Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (3 page)

He thought he saw an elephant

That practised on a fife

He looked again, and found it was

A letter from his wife.

‘At length I realize,’ he said,

‘The bitterness of life!’

Indeed, by the age of seven, had anyone asked if I could recite any Charles Dickens I could have said absolutely. After all, I recognized him as the man who wrote

Choo a choo a tooth

Munch Munch Nicey

Choo a choo a tooth

Munch Munch Nicey.

And that’s not an extract. That’s the whole thing. Take that, so-called
Tale of Two Cities
.

Virtually all this word fascination can be credited to my father, for all that he himself only ever appeared to read one book over and over again: Robert Tressell’s
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
. But it was my old man who sat me on his lap when I was about five and read aloud Browning’s
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
from an enormous Bible-sized compilation of ‘good’ literature that, otherwise, went un-browsed. Oh man, what an experience. All that ‘munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon . . .’ and grumbling, rumbling, tumbling, Doom’s tone and tombstone. Not to mention:

Nor brighter was his eye, nor moister

Than a too-long-opened oyster,

Save when at noon his paunch grew mutinous

For a plate of turtle, green and glutinous

I had absolutely no idea what most of it meant, but can clearly recall how shocked I was at the betrayal in the lines:

A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!

And how much I too yearned to vanish into the side of a mountain like the Hamelin youth – so long as I could emerge very soon after and heroically tell everyone the full eye-popping exclusive story.

Skulduggery

M
y dad was a big man, a dock union organizer, a notorious brawler and dedicated pub patron. His readings of
The Pied Piper
went deep, very deep, and even today I can still catch a whiff of his comforting Guinness breath, the size of his hands on the page, the way I fitted perfectly into his lap, the way his voice would soften and even pronounce the ‘g’s and ‘h’s of Browning’s words.

An extremely popular and well-known face in the neighbourhood – and even more so across the Thames in East London – Frederick Joseph Baker,
always
known as ‘Spud’, was my dad and I never ever wanted another or wished him in any way different.

He was, and I think the word is a perfect fit,
explosive
. A no-nonsense, energy-filled expletive factory who left you in ABSOLUTELY NO DOUBT about his position. He was not offering an opinion, he was telling you how it was. People today may romance the quality of sixties television but, according to him, 98 per cent of it was ‘fucking daft’. Most music of the period was ‘a fucking noise’. The Prime Minister was ‘a long streak of piss’. The news was ‘a load of balls’. Thanks to the instant catharsis of such statements, he was never a morose or frustrated man. Dad was immensely proud; proud of himself, his appearance, his family, his job and his home. Very bald from the age of twenty, I never realized how touchy he was about it until one night, on our annual holidays on the Norfolk Broads, the whole family were sitting in the front row for a variety show at the ABC Theatre, Great Yarmouth. (We had front-row seats because the old man put a lot of store in such things.) Jimmy Tarbuck was the evening’s compère and at one point he looked down at us and delivered what I suspect was a stock line from his repertoire: ‘Excuse me, pal, could you change seats?’ he said to my father. ‘The lights are bouncing off your bald head right into my eyes!’ This got a good laugh from the audience. As it died down and just before Jimmy moved on, my dad bellowed; ‘You know, you can fucking go off somebody, Tarbuck.’ There were gasps all around and I screwed myself deep into my seat. Anita Harris was swiftly introduced and the show went on.

All his life my dad remained convinced that the whole world was crooked, that everyone was corruptible – or to use his word, ‘approachable’ – and that, provided you found the right angle, nothing in this life was ever sold out or beyond reach. In this, along with his hairline, he resembled Phil Silvers’ Sergeant Bilko. Reputations and circumstances didn’t intimidate him in the slightest. In the 1990s, when I was earning an absolute fortune, he came with me to the very upmarket Conran furniture store in West London. As I dealt with the salesperson – a tall, rather fey fellow who was acting as though my time in his day was stopping him getting on with something far more important – I could hear Dad off in the distance turning over price tags and groaning, ‘Faaaackin’ hell!’ as well as his famously sing-song refrain ‘Oh what a load of balls . . .’

Eventually I made my choices and the salesperson said he would go and confirm the items were in stock. Suddenly Dad was by my side. ‘I say, Chas,’ he barked. (He had a peculiar habit of addressing strangers as ‘Chas’.) ‘I say, Chas . . .’ Then, very deliberately, looking right into the sales assistant’s eyes: ‘We don’t want a receipt.’

I heaved my shoulders and stared at my shoes. Here we go again.

The man looked nonplussed. ‘I’m sorry?’ he muttered. Dad snorted as though this half-wit was already attracting too much attention. ‘I said: We don’t want. A receipt.’

Of course what he meant by this was that we, or rather
he
, was not looking for a ‘straight’ transaction like all the other browsing civilians. It meant he wanted to give ‘Chas’ a twenty-pound note directly into his hand and then meet him round the back to put my £500 cupboards straight into our car. No paperwork. We all win.

Such an arrangement might be the norm in a breaker’s yard in Deptford, but they’d never come across it at Terence Conran’s flagship store in Fulham. ‘Ah . . . okay, then . . . I won’t make you one . . .’ said the confused assistant before scuttling away.

Disgusted, Spud turned to me and growled, ‘I don’t know why you shop in these fucking places.’

The only times I ever saw my father quiet and cowed was when he was with his magnificent mother, Nan Baker. He and his equally hearty brothers, my uncles Charlie, Tom, Arthur, Alfie and Godfrey, would become as kids again in her presence. An extraordinary matriarch, Alice Baker had, in her time, given birth to twelve children, lost a few more, lived in every district in East London, served as a docker during the First World War, got bombed out twice in the Second, she’d run shops, managed pubs, worked in factories making everything from jam to armaments, flummoxed landlords, outsmarted debt collectors, terrorized pawn-shop owners, been barred from bookmakers, physically fought both men and women, and downed more Guinness and gin than might have flowed over Niagara Falls since you started reading this book. She was NEVER, and I mean this as a tribute, a sweet little old lady. She was, all of her long, long life, the kind of tough Victorian working-class woman who at closing time each night would stand in the street and sing.

To her dying day she would listen to current-affairs shows on the radio, continually arguing with them aloud. Often, we would turn up at her flat on the Isle of Dogs and she’d wave her hand at us to be quiet. ‘I want to finish hearing what this lousy pisspot is on about,’ she’d snap. Her other favoured insult was a caustic use of the word ‘thing’. Looking daggers at her transistor, she’d hiss, ‘Oh, hark at him, the bastard THING!’

At age ninety, when she broke her hip after falling down pissed, she refused to stay in hospital a second longer than necessary. Upon discharging herself, and not willing to succumb to the public indignity of a zimmer frame, she put bricks in a pushchair and covered them with a shawl so that it looked like shopping. Thus aided, she continued to walk everywhere, including the several miles to our house, a journey that included a hair-raising trek through the noisy Rotherhithe Tunnel under the Thames. When she died in 1982, her funeral was a big event on the island, and the saloon bar in her local pub was soon after officially re-named ‘Ma Baker’s’ in her memory.

As you are probably figuring out, I come from hardy stock. To a young boy it was a boisterous and competitive cast among which to find a place.

In total contrast to Nan Baker and my dad’s hellzapoppin’ side of the family, Mum, Betty, wouldn’t even try to compete. How could she? She had grown up almost totally bereft of family – particularly a father – and any kin she did have (I only know of one distant sister and a half-brother) was totally overwhelmed by the sheer size and confidence of the Baker brood. In fact, I know so little of her side of my genes that even today, when banks ask me for my mother’s maiden name in a security check, I have to tell them that I have absolutely no idea and, frankly, don’t see how they could possibly know either. To the best of my knowledge, I think she might have once been Betty Ward, but then again I’ve heard it said she was Betty Cuddahey. There are a couple of other options too.

She used to tell me that she’d met my dad after he tried to steal her purse following a dance on the Isle of Dogs. She chased him and got it back – suggesting to me he wasn’t running away that fast. I asked if she knew of him at that point, to which she replied, ‘
Everyone
on the island knew your father.’ Whatever the story of their meeting, she would have only been seventeen, he nineteen. They married a few months after her eighteenth birthday, because she was already pregnant with my sister Sharon. Wild boy though Dad might have been, he was never a coward and a respectable union was what was required at that point and in those times.

There are no photographs of their wedding. There was no party. No honeymoon. Only Nan Baker went along, probably to make sure her boy actually turned up. There must have been many periods in my mother’s life when she thought how differently their lives might have turned out had circumstances not dictated the tale. She was a beautiful, shy young girl with amazing dark eyes and a terrific appetite for all things Hollywood. She also had a prodigious memory for seemingly every song she had ever heard and, even during her failing years with Alzheimer’s, is still able to recall lyrics to hundreds of obscure musicals with fantastic accuracy. Yet overall she has a quiet, insecure personality that was completely at odds with the brio, confidence and reputation of her new husband.

Here was a big outgoing man, his full, rumbustious home life the polar opposite of her own, a local lothario who by all accounts could have had his pick of the neighbourhood girls, yet had now been forced by grim convention to marry her. At least, that was how it must have felt to young Betty.

Their home following that joyless, probably loveless, ceremony at Poplar registry office in the freezing February of 1950, was a single rented room in an old house shared by three other, much older yet still desperately struggling families. Even worse, within a couple of months of the marriage my dad was sent to Maidstone Prison, where he served a year for receiving stolen goods. For Betty, that tiny cold room in Stepney must have seemed at the other end of the earth to her teenage dreams of Hollywood heaven.

Of course, I knew none of this growing up and certainly don’t recall it ever being reflected at home in Debnams Road. To me, the youngest in our family by some distance, Freddie and Betty Baker seemed like the most loved up, perfectly matched couple in the whole world. My sister Sharon now tells me it wasn’t quite like that. I know that must be true, and yet, whatever private storms, public quarrels and dashed inner hopes they battled with, Mum and Dad remained married and together for almost sixty years.

Skulduggery
was possibly my father’s favourite word. He used to revel in its piratical flourish and bellow it with a physical shudder of pleasure, because it usually meant that his world view of everyone being corrupt had once again been borne out. It was a greeting to his kin.

For example, he didn’t live to experience the recent political expenses scandal, but I know it wouldn’t have been received by Spud as an outrage or something that demanded a legal remedy. No, bizarrely he would have felt vindicated, beaming as the story broke on TV, his hands thrust under his armpits, gleefully writhing in his chair, saying to nobody in particular, ‘Of course. Of course! Skulduggery! Pure and simple. Everyone’s at it, don’t you worry about that.’

Any time I heard of a football manager being sacked I would call him first and he would usually say, ‘What was it? Skulduggery?’ If I were to reply that it was actually because of a poor run of recent results, he would audibly sneer. ‘Never in your life! You don’t get fired ’less your hand’s in the till, and he must have been well at it. Skulduggery there, boy, nice and tasty.’ Nothing could shift him from this view.

He ran our house along the same lines. Council gas and electricity meters had within them a flat metal disc that rotated faster the more of the utility you used. The faster it moved, the more the numbers on the panel above clicked over and the more you had to pay. People soon learned that by carefully removing the glass at the front of the meter it was possible to impede these wheels and make them run much slower. With canny and sparing use of this trick you could convincingly knock a few pounds from your bills each month. My dad, however, never cared for this half-measure. The wheels in our gas and electricity meters never moved at all. Had the official figures ever been scrutinized, it would have come to light that our family never used an iota of gas or electricity between 1961 and 1975.

Fortunately, the men who called to read the meters were supremely ‘approachable’. (The ‘approachable’ world somehow gravitated towards my dad.) Swift, sotto voce discussions would arrive at a low figure that was agreeable to both parties; the deal would then be sealed with a handshake, and parties would come away content with the result. In those happy days before cheques or credit cards, the meter reader had a couple of extra quid shoved into his palm, while my old man had the satisfaction of beating the system. Meanwhile the cobwebs that festooned the innards of our meters remained undisturbed.