Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (11 page)

I put it on the shelf in my bedroom, but within a week my mother had thrown it out. ‘Pissing old thing, full of germs – no wonder they left it, it’s rotten. I told ya, don’t go round Mud Island, it’s falling down. Somebody’ll get killed there one of these days.’

And somebody did.

Martin Connor, a boy about my age who I knew quite well, had got up on the roof of one of the old houses when it suddenly gave way, sending him plummeting straight through to the ground floor, hitting his head on a beam as he fell. An absolute tragedy, and one that shocked the whole of the Silwood Estate. Even more tragically, I can only recall Martin’s dreadful death in tandem with a grimly funny story.

About a week before he died, Martin had borrowed a pair of two-tone tonic mohair trousers from Lenny Byart, a great mate of mine – indeed, the boy I sat next to in school. Tonic mohair trousers were the last word in high style for a certain, more conventional set, and Nelson’s in Deptford High Street was the only shop that sold them in boy’s sizes. When Lenny went to get his, after many weeks of saving up, the store had just taken receipt of a single, very rare pair in the most sought after plum and blue mohair. You never saw this colour combination on our age group and, quickly snapping them up, Lenny talked about little else for weeks, even delaying his eventual debut in them until exactly the right event in his social calendar.

He had not wanted to loan them to Martin Connor, but the two of them were very best pals and Martin desperately needed something amazing to parade in at an upcoming family wedding in North London. So, after much pleading and, I think, the passing of a pound, Lenny let him have them, along with dire warnings about what would happen should they come back with so much as a thread out of place. A few days later, before the wedding was due to take place, poor Martin fell through the roof. He wasn’t of course wearing the precious strides at the time, but about a week later Lenny was among a small group of very close friends who were invited to come and pay final respects at Martin’s open coffin. Need I telegraph further exactly what trousers Martin had been laid out in?

Those who were there say Lenny reeled, he gasped, with many mistaking his desperate panic as delayed grief.

‘Me tonics! Me tonics!’ sputtered Len to his subdued chums, his voice at a respectful rasp. ‘But they’re mine. He can’t go down the hole in them – they’re mine! I’ll never get another pair, not like that. They cost me twelve quid!’

Martin did indeed go ‘down the hole’ in Lenny’s pride and joys. Many say Lenny openly wept at the graveside. Today a team of counsellors would spend many hours talking him down from such a trauma.

On a positive note, Mud Island was bulldozed into history soon after and no houses have ever been built in that area since. Not out of respect to Martin Connor’s memory, I suspect, but because there must indeed be something unhealthy and rotten in the very soil, the legendary mud, down through the Stink Hole. Tellingly, the only thing standing on the ghost of Mud Island today is Millwall Football Ground.

The visits to Mud Island were getting fewer and fewer by this time in any case, because girls hated the place and 1970 was the year I properly started courting girls. Sometimes men talk about a year they ‘discovered’ girls, but I can’t fathom that. Surely anyone who grows up with a mother, a sister and at least a brace of aunts knocking about can’t still find the existence of females a complete shock? And if he does, well then he has just not been paying attention. I’m afraid I can’t bring you any of that awkward, confused and tongue-tied ticket either. From a very early age I was happy and confident around the girls. I liked them and loved to make them laugh and like me too. I would happily sell out my male mates and badmouth them too if I thought that’s what the girls wanted to hear. Sorry, fellas, but it’s a cut-throat racket, face facts.

At Rotherhithe Primary School the beginning of each February would see the arrival of a red cardboard postbox that was placed in the main hall by the teachers. We children were invited to put in our handmade Valentine cards to anyone we ‘loved’. I used to get scores of the things. All cut-out pink hearts and glued-on lacy bits with giant X kisses scrawled on the inside. I would send plenty out too. Beverley Selway, wonderful bee-sting-mouthed Beverley, she was the main gal for me! Oh, and Marion Purkiss, I was mad for her too. And Christine James . . .

Of course there would be no seeing this fledgling flirting through to anything approaching stepping out together, but it was gorgeous fun and I knew somehow that this was definitely the right stuff. The only boy who got on better with the girls than I did back then was Barry H. He actually joined in with all their games and even made up exciting new ones that they all squealed with excitement about. Barry had this other great gimmick too. He would invent dramatic lies, casting himself as the victim, and then sit sobbing, allowing himself to be comforted by three or four sympathetic cooing females all saying, ‘Oh, poor Barry. Come on now, don’t break your heart.’ It was a class act, but even then I knew Barry was, in fact, as gay as a tangerine, and so it proved. Me? I eventually wanted a solo girlfriend, a real one, not like the imaginary weddings I went through in my head with (a) Diana Rigg in
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
(b) Judy Carne from
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In
and, in a short stormy union that attracted much imaginary press, Cilla Black, who would sing ‘Step Inside Love’ in the most vulnerable and erotic way to me alone.

I eventually made the giant leap from guessing games to kissing games at the age of twelve. Twelve! I’m not sure any more how I feel about that. I’ve gone through various phases of thinking it was roguishly enhancing to downright sick. It wasn’t just a one-off event either. By the time I started going on the road with rock’n’roll groups a few years down the line I saw the physical perks of that lifestyle as pretty much the norm. I’d been around the block for sure. In fact, it is not bravado to suggest that, by then, the path I trod around the block might be known as Dan’s trench. Oh Lord, reading those last sentences, I want to get up and draw the curtains, but there it is. Am I chest-beating, indulging hopeless decadence or identifying generic experience? I know I was always far more comfortable with girls than most of my circle, though it’s also true that I was a lone C of E among Catholic boys. Did I inherit such a drive? It’s possible. I remember when I told my mother that my wife was expecting again, she said, ‘Oh, you’re like your father, you are. He only had to hang his bleedin’ trousers up and I was up the spout.’ My mother, folks.

The first girl I ever kissed was Jane Pascoe. I do hope her husband of today won’t reach for his pistol upon reading that. We both knew it was coming because I’d walked her home the previous night and bottled it. I’d stood there on her doorstep, the tip of my nose touching hers, and simply lost my nerve. Turning away, I said, ‘I know what you want me to do, but I just can’t.’ And I said it in a way that made it seem I was putting her honour and reputation above the forces of lust. What a guy, what a knight. What a terrific piece of business. She seemed disappointed though and I actually saw her hair, which she was wearing up in a loose bun, deflate a little bit. ‘Okay, maybe tomorrow then,’ she said sadly. At this I knew the event was on. Nothing bolsters you for kissing a girl like having an appointment.

The next evening, a long warm summer’s gift in 1970, I bought a packet of Parma Violets and ate them all speedily, crunch, crunch, crunch. Cupping my hand to my mouth afterwards I found my breath could now in no way be confused with the Stink Hole, my darkest fear about the whole thing.

There were about ten of us in the square that night and as Jane got up from the boat and said, ‘Well, I better be getting indoors now . . .’ I rose too. ‘Shall I walk you again, Jane?’ I trilled with some tremolo in the timbre. ‘Okay,’ she said lightly, as if it were simply a question of companionship and nothing more.

Ten minutes later we were kissing. And kissing.

Her mouth tasted of Juicy Fruit gum and I tried to retain its thrilling exotic trace right to the moment I fell asleep that night. Parma Violets and Juicy Fruit – man, could this union be any more perfect?

Okay, here’s a shocking story and at this point I must ask my three children to do what Daddy says and skip this and move right on to the chapter called ‘A Trio of Little Sunbeams That Have Brought Me So Much Joy’.

A couple of years after that first kiss I was going out with a girl who we shall call Lulu. Lulu lived nearby and our families were very good friends. In fact, everyone thought Lulu and I would wind up together – estate kids tended to marry estate kids – but she ended up legging it from me to go out with the Saturday boy from the Co-Op. I could gloat over that and say she let a right catch slip through her fingers there, but another part of me isn’t entirely sure that the Saturday Co-Op boy didn’t grow up to be Alan Sugar. Or that I was, in fact, much of a ‘catch’.

Anyway, the thing is that my nan was going away to Cockfosters for a week to stay with my mum’s sister Joan. This was always terrific news for me because it meant that I would be given the job of going round to my nan’s flat to maintain her fish and budgerigar. Furthermore, there was only one spare key to the place and that would be turned over to me for the entire week. Even better, this particular stay coincided with the half-term holiday at local schools! Needless to say, upon hearing of my duties, Lulu and I exchanged a glance.

Well, one morning there we were the pair of us in my grandmother’s bed, naked and messing about. Both fish and budgerigar remained resolutely unfed as yet and were doubtless damning our gyrations with disapproving glares from accusing and waterlogged eyes.

Then there came a noise from the hall. You know, the hall where the street door was. Well, don’t panic kids, it could just be someone bumping by outside or a card through the letterbox from some new mini-cab company. Except this particular noise sounded exactly like a key being inserted into, and then smartly turning, a lock. But how could it be? There was only one spare key to my nan’s flat, I knew that much.

Actually, when I say ‘knew’ I should perhaps more accurately say ‘assumed’.

Street door opened, street door closed. Now somebody was inside the flat with us (us being me, Lulu, Patch the Goldfish and Lifebuoy the budgerigar).

Brazenly, this person had taken off their coat, set their bag down in the hall and was now in the front room humming my mum’s favourite song. My mind raced through possible suspects. Who on earth would have cloned a key to my mum’s mum’s flat, was aping the brisk way Mum walked, and even knew her current favourite song?

Now they were filling up a kettle in the kitchen. Another thing my mother would typically have done. Man, this person had researched her character brilliantly in order not to raise suspicion.

Meantime Lulu and I had frozen, she pulling the bedclothes up to her chin and now repeating quietly, ‘Oh God, Oh God, Oh God.’

As indeed she ought to be. We were two young teenagers, naked in my sixty-eight-year-old grandmother’s bed, having just had it off beneath two big photographs of my late step-granddad and my own mother as a child. It is about the most revolting thing anyone can think of.

Silently, I mimed to Lulu that we should get up and begin to dress. I did a tiptoeing manoeuvre like walking across wet dynamite to the door and slipped the lock on. Lulu reached for her drawers, I for my jeans – which, call me hasty, still had the underwear in a figure eight inside them.

That’s when the bedroom door handle turned. Then again. And once more this time accompanied by a shove. The door held fast, thank God, with Lulu and me frozen like the mayor and mayoress of Pompeii, she one leg in her pants, me with trousers hitched up only as far as the knees. ‘Who’s there?’ came a voice – again brilliantly mimicking my mum. ‘Who’s in there? Is someone in there? Danny?’

I looked at Lulu and mouthed: Don’t. Move. A. Muscle.

And that’s when my mother’s face appeared in the window above the door frame. How she had so swiftly found something to stand on baffles me to this day. Had she gone to fetch a chair from the kitchen, Lulu and I might have used the few seconds to jump out the window. An unlikely escape, I’ll grant you – especially as my nan lived on the first floor, but who among us at fourteen wouldn’t rather appear broken and bloody in front of total strangers than naked and still partially aroused in front of Mum?

Anyway now she was literally looking down on us and we, helplessly, back up at her. This staring match seemed to me to go on for about eighteen months. I, at half-mast in various ways, mouth open, seemingly on the verge of saying something that might explain the whole dreadful tableau. And Lulu from the flats – little Lulu, Mum’s mate Rose’s girl – with her bum out and everything. Crucially, there was also nan’s bed all unmade and half on the floor. This didn’t require Poirot, did it?

Meanwhile up at the glass above the door, my mother’s face, framed like a BBC newsreader, continued to exhibit a shocked reaction that even the Chuckle Brothers might have judged a bit broad. At least, she did up until she fell off whatever she was standing on.

Then it was like Old Mother Riley in full flood. ‘Oh my gawd! Oh my good gawd! What have we come to! What have I seen! Oh, I’ve gone blind! Oh, I feel ill! Oh, and in me mother’s bed too!’

This chicken coop flurry was topped by another moment of ominous quiet while she gathered her wits, and then: ‘You get home NOW, you dirty little bastard! I’m telling your father right away! And yours, Lulu!’

The slamming of the front door reverberated through the entire sordid flat. Then utter silence.

Uh-oh.

Lulu, numb, pale and trembling finally spoke:

‘You know my dad is gonna have you murdered, don’t you?’

He will, I thought, but first he’ll have to find which part of the moon I’m on after my dad has kicked me that hard up the arse.

You know I’ve often wondered why condemned men, on the morning of their hanging, bother to shave and get dressed. After all, they’re only going up the corridor to be topped. This then was the mood as Lulu and I gathered ourselves, pulled my nan’s bed together and, at long last, dutifully ended the famine for Patch and Lifebuoy. At least we could point to that.