This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (20 page)

Linda never went beyond this early interest but for me hearing ‘Please Please Me’ on that hospital radio began a passion I feel just as strongly fifty years on. It is difficult to describe the
impact the Beatles had on me, a young boy approaching puberty who had always been enthralled by pop music. It’s no exaggeration to say that they became one of the most important elements of my life. Their songs came soaring out of the sea of mediocrity and imitation that was British popular music at the time, leaving our other home-grown rock stars, all second-rate replicas of US artists, floundering.

They would all succumb, one by one, to the Beatles’ influence – Marty Wilde, Adam Faith, Billy Fury and eventually even Cliff. Their Elvis Presley pompadours were de-greased and cut in the new style – the moptop. From slicked-back hair to floppy locks; from a music culture driven by middle-aged men in Tin Pan Alley to something fresh and new introduced by four young Liverpudlians who wrote their own songs. Once, as I sat on a number 11 bus on my way to school, I overheard a conversation between the bus conductor and some adult passengers on the conspiracy theory of the moment: those two kids in the Beatles couldn’t possibly have written those songs. Unable to deny their talent, they doubted its source. John and Paul had to be a front for accomplished older musicians and songwriters. I burned with resentment at the outrage of the old misappropriating something that belonged to the young. At least, that was how it looked from my side of the generation gap.

Happy as I was in my cosy hospital bed that January listening to ‘Please Please Me’, I didn’t realize quite how fortunate I was to be there at that precise moment. The outside world to which I would shortly return was in the grip of the bleakest, coldest winter since the seventeenth century.

Apart from a brief reappearance at Sloane after Christmas the appendicitis was responsible for me beginning 1963 as I’d begun the previous year – off school. The Big Freeze made the house even colder than usual and I’d stay in bed, dressed in layers of threadbare jumpers and buried under as many old coats as I could muster, until lunchtime, when Lily came home between jobs to see how I was. After two weeks in hospital, I had more or less fully recovered from the operation but I cultivated an air of fragility to draw out my freedom from school for as long as possible.

My main task during the freeze was to fetch coal in Lily’s old pram. Those in better houses and with greater resources had their coal delivered, often in bulk to last the entire winter. While some coal merchants had acquired trucks by this time, most still used a horse and cart, lifting the sacks on to their backs and tipping them into the coal cellars through a manhole cut into the pavement.

Their horses vied with those of the totters for space at the water troughs, great stone structures placed on convenient corners by animal welfare charities. Huge, magnificent carthorses were also a regular sight outside the Earl of Warwick and the Latimer Arms, patiently chomping from a nosebag full of hay while their masters sank a couple of pints at lunchtime.

That winter it was difficult for Lily to follow the route of the coal trucks, as was her custom, to pick up the precious lumps that fell on to the pavement or into the road. She and I tried it once or twice but the weather was appalling, with ice and snow making all the surfaces perilous to walk on. Besides which, with
the hours she was working, Lily didn’t have the time to scavenge for coal.

Our two-bar electric heater in the front room had to be used as sparingly as possible because of the amount of electricity it consumed. When it was switched on, the little wheel in the middle of the meter accelerated to an alarming whizz and its appetite for coins became insatiable. So we relied on the coal fire in the back room, which also benefited from the heat generated by the cooker. During the winter we spent nearly all our time there and the front room was rarely occupied.

Linda was spending less and less time at home anyway. I had come out of hospital to find she’d dumped Jimmy Carter after learning from his father that on Saturday nights, once he’d bid her goodnight at around 10pm, he’d head for Soho. There he was frequenting the dives and strip joints, taking purple hearts (the fairly innocuous but notorious recreational drug of choice in the early 1960s) and mixing with shady characters of both genders. In the post-Jimmy period, Linda and her best friend, the slim and attractive Cheryl Roberts, had become Mods and took to going out with a bunch of like-minded friends most evenings.

As there seemed to be a rule that Mods didn’t fetch coal, the job devolved to me. I had to queue outside the coal merchants’, about ten minutes’ walk from Walmer Road, with my battered pram every day except Sundays, when it was shut, because our budget didn’t stretch to buying it in anything other than small quantities. We never had supplies of anything in reserve, let alone coal. I would wrap up as warmly as I could and try to time my visits to be near the front of the queue when the merchant opened after lunch.

He’d spend his mornings delivering and the afternoons dispensing, like a GP holding surgeries and then making home visits, only in reverse. My task would have been onerous once a week in that terrible weather; as a daily chore it was debilitating, particularly as Lily insisted that on every occasion I must ask if we could have our coal on tick. In a normal winter, Lily wouldn’t light the fire until the evening, particularly if nobody was in. But during the Big Freeze, and with me at home, she was having to spend far more on coal than she could afford.

The merchant was a small man with no teeth. Every exposed part of his body was ingrained with dust from the product he traded in. His huge and imposing wife helped to shovel the coal into sacks and weigh it on a set of rusty old scales. Both of them were clear: there would be no credit. There was already a roughly chalked sign on the wall to that effect, as I explained to Lily, to no avail. She insisted that I made the attempt regardless. Her theory was that the more often I asked, the more I would wear them down and the more likely they would be to concede a credit arrangement. Thankfully, I was at least always able to pay when I was knocked back. Lily would give me the few shillings I needed for the single bag that would see us through to the next day, with a few lumps set aside for Sundays. Having tried and failed several times to get credit and being acutely embarrassed in the process, I took the unusual step of ignoring Lily’s instructions.

I’d wheel the pram back through the treacherous streets, keeping an eye out for pieces of orphaned coal on the ground. If I found any I’d force them into the bulging sack, taking care to ensure that none of my precious cargo was spilled for others to scavenge.

The snow and ice lasted from December to March, and that January proved to be the coldest month of the twentieth century. There was no football so a pools panel had to be established to predict the results, thus ensuring that this great Saturday evening institution continued uninterrupted. The thaw had arrived before Dr Tanner considered me fit to return to school, and by the time I did I was even further behind.

At school a majority of the boys were Chelsea supporters – Stamford Bridge, the club’s ground, was barely 500 yards from Sloane. The contempt I attracted for supporting QPR instilled a lifelong antipathy to Chelsea and I tended to avoid Stamford Bridge but in the late spring of 1963, when they were vying for promotion from the Second Division with Stoke City, I made an exception. Chelsea were due to play Stoke at home on Lily’s birthday, 11 May – and the visitors would be fielding the legendary Stanley Matthews on the right wing. I was determined to get there to see the man who, as far as I was concerned, was the greatest footballer who ever lived. As usual, I went alone. Unfortunately, another 66,198 people went as well, and I was very lucky indeed not to have been crushed to death. Incredibly, in spite of periodic tragedies at soccer stadia in Britain and around the world, the potential perils of having vast numbers of supporters crammed into football grounds were not addressed in any significant way until the terrible Hillsborough disaster of 1989 led belatedly to the introduction of proper safety measures and all-seater stadia.

At Stamford Bridge in 1963, my main concern was that I wouldn’t be able to see any of the action. Squashed against the big men around me I had only one small area of the pitch within my vision. Happily, it turned out to be the particular
patch of grass patrolled by the great Matthews during the first half. He was forty-seven years of age by then and had been brought into the Stoke side for his crowd-pulling ability rather than his fading skills. The Chelsea left back, Ken Shellito, seemed frightened of Stanley’s venerable status – in truth, I think nobody wanted the dubious honour of accidentally injuring him and putting an end to his long and illustrious career – and as a result, I saw the famous Matthews body swerve take him past the Chelsea defender two or three times. In the second half I saw nothing of Stanley Matthews and not much of anything else. Stoke won1–0 and I struggled to get out of Stamford Bridge in one piece.

Six days later, I celebrated my thirteenth birthday. In the space of a week, I had become a teenager and Lily had turned forty-two – the age at which both her mother and her grandmother had died.

I DON’T REMEMBER
his name, if I ever knew it. He’d come to our house with a crowd of Linda’s friends when Lily was in hospital for a few days of tests.

He was older than my sister, about nineteen, and the most impeccably dressed of all her friends. Indeed, I’d never seen anyone dressed like him. This was no apprentice Mod, like Linda and Cheryl: he was the genuine article.

It was a Sunday afternoon and I’d just got back from my milk round. Whisper it softly, but I suspect my sister had been at an all-night party. She’d borrowed some of my precious records to take with her. By now, I’d discovered Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters on the Pye International label. There was a record shop in Roehampton, close to our school sports ground, which sold less mainstream music unavailable on the high street. My milk-round money would be spent on these exotic rarities with their distinctive red and yellow labels. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones had sparked interest in the middle-aged, black American artists whose songs were now being recorded by white English boys and would soon be sold back to American kids during the Beatles-led ‘British invasion’ of the US charts.

At Sloane, among those of us who were ‘aware’, a form of oneupmanship developed based on who could discover the most obscure American blues artist nobody else had heard of. Thus a liking for Howlin’ Wolf would be countered by John Lee Hooker, only to be trumped by another boy with Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Chuck and Bo and Muddy were soon old hat, although my fondness for Chuck Berry was enduring, enhanced by the fact that he was serving a sentence in a US penitentiary for smuggling a girl across the state border. I had no idea what this meant (which was, of course, that the girl was under the age of consent in her own state and had been taken to a neighbouring state where it was lower), but it sounded romantic and rebellious and added to Chuck’s allure.

When I arrived home that Sunday lunchtime, Linda, her friend Cheryl and six or seven others were draped around our small front room drinking tea, listening to records on the Dansette and recovering from their party night. Linda insisted on introducing them all to ‘my little brother’ and they talked to me in the patronizing tone so often adopted by adolescents to address those younger than themselves. Linda and her girlfriends wore skirts cut above the knee and their hair was in transition from beehive to bob. The lads wore Ben Sherman shirts and jeans, apart from the Real Mod. He was exquisitely turned out in a pale grey suit and white shirt with little silver cufflinks. His hair was short but thick on top with a high parting and neat fringe. His Italian shoes were polished to perfection.

The Real Mod was interested to learn that the Pye International records Linda had taken to the party were mine.
Following me out to the back room (from which Linda had tried to keep her friends away), he talked to me normally, as if I were his equal.

I was annoyed to discover that Linda hadn’t brought my records back with her. The Real Mod said he would take me in his car (in which they’d all arrived, packed together like a box of dates) to pick them up.

So it was that we left Linda and her friends lounging at Walmer Road and journeyed a few miles across West London to Kilburn, where the party had been held, to retrieve my precious 45s. My new hero obviously worked and earned. This was only the second or third time I had ever been in a car but I knew a lot about them, not least from my old collection of Matchbox toys. His was a 1950s Cortina with a bench seat and column gear change.

We talked all the way there. The Real Mod told me how much he liked Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and asked if I’d heard Sonny Boy Williamson or Lead Belly, Elmore James or Mose Allison, providing me with valuable ammunition in the battle to be top dog in the musical knowledge stakes at school. He told me about the clubs he went to and the bands he heard. Best of all, he passed on his own maxim: the philosophy, in a nutshell, of the West London Mod. ‘You may be poor, but don’t show poor.’ These were kids from the slums, like me. Infatuated with Italian style, they saw no reason why they couldn’t match it. Scooters were cheap to buy and run; the clothes could be expensive but if you saved and bought wisely, you could look good with fewer clothes of better quality. Decent second-hand suits and ties could be picked up in the Portobello Road or Shepherd’s Bush market.