Bernie Fineman, Original Motor Mouth

by Bernie Fineman

  Then of course once we were in, The Blob frightened the fucking life out of me! After I got home I was checking under the beds, and kept the light on, it was scary shit. I’ve seen it since and I laughed my head off. It’s got Steve McQueen in it, good actors. It’s totally naff when you see it now, but God it frightened the fuck out of me when I was a kid.

  Around the same time I started going to the movies I started noticing girls too. There was one girl in particular, and I’ll never forget her – Pat. I was thirteen and she was eighteen. She lived in Upper Clapton and I lived in the scrag end of Lower Clapton, but she liked me ’cos I was a cheeky little fucker and I liked her because she had big boobies! We used to have a little play around, you know: ‘You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.’

  Then for my fourteenth birthday we were going to walk hand-in-hand up to Stamford Hill to go and play on the fruit machines at the ‘Shtip’. Right next to that was a salt beef bar, so if you won any money on the fruit machines you’d go next door and have a salt beef sandwich. Anyway, I turn up at Pat’s house, and ask her, ‘You all right? Ready to go?’

  ‘Why don’t you come in a minute?’ she calls out.

  ‘Where’s Mum and Dad?’ I ask her.

  ‘They’re out. I’ve got a birthday present for you.’

  I’m straight up stairs! We’re in her bedroom under the sheets, getting on with a bit of rumpy pumpy when suddenly SLAM, the front door shuts. Before we know what’s going on her dad bursts in. He was a cab driver and I’ve just been playing ‘now you see me now you don’t’ with his daughter, and he gives me a fucking hiding. So I scarper like a rat out of a drainpipe and as I’m leaving I can hear her mum calling her a fucking slag and all sorts. I get home and I’ve got a black eye, but I don’t tell my dad what it’s for of course, how can I?

  Still, all these years later, I can still remember that it was the best birthday present ever!

  CHAPTER THREE

  A YOUNG T. REX

  As we became teenagers me and my mates started going to underage discos. There were various clubs around London that put on nights for the kids who weren’t yet old enough to drink but wanted to hang out, have a dance and, of course, meet girls.

  They were cracking nights and some of the bands and performers that played have stayed with me forever, like Adam Faith, Marty Wilde & the Wild Cats, Johnny Mike & the Shades, the Spotnicks, the Piltdown Men (who came over from Hollywood) and Helen Shapiro. I actually went out with Helen Shapiro a couple of times. Her brother was known as ‘Fig Leaf’ and he knew some of my mates. When we went over to their flats in Lower Clapton I would see members of the Krays’ gang hanging around.

  Anyway, I was introduced to Helen through Fig Leaf and we dated for a bit, but I never got anywhere with her. Maybe a kiss on the cheek but that was it. What is it they say about Jewish women?

  My favourite band from that time, though, was Shane Fenton & the Fentones. Shane, of course, went on to have big success in the 70s as Alvin Stardust, but back then he had a song called ‘Cindy’s Birthday’ which became a bit of a hit. At the time I was dating a girl called Cindy so on her birthday I took her to the club to see the Fentones. Being Bernie Big Bollocks I told her I’d had a word with Shane and he’d written the song just for her, and that got me some brownie points, I can tell you! I wonder if she still believes it’s about her?

  At these underage clubs you’d find similar crowds going to the same nights each week and so you’d start to recognise people, and one of the most recognisable was a guy called Mark Feld. I remember the first time I saw him, even amongst a crowd of people, he stood out. He was immaculately dressed in a bright red shirt, pressed black trousers and handmade Anello & Davide shoes, and there was an air about him. Another time I remember seeing him in a suit, brothel creepers (suede shoes with thick crepe soles) and a ‘bum freezer’ jacket. He always made the rest of us feel scruffy by comparison.

  Mark was very friendly with a lot of guys in the East End and Lower Clapton. One of his very good friends was a guy called Alan Bodnitz who lived in Hackney. Alan also happened to be friendly with some of my mates, and going to the various clubs together we all got to know each other. We used to go to a place called the Tweeters Club in Manor House, and also the Tottenham Royal, Stamford Hill Boys Club, Brady Boys Club, The Oxford & St George’s in Hackney, and Heaven & Hell in the West End. In fact Alan, Mark, Simon Cohen and Ronnie Morgan were like the in-crowd. They always wore the latest fashions, but where they got the money from I don’t know, ’cos none of my mates could afford clothes like that, but over time we all started to hang out together.

  In those days the height of fashion was to have a button-down shirt, and if you had a button-down shirt in gingham you were like the bees knees. We’d wear skin-tight jeans, boots with Cuban (high) heels and winkle picker extensions (that is with a long sharp pointed toe) – the longer the ‘toe’ extension, the trendier you were. Believe it or not in those days I had quite long hair and the fashion was to have it ‘tonged’ – curled using hair tongs. Everyone who was anyone would save up their pennies and go down to Max’s in Stoke Newington High Street to get their hair tonged, and it would cost you about two bob.

  Now, all this stuff was always out of our price range and I had only one really good shirt which had to do me for weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, everything. One Saturday I decided I wanted to be in with the in-crowd, but I couldn’t afford a button-down shirt, so I got an old shirt I wasn’t wearing anymore, took the buttons off of it, and sewed them onto the collars of my nice white shirt so it looked as if it was buttoned-down.

  So off we went to the Tweeters Club, I was feeling cock-of-the-walk, and when we arrived there was another group of well-dressed lads there. We got chatting to them and I got talking to a guy called Alan. I’d seen him about, he was known as a bit of a wheeler-dealer. In those days you could get all the old stuff from World War II, old valve radios and whatever, and Alan always had bits and pieces he was selling to other people. I’d only known the guy for an hour or so when he looked at me and said, ‘That looks different, you’ve sewn the buttons onto your collar. That’s not a proper button-down shirt.’

  Well, I felt totally deflated, humiliated, and I could’ve lamped him one. A few months later I saw him on a bus but totally blanked him – I didn’t want to give him the time of day. If you haven’t guessed already, that cunt was Alan Sugar!

  He might be a multi-millionaire but is he as happy as I am? I’m always laughing and joking, always got a smile on my face, but when do you see him smiling? Give me my family and friends over vast wealth any day of the week.

  But back to Mark Feld, who was an altogether nicer bloke. Always friendly, always with a hello and a handshake for everyone. Being in a nightclub with Mark, even when he was only fifteen, was some experience, the guy was just a pussy magnet! The girls loved him. There was just something different about him, he was very laid-back, very cool, always smiling. He just had a charm about him. The rest of us would look at each other and think, ‘Bastard! What has he got that we haven’t?’

  All of the above, I suppose!

  He always pulled all the nice girls and so we were left to fight over the rest, but you got some reflective glory from being mates with Mark. However there was one time I got one over on him. He was trying it on with this fucking gorgeous girl called Simone Sternberg but she didn’t want to know. Even the great Mark Feld wanted to get off with her but couldn’t – because she was wrapped up with me, boyo!

  Mark would always be singing, whenever they played a record in the club he liked he would be singing along, and he would always be dancing. He was a bloody good dancer! If you wanted to dance with a girl you made sure you were nowhere near Mark, he’d show you up, and by comparison make you look like you were a jelly with arms and legs.

  I’d see Mark on and off at different places for about a year, we’d always say hello to each other and that, but as we got older and the various members of our gangs left
school and went out to work, the scene sort of broke up. I didn’t see Alan Bodnitz anymore, didn’t see Ronnie Morgan anymore, we all seemed to go our different ways. After that I only saw Mark a couple of times, at the Two Eyes Club in the West End when we went to see Cliff Richard and the Shadows and once at the Coronet Club in St John’s Wood. We said hello, how you doing, but no more than that because the music was too loud to talk.

  Then some years later I turn on the telly and it’s some pop show. And who should I see on there? Bloody Mark Feld! I called to my mates, ‘Oi, come and have a look at this, Mark Feld is on the telly!’ Except they didn’t call him Feld, they said his name was Marc Bolan. He always said he was going to be a pop star, and that was the first time I realised he’d made it. Of course by then he was in the band Tyrannosaurus Rex, and would soon have huge hits like ‘Ride a White Swan’, ‘Telegram Sam’ and ‘Metal Guru’. Great pop songs, and whenever I heard them they always brought a smile to my face as I thought about him back in those clubs in the really early sixties. He was such a nice guy, you couldn’t help but be pleased for him and think he deserved it when success came his way.

  Just don’t ask me what the hell any of those songs are about!

  Now I know there’s one thing you are dying to say, but before you ask, no I never worked on Marc Bolan’s Mini, you can’t pin that one on me! In case you don’t know, poor Mark was killed when his car went out of control and hit a fence post in south-west London. How desperately tragic it was. I remember seeing the front cover of all the papers and as soon as I saw the name I knew who it was. It was 1977, fifteen years or so since I’d last seen him, I was going through a long break-up with my first wife, and seeing someone I’d known as a kid die like that was really hard to take. The two events are wrapped up together for me – Mark Feld dying and me getting divorced within a year.

  It was like my youth was behind me now, and I was grown up.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS

  My early years were spent in constant fear of Mrs Hassinger. She was the headmistress of Tyson Primary School where I went from the age of five. She was a proper Dickensian baddie, a sour old spinster with a face that could turn milk, never smiled, she had bony fingers, and she could look at you and make your balls drop. She had piercing eyes and a really craggy face. She’d give Cruella de Vil a run for her money, let me tell you!

  For small children like us – five, six years old – she was absolutely frightening. I used to have nightmares, even wet the bed a few times, just thinking about her. She never had children and obviously hated youngsters. How she ever became a headmistress in a primary school God only knows. She used to say, ‘Don’t! I said DON’T, are you STUPID?’ Now to me you should never tell a child they are stupid, but that’s the sort of person she was, someone who ruled by instilling fear.

  My uniform was a starched white shirt, cut-down shorts (we couldn’t afford proper ones) and a second-hand blazer with a tie and a little second-hand satchel with my packed lunch in it. On my first day at school my mum took me up there on her way to work and left me on the wrong side of the big wrought-iron gates: it seemed like a prison to me and I thought I would never come out. Everyone seemed much smarter than me, even though we’d done the best we could to make the few things I had look good. I was OK until the bell went for us children to go in and I looked round and my mum was crying. Whether it was her little boy growing up or what, I don’t know. Or maybe she just knew that Mrs Hassinger would be waiting for me!

  At about 10.30 each morning we would have our milk break, which some of us hated more than the lessons. As well as a half-pint of full-fat milk you would be given a teaspoon of radio malt (a malt extract preparation), which was full of all the vitamins we needed, and meant to stop us getting scurvy and suchlike, and a sandwich which was usually a thin slice of cheese in white bread and generally looked as appetising as paper. The malt was ultra-sweet, a dark brown thick syrup that looked like marmite. It kicked off such a sugar rush it literally ‘gave you a buzz’, but it also made you feel really sick.

  I suppose because of the rationing it was the government’s way of making sure children got all the vitamins and sugars they needed, but it was god-awful stuff. But the radio malt was a treat compared to the cod liver oil, which tasted somewhere in between engine oil and piss and made you instantly gag. It was served to us in big soup spoons. You’d queue up, open your mouth and shut your eyes, then they’d stick the spoon in your mouth and hold your nose and mouth shut until you swallowed. If you brought it up they’d send you to the back of the queue and you’d have to do it all over again. You can imagine my first day at school – between terrifying Mrs Hassinger and the force-feeding, I was wondering what on earth I’d got into!

  From the very first day they tried to teach us reading and writing, but for some reason I just couldn’t get the hang of it. I would see the letter A, but it would just look like a squiggle. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing, I’d try to trace it but I still couldn’t write down what I was seeing. The teacher would get really frustrated with me, assume I was playing around or pretending not to get it, and in turn I would get frustrated with her and myself, which I would then take out on other people.

  A few times I got sent to Mrs Hassinger for what they called ‘insubordination’. This basically involved the teacher telling me off for getting something wrong and not trying, and me replying, ‘I am trying, I just can’t write down what I mean.’ So I’d be sent to the headmistress for talking back.

  Sitting outside her office was the worst thing, because you wouldn’t know when you would be called. Then, all of a sudden, you’d hear, ‘Fineman, in!’ You’d walk in and she’d say, ‘Fineman, stand!’ That’s how she would talk to you at six years of age. Then, she’d go on with, ‘What’s this? Are you STUPID? Are you worthy of being at this school? Get out!’

  When I was a bit older, about nine or ten, I’d get ‘six of the best’ for fighting. Often it was because I’d been called a Yid or something and I’d retaliate, so I’d be given corporal punishment. They always used to do it first thing in the morning after prayers. The whole school would be sat in the assembly hall and we’d have morning prayers, then Mrs Hassinger would read out the names of the children to be caned.

  Worst of all, you’d never know if it was your time or not and she’d read the names out in alphabetical order, so once she’d gone past whatever came after ‘Fineman’ and got to ‘G’ I knew I was safe and had got away with it, but those first few moments as she went through A, B, C, D, E, F was horrible. Then when you were called out your fear was three-fold. First, it was having to stand up in front of the whole school so that everyone would know you’d been naughty, then it was the fear of the pain, and thirdly you knew you were going to cry in front of everyone and that they were going to call you a cissy and a baby or whatever. For some of the kids it was too much and they’d piss themselves in front of the whole school, they were so frightened.

  When your name was called you’d have to walk through all the other kids and get into a line. When it was your turn she’d point at you with one of her bony fingers and say: ‘Hand out!’ If you didn’t put your hand out then Mr Bloomberg, one of the other teachers, would come up behind you and twist your ear. That was his favourite torture, though one day we got our own back on him when we let all the air out of his car tyres so he couldn’t get home.

  The cane was about three feet long, thin and white, very flexible and Mrs Hassinger took delight in whipping it through the air first to hear what sort of a noise it made. Then you’d get three lashes on your hand. The first would be near the tip of the fingers, and that would really make you grimace, the second in the middle of the fingers and the third across the palm of the hand, and it fucking hurt! The lacerations were sometimes so bad that if you didn’t treat them properly they’d open up and get infected.

  Then she told you to bend over and touch your toes. Then for a split second you would hear the whoo
sh as the cane came down and she’d strike you across your arse as hard as she could three times. So you’d have the pain on your backside and the pain on your hand and so to get off the stage with any dignity was incredibly difficult. If you smiled, you were sent to the back of the queue for the same again. If you cried then you were told to stand in the corner with the ‘dunce’s cap’ on.

  For those of you who are too young to remember the dunce’s cap, it’s exactly how you imagine it: a tall paper cone with a big D on the front. Every class had one and for committing any misdemeanour you were told to sit in the corner facing the wall with the dunce’s cap on. No point asking to go to the toilet while you were wearing the dunce’s cap – they wouldn’t let you.

  I remember one poor lad had an upset stomach one day, and he pissed and shit himself there and then in front of everyone. The teacher still made him stand there for the full hour, the poor bastard, totally degrading. Well, you can imagine how the other kids treated him after that – he got the ribbing of his life! Maybe it did him some good, though, I dunno, but he went on to become a millionaire working in women’s fashion.

  Kids are amazing things: they can gel really quickly, they can meet for the first time and within minutes be laughing and playing together. But they can also be really cruel. The school bully was a boy called Terry and from the moment I first saw him I knew he was trouble. He was bigger than everyone else and used his size to intimidate the rest of us. At five years of age his delight was making other children cry any way he could: pinching and punching, but also ridiculing as well.

  Terry would find a weakness and prey on it. If someone had a scraggy uniform he would take the mickey out of them for being poor. He used to push me around and pinch me. After a week of this I’d be covered in bruises and one time I was having my weekly bath in front of the electric fire when my mum noticed all these bruises over my body. She told my dad and the first thing he did wasn’t to go up to the school, but to take me to Repton Boxing Club and he started showing me the basics. He said, ‘If anyone hits you, you hit them back, that’s the only way you’ll ever earn their respect.’