In September 1952 I started at Berrymede Junior School. I remember coming home to Denny’s face peeping out through the french windows like a strange, trapped animal. Mum and Dad had given her their bedroom, which she’d filled with the sad booty of her years as Mr Buss’s mistress – sterling silver hairbrushes, manicure sets and Ronson table-lighters. I wish I could say I felt sorry for her, but I don’t believe I did.
Around this time I became a fire-starter. I went door-to-door borrowing matches from neighbours, claiming Mum’s oven had gone out. I didn’t set light to any houses, just to piles of rubble on bomb sites, or old cars. One day I misjudged things: I created a city with building blocks underneath a refrigerated van I took to be abandoned, then stuffed the city with paper and set it alight. The van’s occupant came out screaming: ‘Petrol! Petrol! You’ll kill us all!’
On another destruction-minded day Jimpy and I laid a huge piece of steel across the railway tracks under the bridge and stood back. As the train approached we ran away, waiting to hear the sound of a terrible train crash. This could have not only injured or killed a lot of people, but led us into a very different life, in the penal system. Thank God the train passed without derailing.
At home our chief entertainment was radio. Television had arrived on the scene in 1952, but our family, like millions of others, waited until 1953 and the Queen’s Coronation before buying a TV set. I also read a lot of comics and enjoyed Enid Blyton’s Noddy books, which first appeared in 1949 and were still pretty new. Dad made a model sailing boat that we sometimes took to the Round Pond in Hyde Park on Sunday. He also took me greyhound racing, which I found magical, especially at White City Stadium. And he always gave me far too much pocket money.
Berrymede was in a poor neighbourhood of South Acton, and one day in my first term at school I told a boy in the playground that Dad earned £30 per week. He called me a liar – the average wage was less than a third of that – but I stuck to my guns because I knew it was true. We nearly came to blows over it before a teacher intervened, warning me to stop telling lies: ‘No one earns that much money. Don’t be stupid!’
Dad may have been well paid, but there was little sign of it in our lifestyle (beyond Mum’s clothes). I wore grubby grey shorts and a Fair Isle pullover, with long grey woollen socks drooping around my ankles, muddy shoes and a white shirt that was never quite white. We had no car, lived in a rented flat and rarely went on holiday or travelled unless it was part of Dad’s work; we had a gramophone but listened to the same twenty records throughout my entire childhood, until I started buying new ones myself.
One of the only children’s records available was ‘The Teddy Bear’s Picnic’, backed with ‘Hush, Hush, Hush! Here Comes the Bogeyman’ by Henry Hall with the BBC Dance Orchestra. I played it a lot, but even then I preferred the sound of the modern big bands, including the orchestras of Ted Heath, Joe Loss and Sidney Torch, with whom Mum was guest vocalist for a time before her marriage. My life with Denny in Westgate had left me disliking Broadway musical tunes: every day I was there the eerie strains of ‘Bali Hai’ from South Pacific had crackled from Denny’s big radiogram, a gift from Mr Buss. There was only one South Pacific song I liked at the time – ‘I’m Gonna Wash that Man Right out of My Hair’ – but thanks to Denny’s bathroom brutality, even that had sinister overtones.
1953 was turning out to be one of the happiest years of my life – but then Jimpy moved away. Until then, even though we were no longer going to school together, he had still been the centre of my existence. Now he was gone. My parents decided to replace him with a Springer Spaniel puppy. I remember waking up sleepily on my birthday and being introduced to this adorable, snoozing puppy curled up in an armchair. We called him Bruce.
Bruce became my great joy, although he was shamelessly disloyal. If someone in my gang of friends or a neighbour down the street called Bruce, the disgraceful creature would immediately run to him; no matter what I did he would refuse to return to me. It never occurred to anyone in my family to attempt to train the dog, and as a result Bruce spent a lot of time running around the neighbourhood, barking.
One summer day a local photographer took a photo, reproduced in the Acton Gazette, of my Jimpy substitute and me in the afternoon sunshine, leaning against a wall, almost dozing. In those days the pavement was a long, limitless bench to sit on. Like apprentice winos, wherever we sat in our neighbourhood, we appeared to preside over and size up all who passed.
We were getting more adventurous as a gang and as we got older we used to sit under West Acton bridge on the GWR fast main line to the West. The Twyford Avenue gate there was left open, and under the bridge, out of the rain, we could wait for the West Country and Welsh expresses from Paddington to thunder by as they approached at full speed. As one train approached, I absent-mindedly threw a stick across the tracks. Bruce – ever the instinctive retriever – leapt after it, the thundering locomotive ran over him, and I felt sure he must be dead. Suddenly, with the stick in his teeth, he appeared between the large driving wheels, his head going up and down with the driving shaft, and somehow managed to jump through without getting hurt, dropping the stick at the feet of Peter S, a favourite neighbour of his, while I looked on amazed at both his impregnability and his disloyalty.
One day I came home to find Bruce was gone. He’d been returned to his kennel of origin – or so Mum said. I knew deep down he’d been destroyed, but I went along with the pretence so that Mum wouldn’t be upset that I was upset. I tried consoling myself with the thought that if Mum hadn’t had him destroyed he would probably have died in any case.
Bruce was more than a companion. When he was suddenly gone I was heartbroken – not just over the dog, but for what he was supposed to have replaced. When Jimpy had been around we’d felt like a proper family.
In June 1953 we watched the Coronation at Westminster Abbey live on our brand-new, nine-inch television set, the images barely visible unless all the lights were out and our curtains drawn. Until then my parents had to take me with them if they wanted to go to the pub, or hire a babysitter. Now, with TV to entertain me, they could let me stay home alone.
On my own, terrified, I watched the scary science-fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment. Returning to Earth, the sole survivor of a space mission, ‘infected’ by aliens, gradually and horrifyingly turned into a monstrous vegetable. Although the ‘special effects’ were primitive, their psychological impact was genuinely disturbing and realistic and I began having terrible nightmares. Perhaps in a subconscious effort to make my parents come home, I’d fiddle with the electric fire, folding up slivers of newspaper and lighting them on the red-hot bars. Luckily I never set the house alight.
My parents were still trying to rebuild their marriage, I expect, and the pub and the circle of friends they shared there were vital in this process. It was more normal in those days to leave children alone, but I won’t pretend that I liked it, or that it felt normal. The truth is, though, that my experience of feeling alone, different, alien, was much more ‘normal’ than I realised.
I have always been a dreamer. My new teacher, Miss Caitling, noticed this and helped me. She caught me out once or twice telling lies and let me know she knew, but never made a great deal out of it. The way this clever woman handled me denied me the option of blaming someone in authority for my sense of shame over making things up; I had no choice but to see it as self-inflicted.
Miss Caitling wasn’t conventionally beautiful or pretty. She was stocky with short, dark hair, a little mannish, and wore sensible shoes. But her dark eyes were full of warmth and understanding. She was a champion of the underdog, a perfect teacher for the run-down neighbourhood South Acton had become by then. She was neither an unreliable vamp (like Mum) nor a wicked witch (like Denny); she was an altogether new kind of woman.
As far as girls my own age went, I relied entirely on my peers for guidance. They knew less than I did. Even Dad wasn’t much help. Drunk one night, Dad told me the facts of life. ‘T
he man does a kind of pee into the woman,’ he said. The rest of the details were explicit, so I don’t know why he fudged the critical bit. I remember passing the facts, as I understood them, to a young friend of mine, and his astonishment that we should all have been synthesised from urine.
On 8 May 1955 Dad was playing at Green’s Playhouse in Glasgow when he was sent a telegram from Norrie Paramor of Parlophone Records, part of EMI, offering him a solo record deal. Dad’s record, ‘Unchained Melody’, was released on 31 July 1956. His handsome face was plastered all over the local record shops. Although it was never a hit, ‘Unchained Melody’ was covered by at least five other artists, three of whom I think charted simultaneously. My father, the pop star! I wanted to be like him.
That summer we all went as usual to the Isle of Man. On one occasion while the band played at the Palace Ballroom, two teenage girls sat either side of me and began to tease me. They were dressed in the full skirts and petticoats of the day, with pretty shoes and low-cut bodices. I felt very much the little boy, my eyes darting back and forth between their heaving cleavages as they discussed which member of the Squadronaires they fancied. One girl immediately claimed the drummer. The other took her time and eventually selected the sax player.
‘That’s my dad!’ I shouted. Her disappointment at this confused me.
The incident served to do two things: it set my heart on becoming a performing musician, and prejudiced me for ever against drummers with their fast-pedalling sex appeal.
In 1956 popular music did not yet mean rock ’n’ roll. But The Goon Show, which Dad and I listened to, featuring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe, did include some early BBC broadcasts of rock performances. One of the show’s resident musicians was Ray Ellington, a young English drummer–vocalist and cabaret artist. With his quartet he sang songs like ‘Rockin’ and Rollin’ Man’, which he composed specially, and rather hastily I think, for the show. I thought it some kind of hybrid jazz: swing music with stupid lyrics. But it felt youthful and rebellious, like The Goon Show itself.
I was regarded by my parents as having little musical talent other than a thin, nasal, soprano voice. I was forbidden to touch Dad’s clarinets or saxophones, only my harmonica.
On my first Isle of Man fishing trip, I had a fiasco with a huge trout and was consoling myself by playing harmonica in the rain. I got lost in the sound of the mouth organ, and then had the most extraordinary, life-changing experience. Suddenly I was hearing music within the music – rich, complex harmonic beauty that had been locked in the sounds I’d been making. The next day I went fly fishing, and this time the murmuring sound of the river opened up a wellspring of music so enormous that I fell in and out of a trance. It was the beginning of my lifelong connection to rivers and the sea – and to what might be described as the music of the spheres.
I was always drawn to the water. A friend at school was a Sea Scout, and at the age of eleven I was impressed by his smart uniform and badges. He took me to meet the troop leader, and I was immediately signed up for a ‘bunkhouse weekend’ in order to acquaint myself with the camp. Dad interviewed one of the leader’s assistants and was very suspicious. He told me the fellow didn’t know which way to fly the Union Flag, and doubted he could ever have been any part of the Navy. When I pressed Dad he said he thought the man was ‘bent’, an expression I didn’t understand.
Dad eventually agreed to let me go for the weekend. The troop’s headquarters were on the River Thames, where a large shed was laid out as a dormitory, and a large rowing boat was moored – an old ship’s lifeboat in which the boys were taken for trips. We arrived on Saturday and spent the afternoon trying to tie nautical knots from a chart, which the two adults present couldn’t manage. After a fry-up lunch the light began to fade and we were hurried to the boat for a short trip on the river.
The tide was high and it wasn’t safe to row, so the men fitted an ancient outboard motor to the stern and fired it up. As we swept past the Old Boathouse at Isleworth once again I began to hear the most extraordinary music, sparked by the whine of the outboard motor and the burbling sound of water against the hull. I heard violins, cellos, horns, harps and voices, which increased in number until I could hear countless threads of an angelic choir; it was a sublime experience. I have never heard such music since, and my personal musical ambition has always been to rediscover that sound and relive its effect on me.
At the very height of my euphoric trance the boat ran up against the muddy shore at the troop’s hut. As it stopped, so did the music. Bereft, I quietly began to weep. One of the men put his coat around me and led me up to the camp, where I was settled by the stove to warm up. I kept asking the other boys if they had heard the angels singing, but none of them even responded.
A few moments later I was standing naked in a cold shower set up behind the bunkhouse. It was almost dark; there was a stark light bulb behind the two men who stood watching me shiver as the freezing water sprayed over me. ‘Now you’re a real Sea Scout,’ they said. ‘This is our initiation ceremony.’ The only thing ceremonial about it was the wanking these two chaps were doing through their trouser pockets. I was freezing, but they wouldn’t let me leave the shower until they had each achieved their surreptitious climax. I felt disgusted, but also annoyed because I knew I could never go back: I would never get my sailor’s uniform.
I remember only one truly terrible row between my parents, and sat terrified in the dining room as cups were smashed in the kitchen; I believe Mum flourished a knife. I intervened, weeping like a child actor, only to be told off by Dad who hated the melodrama to which I was contributing. There were also parties, and Dad invited musicians sometimes; their playing kept me awake and I annoyed and embarrassed Dad by bursting in on them and crying, telling him off in front of his friends for the disturbance; Dad told me off in return, but it was terribly exciting. The smell of cigarettes, beer and scotch floated down the hall.
Maybe to compensate for being kept awake at night by wild parties, I was given a small black bike which I hired every day to my friend David for his paper round. He paid me sixpence a week, but I caught him one day bumping it against a curb violently and ended the arrangement.
Once I had a bike I gave full vent to my local wanderlust; there was hardly a street or alley I didn’t explore in an area over two or three square miles. But I was one of the few boys in the gang with a bike, and my solo excursions deepened my solitary feelings. I often went into a trance-like state when cycling. I was nearly killed by a dustmen’s lorry at the top of my street as I swerved in its path, my head full of angelic voices.
I laboriously learned the tricky harmonica theme of Dixon of Dock Green, played by Tommy Reilly, on my own first chromatic instrument. No one was even slightly impressed by my achievement and I realised I was playing the wrong instrument if I wanted superstardom.
Like many of my peers I spent long, boring hours outside various pubs, a packet of crisps and fizzy drink in my hand, wondering why I was permitted such luxuries only when my parents were getting drunk. I was caught shoplifting once. I had gone into a bookshop for some Observer books I was then collecting. I paid for two, and tried to walk out with six. What’s strange is that I knew I’d be caught. The police were called, and I was questioned before being released.
Dad said nothing about the incident. It was the not unkind warning of the police officer I remember: ‘This is the first time, son. Make it the last – it’s a terrible road you’ve set out on.’ A terrible road? He was a good copper, but I thought it was obvious that I was simply filling the time, bored, up to no good. I began to collect things to settle myself down: model trains, Dinky cars, comics, postage stamps.
I was determinedly non-academic, although I wrote stories constantly and drew hundreds of pictures, mainly of military battles. I became obsessed with drawing plans for a fantasy fleet of huge, double-decked touring buses. My fleet of buses contained schoolrooms, playrooms with electric train sets, swimming pools, cinemas, music
rooms, and – as I approached puberty – I added a large vehicle that contained a nudist colony with a cuddling room.
For a few years I attended Sunday school, regularly singing in a church choir. As I fell asleep at night I sang my prayers into the mouth of my hot-water bottle, which I held like a microphone. My parents still resisted the idea that I had any musical talent. No matter, I was already a visionary. A mobile nudist colony with a cuddling room? I’ll bet even Arthur C. Clarke hadn’t come up with that at my age!
Whenever we made a family visit to Horry and Dot’s, I got to see not only my beloved grandparents, but also Aunt Trilby, Dot’s sister. Trilby was single when I met her, and kept a piano in her flat. It was the only one I had a chance to play. Tril read music, and played light classics and popular songs, but never tried to teach me much. Instead she entertained me with palm-readings and interpretations of the tarot, all of which indicated I would be a great success in every way – or at least enjoy a ‘large’ life.
Aunt Trilby provided me with drawing paper and complimented my rapid sketches. After a while I would drift to the piano and, after checking to see that she was engrossed in her knitting or a book, begin to play. The instrument was never quite in tune, but I explored the keyboard until I found whatever combination I was after.
One day I found some chords that made me lightheaded. As I played them my body buzzed all over, and my head filled with the most complex, disturbing orchestral music. The music soared higher and higher until I finally stopped playing, and came back to the everyday world.
‘That was beautiful,’ said Tril, looking up from whatever she was doing. ‘You are a real musician.’
Who I Am: A Memoir Page 3