*
I remember my first few months in Coventry. I don’t know whether I spoke any English when I arrived; my first language would have been Italian. Perhaps my mother and sisters had taught me some English when we were in Italy, I don’t even know. In Coventry, however, I had no one who spoke Italian, and I lost it, forever. People have always told me that it’s in there somewhere, but I can’t find it. Even now, after living in Italy for ten years, I still speak Italian badly, like an Englishman.
After the death of my mother, it was decided I should live with my grandmother, Mabel Davies, in Margate, Kent. This reunited me with my eldest sister Maria, who lived nearby in Broadstairs. She was working in my aunt’s hairdressing salon and would visit me on Sundays, and we would always make a big meal.
My granny Mabel was a great old bird. She was seventy-six when I went there and eighty-six when I left, at sixteen, just before she died. She brought me up really well, and it must have been difficult for her. She had had no sons but four daughters of her own. Her maiden name was Pearce, and she was from Cornwall. She claimed descent from “Tom Pearce, Tom Pearce, lend me your grey mare”, from the folk song ‘Widdecombe Fair’, and they were also descended from the famous Trethowan family of Cornwall.
In Margate I also had a grandfather, but don’t remember much of him. I do remember him chasing me, and him often falling from his bike, but that was it. Jack Davies was around for the first couple of years, but I probably killed him off. He was a stern ex-professional soldier in his eighties and probably didn’t much like having a six-year-old running around the house. It is funny thinking back while writing my memoirs, forcing myself to remember; strange, too, the things that come to me, and the parts I have forgotten.
After my father died, my other two sisters came to Margate from Rome. Christina was now sixteen and Luisa eighteen. They were good girls but they were strangers to me, and seemed so much older – more like aunts. Although they had both been born in England, they didn’t speak much English. Christina stayed with me at Granny’s for a short while and then moved to another of my mother’s sisters, Auntie Joyce. She worked at a deaf-and-dumb school. Luisa studied nursing and lived in the nurses’ hostel. Amazingly, she found time to become the Margate Beauty Queen. As I’ve said, they were more like aunts and women who helped – like my granny. Everyone seemed to be there to help me, or be there to just be there. It was as if they were worried something was going to happen to me as a result of the trauma I had faced in my life so far, but I suppose I was none the wiser. I was happy, in fact, but perhaps the trauma had affected me subconsciously because at about seven years old I began twitching my head. I had fine blonde hair, which Granny thought was the reason (to flick it out of my face), and she put a hairpin on me. I, of course, found it all very embarrassing. No one knew where the twitch came from, what it was or how to get rid of it. Over time, the head twitching turned into eye blinking, and even small sounds came from deep in my throat. “What’s happening to him?” I recall them all asking one another, panicked in a frenzy of Italian irrationality. They were only trying to help, I suppose. I would only do one thing at a time, but I had a compulsive need to do something in a repetitive manner. Over time, it settled into the head twitching as being the dominant tic. I tried various cures, including hypnotherapy, but nothing had any effect. For nearly fifty years, it was the bane of my life.
Although I wasn’t to know it, the decision for me to move to Margate with Granny would ultimately help shape my entire future. By living in Margate, I would meet someone who would change my life, forever. Oh, he would play with my penis too.
Chapter 2
Margate
Margate in the 1950s was the type of town that doesn’t really exist in England anymore. There are still popular resorts like Brighton, Blackpool and Skegness, but they have changed. In the 1950s, all the industrial workers went to these towns for their annual two-week summer holiday, often in the rain, as foreign travel was almost unheard of for the working classes back then. Nowadays, with cheap air travel, Brits can take their holidays in the sun, in Spain or in Greece, and that marked the beginning of the demise of those old English seaside towns. They still exist today, but they are poor and rundown. Like Brighton, Margate was infamous for gang violence between mods and rockers in the 1960s, then mods and skinheads in the eighties, but in the fifties, Margate was just perfect… kind of. Well, it managed to change my world.
*
I went to the local primary school, passed my eleven plus exams and got a place at Chatham House Grammar School in Ramsgate, where Edward Heath, later to become British prime minister, once attended. Founded in 1797, dayboys then had to be at school at 5.40am and were not allowed home until 8.20pm after prayers… quite different to today. During the war, the school had entrances to the network of tunnels running under Ramsgate, then used as shelter from the air raids. Most of the entrances have been covered up now, but you can still see a few on the lower playground. It was the 1950s and I would walk twenty minutes each morning to the bus stop and catch a bus the five miles down the Ramsgate Road to get to the school. In those days, eleven-year-olds wandered around on their own; quite a different time indeed.
As I’ve mentioned, Granny was a great girl and I was now really settled, but she did border on the eccentric at times. She was a spiritualist and the house was filled with photographs of Native American chiefs in magnificent headdresses. My granny thought they were spiritual ‘beings’ and she would host séances each Monday night in the back extension room (under my room). I would always help her prepare for the séance by putting specially made frames covered in black velvet inside the windows to block out any light. She had a regular group of women who attended, like the doctor’s wife. I remember her as the poshest person we knew, and she would bring me comics and chocolate – my weekly treat. I remember being tucked up in bed with chocolate and The Beano and The Dandy before the séance would begin and the next day, Granny would always say bizarre things to me. “I spoke to your mummy last night” would definitely freak me out. Nothing to do with the séances, but similarly bizarre, she used to tell me that Mother died from eating tomato ketchup.
*
All my life, I have loved rock ‘n’ roll music. My first musical memory was of Bill Haley & His Comets’ ‘Rock Around the Clock’, which was a hit when I was little. But my favourite was Little Richard and his hits ‘Tutti Frutti’, ‘Long Tall Sally’ and ‘Lucille’. I remember when I went into the Great Ormond Street Hospital in Carshalton, at the age of twelve, to have my testicles dropped and I sang ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, Elvis’s current hit, in the hospital. At Granny’s, we had a Rediffusion radio, whose signal came down a wire. The box looked like a radio, but was in fact empty except for the speaker. I remember I used to go downstairs late in the evening and put cushions around it, lie on the floor so my granny wouldn’t hear me, and listen to Radio Luxembourg and my favourite song of all, ‘Cathy’s Clown’, by the Everly Brothers.
With this fascination in music, Granny decided I should learn a musical instrument, and I was given the choice between a piano accordion and a guitar. At that time a guitar was quite an unfamiliar instrument to me, but more to the point, what would an Italian do in England other than play the accordion in Italian restaurants? Needless to say, I did not get to learn the guitar. Keith Richards and Eric Clapton were clearly more switched on than me, and were following Chuck Berry and the blues greats like Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley, but that kind of thing hadn’t really made it down to Margate – not to my knowledge anyway. I was soon practising the piano accordion every day for a good hour, and I became quite proficient. Had I done that with a guitar, I may have had a very different life, and my future friends Eric Clapton and Pink Floyd might have been totally different people to me. I’m not saying I would have turned out to be a great guitarist or that I was at all upset with my granny, for the piano accordion was itself a beautiful instrument. I suppose we all have our own journeys in life and mine w
as destined not to be a rock star, not quite anyway… I played that accordion at hospitals and old people’s homes and joined the Margate Children’s Piano Accordion Band! My band was even chosen to represent Margate on television in a contest called ‘Beat That Town!’. It involved a number of entertainers, like singers, dancers and a Hawaiian guitarist. Going to the TV studios in Manchester was the furthest away I had been from Margate and I really did love that trip. I remember the journey and how shocked I was when one of the dancers went into the toilet on the train with a man she had just met. I didn’t know anything about sex in those days – why would I? I was still eleven and living with Granny. For the show, the whole of the accordion band were dressed up as little Dutch boys and girls, with curled-up hats, plaits and clogs. I have a photo of the band taken from a little black and white TV screen, and I’m in the corner grinning from ear to ear – fame!
Television was not something we had at home, on Addiscombe Road, Margate. In fact, there was only one television on the entire street. It belonged to a family with a son who was my age, so every Saturday and Sunday evening I would go there to be with him and we’d plonk ourselves in the front room on the floor and stare at the television in amazement. It was raised on stilts and must have been like one of those old classic images of the kids sitting too close to the screen. The family would give me a Wagon Wheel chocolate biccy and a packet of crisps, things I rarely had in my house. I remember the excitement of Bonanza and Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Even in black and white, television was thrilling in those early days – totally and utterly thrilling.
Our street also lacked cars in the 1950s, but the family with the telly had a motorcycle and sidecar, and that was all of the available transport on Addiscombe Road. Our house was a basic two-up, two-down terraced house, with a rear extension and an empty field opposite the house where every year a circus would pitch its tent. I remember the knocks at the door from “the man with the bucket” asking for water for his elephants. Eventually, the council built a housing estate on the field and the circus was no more, but the donkeys for the children’s rides on the beach would still come and pass our house. My job was to rush out and scoop up their droppings to scatter on the roses.
My sister Maria had Sundays off from the salon and she would visit us for Sunday lunch. My job for the meal was to make the cream and I’d use full fat gold-top milk. Back then, milk came in glass bottles and the different colour top indicated the different type. First I’d boil the milk, let it settle overnight, then the next day skim the top off and compress it through this big old machine of Granny’s. It would come out the other end as Cornish clotted cream. Beautiful. I’d help make the mint sauce too, by picking the mint from the back garden. As you can see, life was different in those days, in all the little ways. We had a toilet outdoors, for example, and there was no such thing as Andrex, just a metal hook, and on it, shreds of newspaper – usually the Daily Mirror.
In the summer we brought bed-and-breakfast holidaymakers into the house, mainly car workers from the Midlands. We would get the same families every year but, thinking back, I can’t imagine now how they’d have all fitted into our small house, with the whole visiting family using just one room. I had another job as well: to take up the jug of hot water for guests to wash in the morning, and then empty the bedpan full of urine. Guests were never allowed to use the house’s only bath. It was a tin tub, which was in a shed out back – that was just for us. It was a small tub, and hung on a nail when we weren’t using it. I remember Granny and I filling the tub with kettles for our weekly soak, and we would, of course, both use the same water. We were so excited when we got a gas hot-water boiler over the tub. To us, it was the most tremendous and dazzling of modern inventions.
One family of regular holidaymakers had two daughters: one my age, of eleven or twelve, and the other about nineteen. I liked the younger one and she was my friend, but the elder was rather odd to me. She’d tart herself up each night and go out on the town. One Monday, while the séance was happening underneath my room, she came in. I was busy at the time, eating my chocolate and reading my Beano. She closed the door behind her and approached me – weirdly she was not too interested in the Bash Street Kids or even Billy Whizz, but rather in something else and she began to touch my penis. I was very naive at the time, and what with my comic book reading to get on top of, the timing was all wrong. I told her if she didn’t stop it, I would shout to the séance for help. She left the room in a huff. I continued reading.
*
By now, the town council had appointed a child protection officer to keep an “eye on me”. She was a nice lady called June Jolly. When I was twelve, she introduced my family to the chaplain of the public school, St. Lawrence College, in Ramsgate. His name was Revd Kenneth Senior. He was married to a doctor and had a young family. He took an interest in my well-being and paid frequent visits to the house. He taught me how to drive in an empty field and how to swim, but sadly the Revd Kenneth Senior had an ulterior motive. With the approval of Granny, he offered to teach me about the birds and the bees – something Granny considered a man’s role, and one less job she had to do. It seems incredible these days, but at that time, and at the age of twelve, I was completely unaware of sex. He explained to me about procreation and taught me how to masturbate. Of course, he taught me by demonstrating it on me. Revd Kenneth Senior was a paedophile, although that was not a term in common use in those days. They were called child molesters or perverts, but whatever they were called, he was one of them.
He never did manage to molest me again, but that was not for want of trying over the years, which is harassment in itself. He would try at the swimming pool and on trips. He begged me to let him have “his fun”, like when he took me to Cambridge where we spent the day trainspotting – my passionate hobby in the days of the steam trains. I liked the Stanier and the Fowler, such terrific sounds. When a steam train came in, my entire body would shake. It was to me the most exciting thing in life. Watching old films that capture the deep whistle of the train – the chug chug – it was just as it was. I remember talking to one budding trainspotter there in Cambridge, as we watched one locomotive finish its scheduled turn of work – it was now due its clean-through – and asking him what was happening when the fireman stepped down from the train and entered the shed beside the track. The man had a moustache and a bowler hat, too.
“He’s come to report the engine. The reporting clerk will then tell the footplate man where to leave the train in the yard. Its firebox, tubes and boiler will need to be cleaned, or the engine steams poorly and burns more coal than is necessary.”
I really did love those steam trains and thinking back now, it was really anything that had an engine. Maybe it was that tin-plate model car with working headlights that my father had given me that had sparked the love – something that I slept next to each night and sometimes even took with me on trips.
When we got to Cambridge, after I had got undressed for bed, Revd Ken Senior tried to molest me again, but I wouldn’t allow him. I was resistant and stubborn. I had obviously led him into a false sense of opportunity, what with my fondness for the steam trains and the trip away, but I was only twelve and wasn’t to know the mind tricks I was then playing on the man. He became angry and raised his voice, something quite terrifying to me at the time, and all I wanted then was to be back with my granny. “You’ve had your fun, now let me have mine,” he demanded. I must have been a strong-willed young lad to resist the reverend, but resist I did. It was never to happen again.
He even took me on Thames river cruises with what we would now call paedophile rings. Two or three of the cruisers were packed with schoolteachers and young boys, for a week’s ‘trip’ down the Thames. I don’t know for sure that the boys were passed around, but I do know that the Revd Ken Senior slept with a small boy in his cabin. I know it for a fact. Meanwhile, as the non-player that I was, I was relegated to the quartermaster’s launch, and I remember him sulking all week bec
ause he was missing out on the little boy action.
In 1960, the reverend took up a new post at Dean Close School, another public school, in Cheltenham, on the other side of England. My guess is he had been found out at St. Lawrence College and needed to do a runner. In those days, as with priests, schoolmasters were just moved on when their fondness for young boys was exposed. They were rarely prosecuted, mainly just protected. Has much changed?
I was approaching sixteen and my grandmother was eighty-six, nearing the end of her life, so it was decided I should go and be with the Senior family in Cheltenham. They already had three children of their own with another one on the way, but they officially fostered me. I never told my granny about the reverend’s advances and it never passed my mind that I should. Not knowing at such a young age what was right or wrong and which way to go in life, I became the Senior family’s fostered child and what happened next was quite unusual indeed.
*
The front cover of The Times newspaper in 1960 was just classified advertisements. The news started inside, on page two. Revd Ken Senior had put a small ad on the front cover, ‘Financial help wanted for bright orphan to pay for school fees’. Perhaps it was then when I realised the power of advertising. He had a reply from someone called the Revd Timothy Beaumont, who paid for all my school fees for three years at Dean Close School. The Revd Beaumont had one clause: that there should be no contact. I never met him and I was surprised that well into the twenty-first century he was still alive, by then Lord Beaumont of Whitley. When he died a couple of years ago, his obituary explained all. He had been a young Anglican priest and just thirty years old when his mother, a rich American from a shipping family, died, leaving him fifteen million in her will. This was a considerable fortune in the 1950s and he resolved to give it all away in just three years. Reading what Andrew Roth wrote for The Guardian in 2008, the man seemed quite interesting to me, and I would have liked to have met him.
Johnny Cigarini Page 2