Bernie Fineman, Original Motor Mouth

by Bernie Fineman

  Dad would see the sergeant on the desk who’d say: ‘You paying the ten bob today?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The copper would stamp the form and off you went. We’d get outside and he’d just say, ‘Make yourself scarce.’ He’d walk home and I’d run off, go to a mate’s house rather than go home ’cos my dad would go fucking mad, not ’cos of what I’d done but angry that it had cost him ten bob! He wouldn’t be mad at me for fighting anti-Semites, just tell me I was a fool for getting caught.

  There was a very famous anti-Semite, he hated fucking Jews, hated everyone who wasn’t white and English. His name was Ginger Marks. He always used to have five or six guys around him – minders – who used to Jew-bait, and do it on Saturdays, our holy day, whenever they could. The bloke was untouchable, you could never get near him. And I overheard my dad chatting to a mate one day and he said, ‘That Ginger Marks, I’m going to ’ave him.’

  ‘Harry,’ his mate said, ‘you won’t get anywhere near him, he’s got five or six minders.’

  And I remember my dad saying, ‘Fuck the minders.’

  A week goes past and all of a sudden there’s talk all around the East End – the word is that Ginger Marks is dead. What?! You know that moment when you put two and two together? No one saw nothing, one minute one guy is having a go at the minders and the next minute there’s no minders. Nothing was ever said, no one knew anything, but if I had to lay my life on it, I’d say that was my dad did it.

  Anti-Semitism is fucking stupid. People think Jews are all rich, bankers, accountants and such. But we never had any fucking money! First time racist things ever happened to me, I was nine years old on the bus coming home from school. This kid a few years older sits behind me and says, ‘You’re a fucking Jew.’

  I says, ‘What?’

  He said, ‘You’re a fucking Jew!’ And proceeded to beat the shit out of me.

  I got home, all battered and bruised, and my dad says, what’s happened to you? I said I got the shit kicked out of me. He asked why I hadn’t hit him back. I ask you! I’m nine years old, and I was lying on the floor getting the shit kicked out of me!

  And that’s when Dad started to teach me to fight. I learnt how to defend myself. Not Marquis of Queensbury rules, oh dear me no. I learnt street fighting, where you use your elbows, your knees, your head, anything you can. Never face your opponent straight on – that way you get a kick in the balls. Look ’em straight in the eyes and never show fear. Then catch them when they least expect it. If you pull your arm back they think they’re going to get a punch in the face, that’s when you kick ’em in the bollocks! I took a lot of pastings, but I learnt.

  I was taken to Repton Boys Club by uncle Simey – he was a street fighter too. But I took a lot of blows, from Simey and my dad, because you’ve got to learn to receive before you can give, to toughen you up. Got a black eye from my dad once. He was teaching me how to box and I didn’t duck out of the way of a hook quickly enough. But I sure as hell did the next time I can tell you!

  About a year later the same sort of racist attack happened again. Why do people pick on me, I wondered? It was because I’m small and we were poor. My clothes were old and always being patched up, but they were ALWAYS clean.

  So one day I am getting off the 253 bus in Lower Clapton and there are some kids there from one of the local schools and I hear one of them say, ‘Uggh, look, it’s one of them fucking Jews.’

  I said, ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You’re one of them fucking Jews, aren’t ya?’

  He didn’t even see it coming. He was down on the ground and I yelled, ‘Any of you other cunts want some?’

  No, that was it, they weren’t having any, and I walked away. I felt about twenty foot tall. He was still sparked out as I was leaving, because I went for the ‘cigarette punch’. You know it? It’s where those old guys used to have a ciggie hanging out of the side of their mouths? That’s where you aim. Catch someone full on the jaw and you break your hand, but catch them on the side and it moves their jaw sideways, sends a shockwave through the brain and they’re out cold.

  My parents always worked, were always active. Mum was constantly cooking and cleaning, cooking and cleaning. Whenever I was doing a consultancy job my dad would always be there to give me advice.

  As I told you, my dad was always tough, all his life. Along with his sixty-inch chest, he had a thirty-five-inch waist, and believe me, it was solid fucking muscle. Then twenty years ago he didn’t seem himself, and being a typical bloke he wouldn’t go to the doc, but my mum insisted. They took some blood tests and they found out he was losing blood so he went up the hospital for more tests and they found out he had prostate cancer.

  He was getting thinner and thinner, about half the size that he used to be. They said the only thing they could do would be to remove his testicles to stop producing the male hormone which should stem the growth of the tumour. So we made him an appointment to see the surgeon and I went with him. He was frail by then but still tough. We sat in this office with this nice surgeon chap who says, ‘Mr Fineman.’

  ‘Call me Harry.’

  ‘OK, Harry. The only way we can treat this condition is by removing your testicles…’

  And my dad stood up, grabbed the bloke by the collar and said, ‘Sonny boy, I was an RSM, I was born with balls and I’m gonna die with balls. Fuck the cancer.’ And he walked out, never had any more treatment, and within six months he was dead.

  After he died Mum was never the same again, it was as if part of her was missing. The love of her life was gone. We tried to keep her busy, bought her a dog to keep her company, and my wife Lisa and I would pop over all the time, but she didn’t go out much.

  Then one day her friend Sadie, her pal from all through the war, introduced her to a widower and they became good friends. They’d go out together, do the shopping, go to the cinema. He was a good friend and I was really grateful to him for being a companion to her.

  Everything was going fine until one night I get a call about three in the morning. It was the police. They’d found my mum wandering down Stanmore Hill in her bra and knickers carrying a kettle. And that’s the first time we realised she had Alzheimer’s. We’d been going round and occasionally we’d find things in odd places, the washing in the oven or whatever, but she would laugh it off and we thought it was just forgetfulness.

  We deliberately put it to one side, maybe we didn’t want to think about it, but from then on she quickly deteriorated. She had a carer living in, but eventually she couldn’t cope anymore and we had to put her in a home. The last thing you ever want to do as a son is put your mum in a home. You want to care for her like she cared for you as a baby, but it just got too much.

  But we found a lovely little home for her, they looked after her really well, but even so the first time I drove away from there it broke my heart. She was in that place four-and-a-half years, got glaucoma, and lost her sight. So me, my wife Lisa, or my daughters Nadine and Lisa Marie, one of us would go over to visit virtually every night. Sometimes she’d remember me, sometimes she wouldn’t. Then one day I get a call from the home and I think this is it. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Fineman,’ says the caller, ‘your mum’s fine, but she’s broken the nose of one of our nurses.’

  With Alzheimer’s you can get very twitchy and my mum, having being a welder, was still a strong woman. This nurse had obviously picked her up in a slightly wrong way that my mum didn’t like and so she lashed out. It was just one of those things, but I had to pay a thousand pounds compensation to the injured lady.

  At the time I was doing some consultancy work for a company called FX International and one day a big job comes in for Central America. They’re paying me a lot of money to go over there for two weeks. I don’t want to leave my mum for two weeks, and I definitely don’t want to leave my wife and daughters for two weeks. But Lisa persuades me, says they’ll be OK. I spoke to the people at the home, and they said don’t worry, your mum will be fine, she could go o
n for years.

  So I went away on the Sunday, early morning, and on the Monday Mum died. And on the same bloody day in El Salvador there’s a military coup! All the airports are closed, telecommunications are down, can’t get through to the British Embassy, the police have blockaded everything, you’re not allowed out of your hotel. So Lisa is at home dealing with everything on her own, can’t get through to me because everything is in lockdown.

  Fortunately she had a Colombian friend who is a cancer nurse who knows the area I’m staying in and somehow gets the message through to me that my mum’s died. In the Jewish religion they bury you very, very quickly, so I’m desperate to get home in time. Now the guy I was out there with was a lovely bloke called Christian Auer, who used to be a mercenary for the French Foreign Legion, and he married a Salvadorian girl and settled in El Salvador.

  I’ve never been a religious guy but I know by now my mum will have been buried and Lisa will’ve had to handle everything, so I say to Chris I want to say a prayer for my mum. A church, synagogue, anything would do – I just want to go somewhere to say a prayer for my mum! So Chris finds out that in the middle of fucking nowhere, between El Salvador and Guatemala, there’s this tiny synagogue. There’s only about three Jews in the whole of El Salvador but they’ve got a synagogue!

  So Chris convinces the police to take me out there. Two police cars, four policemen, me and Chris drive out there to this tiny place, they take their hats off while I go inside to say a prayer, then they drive us all the way back again. I could never forgive myself for missing Mum’s funeral, but was so grateful to those guys risking their lives getting me to that synagogue. A week later the coup was finally over and I was able to come home.

  And that’s why I never speak about my brother. As far as I’m concerned I never had one. He lived five miles down the road from Mum and Dad but never lifted a finger to help, as far as I know. When Mum was in the home we visited every fucking day and I never saw him there once. The less said about him the better.

  CHAPTER TWO

  GROWING UP

  When I was at the tender age of nine, I always had this fascination to take things apart, to see how they worked, and then put them back together. Sometimes these efforts worked, sometimes they screwed up.

  My first downfall was at Uncle Simey’s house where I would go on a Saturday while Mum and Dad were at work, and I was left on my own to play. Simey and my mum’s sister Julie shared a house for a while, they were housemates and good friends, but there was never anything romantic between them.

  They had bought a top-of-the range Hoover vacuum cleaner on HP, that’s hire purchase (known as the ‘never never’) from a big store. Posh sods, this was 1954! I was left to play, and found Simey’s toolkit in the cupboard. I took the Hoover apart, each and every nut and bolt, because fascination had got the better of me. I put it all back together again, there were no bits left over, or so I thought. My aunt came home and asked me to go and play outside. After a few minutes there were screams, like a person being murdered. I rushed into the house and saw Julie on the floor, writhing in pain.

  ‘What the fuck has happened?’ my uncle shouts, as Julie mumbles, ‘I turned on the Hoover, and the bastard threw me across the floor – I got a massive shock!’

  Julie and Simey took me back to Harris’s, the store where Simey purchased the Hoover. We saw a salesman, who told us they would have to send it back to the factory for inspection.

  ‘What?’ says my uncle, ‘my missus got a bloody shock, what about her then?’

  ‘Sorry,’ says the salesman, ‘there’s nothing I can do until it’s sent back.’ And then he done a stupid thing: he turned his back on Simey and tried to walk away.

  Simey is a big man, like my dad, so he proceeds to lift this wimp up by the neck, and says to him, ‘CHANGE this Hoover now, and gimme some more goods for my inconvenience, and a new Hoover.’

  As the salesman is turning blue, with my uncle Simon’s hands around his neck, the store manager approaches and tries to calm things down. The salesman is put down, gasping for breath, and the store manager tells us to leave the store, or he will forcibly remove us.

  Bad move mate.

  All hell is let loose as Simey punches this dick full in the face and then starts to take the store apart, smashing and wrecking things. The police are called and Uncle Simon is carted away by four policemen.

  At the police station we are told he will be in court tomorrow morning for assault. Now I realise at my young age that it’s my fault that I had not put the Hoover back right, and all this trouble has been caused by me. So, I did the sensible thing: kept quiet and went with the flow.

  The outcome was a fine of five pounds (about three weeks’ wages in those days) or one week in prison: uncle Simon takes the one week in prison. Ooops, it was my screw-up, so I do the cowardly thing and keep schtum. The Hoover was found defective, a new one was handed over, Uncle Simey’s fine was paid by the store, and a new refrigerator given as compensation, so not too bad an outcome really. That was my first fuck-up, in a line of many…

  When I was about eleven they found subsidence or something in the Samuel Lewis Trust flats we were living in and they moved everyone out. So we moved in with my mother’s parents in Stoke Newington for a few months before the council found us a house in Filey Avenue, N16.

  The place was completely bare and needed decorating throughout, so my dad, uncle Simey and me spent weeks before we moved in, sprucing up the whole place.

  And that’s how I learnt to become a handyman.

  Woodwork, plastering, painting, we did it all. It even needed completely re-wiring and because I was so small they used to send me under the fucking floorboards to feed the wires through! It was our first proper house, and we loved it. We had a ‘posh’ lounge that you wouldn’t use every day, only for special occasions, a choice of indoor and outdoor toilets and an Anderson Shelter (an underground metal box used as a protective bunker during World War Two air raids) at the bottom of our own garden.

  We even had a proper bathroom – I thought I was in heaven! Living in the flat we’d not had a proper bathroom, just a galvanised bath hanging on the back of the scullery door and twice a week we’d fill it with a kettle and all of us would take turns to bathe. Mum would always go first, then dad, then I’d get the leftovers.

  Before we had our own tin bath we’d go over to Hackney Baths once a week. You’d pay a penny and they’d give you a towel and a bar of soap, no sponge or anything, and you got your own bathroom for thirty minutes. But only thirty minutes, mind. Outside the door they had a lever, and when your thirty minutes were up they’d pull it and if you’d fallen asleep you’d suddenly wake up and all the fucking water would run away. You had no control over anything. Once the bath had drained it would automatically fill up again, and all you had was a cold tap to cool the water down if it was too hot, but there was no hot tap if it wasn’t warm enough, that was tough luck. Having our own bathroom meant we could have a bath each with fresh water, and it felt like being a millionaire.

  Our other great pleasure in Hackney was going to the Town Hall on a Saturday night to watch the wrestling. My dad, being a bit of a name in those parts, knew quite a few of the wrestlers and so we always used to get front-row seats. That was entertainment, I tell you!

  Some of the famous names included Steve Logan, Johnny Kwango, Dr Death, Shirley Crabtree (aka Big Daddy), Jackie Pallo, what days! My favourite back then was Mick McManus. He was always the bad boy, doing naughty moves, winding up the crowd, who would boo him and he’d get the crap kicked out of him for fifteen minutes and then come back and win! Even as a kid, though, I’d look at his hair and think, ‘That’s not right.’ It was gloss black, dyed to within an inch of its life.

  Then there was Ricky Starr who was a ballerina, he was like no one else. He was much slimmer than the other wrestlers but really muscly, and he would dance around the ring doing all this ballet stuff – we thought he was a joke when he first came on. Then whe
n Johnny Kwango came for him he stood on one foot and kicked him in the head with the other! The posts in the corners of the ring must’ve been four foot high and I remember once when Ricky, from a standing position, jumped straight onto the top of the post right in front of me, it was incredible! Then he lost balance and fell off. Johnny Kwango dived on top of him – one, two, three and he was out!

  Once the wrestling was over for the evening we’d head to the bar where my dad would catch up with his wrestling pals. Being seven or eight years old and stood next to these giants like Big Daddy, I suddenly felt very small indeed.

  I was reminded of those days last year when I went down to Ramsgate to the house of the late Jackie Pallo. He was a decent mechanic in his day and he loved cars, almost too much because he couldn’t bear to part with them. In his back garden he had a collection of rusting old Saabs and other things that he’d hoarded away. It was both amazing and sad to see.

  From getting stuck into my early handiwork I got quite good at fixing things, so once I grew out of my wooden toys, as I said, I used to take things apart and put them back together. I’d go down the scrappy’s (scrap merchants) looking for old things to repair and also go door-to-door asking if people had anything that needed fixing, and they’d give me sixpence for doing it. Electric fan heaters, mangles, anything that had broken, I would take away, get out my little toolbox of nuts and bolts, and spend hours figuring out how to fix these things, and earn a few quid doing it. That was my greatest pleasure, until I hit thirteen.

  Then it was all about trying to get into eighteen-rated movies, then called X-films. Me and my mates used to go to the Kenning Hall Cinema in Lower Clapton to see movies like The Blob. We’d hunt around the pavement looking for fag ends, then roll them up in toilet paper to make several of them assembled together look like one fag. We stuck our collars up, put the swagger on and walked past the doorman smoking, trying to make out we were eighteen.