought of my Mum and Dad doing unspeakable things in a field defied even my imagination. How dare this great lout suggest such a thing.

      “My Mum and Dad just wouldn’t do anything like that.” I offered uncertainly.
      “Oh no? Well, mine did.”

      He turned away cackling and swaggered back to the group he’d been sharing a good titter with - the main subject probably being me and my total ignorance. This was my rather crude but bluntly accurate introduction to the facts of life, or the reproductive sexual activity between men and women as it should be described - a truth that would dawn again and again when I overheard rude jokes from adults and started to understand for the first time what they meant. However, any thoughts of my Mum and Dad engaging in such carryings on didn’t bear thinking about. So I didn’t. I couldn’t.

      As I was left pondering this sudden assault on my sensitive and now crumbling naiveté, Wallace turned back:

      “Hey, Brads. You’re right. Women who want babies do eat certain things,” I looked up into his grinning face, feeling slightly relieved. “AFTER they’ve been fucked.” Another door slammed shut in my face. In reality, of course, one of the biggest doors of all had actually been blasted open. It just didn’t feel like it at the time.

     BUMS

     Mrs Ball had been eating special food, (probably supplied by Mr Wall!!!) and got knocked up. She left to have a baby just like me and was replaced by Mr Hewitt, a youngish, shortish, sharp-featured man with a wiry body and wiry black hair that fell across his forehead like a Brillo Pad, and a far less interesting chest than Mrs Ball’s. He had a habit of using long words that made his sentences sound unnecessarily
complicated.

     “Will the unfortunate individual who has lost his or her physical training footwear, seek me out after the lesson period and I’ll make sure they are re-united with their property.”

     He could have said: “If you’ve lost your plimsolls, I’ve got them.”

     Looking back, he was probably a pervert as he was far too fond of smacking people’s bottoms. He smacked mine twice for talking in line. Being smacked wasn’t a problem, but having it done in front of the class, especially the girls, was very embarrassing. He’d grab you by one arm and whack you so hard that your feet came off the ground. He’d always hit you twice and would catch you with terrific force as you swung back to meet his hand coming the other way.

     Mr Hewitt fell in love with another teacher. Not a bloke - a woman called Miss Rockcliffe, so maybe he wasn’t a pervert after all. After he left, a couple of us caught him one evening sneaking into the school via the back gate by the huts, and making his way to her classroom.

     We got our revenge for him smacking us all on the bum so frequently (I’m sure he was a pervert) and took the piss something rotten.

     “Going to see your girlfriend, are you, Sir? Going to give her a kiss, are you, Sir? Give her one from us, Sir.” (a kiss, that is.)

     Miss Rockcliffe left and both she and Mr Hewitt turned up in The Chislehurst and Kentish Times in the ‘Just Married section’. They probably had loads of kids so he could smack their bums whenever he felt like it.

     BOUNCY BALL

     Mrs Ball used to smack bums, too. Her technique was different. She used to make offenders touch their toes so that their clothing was tight across the area of impact. Strangely, I wouldn’t have minded being smacked by Mrs Ball but it was never to be as she thought I was such an angel. Sometimes, I think corporal punishment was an effective teaching tool. But I’m not quite sure what it taught you.

     In the 3rd year, Mr S. Hill taught me how to spell ‘because’ with some deft movements of his left hand. I’d got it wrong so many times in the weekly spelling tests that he suddenly lost it when I was standing next to his desk as he marked my exercise book.

     “B ! E ! C ! A ! U ! S ! E !” Each letter was punctuated by a vicious swipe from his left hand across the back of my head. It worked. I got the message, and still think of his great big hand swinging through the air to pleasure me every time I write the word today. Very clever, when you think about it. He was very lucky, though. If I’d told my Dad about this particular teaching skill of his, he’d have been dead meat.

     A GREAT LEAP FOR MANKIND

     Zebedee, the TV character with springs for feet, was in our class. He called himself David Pullen. He was very bouncy and walked on the balls of his feet. The fastest runner in our class was Hazel Head, followed not too far behind, by Stan Adgie, Janet Skinner, Chris Stone and me.

     Keeping up with us, however, was the unconventional Mr Pullen. He ran with long strides, his legs rising high behind him, almost turning right over at the hip joints. He could jump over anything, chairs, tables, pianos, gates, wooden horses, Janet Skinner - even Mary Edge, the tallest girl in the class by about a foot.

     As for the long jump, Pullen seemed to just step over the entire length of the pit with ease. The boy could fly. On Sports Day, this merry band won just about everything, except me. I didn’t win anything the first year- except a trip to Bromley Cottage Hospital. As I didn’t put my name down for anything, I was entered against my will in the obstacle race, which turned out to be a cunning form of torture so that those who didn’t voluntarily take part in the more respectable events made damn sure they did the next year.

     I had to scramble under a net staked to the ground, climb through a suspended tyre, hop through another load of tyres laid out on the ground, climb over a vaulting horse, sack-race for about 20 yards, scramble under another net, and stagger for the line. The spectators found the whole thing hilarious but for the participants it was particularly degrading.

     I came second to last and was close to tears, not just because of the humiliation, but because of the agony in my left shoulder. Somehow, struggling under the last net, I managed to crack my collarbone. By the time I got home, there was a huge red and purple patch on the shoulder itself and the whole thing was very swollen. A visit to the doctor and a subsequent X-ray, revealed the real damage.

     I had to wear my left arm (rather proudly, I might add) in a sling for the next week or so, something which got a lot of attention from my classmates.

     “You’ve smashed your collar bone, then?” said an excited Stan Adgie. ‘Smashed’ sounded so much more dramatic than cracked so I nodded in agreement. Well, what’s the difference between a crack and a load of powdered bone between friends?

     The next year I entered all the running races, anxious not to go through the same army assault course again. I did quite well in the 80yds coming a close 3rd behind Stanley Adgie and the mercurial Chris Stone, David Pullen prancing home 4th just behind me.

     The girls and boys raced separately so we never got a chance to pit ourselves against Hazel Head and Janet Skinner, who literally ran away with everything. Just as well really. I’m sure they would have beaten us by miles and shown that uncanny superiority that women have over men that in later years they would use time and time again.

     David Pullen went on to greater heights, however. At Edgebury, a trampette (small trampoline) was introduced in PE to help get us over the vaulting horse in a more spectacular fashion. On his first try, Pullen took a fast run up, hit the trampette at high speed and took off with such force and velocity that he flew up and hit the ceiling of the hall, a height of about 25 feet. He crashed to the ground and broke his right arm and left ankle, his bouncing days well and truly over.

     STEP, 2, 3...

     In the 3rd year at Red Hill, we were introduced to country dancing by a delightful young teacher with short auburn hair, called Miss Kirby. The lessons took place in the over-flow canteen, which, stripped of its table and chairs, was just about big enough to
Accommodate the 42 of us. (We were ‘baby boom’ kids and this size of class was common for most of my school days.)

     The girls thought prancing around in plimsolls to recorded accordion music was quite a lovely thing to do and their latent power over men came rushing to the surface as they witnessed our clumsy embarrassment. Obviously, we foraging young males didn’t think quite so highly of this strange, poncey activity but all tendencies to behave like 20 or so William Browns was soon over-ruled by the smiling Miss Kirby as she enthusiastically dished out partners.

     “Come along, Stanley. You’ll dance with Janet.”

     This pissed Janet Skinner off no end. Though she and Stan had been an item, she was now firmly ensconced in the arms of Terry Pike, 3B’s best footy dribbler, and had immediately ear-holed him to escort her through the gentle gyrations of ‘The Jolly Roger’, or whatever it was called.

     The power of women has never ceased to amaze me since the age of 10. The highly attractive Ms Skinner, with her big blue eyes and overtly revealing white ankle socks, once had the aforementioned Terrence on both his bended knees pledging undying love and on another occasion scribing said message in wet sand on Margate beach. This at least earned old Tel a couple of full-blooded smackeroonys on the chops from JS.

     I got Christine Douglas. She was fairly pleasant. Not unattractive, always smiling with long brown ringlets with a huge white bow on top of her head, and blue eyes. She always wore blue - especially a thick-knitted cobalt blue cardigan that she wrapped around herself like a blanket. Christine always seemed to have a cold and would spasmodically dab at her blocked up nose with the huge rolled up handkerchief she kept up the sleeve. I have to say I didn’t find this altogether alluring or attractive. More sick inducing.

     Still, Christine seemed pleased to have me as a partner. Funny, though, at that age, it was easy to spot if a girl liked you or not. Since acquiring curly bits down below, I’ve found it impossible.

     I didn’t mind country dancing at all. I was always light on my feet and would later on in the 60s and 70s be labelled ‘Snake Hips’ by some of my friends. In a way, it was also quite gratifying to watch the likes of Geoff Miller and Charlie Allen skipping round their female partners. The music was a bit crap - usually accordion stuff played on one of those (Kent Education Committee) gramophones with the big wooden speaker cabinet.

     The Maypole, though, was a nightmare. The manoeuvres were too complex for the boys and we managed to tie us and the girls in all kinds of knots. The idea of us collectively performing was abandoned and the girls did it on their own.

          MEN

      My sister came home from her first day at Red Hill in 1951 in a state of shock.

      “It’s a man!”
      “Who is?” enquired Connie.
      “My teacher. It’s a man!” she said with a kind of disgusted tone that implied men teachers were covered in runny green slime and made of bogeys. This was a new concept for my sister. So far, teachers had always been women.

      The thought of being taught by a man was way outside her comprehension, and it was certainly a possibility I’d never considered. This particular green, slimy, bogey-creature’s name was Mr Straughn, a fittingly big- nosed man with a quiet voice, thick curly hair and thick-soled shoes that made a funny squeak when he walked.
     She came to adore him and I got fed up with hearing Mr Straughn said this and Mr. Straughn did that. Mr Bloody Straughn could go and boil his head and as far as I was concerned, he was definitely made of bogeys.

      THE SECOND MISS WILLIAMS

      My first teacher at Red Hill was Miss Williams, a very pretty dark haired 25 year old who was very trendy for the time. She was tall with shortish bobbed hair, and wore the 50’s style thin flat leather shoes that I found attractive, perhaps because looked like they’d been painted onto the soles of her feet. She wore long tight skirts, very wide belts with big buckles that seemed to pull her waist in to the same diameter as her neck.

      The tight belt also effectively thrust her distinctly pointed bosom forward like the guns of Navarone - the same prominent aircraft fuselage-shaped breasts that her Mead Road counterpart had and which Peter Baddrick used as a punch bag.

      Miss Williams wore heavy make up and spoke with the clear-toned, self-assured voice of mid-twenties female authority. She had a strong over-sweet smell about her that made me feel sick. I think it was a mixture of make-up and perfume but, whatever, I found myself leaning away from her when she got too close. I thought that retching in front of her might be a bit of a problem.

‘For the best inner picket of the bruflade, Flowers’.

Michael Miles: “Welcome back to ‘Take Your Pick’ after that extremely tedious commercial break. You’ll get used to it – or perhaps you won’t. Still, who cares?
“Now, Edna Sugden, you’ve successfully answered your 3 questions, though to be honest, my 2-year-old son could’ve done better. 2 and 2 doesn’t actually make 5 but it’s near enough, isn’t it?”
SFX: Applause.
“Right now, Edna, you’ve chosen key No 6, I’ll give you’re a fiver for it.”
Edna: “No, I’ll open the box.”
MM: “Ten quid! I’ll give you this brand new, crisp tenner for that key.”
E: “No, Guv’, I’ll open the box.”
MM: “How about a grand?”
E: “What?”
MM: “Did I say a grand? Actually, I meant 2 grand. Now I can’t say fairer than that, can I?”
E: “No, I’ll open the box.”

MM: “You must be out of your tiny mind, Edna. You’ve just turned down 2 grand for key No 6. You’re really determined to open the box, aren’t you?”
E: “Yis. I is.”
MM: “What do you reckon is in the box then, Edna? The complete set of 2 inner tubes perhaps, or maybe the golf clubs, or it might even be tonight’s star prize of the fabulous imitation Fablon coctail cabinet complete with breakfast bar and bowling alley. What should she do, audience, open the box or take the Money?”
Audience: “Take the money, you silly cow.”

“The cocktail cabinet’s a load of crap. Take the dosh.”

“ Open the box and give us all a right, good laugh.”

“Take the 2 grand, you stupid mare.”


MM: “She’s looking a bit perplexed – I think she might be wavering. Look at all this lovely money. There’s 2 thousand knicker there and it’s yours for the taking. What’s it going to be? That’s a terrible frock you’re wearing, Edna. Where’d you pick that up? Jumble sale, was it? Just think of all the nice clobber you could buy with that kind of dough. Oh, that hit a raw nerve. You’ve gone all red in the face, Edna. Right, you’ve turned down 2 grand. Let’s go over and open the box.”
E: “I ‘aven’t made up me mind yet.”
MM: “Too late, I’m afraid, Edna. You were taking far too long and there’s a queue of other idiots waiting to be patronised. Now you just stand there while I open the box. Now let’s see what’s on the card. Edna Sugden, you’ve turned down 2 thousand quid – no don’t look at me, face the audience, there’s a good girl. You have won…
THE SET OF GOLF CLUBS. You do play golf, don’t you? No? Oh, dear, oh dear. What a shame. Never mind, you can give ‘em to your hubby. Still, you’ve been a good sport, hasn’t she, folks?”
E: “ Don’t want the bliddy golf clubs. I want the cocktail cabinit.”
MM: “Fraid that’s the luck of the draw, Edna. You should have taken the money.”
E: “Don’t want the bliddy golf clubs.”
MM: “Off you go, Edna. Let’s welcome the next contestant.”

E: “Don’t want the bliddy golf clubs. I int ‘avin’ ‘em.”
M: “ Yes, that’s a nice number 9 iron you’ve got in your hand, Edna so why don’t you just T off?”



* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Freight train, freight train,
Goin’ so fast,
Freight train, freight train,
Goin’ so fast,
I don’t know what train he’s on,
Won’t you tell me where he’s gone,

Don’t know where he’s headin’ for,
What he’s done against the law,
Got no future, got no hope,
Just nothin’ but the rope,

Freight train, freight train,
Goin’ so fast,
Freight train, freight train,
Goin’ so fast,
I don’t know what train he’s on,
Won’t you tell me where he’s gone,

When he dies, won’t you bury him please,
Way down at the end of those chestnut trees,
Poplars at his head and his feet,
And tell them he’s gone to sleep,

Freight train, freight train,
Goin’ so fast,
Freight train, freight train,
Goin’ so fast,
I don’t know what train he’s on,
Won't you tell me where he's gone


Chapter 16: THAT ABSOLUTE BRICK, WALL

     Whenever Mr Wall showed up, which was quite frequently, Miss Williams blushed red like a traffic light. Mr Wall, a teacher at Red Hill, was a charmer, very popular with the kids, and very funny - debonair, in a 50’s sort of way with his badged Blazer, Brilcreamed hair and toothy smile. He must have been in his late 30’s and from ‘soomewhere oop Noreth’, according to his accent.

     I’m not sure he was that popular with the male members of staff but a few of the younger female teachers were definitely under his spell, and probably his body on occasions. He was the games master, on account of the fact that there wasn’t a proper games master available, and tucked his trousers into his socks when he put his footy boots on.

     Miss Williams, and Mrs Ball, also in her early twenties, with her blonde hair scraped back into a tight bun and Diana Dors figure, used to meet in the alcove at the back of our classroom for a fag and a giggle during playtime. Sometimes, Wall would join them and the giggling would turn into peals of raucous laughter. I wonder now what the lecherous bugger was saying to produce such filthy cackling from such fair maidens. I REALLY wish I knew.

     When it snowed, Mr Wall would be outside with the kids throwing snowballs and generally behaving like a big kid himself.

nbsp;    I;“Oh, look. Sir’s covered in snow, Sir is.” A gleeful Roger Haywood once announced. Wall, who was covered from head to foot in dripping snow and slush, his green tank top wringing wet, was blue with cold but just stood there grinning like a Cheshire cat.

     He was centre stage, which above all, was where he loved to be, apart from atop Miss Williams and Mrs Ball, probably at the same time. Wall left the school suddenly half way through my first term at Red Hill which everyone thought was a bit strange. Then he turned up one afternoon about 3 months later. Miss Williams saw him standing in the corridor leaning against a window alcove and she melted into a giggling heap, almost staggered out of the classroom, and flung her arms around his neck. Enough said, I reckon.

     MOVING RIGHT ALONG

     When we moved up to the second year, our teacher was Diana Dors, who still claimed her real name was Mrs Ball. She apparently thought I was wonderful and told my sister she wanted a little boy just like me. (Not absolutely sure what she meant by this on reflection. She could’ve been some kind of pervert.)

     In her eyes, I could do no wrong and when I was plunged into hospital at the age of 8 to have my tonsils and adenoids (whatever they were) ‘whipped out’, she encouraged (instructed) the class to make a collection and bought me a box of sweets, a sort of compendium of a Bounty, Mars Bar, and a selection of Liqruice Allsorts that I hardly thought I deserved. After all, nearly all the kids in the school had the same operation during that year. Like me, they probably came home one Friday night to have their Dad say:

     “How d’you feel about having your tonsils out?”
     Now, what sort of question’s that?
     “You’re going in on Monday.”

     Terrific! That’s just what I always wanted.

     I was only in for 3 days. I was put to bed on the 1st day then woken up in the middle of the night by a middle-aged nurse.

     “Wake up, Neal. It’s time for your sleeping pills.”

     I thought it was a pretty puny joke even when it turned up on the back of the Beano. I came to the next evening with the mother of all sore throats and feeling like I’d swallowed a drawing pin and sandpaper sandwich. I was given ice cream I couldn’t get down, and to this day, I still get a pain in the throat if I sing or laugh too much. Just think, if I’d wanted to be an opera singer, I’d have been stuffed.

     The only bonus was being allowed to stay up late and watch the last episode of The Quatermass Experiment on television my first weekend home. This was the Episode where Victor Carroon, who had absorbed the other two members of his space ship crew, had also absorbed a cactus plant and become a monster cactus himself crawling across the roof of Westminster Abbey.

     (I think Mr Wall absorbed young women teachers in much the same way ) They finally got him with flame-throwers. Brilliant. (Victor Carroon, that is, not Mr Wall.) The programme that followed was the Bob Monkhouse and Dennis Goodwin show that was hysterically funny, and I had to go to bed because I couldn’t stand the pain. In the throat, that is. Bob Monkhouse only became a pain later in life.

     When I returned to school, Mrs Ball literally welcomed me with open arms and clasped me to her also very prominent bosom. It was all a bit embarrassing really - I’d only been away a week and Connie didn’t hug me when I came out of hospital, not that I expected her to. I think some of the other kids in the class thought Mrs Ball’s behaviour a bit over the top like her chest, but no-one ever said anything. You’d have thought an 8 year old child might appreciate such special attention, but I just found Mrs Ball’s behaviour a bit cringe making.

     DEATH

     As a child, the concept of death seemed very remote - something that only happened to old people and probably not really to oneself and if it did, it was so far in the distance it didn’t matter. Even when it visited class 2B at Red Hill Junior School in 1955 and snatched away one of our classmates, it still didn’t seem real. Robert Davies was a nice, inoffensive kid.

     Tall, pale-skinned, smiley, freckly, he always wore grey corduroy short trousers and brown sandals. His best friend was Patricia Hemmings who lived near him in Empress Drive off Chislehurst High Street. We’d all been in the same class at Mead Road and by this time were all used to each other and part of the same organic community, which is a right on, left wing, PC, pretentious way of saying we were all growing up together.

     Half way through the 2nd year at Red Hill, Robert was away ill for a bit of a long time. Then he came back and then he was off again. He apparently had anaemia - something none of us had heard of. He came back again looking a bit paler than normal, but otherwise OK. We didn’t take much notice. Then a few weeks later, he was away again, this time for much longer.

     And he didn’t come back. He died. He didn’t have anaemia. He had leukaemia, another thing we’d never heard of. Something we never forgot. Something most of us have feared ever since. It wasn’t so much of a shock but more of a surprise. Sure, we knew about death. It happened every time you watched a cowboy film and we knew that a lot of people got killed in the war, which had apparently finished not that long ago.

     And there always seemed to be a murder in the newspaper and everybody had heard of Dr Cripin and John Christie. THAT was death. Death was sinister and was caused by or happened to the bad guys. It didn’t happen to school friends. It couldn’t. Maybe that’s why Robert’s death didn’t seem real.

     “He was covered in bandages. From head-to-foot. You could only see his head and nose. He just lay there. He didn’t recognise me.” Pat would say the same thing over and over again. Then she’d cry. “You just don’t know. You don’t understand. It’s not fair.”

     Poor Pat couldn’t understand why no one was as upset about Robert as she was. She tried to tell us how he’d suffered but we were only curious, not really moved at all. We’d all just stand there dumfounded, and a bit uncomfortable. Even Robert’s death was a distant thing to us.

     It wasn’t like he didn’t exist any more. He would just be absent from school for good. I did feel a bit guilty about the sweets that had been collected for my tonsil job. Robert was ill for a long time and he didn’t get anything. And then he died. It didn’t really seem right somehow. But we all just shrugged and got on with whatever there was to get on with.

     Death grabbed another kid at the school who I didn’t know, and in much more dramatic circumstances. The Edgebury Estate almost backed onto the A20, the main arterial road between London and Dover. It was a very crowded and busy road – a duel carriageway, supplying a continual background hum, its relentless snake of heavy traffic powering its way to and from the coast, 24 hours a day, a mass of mobile machinery in a hurry, impatient, angry. Dominic

     Drive, a steep, gravelled road ran past Molescroft, the entrance to the estate, down to a break in the carriageway on the A20 that pedestrians used as a crossing. There was no Zebra crossing, no bridge and no traffic lights at this point, and getting across was very much a game of Russian roulette, the bullets, articulated Lorries, Coaches, and virtually anything else on wheels.

     A nine year old Red Hill boy from Townsend Road in Chislehurst came careering down Dominic drive one Saturday morning on his half–sized bike, heading for the junction with the A20. The coach driver who saw him entering the road on the northbound carriage way on the opposite side to which his fully laden vehicle was travelling towards some seaside destination, maintained that the kid was desperately applying the brakes moments before he swept across the junction and into the path of the big Bedford charabanc.

     The bike’s brakes didn’t work and the last thing the driver remembered was seeing the kid’s terrified face a split second before the coach struck him and dragged his mangled body and bike a further 70 yards in the direction of Margate.

     We could see the halted traffic from our back garden about a hundred yards away, across the field that led from Marge Chilton’s back garden, and I remember feeling very sorry for the kid’s parents when someone excitedly told us what had actually caused the traffic jam we were all gazing at with such interest. It was to be another 10 years and several dead pedestrians before London County Council saw fit to place a bridge over the junction - a terrible eyesore that saved lives.

     US

     I think generally, we were a nice bunch of kids. Maybe we were boring and there were a lot more interesting kids in the rest of the school who were always getting into trouble and being caned and stuff, but for some reason, none of us were like that.

     We were all bloody angels. And I think, happy. This could be where you close the book and do something more entertaining like go to sleep. Some of us stood out more than others. Charlie Allen was one: a heavy kid with thick red hair, the teachers always picked on him - maybe because of his ginger Barnet. Diana Dors called him ‘Charles The Unready’ after Ethelred. But then that was as a comparison to me who she called ‘Neal The Wake’ after Hereward. I just wanted to hide under the desk when she went on like that.

     You’d think this would’ve made the others want to puke but nobody took any notice of these silly teacher quirks. I didn’t know if I was bright or not and I didn’t know if Charlie was dumb or not and neither of us could have given a monkey’s. It just didn’t matter then. Nothing did. I’d still played marbles in the playground with Charlie. I thought he was OK. So what if he was dumb, anyway? What did it matter? Maybe he was and maybe it did. When we were in the 4th year, Charlie went on holiday to Jersey.

     He fell off the harbour wall and broke his leg. It was a serious break. It took about six months to heal and then he walked with quite a pronounced limp, probably for the rest of his life. I suppose it was a pretty dumb thing to do. Fall off a harbour wall, I mean. Well, it is. Isn’t it?

     One thing that Charlie could do was blowing his nose with the sound of a post horn. I don’t think it was a conscious effort on his part, mimicking a post horn with his schnozzle, and unlike when one of the girls blew her nose, I didn’t find it at all sexy - at that age I didn’t know what sexy was, but I knew what it felt like. I think.

     GONNA RAISE A FUSS

     Barbara Collins was a real gas. She didn’t mean to be of course. She just wanted to be first in line - all the time. She had to be first in this queue, first in that; first in line at the end of playtime; first in line outside the classroom at the beginning of lessons; first in line outside the canteen at lunchtime, then first at the serving counter; then first finished and first out into the playground, which, as she was always first, was always empty. She sat at the front of the class - first next to the door.

     God knows what she thought it proved. But to Barbara it was the most important thing in the world, to be first in line. And how she let it show. Whenever she was first, which was always, she beamed bright from ear to ear. Proud. Accomplished; a cut above; the possessor of that most divine knowledge: how to be first in line.

     There was a trend in 1956-57 for TB vaccination. This was a particularly vicious inoculation, so powerfully packed with killer germs that the puncture could fester, a high fever could follow, and you could be really sick for days afterwards. We knew this was true because Tony Ford, who lived across the road from us, copped the symptoms of malaria from his jab and turned a very interesting shade of sage green for his trouble. When it was the turn of 3B, no one wanted to know. But guess who was at the front of the queue. Dear old Babs.

     The rest of us thought she was potty of course, but there was no malice. If that was what turned her on, and it very clearly did, that was OK, that was what turned her on. All the teachers just called her a fusspot, which I suppose she was. But Barbara cared not a jot, as long as she was first. Years later, she became an accomplished state registered mid-wife and delivered my sister’s first child, my niece Kirsty. Kathryn said Barbara had a brilliant bedside manner and was very reassuring, very professional and very caring. I don’t know what that had to do with being first. Not a lot, probably. Maybe she only delivered 1st-born babies.

     SCARLET

     Vivien Lee was in our class, too. I’ve no idea where she got the name Vivien and frankly, my dears, I don’t give a damn. She was a tough little bundle with dead straight straw-coloured hair, double bows atop and two huge incisors that gave her a rodent-like appearance. She couldn’t pronounce her ‘th’s or ‘W’s and replaced them with ‘V’ or ‘F’s.

     “Vhat do you mean, vere’s none left? Vere vas ver last time I looked. You know vhat I fink? I fink vat Graham Baker took vem. Vat’s vhat I fink. And he’s already had more van his share. Vat’s vhat I fink.”
I knew a bloke at the advertising agency, McCann Erickson, in the ‘80s who couldn’t sound his ‘F’s and he used to tell people to thuck off.

     SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND

     Graham Alexander was always laughing. Even when he spoke, his voice was laughing. When he was cross, he’d grow bright red and his voice would become clipped, but his face still smiled. His Dad was a barber who worked with his club-footed partner in a Brilliantine-smelling, smoke-filled parlour in Belmont Parade, knee-deep in clumps of human hair. Not much funny about that, I grant you.

     But Mr Alexander was an amiable, if quiet, sort of chap, seemingly happy with his lot in life though possibly worried about his son’s slightly demonic behaviour.
     The Alexander’s lived in Alexander Road, believe it or not, behind the Gordon Arms where the 277 single decked buses stopped and so that the drivers and conductors could nip across the café for a quick cuppa and a fag before turning round and heading back to Crystal Palace.

     The Alexanders was one of a terrace of pretty Victorian cottages that they rented from the council but that to day are privately owned and worth shed loads. Roger Hennessey, Geoff Miller, and David Pullen, all lads from the Red Hill B stream, lived in the same street. So did a snivelling little git called Derek Mumpford from the A stream, who, when he reached the 4th year, became promoted far ahead of his station, became a prefect, and delighted at the authority he was able to weald over other kids.

     Roger, from an obvious Irish Catholic background, had a very well spoken ENGLISH accent and was the best reader in the class. His hair wasn’t red but a sort of Irish red-brown that looked like it could turn red suddenly at any second, allowing the real Irishman to spring forth clutching a point ‘o’Guiness and warbling The Mountains Of Mourne.
Roger didn’t go to Edegbury when he left Red Hill. He went to St Joseph’s in Orpington, which, according to a friend I made at Sidcup Art School who was at St Joseph’s at the same time, was run by a load of brutal monks with whips.

     COPS

     Red Hill was also my first introduction to juvenile police. Nearly all the 10 year old stuck up little gits in the top class, 4A, were prefects and wore red shield-shaped enamel badges to prove their authority. These young

     Nazis carried small exercise books in which they were allowed to write the names of anyone who broke the school rules. A felony could be anything from being late for school, running in the corridor, stepping on various patches of ‘sacred’ grass, drinking from a fountain after the whistle for the end of playtime had sounded, or if one of the little buggers didn’t particularly like you.

     The smart school corridors at Red Hill were tiled with foot square tiles in three colours. A sort of greyish beige for the majority of the floor, an orange single line along both edges, and a continuous line of blue along the centre. This was the line you had to walk on. Very sensible, when you come to think of it, and very safe. But there were police every 20 feet to make sure you didn’t stray. Like automatons, their chant was continual and tedious in its monotony.

     “Walk on the blue line.”
     “Walk on the blue line.”
     “Walk on the blue line.”

     The only relief was the occasional change of accent. “Walk on t’ bloo larn.”

     And if you stepped off it your name went into the prefect’s book. Often, some ‘friend’ would push you off it. Then both names went into the book: your own and your assailant’s. Protest, and you went in twice: once for the offence, and once for luck. If your name was ‘put down’ once, you got detention. Twice and you had to appear before Miss Atwood, the school’s rotund headmistress. If she thought there was just cause, you were caned - one swipe across the palm of each hand. If your name was down 3 times, there was no argument - you had no right of appeal and were caned automatically.

     The delightful Hazel Bridel was a prefect in 4B. She probably deserved to be, though to me, she didn’t really have the necessary cruel streak that seemed to go with the territory.
She was far too kind and gentle a person ever to wear the badge of the Red Hill Fascist without any malice, though she once confessed that she did actually cause someone to be caned.

     The person concerned must have committed a crime not far short of murder and be thoroughly deserving of the punishment for Hazel to have reported them to the ‘authorities’. There could be no other explanation for the actions of such an angel.

     Ann Cooper, another sweet, gentle soul in 4A who used to live opposite us in Imperial Way, was also promoted to the elite corps only to be stripped of her rank when she was caught playing kiss-chase with two Red Hill boys along Chislehurst High Street after school one afternoon, and branded with the description: ‘flighty’, a totally unjustified character assassination, I’m sure. Ann says it was a set-up, and that she wouldn’t have been seen dead kissing the two boys involved, if they were the last two boys on earth. Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she?

     As I said, I was never caned, though my name was once put down when I was in the 4th year. The boys in our class, 4B, joined the boys of 4A for craft on Wednesdays, and the project we were working on was to produce a scale model of the school in balsa wood from the original blueprints. It was going very well, but the 4A lot worked on it in break times every day, so to be fair to them, begrudgingly, they’d done 60% of the work by the time it was ready for painting.

     I was having a discussion with Derek Mumpford, a 4A copper, about the position of the girls’ toilets or something when he suddenly announced that the project was really a 4A job and that as such we 4B’s didn’t have a right to an opinion about the structure. I was in the process of pointing out what utter crap he was talking when he suddenly said:

     “Right. I’m going to put your name down.”

     Of course, I protested to the rotten little turd with his beady eyes and pointed pixie ears, but he produced his nasty dog-eared notebook and proceeded to scribe my name with all the enthusiasm of a starving piranha that’d just found its way into a public swimming pool.

     Mumford was a nervous little sod, and an interesting effect could be produced by suddenly raising an arm in front of his face. Both his hands would come up automatically as if protecting himself from a swarm of drug-crazed wasps and his eyelids would blink at a thousand times a second. Usually you'd pretended you were just going to scratch your head, albeit at the speed of light. It was a neat trick and never failed. It really pissed him off but he could hardly accuse anyone of assault as no blow was ever struck.

     He was gleefully putting the finishing touches to the entry of my name in his grotty his little book when Mr F. Hill, the 4A form master at the time, stopped by the table where the altercation was taking place.

     “What’re you doing, Derek?” he asked quietly.
     “Er, I’m putting Bradley’s name down, Sir.”
     “Really? What for?”
     “For...for being aggressive, sir.”
     “Aggressive? What do you mean, aggressive?”
     “Argumentative.”
     “Don’t be ridiculous. Rub it out.”

     Fred Hill passed on, leaving the red-faced Mumpford rubbing away. I stood there just to make sure the task was completed, knowing that he was wishing that some freak act of God would reduce me to a pile of puss and bones where I stood.

     Fred Hill was a very fair, just, sort of person. A staunch socialist and paid up member of the labour party, he was hired to replace Mr Ormrod, a teacher with the same outlook on life as the Duke of Edinbrough’s, or Genghis Kahn’s, having absolutely no understanding of, sympathy with, or compassion for, what he considered to be the lower classes: in this case, anyone in a class below the A stream.

     NOT SPARING THE ROD

     Mr. Ormrod was a head hitter too. He once hit me for daydreaming in his lesson. 2 resounding smacks on the bonce connected my forehead to the desk with a bang. Had I had my wits about me, I would’ve pretended to fall unconscious onto the floor using the Mike Rickards dying technique, which I’d started to master.

     There would have been a big stink with enough witnesses to get the bastard fired, and another big stink as Ormrod shat himself. (So I liked to think) Actually, I should’ve told Alf and Ormrod would have been dead meat.

     “”E did what? ‘E ‘it you on the bloody ’ead? I’ll give ‘im ‘it you on the bloody ‘ead!
I’ll knock ‘is bloody ‘ead right off ‘is bloody shoulders.”

     He would’ve done, too. Alf was quite nasty when he was riled and I’d love to have seen Ormrod’s face when confronted with the irate matelot. Not that Alf was against corporal punishment. As far as he was concerned if I ever got the cane and deserved it, it was down to me and served me right. But he had a real thing about head hitting, I suppose because it was so bloody dangerous. Still, there was a lot of it about, and the buggers that did it didn’t seem to give a hoot.

     TO BE FAIR

     Fred Hill, on the other hand, saw it as his obligation to teach his charges in 4A that they weren’t the upper crust elite they thought they were and that as far as he was concerned, he was going to stamp out such notions wherever he came across them and if that meant stamping 4A out in the process, then so be it.

     That’s why he gave the weasely Mumpford such short shrift. Fred was quite a striking man in his early forties. His white hair was scraped back off his forehead and he always looked suntanned. His flattish, Negroid type nose and yellow, slightly gappy teeth were strong features, but his deep, gravely voice was remarkable and had tremendous power.

     At low volume it had a warm comforting effect but when he turned it up, it could scare the birds from the trees at 100 yards. He was obviously proud of what he could do with his vocal chords. Usually, a whistle was blown to signify the end of playtime when everyone had first to stand still and then on the second blast, line up with their classmates. One day, when Fred was on duty, he just shouted :

     “STOP!!!!”
     Every one of the 200 or so kids in the playground froze solid. Fred Hill’s daughter was in his class, too, but she got no favouritism.
     “That’s enough talking at the back there. JANET HILL. SHUT UP!”

     FRED

     Fred also took over as games master for a while and decided that the showers in the boys cloakroom at least, which had never been used, would be used. He made the
Announcement in the mixed 4A / 4B craft class the day before he was due to take us for football. Diplomatically, as one boy at least totally misread it, he asked if there were any objections.

     He was a particularly toffee-nosed little git called Adrian Varwell (you’d have to be stuck up with a name like that ) raised his hand and stood up, stating that his mother would rather he had a bath. (pronounced borth ) Fred had this frightening knack of speaking through his teeth when he was really narked. He didn’t raise his voice but it came out like the hiss of a really pissed off python.

     “You’ll have a shower like everyone elssssssssssse.” he hissed.
     Varwell sat down. And the next day, he took a shower along with everyone else. I got the same treatment once when Fred was talking about taking us swimming and teaching us to swim properly.
     “I can swim, sir.” I said, with a stupid grin, “Like a brick.”
     “That’s not funny!” hissed the clenched yellow teeth. I wanted to die.

     But Fred was a very kind soul. Janet Skinner told me years later that her beloved Dad had got his business into trouble and had in turn got himself into trouble trying to rescue it and ended up in prison. His exploits made a couple of column inches in the local paper though he wasn’t exactly Buster Edwards.

     I don’t recall knowing anything about it, but Janet, loving her Dad to absolute bits, was very upset. During a swimming lesson at the dreaded Darrick Wood swimming pool in Orpington, Fred swam up to her when she was alone near the deep end and asked her if she’d had any comments from other children in the school and that if she had, he would take care of matters and put a stop to it.

     Talking of schoolboy football, (Who was? I know I wasn’t.) I happened to pick up a pair of my 12 year old son’s footy boots whilst following the trail of discarded items of clothing that your average 12 year old boy seems to drop in his wake like so much discarded snake skin.

     I was amazed that his special David Beckham designed footwear were more like ballet slippers - slim, elegant, streamlined, with soft toes, unlike the brown leather clod-hoppers I owned as a child. You know, the ones that stretched half way up your legs with white laces half a mile long that you used to push through the leather loop at the back of the ankle, cross over then wind underneath the sole and across the top as many times as it took till there was just enough left to tie a double knot.

     Those boots were hard and stiff, and felt like they were made of corrugated iron with toes of armour plate. If you got stuck in the mud in these things and you fell over, it was likely you’d snap your ankles clean off. They were supposed to soften with use if you waxed them with dubbin. Of course, no-one bothered.

     FOOTY

     Granddad, who never usually bought Christmas presents, stunned the family by presenting me with a pair of brown leather football boots along with a panelled brown leather football, on Christmas morning, 1955.

     Proudly, I wore them out onto the street while my sister tried out the metal-wheeled roller skates he gave her. She maintained her balance with the use of my trusty King Arthur Sword Alf made for me the year before, until coming to a complete standstill and screaming for me to rush to her aid. I probably ignored her for a few moments, and enjoyed the scene before trundling to her rescue.

     On the pavement, clutching my new ball under my arm, outside 2 Slades Drive where we always spent Christmas, the half inch long leather studs made me sound like the Victorious German army entering Paris in 1941.

     I was 9 when had my first foray onto a real football pitch – well, a school football pitch. For the event I wore the shorts that once belonged to Tim Adkin, the 40 odd year old son of the very rich family that my Grandmother was housekeeper to. Tim Adkin had been a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm during and the navy blue baggy bloomers with elastic round the waist, looked like a long, flared skirt on my tiny frame.

          TIN GOD

     Miss Atwood, or Fatty as she was unkindly called, was a short, large bosomed, middle-aged dumpy lady with a very heavy footfall. She arrived for the daily assembly from the back of the stage where the Choir stood, and though you couldn’t see her, the sound of her march on the wooden floor was unmistakeable and the whole building seemed to quake. (Must have been a well-enforced floor.)

     She drove a small, rounded, bubble-shaped green Austin A35 ‘baby’ car which very accurately complimented her own shape. She was strict and could be frighteningly severe but had a soft side, which most people never saw.

     “You’re nothing but an old tin god!” was a famous remark once screeched at her by an irate Mrs Ayers, whose 3 children, she claimed, were being victimised and often punished unnecessarily. The fact that the two boys, Martin and Colin, were a pair of disruptive tearaways had escaped Mrs Ayers’s maternally instinctive notice.

     Basically, Miss Atwood was a good all-round (very round) headmistress - strong-willed, and in control. Or was she an old fashioned, out of date, control freak of a frustrated old maid?

     MISS A

     Like all Head teachers, Miss Atwood could be pretty terrifying. When she was really pissed off about something, she’d carry her cane with her, probably eager to vent her anger taking the skin off the palms of some victim’s hands.

     She once tapped me on the head with it as I walked past her in a line of classmates after she’d delivered one of her terrifying ‘naughty children’ speeches to the whole school. I must have been talking or breathing out of turn and it gave me a real shock as if someone had suddenly plugged me into the national grid. It worked it’s magic, though. I was scared shitless of ever doing anything wrong and having to face Miss Atwood’s total wrath. I just knew in such circumstances I’d have a heart attack or worse, bawl my eyes out.

     Actually, none of the goody-goodies in my class at Red Hill were ever caned or came near. Whether we were natural born angels or everybody was just chicken like me, I don’t really know, but the thought of being sent to Miss Atwood for punishment carried the same weight as being sent to the electric chair. As History continually shows us, fear is a great controller.

     ONLY THE LONELY

     Being a head teacher must be a very lonelyplace to be. Back in the 50s most of the headmistresses of the day were married spinsters - married to the job with no room for a person of the opposite gender in their lives, and perhaps no inclination for any relationship other than the one they had with the school and its pupils. I used to wonder about this situation. Everybody had to be married if they were normal it seemed to me.

     My Mother and Father were married after all, and so was everyone else’s. Not to be so, was a strange concept to me. Maybe no-one found headmistresses attractive. Certainly the two I’d had the closest dealings with could hardly have been said to be glamorous or even pretty. One was vastly overweight and the other was stringy like a stick insect and both were as abrasive as heavy-duty sandpaper most of the time.

     I found this state of affairs rather sad. I’d wondered what they did at those wonderful family times like Christmas or birthdays. Did they spend the time alone? Did they get presents and if so, who from? And did they ever go on holiday and if they did, did they go alone? Did they actually have friends? Did they.......
.......It was all too difficult to contemplate.

     Years later, I was delivering a parcel of sausage meat to a bungalow in a quiet side road off Willow Grove, and as I parked the bike against the hedge I noticed a figure bending over some plants in the garden next door. The figure straightened up. It was Miss Atwood, still in one of the flowery frocks she always used to wear.

     She smiled warmly, genuinely, and said good morning. I said good morning back and her smile widened. As I looked at her standing there in that little garden surrounded by tiny rockery blooms, it struck me that this once iron-fisted icon of discipline looked vulnerable, almost pathetic.

     Was there a glimmer of recognition? Surely not. She’d had hundreds of children pass through her care and hardly knew any of them very well. I really wanted to say something - to stop and chat, to pass the time of day, to engage in some small conversation. After all, she’d been a big influence on my life in her way.

     She’d never done me any harm - likely as not, she’d probably done me a lot of good even though at that particular moment I couldn’t think what. For some un-accountable reason, I felt sorry for her. She was obviously retired and this must have been her retirement bungalow. It was only big enough for a single person, probably with one bedroom.

     She lived alone of course. So here she was looking exactly the same, perhaps a little older, but the same Miss Atwood. But I turned away. As I rode off down the road, I wondered what she thought about. Had her life and career been worthwhile? Was she fulfilled? What did she think about now? Was she happy? What did I care? Why should I care? Strangely enough I did.

     PURPLE HAZE

     Being an avid reader, Roger was a great playmate for imagination games at playtimes. I was never interested in kicking a tennis ball about and pretending I was at Wembley. I’d much rather transport myself off to the plains of Montana and torture a few Indians or to the Sahara desert and gallop about on a white Arab stallion, scimitar raised, screaming:

     “Death to the infidels and 4A prefects.”

     The class was split into groups according to reading ability, each group working it’s way through a book suitable for it’s particular level. I was in the top reading group in 4B with Roger, Christine Searle, a dark-haired, serious girl with apparent high moral values, Janet Earle, fresh back from 3 years in India, and with a distinctive, cultured English Raj type accent, and the wonderful Hazel Bridel.

     Hazel had turned up with her twin sister, Angela, one day half way through a term at Mead Road in identical blue Macs with tartan-lined hoods. Apart from the clobber, they didn’t look remotely alike and were immediately separated by dint of the fact that Angela was academically brighter and was placed in a class up a grade. 4 years later Hazel, quite unconsciously I’m sure, began subtly to mesmerise me with her soft, welcoming smile, and her quiet, gentle beauty.

     Being so close to her in the reading group, which was bunched up round two pairs of desks pushed together, was almost more than I could have wished for at the tender age of 10. I fantasised that she felt the same way about me as I did about her, though we never discussed such things.

     Angela just seemed to know how smitten I was - instinctively. It must have been that twin thing. You know, when one of them’s in pain the other feels it. Or perhaps she’d just noticed me staring dewy-eyed at her sister.

     I did worship the ground that Hazel floated over, but I never admitted it either. Hazel just smiled that wonderful smile ofIn normal class times, Hazel sat behind me to the left next to her best friend Barbara Copin, who for some reason seemed to hate me. Maybe she was jealous of my quiet worship of her friend or something, but, whatever the reason, she was quite vociferous:

     “You’ve got dirty ears.” Barbara would say venomously. It was a horrible thing to say even if it was true. It fair sapped my self-confidence. Her timing was impeccable. She said it loudest at the very moment when Hazel and I embraced on the way home from school one glorious summer afternoon.

     Hazel and I suddenly found ourselves practically nose-to-nose and I didn’t really know what to do next - no, correction - I didn’t have a clue. There was a definite instinctive sense that I should do something, so we just rubbed cheeks. It seemed kind of natural. It was, after all, what I’d always done with my Mum when I told her I loved her.

     “You’ve got really dirty ears.” Barbara’s cutting voice broke the spell.
nbsp;    I;It was the day of our one and only date, Hazel and me. I was taking her to my Nan’s house to see the 6-week-old Labrador puppy my Aunt had been given for her 21st birthday. Angela came too, but I don’t remember Barbara being there. Just as well, really. She’d only have said the dog had dirty ears or something.

     ALL THE RAGE

     I sat next to Graham baker in 4B at Red Hill. He was one of the tallest boy in the class and had a spiv-like quality about him, and he was always party to the next coming trend and knew how to get hold of whatever was required before anyone else and for next to nothing.

     “What’s that?” I said one day as he produced what looked like plastic raffia from his pocket.
     "Scooby-Do.” he announced, as if he’d just discovered sliced bread.
     Scooby-Do was a completely pointless pastime consisting of four strands of coloured plastic about 2 foot long which you painstakingly wove together until, after about a week, you ended up with a 4 inch long woven plastic cube about half an inch thick, which was completely and utterly useless except to remind you you’d completed the task of making it.

     Then you bought some more plastic strands and started again. But Baker was right. Scooby-Do caught on and spread faster than wild fire. Soon, everybody was at it. It was mildly therapeutic I suppose, but quite what the real point was no one was sure.

     It didn’t seem dangerous so it never got banned like conkers or those cap bombs you could toss high in the air by swinging them from a piece of cotton till they came down and penetrated someone’s skull, exploding on impact, scattering bone and brain tissue far and wide, splattering everyone’s white Summer ankle socks with bloody confetti - at least that’s what we were led to believe.

     Like all such raves, Scooby-do lasted about 6 weeks then disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, by which time Baker was already into the next craze, making butter from school milk. This was a perfectly simple task involving saving about half an inch of milk in the bottom of the bottle of school milk we were all forced to swallow a during the morning break, then shaking it furiously for about 3 hours.

     It seemed almost as pointless as Scooby Doo to me, but at least you could spread the butter you’d made on some bread if you were really desperate.

n     Another playground craze was 5 stones. This consisited of 5, three quarters of an inch, chalk cubes which you tossed up from the palm of your hand, turning your hand overto try and catch as many as you could on the back of your hand. If you didn’t catch any, it was your opponent’s turn.

     However many stones you caught, you had to throw them up and pick up the ones you’d dropped before turning your hand over and catching them as they fell. First, there was ‘Onesies’, which meant picking up remaining stones one at a time. Then Twosies’,when you had to pick up 2 at time.

     Then,‘Threesies’,and so on. Riveting stuff. Having completed these basic moves, you could progress into more advanced territory. There was ‘Cavesies’, which meant making a cave with your left hand and knocking remaining stones into the cavern one at a time. There were many other manoeuvres to complete before the game ended, but I don’t remember them because I never completed Cavesies.

     Actually, I didn’t know anyone who ever completed the whole game.

     The heavy, chalk stones had sharp corners when they were new and, if thrown too high, would turn your knuckles red and raw after not too long, but the kids who were rich were able to buy wooden 5 Stones which were much lighter and easier to use.

     The really wealthy kids, progressed from 5 Stones to ‘Jacks’, a similar game using small, spikey, brass-like objects and a small rubber ball. It looked like a more sophisticated game, but I never learned it, not being able to afford the equipment and having become bored with the whole 5 Stones concept fairly early on – after about half an hour.

     There was one game that every boy was always up for: ‘He Ball’. It was a form of ‘Lepper’, the tag game where anyone who was touched became a chaser until everyone had been caught. In He Ball, the ball was thrown by whoever was nominated ‘he’ or ‘it’, and if you were hit, you joined the ranks of the chaser.‘He Ball’ was played with a tennis ball which was thrown at the flee-ers by the chasers, usually with considerable force.

     As a flee-er, you could only run when the ball was loose and you had to stop when the ball was in the possession of the ‘It’ person. The ‘It’ person could throw the ball to another ‘It’ person who might be nearer to a possible victim, who could defend himself by punching the ball away with his fists or by lying down and using the soles of his feet. If the ball hit you on any other part of the body, you were infected and became an ‘It’ person yourself. It was a very exciting game and was played by any number of kids from half a dozen to anything up to a hundred.

     The game was banned, however, when some bright spark decided to replace the tennis ball with a cricket ball half way through a game. Shame, really.




‘Are you a Pears baby?’

Al Reed: “Coom in.”
“WOOF!”
AR: “ Get down! No, not you! The dog. Don’t take nor nortice of ‘im. ‘E’ll settle down in a minute.”
“WOOF!”
AR: “Sit! Not you, the dog. Any road, you’ll find t’ sofa’s more coomfortable than t’ floor. Would you like a biscuit?”
“WOOF!”
AR: “GERROFFIM! It’s all right. He’s joost beinn’ friendly. Look, best give him the buscuit.”
“WOOF!”
AR: “Caught your fingers, did ‘e? Well, they were a bit close to ‘is gob.”
“WOOF!”
AR: “ Now stop that. Put ‘im down! Joost relax. Play dead. ‘E’ll drop yer in a minute.”
“WOOF!”
AR: “There’ya. I told yer ‘e would. Joost dorn’t mek any sooden movements and you’ll be OK.”
“WOOF!”
AR: “Oh. Bit of a mistake that, reachin’ into your pocket.‘E thinks you’ve got summat for ’im, yer see. Your best suit, was it? Well, it’s seen better days, ‘as that.”
“WOOF!”
AR: “‘S all right. ‘E will let go your arm. Eventually.


* * * * * * * * * * * * *


Stupid Cupid, you’re a real mean guy,
I ought to clip you wings so you can’t fly,
I’m in love and it’s a crying shame,
And I know you’re the one to blame,
Hey-hey, set me free,
Stupid Cupid, stop pickin’ on me.

I can’t do my homework and I can’t see straight,
I meet him every morning bout a half past eight,
I’m behaving like a lovesick fool,
You’ve even got me carrying his books to school,
Hey-hey, set me free,
Stupid Cupid, stop pickin’ on me.

You messed me up for good right from the very start,
Hey go play Robin Hood,
With someone elses heart,

You got me jumpin’ like a crazy clown,
And I don’t feature what you’re puttin’ down,
Since I kissed his lovin’ lips of wine,
The thing that bothers me is that I like it fine,
Hey-hey, set me free,
Stupid Cupid, stop pickin’ on me.

Hey-hey, set me free,
Stupid Cupid, stop pickin’ on me.


Chapter 17. HEADS, I LOSE

     It was while I was at Red Hill that I had my first experience of toothache, followed swiftly by my first visit to a dentist, John Percy Page, in the Foots Cray Road. I was 7 and had a brand new shiny, ball bearing growing in my gum, obviously making a take-over bid for the front left side of my mouth and pushing the teeth to one side, thus causing the unspeakable pain I was suffering.

     John Percy Page was a huge man with nicotine stained fingers, who breathed the aftermath of several packs of Senior Service into my mouth, his huge, pebbled lensed, horn-rimmed glasses making his eyes appear enormous, and a white coat that looked for some reason like it belonged to a hard up vet rather than a dental surgeon.

     The surgery, the front room of a terraced 30's house, was dark. It had high doorknobs that only extremely tall adults could reach - obviously placed they’re to stop terrified children escaping. Everything was painted in that horrible brown varnish that my Dad, Alf, seemed so fond of in those days.

     The floor was covered in dark red lino, so all the blood that was spilt didn’t show and frighten the next patient. Old Percy’s footfall was so heavy on this stuff, you could hear him striding about from the waiting room. I used to imagine what he was doing to some poor devil when the footsteps stopped. It was like the cue for a blood-curdling scream.

     By the frosted glass window in the surgery stood an electric chair, black and foreboding - well, that’s what it looked like to me. I’d seen one before on a James Cagney film as they strapped him screaming into it before a shadowy arm pulled huge switch, ending Jimmy’s pleading abruptly with a sinister humming sound.

     The chair was connected to all kinds of evil looking things by thin, dark red rubber hosing. There was a whooshing sound somewhere in the background and the place reeked of some horrible sickly something that my young nostrils hadn’t encountered before.

     Stiff with fear, my tiny frame was placed in the electric chair and JPP disappeared behind me. Suddenly his face was in mine, upside down, grinning, looking exactly like the Cheshire cat in Disney's Alice in Wonderland. He kept disappearing too, only to reappear a nano-second later with a fresh gouger. He prodded the ball-bearing with a yellow finger and said: "Yeeeeeeesss! I see."

    He'd had to be blind not to have. It was right in the front at the top, and a bit to the side. I know that's not exactly dentist talk, you know, all that stuff they recite to the nurse before they reach for the mole-wrench. That's more frightening than anything. You sit there terrified that that last Chinese word 6you heard him say actually meant something's got to come out. What the hell does 'aclusal' mean, anyway? It's the scariest word in the dictionary.

     JPP pumped up the chair with that kick-start type pedal those old chairs used to have and the emptiness in my stomach from the lack of breakfast ( it wasn't explained to me why I wasn't to have any) rolled into a knot of panicking air and tried to force itself into my throat with every jolt.

     "We're going to put you to sleep." JPP announced with his booming voice. I didn't find this at all encouraging - I knew that this was what you did with cats that were past their sell-by date. He jammed a rubber house brick attached to a chain between my upper and lower jaws and told me to take deep breaths. I obeyed the booming voice in a jerky, nervous sort of way dreading what was coming next.

     In a vicious, sudden attack, Percy caught me by surprise, clamping something unspeakable over my mouth and nose. There was that smell again, only this time it was all I could smell. There was no escape. The stuff, whatever it was, seemed to be filling me up and my body felt sort of fizzy and sponge-like and I felt I was fading away.

     "Just breath deeply." came Percy’s now wobbly voice from a million miles away, and I was propelled upwards into a nightmare of loud buzzing noises and frantic screams whose origin I couldn't determine. Vibrant, lurid colours assaulted the front of whatever mind I had left. I was lost - rising then plummeting; twisting; turning; spiralling...

     Two things brought this vile experience rushing back to me in later years. The first was when the class of 12 year olds I happened to be part of at my secondary modern school, were forced by it's particularly sadistic form master to learn to the point of recitation John Milton's L' allegro:


Hence loath-ed melancholy,
Of Cerberus and blackest midnight born,
In stygian cave forlorn,
‘mongst horrid shapes, sights and shrieks unholy....


     That about sums it up. I'm not sure which was worse, the poem or the dentist. I think the poem, actually. It put me off dentists for years.

     The other was when Kane in Ridley Scott's film ‘Alien’ was recovering from having the organism thrust down his throat, and a crewmember asked him what he remembered and he said ‘just some horrible dream about smothering’.

     Years later, I wondered how Percy managed to get hold of his LSD gas conversion kit so far ahead of time. (Not that I ever took the darn stuff, but I knew a girl who did.)

     Percy was grinning down at me when I came round, and I marvelled at the yellowness of his own huge teeth. I'm making him sound like and ogre (He did actually) but in fact he was a very nice, caring man. He just had an alarming appearance. He did seem extra delighted with the socking great hole he'd just created.

     "Well done." he said. What for? I was asleep. Well, having nightmares, anyway.

     For a while nature took its course and things went smoothly, in the Hampstead Heath department. A year later my top 2 front teeth came out - you know, all I want for Christmas type stuff - nothing left but a gap as wide as the English Channel. Several months later and it was still there - my smile still revealed nothing but a dark abyss. There’s a school picture of me somewhere where I'm only half smiling. Connie told me that morning that whatever I did, I should keep my lips closed.

     More weeks went by with still no sign of any new choppers giving birth. Nowt. By now the gums were blue and swollen, and JPP assured a worried Connie that there were indeed 2 very healthy and large teeth up there but that they appeared to be asleep and that it was about time for him to do something to wake them up.

     Oh, he woke them up all right! He kicked them out of bed with a long chopstick type thing with a very sharp point on the end. ‘Nicking the gums’ he called it, grinning down at me. Percy certainly enjoyed his work. In much the same way that Jack The Ripper mustve enjoyed his.

     Wow. The new teeth were fantastic...apparently. I say apparently, because I don't remember them, at least, not the way they were when they were first born. I didn't have time to get to know them. No sooner were they fully erupted (That's dentist talk for come right through) when in the playground of Red Hill School, one early morning break, they collided with Graham Baker's head.

     He was running one way round a group of girls and I was running the other. ( I suppose we were unconsciously rounding them up, a practise that we'd soon be adopting in earnest.) The choppers were knocked loose and crooked, spilling much of my 8 year old blood in the process.

     After that, it was all down hill. JPP couldn't do anything and sent me to an orthodontist pal of his at the other end of the street, a nice little man called Mr Wallace. He wore a short white jacket rather than a fullength white coat and always sat down to his work. He wore rimless Gestapo style specs and squinted a lot showing the most beautiful set of false teeth I'd ever seen, which was a little disconcerting, and didn't exactly fill me full of confidence.

     After numerous X rays and impressions, (no, not as in Rory Bremner, unless he's a brass-coloured dish full of what looked like second-hand bubble gum that was forced into my mouth till I gagged) I had 8 side teeth extracted and was fitted with various sets of pink plastic plates with adjustable screws and ratchets to try and prise the damaged top teeth out from behind the bottom ones which was where they'd ended up. The treatment took years and was never entirely successful.

     The teeth started to twist as I got older and eventually the left one began to protrude at at an ugly angle when I got to my late 40's. There'd apparently been an enormous amount of damage done by the initial impact that was later to cause me trouble again and again. I'll get you for this one day, Baker.

     THE END AND THE BEGINNING OF THE END

     The last term at Red Hill was a heavenly experience. The exams were over and everybody’s destination to a secondary school was decided. We could just relax and enjoy the hot summer and look forward to the promise of a sparkling future. We played rounders, sat in the sun, and waited for the 7 weeks of holiday time that was to come.

     Those of us who lived on the estate could spend countless hours roaming the fields and meadows of the vast stretches of Green Belt land that surrounded us, and lose ourselves in that fabulous world of imagination that envelopes a 10-year-old’s existence. Life was sweet.

     In H.G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine, the hero comes into contact with the Eloi, a totally innocent community of beautiful, idealistic people who believe they live in heaven.

     They wander about holding hands, sometimes making love and sometimes making flower necklaces and generally enjoying their utopian existence not realising that they are being bred for the sole purpose of providing food for the Morlocks, a war-like breed of underground horrors who live in caves beneath the Earth’s crust.

     Looking back, the last term at Red Hill before leaving to enter the nightmare of Edgebury and the like, had much the same flavour. We weren’t destined to be eaten, of course, but some of us were due to be swallowed whole by a tyrannical system that at the end of it all, would spit us out in tiny pieces - if we couldn’t find a way to survive it all.

     It was all a part of what was loosely referred to as growing up.


‘Bridge that gap with Cadbury’s Snack’.


VS: “Good morning, everyone. Welcome to half an hour of delightful music and sweet melodies from my wonderful orchestra, and me, the wonderful Victor Sylvester. I hope we can transport you away from the humdrum of your housewifely existence to places you are very unlikely to go in reality and can only dream about from your lowly, working class position and generally drab lot in life.

“Now my Silver Strings would like very much to play their rendition of’ Golden Sunsets’, a haunting little number that I scribbled down this very morning as I sat on the lavvie. O-le!”



* * * * * * * * * * *


Hang down your head Tom Dooley,
Hang down your head and cry...
Hang down your head Tom Dooley,
Poor boy, you’re gonna die,

I met her on a mountain,
There I took her life,
Met her on on a mountain,
Stabbed her with my knife,

Hang down your head Tom Dooley,
Hang down your head and cry,
Hang down your head Tom Dooley,
Poor boy your gonna die,

I reckon in the mornin’,
Reckon where I’ll be,
If it hadn’t’ve bin for Sherriff Grayson,
I’d’ve bin in Tennessee

Hang down your head Tom Dooley,
Hang down your head and cry,
Hang down your head Tom Dooley,
Poor boy your gonna die,

I reckon in the mornin’,
Reckon where I’ll be,
I’ll be down in the valley,
Hangin’ from a wide oak tree,

Hang down your head Tom Dooley,
Hang down your head and cry,
Hang down your head Tom Dooley,
Poor boy you’re gonna die.



Chapter 18. THE BOTTLE I HAD THEN BUT DON’T HAVE NOW

     In late 1956 the skiffle craze really took hold and though I quite liked a lot of the American R&R stuff, it was skifflle for me because the groups were guitar based. Actually, they were tea chest ‘bassed’, but there were always guitars or banjos included.

     The great thing about skiffle was that almost anybody could play it who could twang the piece of string attached to a broom handle or scratch out a rhythm on a washboard with a fist full of brass thimbles. The guitar added musical authenticity and polish to the performance and you only needed to play 3 chords in the one key that the singer/singers felt comfortable with: E Major. (Also, E Major could be played with just 3 fingers and, being down at the ‘easy’end of the fingerboard where the tuning machines were, it was the easiest chord to play and the first one that every would be guitar player learned.)

     If you could play 4 chords you were really pushing the boat out but would very likely upset other members of the group whose musical abilities generally only stretched to 3 at the very max. There was no limit to the number of people in one skiffle group and sometimes there were as many as 7 guitar players.

     The songs were rough-edged and raucous and the more rough-edged and raucous a bloke’s voice was, the better. This was real suburban folk music and anyone could get involved - anyone who weren’t your parents, that is.

     Skiffle groups sprang up all over the place. All you needed was a bunch of enthusiastic blokes; an exotic name; somewhere to practice; and you were away. The famous groups all played the coffee bars of Soho, like the 2 I’s and the Heaven and Hell in Old Compton Street. (It wasn’t usual for girls to join a group of smelly men warbling their way through resurrected blues and gospel songs though there were one or two exeptions to the rule.)

     Few skiffle groups could claim fame that stetched very far beyond the boundaries of their local street, but those that could included ‘The Vipers’, with Wally Whyton, (From which later emerged Hank Marvin, Tony Meehan and Jet Harris, who with Bruce Welch, became first the Drifters and then the Shadows, Cliff Richard’s backing band); ‘The Chas McDevitt Group’ with Nancy Whiskey; ‘The Worried Men’, with Adam Faith as the lead singer; but best of all by far, ‘Les Hobeaux’.

     Les Hobeaux produced a sumptuous, acoustic guitar sound and, like Lonnie Donegan, had an electric lead guitar. Alf heard them first on Radio Luxemburg and told me about what he thought was a great song:
     ‘Oh Mary Don’t You Weep’.

     He was right. ‘Oh Mary Don’t You Weep’, was an old spiritual nicked from the archives, dusted off and polished up by Les Hobeaux, and their performance of the song, with its rich wall of acoustic guitar sound, finally confirmed my ambition to make such a sound myself - or a sound like the one produced by the Chas McDevit skiffle group who, with Glaswegian singer Nancy Whiskey, had a No1 hit with ‘Freight Train’. I was sure I’d be able to do it. All I needed was a guitar or 6.

     The most important pre-requisite for being in a skiffle group, above being able to play anything or even sing was, what we would call today, attitude. It was essential to look depressed, in a world-weary, resigned, dead-beat, persecuted kind of way. If you could half-close your eye lids and stoop a bit, it helped. And you never, ever, smiled. ‘Happy’ just wasn’t skiffle.

     One of the front singer-guitarists in the Vipers got it absolutely right on the nail He had no top front teeth. If he’d had them removed for the purpose, it was pretty hip. If he’d had them knocked out in a fight, he was a real rebel. If he’d had them taken out by a dentist because they were decayed and he couldn’t be bothered with dentures, he was next to Jesus Christ.

     The songs helped with the mood thing. They were nearly all blues or gospel based, sad and melancholic. A lot of them were about trains and probably as a tribute to all the hobos who used to travel the freight trains from one side of the USA to the other during the depression of the 1930s, often loosing the odd leg or foot trying to clamber aboard a slowly moving freight train. There could easily have been a skiffle song called: ‘I Left My Foot In San Francisco’, a guaranteed smash hit, I’m sure. But there wasn’t.

     CHEWING GUM

     Lonnie Donegan claimed to have started it all when he was playing banjo in Chris Barber’s traditional jazz band in the early 1950s. During the rest periods in the recording studios or gigs, Donegan would sing blues and old blues based folk songs and other band members would join in and improvise with anything they could lay their hands on.

     What they had was like the sound of the New Orleans ‘jug’ bands of the 20’s and 30s where anything that a tune could be got out of was used, including and washboards and kitchen implements that you could blow through or bash, things with. I thought the word Skiffle came from the ‘shuffly’ sound that the groups produced with their peculiar rhythms but hoped there was some more esoteric origin. Not that I’d ever heard the word esoteric at the time

     Skiffle’ just sounded right. It turned out that the term was originally ‘skuffle’ but became skiffle because of the way the word was pronounced in New Orleans.

     Lonnie Donegan played a Martin Guitar, from Nazareth, Pennsylvania, one of the finest acoustic steel strung guitars made anywhere in the world. They’re still unsurpassed today - the modern ones are arguably not quite up to the standard of the older instruments, but nevertheless, they’re still the best. My first ‘real’ guitar I bought was a Martin, which I got on HP having borrowed forty quid off my girlfriend in 1968 for the deposit. (Come to think of it, I don’t remember ever repaying her.)

     When Lonnie Donegan became the mega success that he did, he moved away from the raw routes of the skiffle genre, and his skiffle group became more of a ‘show band’, with the band members in tuxedos.

     He did, to some degree, stay true to the skiffle roots, playing mainly traditional blues derivative stuff, but occasionally buggering about with crap like ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman’ and ‘Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour On The Bedpost Overnight?’ for which he should have been placed somewhere deep in the Tower of London, and had his plectrum fingers squeezed in a vice.

     What Lonnie did better than anybody, including the Rock ‘n’ Rollers, was to work himself up into a frenzy so by the end of a song he was almost hysterical. Small wonder he was to be the victim of several heart attacks in later years. But his slower songs were often plaintively beautiful.

     Skiffle was relatively short lived, however, and most of the groups were dying out towards the end of 1957, due to the pressure from and popularity of Rock ‘n’ Roll, though it could have had something to do with Skiffle songs being so depressing.

     Even the Vipers, considered to be the most purist of the whole movement, started to produce cover versions of guitar based American music and actually recorded a version of Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’.

     Rock ‘n’ Roll songs were also about suffering, but it was more the kind imposed by schoolteachers, parents and broken hearts (According to the American Dream) rather than the drugs, booze, murder, rape and vice, that seemed to be underlying themes in Skiffle songs. Rock ‘n’ Roll was upbeat in more ways than one. It was a celebration of being young and free. The booze and drugs could wait till later, as in a lot of cases, it did.

     To support the guitar rave but also in an attempt to keep things respectable, the BBC launched the radio programme,‘Guitar Club’, hosted by Guitarist, Ken Sykora, and featured first class musicians like Ike Isaacs and Diz Dizley, exposing its audience to the music of Django Reinhardt and other jazz guitar players. For would be guitar players the programme was a dream come true and my ear was regularly glued to our little post war Bakelite Bush radio we kept on a shelf in our tiny kitchen, as I tried to drain it of every guitar sound it had on offer.

     Guitar Club was renamed ‘Saturday Skiffle’ which didn’t last long. The Rock machine swiftly Rolled its tank tracks right over the top of it, brushing it aside and replacing it with the stabilising, adultish voice of Brian Mathew and his annoying ‘Saturday Club’, catering for the far wider, hungrier Rock audience but still keeping things civilised at the same time.

     The big Rock ‘n’ Roll promoters had begun to take their stuff seriously realising there was big money to be made and skiffle was finally squeezed out of the pop music scene altogether. Its bohemian image was thought totally out of place anywhere near that of the polished, slick, and most importantly, sexier style of the Rock ‘n’ Rollers.

     Lonnie Donegan’s management skilfully sidestepped the issue by re-pitching him at a slightly older age bracket, smartening up the group’s stage appearance and sprinkling his repertoire with silly comedy songs. The strategy worked and Donegan kept his popularity alive well into the 1960s, even changing his hairstyle from the swept back Rock/Skiffle look to the new American short, sideparted ‘College Boy’ cut snatched up by Adam Faith, Perry Como and, eventually, even Frank Sinatra.

n     HANG DOWN YOUR HEAD

     When Lonnie Donegan was at the top of the hit parade with his manic version of ‘Tom Dooley’, I wandered off to the Regal Sidcup one Saturday morning with my guitar. I was about 13, and was already quite a fair player. I must have been pretty confident, if a bit rash, because I went to the manager’s office as the kids were queuing up for their tickets, and offered to play and sing for them.

     He stared at me incredulously from his leather armchair, his bow tie twitching nervously.

     Mr Penny was a slightly odd man, intelligent, with a cultured voice but intense, probably too intelligent to be a mere manager of a local cinema. I never thought he was at all comfortable with the masses of banshee-wailing kids that surrounded him on a Saturday morning. I think he really believed that children should be hidden away from view until they were no longer children.

     “You want to what?” he said, his eyes narrowing suspiciously.
n     “I thought I’d play to the kids.” I said, feeling very adult suddenly.
     “What would you play?” he said, even more suspiciously.
     “I thought I’d do Tom Dooley.” I said with just a pinch of arrogance.

     His eyes widened and his eyebrows almost came unstuck, his David Nixon look-alike hairless bonce sprouting tiny beads of sweat as he tried to contain his excitement. (David Nixon was a popular magician and TV personality of the 1950s.)

     “You can play that?”
     “Yeah.” I said, my arrogance moving swiftly on to an air of ice-cool nonchalance.

     I have to say, my version of the song had been heavily rehearsed and bore more than a passing resemblance to Donegan’s, including the near hysterical crescendo at the end. I could even mimic the way he played, his posture, the way his head sank down into his shoulders, the way he lifted his feet and bent his knees inwards like he was experiencing an attack of Montezuma’s Revenge.

     Penny suddenly sprang keenly to his feet, as if he was the Captain of the Titanic and someone had just come up with a way to bung up the hole.

     “Come on then,” he said, excitedly, if a bit anxiously, ushering me out of his office and locking it behind him.

     I followed him through a couple of corridors, beneath a set of red velvet curtains, and into the aisle that led down a slight slope to the stage.

     I;A tidal wave of sound from 1000 screaming kids immediately bludgeoned us like a million socks full of sand. Little wonder Penny was pleased to have found some new entertainment for them - they were like a Roman mob baying for blood. He climbed purposefully up the steps onto the stage with the demenour of a man on a mission and I followed.

     Penny adjusted the tall chrome microphone stand as a powerful spotlight was turned on, half blinding me and hiding the sea of faces behind a shroud of brilliant white light. It was just as well. If I’d caught sight of the rabble, I might have had second thoughts or sent for a fresh pair of trousers. The manager’s loudly amplified voice cut through the din like a razor through flesh.

     “We’ve got some special entertainment for you this morning. Er....” he leaned down from his 6ft 2 height and hissed, “What’s your name?”

     I thought of saying something exotic like Marlon or Jed, which I thought would make me sound more ‘skiffle’, but what came out, was “Neal,” and I casually began to strum an introduction to Tom D.

     “Neal, here, is going to play and sing for you.”

     He didn’t announce the song, but stepped back and went down the steps as if making straight for an air raid shelter. If this went wrong, he wasn’t going to be the one that got pilloried. I couldn’t see a bloody thing, still temporarily blinded by the spotlight, but the noise rose to a crescendo. I stepped forward to the flat chrome mike which Mr Penny had lowered for me and was big enough to hide half my face, and sang the slow introductory line of the song, gently stroking the first chord a’ la Donegan.      “Hang down your head Tom Dooley....”

     My voice came back to me in an amazingly powerful echo from somewhere up in the roof. The effect was shattering. I couldn’t believe it was me, and it pumped up my confidence a level or two. As the last echo died at the end of the first line, the audience shut up as if someone had flipped the off switch. If a pin had dropped on the soft red cinema carpet it would have sounded like an iron girder....”

     I was off and running, and boy, did I go for it. I was lost. All I could hear was my un-broken voice from somewhere up in Heaven and the guitar. At last, I wound into the final hysterical chorus and hung on to the high-pitched endnote for as long as I had the breath.

     “POOR BOY..........YOU’RE GONNA DIE YEYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!”

     The echo faded into the roof leaving a split second’s silence that seemed like an hour to me. Then the place erupted. 1000 kids screamed and cheered. I still couldn’t see anything of the audience. I stood back as the manager climbed onto the stage. The spot light was turned down and for the first time I saw the heaving, screaming mass of kids. It was awesome.

     The Beatles were already playing in Hamburg but yet to be exposed to the hysteria that was to become their hallmark. At the age of 13, in my own small way, I’d had a taste. The manager eventually calmed the crazy mass down and announced that 2 weeks later there would be a talent contest and invited me back to take part.

     It seemed I had no competition. I won 1st prize from a vote measured by the amount of applause given to each contestant. 2nd prize went to a boy reciting ‘There was an old man called Michael Finnegan’. I won a duffel bag, which was the most adult prize there. The bag wasn’t really skiffle or Rock ‘n’ Roll, but I thought it would do to carry my football kit in.

‘Surf. Hold it up to the light. Not a stain and shining bright.’


HC: “Sooty. Dorn’t do thut!”





* * * * * * * * * * * * * *


Look homeward, angel
Tell me what you see
Do the folks I used to know remember me?

Look homeward, angel
Eye my lady fair
Does she dream about the love we used to share?

So she'll know how very much I miss her
Angel, while she's dreaming, won't you kiss her?

Look homeward, angel
One thing I must know
Do her empty arms still yearn for me alone?

So she'll know how very much I miss her
Angel, while she's dreaming, won't you kiss her?

Look homeward, angel
One thing I must know
Do her empty arms still yearn for me alone?

Do her empty arms still yearn for me alone?

(ahh, ahh, ahh, ahh, woo)



Chapter 19. FLICKS


     Going to the pictures in the 50s was always a great event. You never bothered to go at the start of the programme. It was accepted practice to pitch up anywhere in the performance, piss people off as you stepped on their toes struggling to your seat in the dark, watch from wherever the programme had got to, then watch from the beginning and leave when you got to the bit ‘where you came in’ - the origin of the now familiar phrase – and piis peaoplk off as you clambered over their feet in the dark to get out.

     Tommy Mason and I once sat through ‘Run Silent, Run Deep’ 3 times, at the Bromley Odeon one Sunday afternoon. It was a war film about a submarine fighting the Japanese in the Pacific, with Burt Lancaster and Clarke Gabel. (They were in the film, not watching it)

     We wanted a few more chances to see the bit where a torpedo falls of its rack and rolls onto a sailor who’s been knocked to the floor by the shock of an exploding depth charge, crushing him to death. There is a camera-eye view as the torpedo falls into the screen and blacks it out, silencing the guy’s screams and mashing his face to pulp. Brilliant!

     There were always 2 films, the B feature, usually a cheap black and white British made thriller and the main feature. Between the B and A features was The Pathe News, where the title graphic was a demented cockerel yelling its wake up call. The Pictorial was a sort of collage of news pictures from the past month roughly stitched together to some anonymous rousing music and narrated by the distinctive melodramatic tones of Bob Dambers-Walker.

     His was the voice used for wartime newsreels and had a characteristic 2-tone quality, one to describe victory, the other defeat.

     “Once again, London falls victim to the Nazi scourge as that bastard Hitler tries all he can to crush the British spirit with bombs. But it’ll take more than that to dampen our enthusiasm for life and belief in the fight of good against evil. That’s why, amongst the devastation, that indefatigable sense of survival against overwhelming odds and national pride shines through.
“None of your Blitzkrieg nonsense will do you any good in the long run, Adolf. So do your worst, you nasty little Prussian maggot, because, as Mr Churchill says,’ we shall never surrender’, at least, not to a load of fat, Kraut, sausage eaters like you Jerries.”
     “And so, Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and His Royal Highness, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinbrugh, set sail aboard Royal Yacht, Britannia on the first leg of their Commonwealth tour. Too bad the British climate shows little respect for the Royal Couple and chooses a deluge to mark the beginning of this historic journey. Its pissing down and Prince Philip, the young Greek charmer, has a face like a wet dishcloth as usual as he surveys the couple of thousand plebs on the dock below, waiting for a chance to tell them to get their fingers out and stop complaining about their lot. Innit?”


     Next was ‘Coming Soon’, trailers of forthcoming films followed by the Pearl and Dean advertising slot where local retailers could buy a spot to advertise their restaurant or dry cleaning operation. Finally, an announcement that ice cream was now available from the pretty, but bored looking lady standing by the screen in a funny hat and an overloaded tray filled with tubs of ice cream.

     The little wooden spoon you got inside the tub represented another one of those familiar rituals that vanished along with usherettes. You still sometimes get spoons with your ice cream, but they’re smooth plastic ones that don’t drag on the surface of your tongue, and where’s the fun in that?

     All this was the build up to the main event of the feature film, and you waited with baited breath for the man with the huge muscles and funny haircut to bang the giant gong or for the lion to growl and scare you out of your wits if you were under 5 years old. Then a brief, scratchy ‘This is to certify’ certificate heralded the start of the film.

     The smell of cinemas was all part of the excitement – a mixture of stale gigarette smoke, rancid socks and bad breath all added to the ambience. You could smoke anywhere in the auditoreum (provided you were over 5) and the overhead projection light was always a thick blue swirling haze that you could’ve cut with a pair of scissors if you were tall enough.

     Talking of being tall, no matter where you sat, the was always some great fat bastard who came and sat in front of you and blocked your view. There wasn’t a lot of satisfaction in only seeing a quarter of ‘Ben Hurr’ of half ‘The Battle of the River Plate’.

     We rarely went to a cinema as a family because the interest of the male and female members was a long way apart. In the long school summer holidays, Connie usually found time to take Kathryn and I to see one of the popular Disney’s of the time and we once queued for 2 hours to get in to see Snow White. The 7 giraffes weren’t really my mug of gin, and I would have preferred something more likely to include a gun battle or blood spillage of some kind.

     THE BUG ‘UTCH

     At the bottom of Red Hill just where Chislehurst High Street begins, was the Bug Hutch, or The Cinema, Chislehurst, as it was described in the Chislehurst and Kentish Times. It was a cinema but tiny by comparison to any others I’d ever been in. It probably seated no more tan 200 people at a push and the floor sloped up towards the tiny screen unlike most, which sloped down.

     The posh seats were in the back row at 3s 9d and the cheapest at the front at 1s 3d p, or sixpence for kids. There was no aisle down the middle as there wasn’t room but a gangway down either side. If the main feature was in Cinemascope, Rosemary Lettington’s Mum, who also sold tickets from the cubby-hole inside the front doors, and choc ices in the interval, wandered down to the screen and wound the black frame out to the correct width by hand.

     The great thing about The Bug ‘Utch, apart from being cheap, was that it was always a month or two behind all the other local flee pits with its programmes for some reason, so if you’d missed something you wanted to see, you could always catch it later without having to wait for a re-release.

     I saw some great films there: ‘The African Queen’, ‘The Alamo’, ‘Davy Crocket’, ‘The Bridge On The River Kwai’, ‘Calamity Jane’, ‘Strangers On A Train’, ‘Calamity Jane’, and, with Red Hill School, The Conquest Of Everest’ in 1954???? That wasn’t a great film, but interesting and current, like The Queen’s Coronation and Nigel Drew’s exposed willy. (See Mead Road 1953)

     The manager of The Bug ‘Utch was a grumpy old sod called Mr Cripps, who must have been about 120. Mick Rickards and I were throwing snowballs at the sidewall of the place on our way home from school one day as he came tramping along in his galoshes. He caught Mick a backhander across the cheek as he went by and knocked him flying.

     I don’t know what sort of damage the old man thought we were going to do to his precious picture palace. Did he really think a few handfuls of snow were going to bring the place crumbling down? Maybe he knew something we didn’t.
     So, apart from the odd family film, I usually went to the pictures just with Alf to see either war films or Westerns. I really think Alf got a huge adrenalin rush watching war films, which wasn’t surprising as he’d been in the thick it of only about 10 years before.

     THE REAL THING

     I did find it strange that he could stomach all those scenes of explosions and people getting blown to pieces, especially when he told me about some of things that had happened to him during his time in the Navy. I asked him if he was ever scared.

     “You’re kidding. There was never a time when I wasn’t. We were in dock in Alexandria once, and the buggers bombed us, sank us, actually. I’d just gone ashore and was walking up a hill to a famous beauty spot when the Stukers came down. I was still running half an hour after the raid was over. Scared? You don’t know what scared is.

     “There was another time when one of our frigates got sunk off Crete. It was right in the mouth of the harbour and when the tide went out, only half the ship was submerged. So me and Kenny Upton, he was a mate of mine on the Warspite, were detailed to take a boat out and retrieve any ships’ documents we could find.

     Of course, every time we got on board, they’d send a bloody Mechershmidt to machine gun us, and we’d end up diving off the boat into the water. We spent more time in the bloody water than we did on the sodding frigate.

     “The bastards tired machine gunned me once when I was just strolling through a dockside encampment in Cairo. I dived for cover. It was ridiculous. I dived behind some crates of live ammunition into a bleedin’ tent.”

     During his 15 years in the Navy. Alf said he’d been to virtually every country in the world except Australia and New Zealand. Like many other ex-service Dads, Alf had no time for Arabs.

     “Just couldn’t trust the buggers, especially the Egyptians. They were only ever on the side they thought was winning at the time. If it looked like the Germans were in front, then it was a case of:
     ‘Misser HITLER, he very good bloke’ but if we were winning, it was:
     ‘Ol’ HITLER. He very bad person.’ Bloody Wogs!”

     Alf saw quite a few of his mates killed during the many sea battles he was involved in. He would talk about his experiences if pushed but like nearly all servicemen who saw action, he never bragged about it or saw his involvement as anything particularly important.

     One shipmate, Eric Kirby, was a gun aimer in one of the *six-inch turrets on a destroyer when it got hit by a bomb. Eric’s body just disappeared but Alf found his head, perfectly intact, on the deck still with the headphones on.

     (Six inches was the diameter of the gun barrel)

     THE WAR GOES ON

     Alf and I saw all the classic war films: ‘Battle Of The River Plate’, where one of the ships he’d been on, a cruiser called the Cumberland, made a cameo appearance to deliver fuel and supplies to the Exeter, Achilles and Ajax during the battle, ‘Sink The Bismark’, Above Us The Waves’, ‘Away All Boats’, ‘Cockleshell Heroes’, ‘The Cruel Sea’, ‘Trobruk’, ‘Ice Cold In Alex’, ‘The Damn Busters’, ‘The Sands Of Iwogima’, ‘The Colditz Story’.

     To Alf, maybe it was like going back. Revisiting. Making sure that the things he’d seen had actually happened and that it hadn’t all been some kind of ghastly dream. Or maybe he just enjoyed a bloody good battle.

     Whenever he was at home on leave at Marsham close and there was an air raid, Connie said he’d pace up and down like a cat on hot razor blades. The deafening crack of the mobile anti-air craft gun in the car park of the White Horse pub a couple of streets away shook the foundations of the houses and rocked the inadequate structure of the Anderson shelter to the core.

     The gun crew would sing out before every blast: “Don’t go down the mines, Daddy…” CRACK!
     “Just let me get behind that fucking gun.” he’d say, clasping and unclasping his hands in frustration. “Just let me get behind that fucking gun.”

     RODENT IN THE SHADOWS

     The toilet in the Eltham Picture Palace was up a cold stone flight of steps and was a dark, damp, smelly room with a broken window through which the wind whistled like a ghostly laugh. I was at The Palace with Alf probably watching another war film when nature called. I was about 7 or 8 and in those days it was considered perfectly safe for children to visit the toilets unaccompanied.

     The cold, dark concrete room, which was passed of as a toilet, was empty when I got up there and I had my pee and turned round to the basin to wash my hands when a shadowy figure stepped out of one of the cubicles. It was a youth of about 15 in a grimy blue suit and black plimsolls. He was pale and spotty with yellowish buckteeth and to my horror produced an open penknife and held the gleaming blade against my chest.

     “’Ooer you wiv?” he growled in a croaky voice. Quick as a flash I brought my knee up into his testicles, side stepped as he bent double and then brought my right hand down on the back of his neck in a perfect rabbit punch. There was a smart snap as the spinal chord gave way spilling spinal fluid all over the floor and he fell headlong and lie still, his head in the urinal.

     Actually, I tell a lie. I just shook from head to foot and said, “My Dad.”

     The slimy rodent snapped the knife shut and put it back in his pocket.
     “Ge’ aadovit, then. And don’t you say enyfink or I’ll find you and cut you froat from ear to ear. I know where you live.”

     Just like in the films, the rat shrank back into the shadows and I beat a hasty retreat back down the stairs to the welcoming crowd in the auditorium.

     I didn’t say a word to Alf because the bag of slime that dwelled in the toilet had said he knew where I lived. I didn’t really believe him but…I decided not to take any chances. Of course I should have told Alf what had happened. In fact I wish I had. My favourite sailor would’ve been up those stairs 5 at a time and removed my assailant’s arms and head like picking the wings off a fly. As I said, Alf was pretty alarming when he was riled.

     I could probably have blamed my encounter with the ‘horror of the black toilet’ to the increasing number of nightmares I started to suffer was in not for ‘The Fatal Night’, a crumby black and white B feature starring Patrick McNee which really did scare the living daylights out of me for about 10 years after I saw it.

     WOOLWICH

     Alf’s Mother, Tilly, or Nana to Kathryn and I, used to visit us from Yorkshire about every 2 or 3 years or so. When she did, we’d sometimes make one of the most exciting trips I can remember: a visit to Woolwich. This meant a walk round the market, a fish and chip lunch in a Chinese restaurant, a trip on the Woolwich ferry and finally, a visit to one of the swanky cinemas that Woolwich had on offer.

     ‘Woolwich? That shit hole?’ Yes, but to a young imaginative child between the ages of 6 and 9, it was a fantastic place. For a start, you had to get there by tram. We’d get a bus to Eltham and pick up the tram at the bottom of the High Street where it would turn right along Well Hall Road and grind its bumpy, clanky, sparky way towards the Barracks and the dirtiest part of the Thames.

     The smell was almost overpowering the nearer the town we got, but in its way, it was the best smell in the world apart from the that of freshly cut grass in the Summer at Red Hill after the tractor towing the gaggle of mowing machines had done its pruning job.

     Connie never liked Woolwich since she’d been there herself as a small child with her cousin, Joan. They were on the ferry when a Chinaman with a long pigtail grabbed Joan up in his arms and threatened to carry her off.
     “I like you, girlie. I like you plenty much. You come-along-a-me. You come-along-a- me-a-China.”

     It scared the wits out of the two girls and when the man put her down, they ran screaming to Joan’s Mum. I reckon it would’ve scared the wits out of Vincent Price. But there was a special kind of magic about Woolwich, with its pokey market stalls and foreign faces, it seemed like being in another country, which, being so close to the docks, it was, to all intents and purposes.

     In an episode of ‘Only Fools And Horses’, there was a joke made about Rodney’s father taking him down to the engine room on the Woolwich ferry, and it brought a lot of laughs. But when Alf took me down there, I loved it. Maybe I’m just weird, but watching the great, oily piston arms pound round was a very exciting and satisfying experience.

     That and staring over the side into the dark brown, muddy water and effluent suds. I always thought it was the movement of the boat that made me feel slightly giddy but perhaps it was what I was breathing into my tiny lungs, from what was, and still is, one of the most polluted areas in Britain.

     “Horlicks. The food drink of the night’

Cinema usherette:“Sshhhhhhhhh!”
Punter: “What?”
U: “I said sshhhhhhhh! Would you mind being quiet? You’re spoiling it for everyone.”
P: “Take a powder.”
U: “People are trying to hear the film.”
P: “Well, turn it up, then.”
U: “Just be quiet!”
P: “Oooh. Please don’t hit me, Miss.
2nd P: “Just shut up.”
P: “Oo asked you?”
2nd P: “I’ll come over there and shut you up in a minute.”
Female punter: “Be quiet, both of you.”
2nd P: “Who asked you?”
P: “Yeah. Oo asked you?
U: “Just be quiet, the lot of you.”
FP: “Don’t you use that tone with me.”
P: “No. Don’t you use that tone with her.”
FP: “Just shut up.”
P: “You shut up.”
2nd P: “Yes. Shut up you silly cow.”
FP: “How dare you!”
4th P: “For God’s sake, I’m trying to listen!”
U, P, 2nd P, and FP: “SHUT UP!”





* * * * * * * * *




I’m Alabamy bound,
I’m Alabamy bound,
And if the train don’t stop,
An’ toin around,
I’m Alabamy bound,

Well, your hair don’t coil,
Your eyes ain’t blue,
An’ if you don’t want me,
Sweet Polly Anna,
Then I don’t want you,

I’m Alabamy bound,
I’m Alabamy bound,
And if the train don’t stop,
An’ toin around,
I’m Alabamy bound,

Let the preacher preach,
Pass his hat around,
Cryin’ bothers and sisters,
Leave your money to me,
I’m Alambamy bound,

I’m Alabamy bound,
And if the train don’t stop,
An’ toin around,
I’m Alabamy bound,

I’m Alabamy bound,

I’m Alabamy bound.




Chapter 20. JOHNNY BE GOOD

     Johnny Lynch spoke out of the side of his face. At least, that’s where his mouth travelled to whenever he said anything. The upper lip stretched tight under his top teeth and the lower one twisted sideways and downwards, forcing the whole caboodle to move towards his right ear.

     It wasn’t an affliction he’d been born with but a habit gained from years of speaking in whispers or hushed tones behind his hand or down at the ground. Consequently, his voice came out in a kind of snatched staccato, the words almost clipped short, as if to get them out before any passing management spy got an earful or the chance to lip read.

     Johnny was a dockworker, a union secretary, and fully paid-up member of the bit of the Labour Party that says keep left. You half expected him to prefix everything with ‘Brother’, and he always wore the same double-breasted brown suit over a green jumper and collar and tie, and the same light brown diarrhoea coloured shoes all of which seemed to fit his image as the struggling voice of the downtrodden working man, victimised and persecuted by the privileged upper classes, who were corrupted by the one commodity they obviously had too much of for their own good: wedge.

     Like all ‘paid up members’, he spoke in long, complicated sentences deliberately sprinkled with ‘long words’ to make everything sound more intelligent. He loved the sound of ‘arbitration’, ‘consequentially’, ‘justification’, and ‘manifestation’, to name a few.

     “It has come to our attention, Brothers, that the aforementioned agreed discussion mechanism put in place with management, has resulted in the manifestation of certain attitudinal clarifications on their part and that, consequentially, there is no longer any justification to accept their terms for arbitration.”

     Which, roughly translated, means: “The bastards have turned down our outrageous demands flat.”

     Johnny Lynch, who lived in Edgehill Road on the Edgebury Esate, opposite the small crescent parade of shops, started a youth club in 1957 at St Aidens, the newly built church in Gravelwood Close. It was only a church when the folding doors which divided the main hall from the chancel were drawn aside to reveal an alter, a grand piano, a lectern, a stained glass window and a couple of choir stalls. The rest of the time it served as a community hall, scout hut, over 60’s club venue, Ladies’ Fellowship tearoom and Tenants’ Association Conference Centre.

     It was probably Johnny’s fixation with the underprivileged working classes that prompted him to invite anybody over the age of fourteen and under the age of twenty five to meet once a week to do whatever, within reason, that people of that age did.

     What was really at the back of Johnny’s mind was to provide himself a chance to ‘get across’ to the youth of the day some of his more profound theories on the socio-economic, political climate and environment issues of the day. Maybe this was why he organised things so badly. True, there was a table tennis table, card tables that couldn’t actually be used for playing cards because the building was on sacred turf, and a chair to stand a record player on, but that was about it.

     The club had been going for a couple of months when Johnny decided to hold a youth club dance. He invited Connie and Alf and my sister and I. Full of expectation we went along. As it was a special event for the club they’d really pulled out all the stops.

     There was the table tennis table with two blokes who, according to Alf, should have been dancing instead of playing table tennis. There was the Dansette record player on a chair and a blonde with a beehive on her head and a hooped skirt and flatties. (Popular footwear among young girls, they had very thin soles and no heal.) Next to the record player was a young girl with a pile of 45rpm records in her hand. Two girl couples were jiving together and that was about it.

     The tinny, thin sound from the Dansette was sucked up by the echoey acoustics of the hall and spread economically over the eardrums of the pathetic gathering, leaving just the vibration of the tiny speaker to dance to.

     A good game would have been to guess who was singing and what was being sung, and Alf was heard to mutter that they didn’t have a bloody clue. This was the man who’d partied, danced and boozed his way around the world, and this wet, limp apology for a ‘dance’ made him very impatient and a tad cross.

     The weedy Dansette was given a rest at halftime before it melted. Everyone sat on the chairs against the walls around the hall - the same ritual practiced at dance halls all round the world. At most British wedding receptions, it was brides family one side, groom’s the other, and never the twain would get together unless there was a punch-up, which there was a good chance of later in the evening when everybody was tanked up.”

     THE WEAPON

     Half time was called and the Bradley family, who’d done their level best to get things rocking with a demonstration of their newly acquired Arthur Murray jive routine, sat down on the row of canvas chairs against the wall. By now, Alf was seriously muttering under his breath and looking more than a touch turgid.

     As the Dansette cooled down, a tall thin bloke in a very smart, blue three-buttoned suit came into the hall carrying an up-turned tea chest, which I felt was a good sign. There weren’t many ‘Teddy Boys’ around, as by 1957, they were already considered to be un-cool, past it, out of date or just plain silly.

     Most of the blokes wore American style light coloured sports jackets, dark shirts and white ties, and black slacks. (Never trousers - what the difference was, I don’t have a clue, except the slacks were very simple in design with small pleats and not a lot in the way of spare material) The bloke with the tea chest was Alan Blunt, a lamppost tall guy sporting a prominent Roman nose, and a fag dangling from his gob, half of which was 2 inches of ash.

     His girlfriend was a tiny, very pretty, ample chested girl called Ronnie. She was the one who did all the moving when the two of them were jiving. Alan just stood there being a lamppost, passing her under his armpit occasionally, or holding his arm above her while she pirouetted. It always amazed me that the two inches of ash never dropped off his fag.

     Poking out of the upturned teachest, was the neck of a strange looking electric guitar. It didn’t seem to have a proper body. It was more like a plank of wood with turning keys at one end. It was crudely painted black, and stencilled on the body, in luminous green was the inscription: ‘The Weapon.’

     Just before the ash was about to fall, Alan Blunt took a last drag of his fag and dropped the dog-end on the floor, grinding it with his foot. He placed the Weapon gently across two of the canvas-backed stacking chairs that doubled up as church pews on Sundays, lifted the tea chest with his foot, and with one deft manoeuvre, extracted the broomstick and string from inside, turned the chest over and dropped it on the floor, placing his left foot and the broomstick on the top in perfect synchronisation.

     Alan Blunt didn’t look skiffle, but there was no doubt that he was, and in spades. Pulling the broom handle backwards with his enormous left hand to stretch the string tight, he started to pluck at it with his enormous right hands extracting a very satifying BE-DOOM BE-DOOM sound from the T chest. Another lad walked in carrying a large and obviously heavy blue painted box. He set it on the floor with a gasp, and plugged an electric lead into a wall socket.

     This bloke, in his white sports jacket, red shirt and 1inch wide tie, was Mirabelle. (Great skiffle name, even though he didn’t look the part either. His real name was Mick Moore - almost skiffle, but not quite ‘Lonnie’.) He plugged The Weapon into the Blue Box which had ‘The Moonrakers Skiffle Group’ painted crudely on the top. He turned a knob on the guitar and the air was split by a screeching wail of feedback, which had all church mice in the vicinity on the next plane to anywhere.

     The screeching died down and focused into some beautiful single note electric guitar sounds. By now, my mouth was a gaping hole the size of the Blackwall Tunnel. But it was about to expand to take in the Thames Estuary.

     In what was to become a time-honoured tradition, the 3rd, and lead member of the Moonrakers made his late entrance. I saw Count Basie do this at the Festival Hall when he was doing a concert with Georgie Fame in 1968.

     For the Bassie gig, (That’s a musician’s term for being paid to make a bloody good racket) the show opened with the bandstand laid out, but empty of musicians. First to stroll laconically onto the stage was rhythm guitarist, Freddy Green. The guy only played chords and never any single note stuff. He wasn’t amplified either and played a beautiful Gretch cello style, acoustic guitar.

     He sat down, placed the precious Gretsch on his knee, and began chink-chinking away. He was a phenomenal player - each down-stroke of his enormous plectrum hand striking a new chord. Difficult? I didn’t know there were that many chords on a guitar.

     For every 3 skiffle chords, Freddy could counter with another fifteen. Freddy saw himself as the essential rhythm root of the entire band. Even though he was drowned out when the awesome brass section was motoring, he was still there laying down his ‘chops’ when they paused for breath.

     Freddy was joined by the bass player, and the two of them played along merrily till the drummer strolled on, sat down at the kit and added some gentle high-hat with his foot. One by one, all the musicians took their places until the bandstand was full. Still the only sounds came from the guitar, bass and high-hat. Bassie’s Steinway grand piano was at the side of the band, to the front and sideways to the audience, but the seat remained empty for another five minutes.

     Then the ‘man’ sauntered onstage to loud applause and whistling. He waved to the gathering, grinning all over his face, and seated his amply proportioned body at the piano. The band didn’t seem to notice and paid him ‘no never mind’ as they fidgeted and shuffled their music sheets about. One guy even blew his nose. Still Freddy and the rhythm team carried on laying it down. Bassie grinned to the audience as if they were party to some joke or other as his left hand to strayed to the keyboard. He played three ascending notes: DOINK, DOINK, DOINK... and then...

     ‘BA-BAAP!’

     The entire band played one loud chord in complete unison. Jesus! The audience were caught napping and nearly died of shock. Bassie cried with laughter and launched into the evening’s performance.

     Jack Head’s entrance to St Aiden’s Church Hall wasn’t quite so spectacular or well rehearsed but, none-the-less, it made quite an impression on me. He came striding in - a long, skinny streak in black jeans, attached to a huge brass belt buckle that looked like it held the whole ensemble together.

     He had the features of a hawk - sharp, pointed chin; sharp, pointed nose; sharp, pointed Adam’s Apple; piercing blue eyes and a huge privet-hedge of thick brown hair perched on his head, casting a shadow over his compact features. Charismatic wasn’t a sufficient description. This geezer was from the planet Hip.

     Jack carried the most fantastic guitar I’d ever seen - a top-of-the-range, state-of-the-art, sunburst Hofner Committee electric acoustic cello style ‘box’, with its unique ‘curly’ shaped machine head, Mother-of-Pearl inlays, ebony finger-board, silver-plated pick-ups, and Jack Head customised, rhinestone-emblazoned scratch plate. In other words, guitaristically, to an 11-year-old enthusiast: a signpost to Mecca.

     The crowning glory of Jack’s oufit was a pair of black motorbike chucker boots on Jack’s feet, adorned with silver chains that jingled like spurs as he walked.

     I was rooted to the spot. Paralysed with admiration and adulation. My mouth went dry with expectation as Jack plugged the Hofner into the amplifier. What came next was a string of songs I’d never heard before. It didn’t really sound like skiffle and it wasn’t Rock ‘n’ Roll, but whatever it was, it wrapped itself around me like a warm, comfortable blanket.

     And could this cowboy from the backwoods of the Mottingham Coldharbour Estate sing??!!! Was Hitler German?

     His voice cut through the staid atmosphere in the hall like a razor through a mouldy potato sack and my hair stood on end. The sound was high-pitched and penetrating and seemed to glue everyone to their seats like garden statues. AND he could yodel!!!

     As for Jack’s guitar playing, I’d never heard anything like it. The guy was playing chords and picking bass note melodies at the same time. I could have dropped at his feet and would’ve, had by bum not been glued to my chair.

     The Moonrakers launched into ‘Wabash Cannonball’; ‘Jambalaya’; ‘Ghost Riders In The Sky’; ‘Grand Coolly Damn’; ‘Kawa Lieger’; ‘Cold, Cold Heart’; ‘San Francisco Bay Blues’ and a lot more. This was my first taste of music by Hank Williams; Jesse Fuller; Woody Guthrie; Jack Elliot and the convicted murderer and rapist, Huddie Leadbetter, or Leadbelly, as he was known by the initiated. What I heard was like a bright chink of light under the door. I just wanted to get into the room come Hell or high water.

     I felt I’d come home. What I’d heard wasn’t skiffle. But I didn’t care. I’d left skiffle behind. It belonged to the day before yesterday. The next time I saw the Moonrakers, they were the Moonrakers Country and Western Trio. Yep. They sure as hell were. Rock ‘n’ Roll? Skiffle? Whatwassaaaaaat?


     ‘A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play.’

     Billy Cotton yelling at the top of his lungs:

“WAKEY-WAKAIIIIIIIIIYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Music: The highly polished sound of Cotton’s 12 piece dance band crashes into
‘Somebody Stole My Gal’ at 90 mph and the entire British nation chokes over its traditional Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding at the sudden shock, though the same onslaught is repeated every week from 1949 till 1968.

BC: “Hello. I’m Billy Cotton and this is my Band Show, not that you need remindin’, and for the next half hour I shall bash you sensless with a stream of passable jokes from a few up and coming comedians while I interject with my own crass comments. They’ll be some light musical interludes from my fabulous band including a few little dities from my resident singers, Alan Breeze and Kathie Kay, who’ll do their level best to slaughter any current popular songs wot I think are worth slaughterin’. Just wait till we get ‘old of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. We’ll turn ‘em into open-toed summer sandals easy as pie. You might, understandably, be led to believe that I’m shoutin’ but this is my normal talkin’ voice. I’m just a very big bloke with an enormous pair of lungs wot need a lot of exercise.

Don’t you just love me? Course yer do. Right you lot, let’s ‘ave a rousin’ chorus of ‘Knees Up Muvver Brahn. A-one-two-free-fowah…”




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