by Mark Dapin
We saw Leeds United once, in 1974, when they played Liverpool in the Charity Shield at Wembley. I still meet men in Australia who can recite the names of every player in that Leeds team – Harvey, Reaney, Cherry, Bremner, McQueen, Hunter, Lorimer, Clarke (substituted by McKenzie), Jordan, Giles, Gray. They marched onto the pitch – all white men dressed all in white – behind their new manager, Brian Clough, with their long sideburns and blow-waved partings, and drew one-all with Liverpool. The game was scrappy and vicious, with a brawl between Leeds captain Billy Bremner and Liverpool’s Kevin Keegan. They were both sent off, and each tore off his shirt in protest. Liverpool won on penalties, but by this time, my dad had lost most of the simple things he had worked for.
His marriage was broken, he had to remortgage the house, and his children were drifting away from him, emotionally, culturally and geographically.
My mum was born in Harehills, Leeds, and grew up with four sisters in a two-bedroom terrace house. Jimmy, her father, thought an education damaged a girl’s chances of getting married, so he burned her ‘O’ Level results and refused to let her take ‘A’ Levels. It was shame enough that her sister, Gloria, had won a scholarship to Oxford University. My mum studied shorthand and typing, left home at sixteen, came back, worked first as a secretary, then as a nurse.
My dad must have seen himself in her. She had Russian grandparents on her mother’s side, she grew up in a crowded, superstitious community of immigrant poor, and she wanted a husband and children in a house with a garden. They bought a semidetached home, with a hedge and a garage and fruit trees and a raspberry bush in the back.
I think my mum hid the fact that she always wanted more; she, too, felt it might make her unmarriageable. She gave up work when I was born, and four years later she gave birth to my brother. All the while, she was studying for her matriculation with the Workers Educational Association. We started to take in lodgers, and I had to move into bunk beds with my brother. There was a boy from France, a man from Holland, a student from London, and another from Billingham, near Newcastle.
My mum began a degree in sociology and psychology at Leeds University. After three years, she graduated, and a year later she abandoned my dad’s house, taking my brother and me with her in a taxi. We drove across town to a flat, where we met again the lodger from Billingham, near Newcastle. He was twenty years old, and I was ten.
My brother and my father were torn to shreds. My mum could barely cope with what she had done. She was a cook and a cleaner, a woman who collected recipe cards, never drank, ironed handkerchiefs and folded towels, and she had run off with a long-haired, bearded student who was not even Jewish. Her parents refused to speak to her, and eventually she had a breakdown.
My dad cried the night before we left, and when we visited his house that used to be our house – was still our house, in those days – the wallpaper and the carpets were swollen with his tears. We stayed up late and watched war films on the black-and-white TV, ate big bags of cheese-and-onion crisps and drank fizzy, red Tizer from the bottle with our arms around each other. They were some of the best times I ever spent with him.
I liked the new arrangement. The student played guitar, and listened to Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. He papered our flat with posters from rock newspapers. He read American comics, as I did, and Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, and the poetry of Leonard Cohen. The only unhealthy thing about him, as far as I could see, was that he supported Newcastle United.
He was still at university, and my mum worked only part-time, so we had no money. My dad rented us a TV, on the promise it would be kept in our bedroom, so Mum and her lover could not watch it. To make the TV work, we had to put in a tenpence piece every four hours. It always ran out just before the end of movies, or in the middle of The World at War.
After a year, we moved to a housing-association estate in Harehills, between my grandparents’ house and the largely West Indian district of Chapeltown, which was soon to burn in Britain’s summer riots. I was happier than I had ever been. I could grow my hair as long as I liked – which was very long – I had a big bedroom to myself, I could read comics all night and play football with myself in the alley, making up stories in my head. I was an atheist and a socialist. I did not like being Jewish, and the dull, dripping religion we were raised on was bleeding into the background of more fantastic dramas. I was told we would soon live in London, where there were shops that sold nothing but comics.
In fact, we moved to a garrison town where British Army recruits performed their basic training, and there were as many soldiers as civilians. It was a brutal barracks, with the possibility of violence hanging over every exchange. I got punched in a bookshop, beaten up outside a scout-hall disco, smacked around the head in an alleyway, kicked in the balls on my way to school, chased by squaddies through the town. I adored it, loved being a teenager in a lawless place, growing up with a soundtrack of punk rock music. I remember those years like a kidnapper’s collage, letters cut from newspaper headlines, events pasted at random: watching The Clash play an Anti-Nazi League benefit at Brockwell Park, Brixton, with the Tom Robinson Band and X-Ray Spex; watching skinheads smash a punk over the head with a toilet seat to the imbecilic beat of Crass; running from a party in a hall broken up by the police; running from other parties broken up by fighting; a daytrip to France when we ran first from a bunch of fat drunks from the Black Country, then from a mob of French rockabillies, then from the older men from the garrison town who felt we had let them down by running; piercing my ear with a safety pin, again and again; tattoos crawling up my arms – swords and hearts and snakes and swallows – marking the years. Most of all, I remember the music, and the feeling it gave me as if I was standing on the edge of the world, burning with an anger that bordered on bliss.
Rich, Paddy and I were the first kids to form a band, a punk rock group that eventually became Deadlock. I wrote songs that were complicated and obscure, about things I had never known: valium, wife-beating, the death of a soldier. I could not sing, and I was too shy even to try. Our rehearsals were comically stifled. Nobody could change chords or keep time, and we ended up channelling my radio-cassette player through the amplifier, and miming along to The Jam. The rest of the band pretended to split up, in order to kick me out.
I had a lot of friends, a big gang who went on to form other bands, get married, or die. Dave and Merv committed suicide. Sarah contracted leukaemia. John, Rich and others filled their veins with heroin. Nobody made it as a rock star.
My school was like the town – rough and cold, grey and stupid. Several of the teachers simply chalked the lesson on the blackboard and left the classroom. It was a boys’ comprehensive school, and the staff still used the cane. There was trouble in the playground every week, as I huddled with smokers behind the bike sheds, or skipped lessons to go shoplifting in the centre. I was good at lessons for the first two years, until I realised being good at lessons was the same as being Jewish. By the third year, my reports had degenerated from columns of As into a snide platform for staffroom sarcasms. I won prizes in a couple of national writing competitions. My housemaster congratulated me, but wrote ‘One cannot live on English alone’.
Many of the boys came from military families. At school, as in the military, the emphasis was on obeying orders, fighting, and everybody looking the same. The uniform was a black blazer and black trousers, a white shirt, grey socks, and a grey sweater in winter. You would get a stiff talking-to for kicking another boy in the head, but you could be sent home for wearing a blue jumper. Hair could not be too long – at least an inch above the collar – nor could it be too short. A boy who chased the French teacher through the school with a brick was caned, but a boy who turned up with a number-two crop was suspended. We could wear Dr Martens boots – presumably because soldiers wear boots – but only the shorter, less fashionable, eight-hole styles.
One small doubt remained in the hearts of the housemasters: could they really be said to
be in control when boys wore whatever socks they liked? There was already a fatwah on football socks – supposedly for medical reasons – but when Paul Weller and The Jam popularised white socks, the whole system trembled. At the end of one assembly, two teachers were posted at the double doors to check the boys as they filed out. Each pupil had to lift his trouser leg past his eighth hole, and if a white sock was showing he received an ‘official warning’. I grew up determined to wear white socks at all times.
Much later, I moved in with D, who hated my sock collection. She said, ‘It’s a sartorial rule that men wearing dark pants don’t wear white socks.’
I think it was the word ‘rule’ that set me off.
She said, ‘Since you insist on deliberately wearing your trousers too short, you should at least wear dark socks.’
But the whole point of the shortened trousers was to show off the white socks, like Paul Weller (although even Paul Weller had long grown out of white socks by then).
D responded with the most precise encapsulation of female frustration with men I have ever heard.
‘Don’t be who you are,’ she demanded.
I had long stopped being who I was – but I am jumping ahead eighteen years and dozens of pairs of white socks.
I withdrew from school in increments. First, I absented myself from technical drawing, a class I could not understand, run by a man who liked to beat his pupils’ buttocks with T squares. He was widely feared and mistrusted, but when he cornered me in a corridor and asked where I had been, he met my confession with sinister kindness. He told me I was the boy with the least aptitude for technical drawing he had ever come across, and encouraged me to stay away.
I stopped attending PE, where red-faced teachers yelled and bawled and shook their fists, and kicked pupils as if they were balls. Every week, I said I had lost my kit. I was given new shorts and a football shirt, but I lost them again. The teachers pressed their noses close to mine and ranted like drill sergeants, telling me I was not as clever as I thought I was – but I knew I was cleverer than them, and they could not make me do ‘Games’. I was called to the headmaster, who told me if I did not play sports I would not be a ‘whole man’.
My class was given an exam in religious education, a cursory joke comprising unconvincing stories of happy spastics and American street gang leaders who had repented and found God after they had had all the fun of getting drunk, taking drugs and stabbing people. RE was a freeform discipline. In the test, we were told to write whatever we liked. I wrote I could not see the point of RE, and quoted the song ‘Bodies’ by the Sex Pistols, to show I was an anarchist: ‘Fuck this and fuck that, fuck it all and fuck the fucking brat.’ I was banned from RE, which was odd, since the subject was compulsory through all English schools. The teacher refused to teach me, and even gave a lesson about me to another class.
I passed my English ‘O’ Level a year early, with the highest grade, but was made to attend the final-year classes anyway, presumably to piss me off.When I complained about it, the head of English hit me.
After the mock maths ‘O’ Level, the teacher said, ‘Anyone who scored under ten per cent might as well get up and walk out.’ Only three of us had achieved such spectacular innumeracy, and I was the only one to walk out. The boy who scored a lower mark than me left school early to join the Parachute Regiment.
I had one generous, supportive English master but, on the whole, I disliked the gentle teachers more than the brutal ones. A fey drama teacher called me a ‘thundercunt’. I called him a ‘poncy, affected wanker’ and the head of my year threatened to kick me down the stairs.
They were my shoplifting days, with nights spent doing nothing in the park: breaking bottles, spitting, smoking, being chased by the police. On winter mornings, when I sometimes smell cigarettes, for a moment I am back there and I realise what I’ve lost.
In Leeds, my dad had found another woman and remarried. They changed the shape of our house in Leeds. Builders made an extension that crept into the garden where we used to play. Dad chopped down two of the fruit trees, and cleared away the raspberries. His new wife had no children, but her family had some money: her stepfather ran a market stall selling carpets, and her parents owned both their house and the one next door. She and my dad wanted to raise my brother and me, but said they would never split us up. It was left to me to decide who we would live with when I reached the age of thirteen and became a man under Jewish law. They offered more pocket money, a reward for every exam we passed, and a car when we turned eighteen. I turned them down, in tears over the telephone, and a year later my brother went to live with them anyway. A year after that, he returned to the garrison town.
Mum had married the student, too, and when I was thirteen, they had a daughter, Suzie. My stepdad and I gradually withdrew from contact. There were no angry scenes, no threats or shouting, but I don’t think he spoke to either of us the year my brother came back. I slipped out every night at six o’clock, while he was watching the news, and did not come back until eleven o’clock, when he had gone to bed.
While I ignored him, I spent his cash, pocketing my lunch money and anything else that came my way. Mum would give me ten pounds to do the shopping, and I would steal everything from the toothpaste to the chicken. I worked a paper round that seemed to cover for my wealth. My dad never paid much maintenance – I guess he thought if we really needed anything, we should go and live with him – and my stepdad, now a junior civil servant, did not earn a lot. He and my mum dressed in cheap clothes, bought furniture from second-hand shops and books from jumble sales, cut corners, saved pennies, and rarely went out.
I wore Fred Perry polo shirts that cost twice as much as his business shirts, Dr Martens boots and red-tag Levi’s. While he struggled to buy a house, run a car, bring up three kids and pay for his season ticket to London, I smoked twenty cigarettes a day and scratched his record collection.
Mum was loving and supportive and endlessly credulous. She would talk about anything, and she enjoyed having my friends around, even when they started to get into the local paper for petty crimes. I borrowed from the library and read everything: first American comics and science fiction, then Orwell, Camus and Kafka.
I took my first adventure into journalism when I was eight years old, and produced the Moor Allerton Crescent News. This was a local newspaper, whose distribution was limited to my house. The cover story featured the arrest of Great Train Robber Ronald Biggs on a golf course. This was also my first ‘beat-up’, based as it was on the largely unconnected facts that (a) the police existed; (b) Ronald Biggs existed; and (c) golf courses existed.
As I grew older, I had a poem published in a magazine, a story anthologised in a book, a TV review featured in a London evening newspaper. I tried to put together fanzines with my mate, Rich, first devoted to comics, then to punk rock. Although I told the local Careers Service I planned to become a terrorist, I never doubted I was going to be a journalist – although I felt I would probably be a rock star first.
I left school with six ‘O’ Levels, one of fewer than ten boys to matriculate from the two hundred in my year. I studied for my ‘A’ Levels at a technical college. I was eager to get out of home, so I crammed two years of study into a single year, in classes partially made up of students doing retakes. I met Guy, who was then attempting maths ‘O’ Level for the fifth time, and having his second go at history ‘A’ Level, and who has proved a better friend to me than anyone I have known.
I took the entrance examinations for journalism apprenticeships – which were centrally controlled and administered from a clutch of journalism schools – came third in my intake, and went to an interview with a board that included the editor of the Evening Standard. I wore a plastic, adolescent sneer, an enamel ‘Sid Lives’ badge, and told the panel that I would not perform ‘death knocks’, in which a reporter doorstops the recently bereaved. I was not offered a place.
The big gang split up. It was partly my fault, because I had trouble with
somebody and I walked away. I swore never to join a big gang again, and never walk away – although I was to do both, many times.
I went with Guy to Warwick University to study politics. We chose Warwick because it would accept students who did not have maths ‘O’ Level (I never took mine, Guy failed his again). I was younger than most people at university, and the only student with twenty tattoos and seven earrings. I parted my hair in the middle and dyed it blond on one side, in the curious hope that it would attract women. I had an argument with a politics tutor, and left the department to study a degree in sociology and social administration. Guy did the same the next year (without the argument). At university, I did nothing but drink and read books. I did not report for the student radio station or write for the student newspaper, and I looked down on the people who did. What did they think they were? Jewish? I had a beer and a smoke and a laugh with my friends, and it lasted three years.
When it was almost over, my personal tutor called me into his office and said it was time to decide whether I wanted to go out into the real world or stay on as an academic. I won a place on the PhD program, but I was not eligible for a grant unless I got a first-class degree. I did not study, and I did not get a first. My PE teachers were right: I was not as clever as I thought I was. The drama teacher was right: I was a thundercunt.
I graduated with an upper-second-class honours degree, a skeletal employment history, and an unsustainable alcohol habit. I woke up ready for a drink, and spent all day thinking about the first one. That first beer grew quickly from a pallid can of insipid supermarket lager into a mortar bomb of extra-strength Tennent’s Super. I guzzled cheap whisky, and it tasted like glue.
I moved in with my girlfriend, Jo, when I was nineteen. We were happy and I was aimless. We played like children. We lived with Guy and other friends, in shared houses and student accommodation. Most students, once they graduated, either went back home or moved to London. I was paralysed, stupefied, and I simply stayed where I was. I could not cope with the fact that it was over.