Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (8 page)

It revealed itself just outside Horning in Norfolk.

This is not fanciful nostalgia. Every detail of that instant has sat in the centre of my consciousness ever since. It was July 1966 and I was newly nine years old. We always holidayed on the Broads and the family had recently taken possession of the gorgeous wooden cruiser that was to be our floating home for the next fortnight. It was called
The Constellation
and, as my brother and I breathlessly explored the twin beds and curtained portholes in our cabin built into the boat’s bow, the prospect of what lay ahead saw the life force beaming from us like the rays of a cartoon sun. Dad was singing at the wheel as we drew away from Chumley & Hawke’s boatyard, Mum was in the galley unpacking the boxed groceries always preordered to be aboard on arrival and my sister was perched upon the aft roof gathering the first few rays of what she hoped would be a healthy tan. I then made my way down through the boat to take up position in the small open area at the stern. On the way, I picked up sister Sharon’s teeny pink and white Sanyo transistor radio and switched it on. Settling into one of the two seats fashioned in the craft’s rear, I looked up at the clear blue afternoon sky. Ike and Tina Turner’s ‘River Deep, Mountain High’ was playing and a sort of rapturous trance descended on me. From the limitless blue sky I looked down into the churning, crystal-peaked wake our boat was creating as we motored along, and at that moment ‘River Deep’ gave way to my absolute favourite song of the period: ‘Bus Stop’ by The Hollies. As the mock flamenco guitar flourish that marks its beginning rose above the deep burble of the
Constellation
’s engine, I stared into the tumbling waters and said aloud, but to myself, ‘This is happening now. THIS is happening now.’

You’re a Big Boy Now

I
t was in my final year at Rotherhithe, virtually on my last day, that I had my Damascene moment. The end-of-term play was to be
Alice in Wonderland
; everyone had been given a part, of course, and I was to be the Mad Hatter. Skimming through the breezy job Ms McKenzie had done on the script, I saw the Hatter was a pretty beefy role and I had no complaints. I was even more pleased when I was shown the enormous cardboard top hat I was to wear on the night, complete with its traditional 10/6 ticket stuck into the paper hatband. It was by far the biggest prop in the production and was for my exclusive use – that’s all any actor can really ask of a part, I reckon.

I also was handed a more subtle piece of business that, not that I knew it back then, would set me on my life’s true path. It was a paper teacup with a perforated half-moon section punched out on one side. When the courtroom scene reached its zenith – after I had nervously said ‘I am a poor man, Your Majesty’ about five times – I was to raise this cup to my mouth and bite away the perforated section. ‘Oh dear,’ ran my line, ‘I’m so nervous I’ve taken a bite out of my teacup instead of the bread and butter.’ I was then to hold up the cup and show everyone. Well, naturally, I had high hopes for the bit but I was not prepared for exactly how big it was to go over on the night. Huge. A bulls-eye. A smash. Seriously, if Jolson at the Broadway Winter Garden ever got such an enormous roar I’d be very surprised.

As this laugh rolled back across the audience I stood there with a noise akin to miniature crystal-cut church bells peeling in my ears. What was this? What had I done? Then the laugh broke into a ripple of applause. Oh, yes please! Had they passed me a fresh perforated cup at that point I would gladly have repeated this socko routine. In fact, I would have stood there chomping lumps out of prop cups all night if that’s what my public demanded. Thank you, thank you! You’ve all been so kind. Somewhere inside, a little pilot light was ignited and its flame whispered to me, ‘I think we should have some of this, old fruit. Face it, you are not cut out to be a docker.’ It is entirely possible that as I stood there drinking it all in, milking it even, the rest of the cast detected the telltale whiff of a newly created, if over-cooked, ham wafting across Wonderland.

I cried when the dread day arrived and I had to leave Rotherhithe Primary School and make the move up to a ‘big’ school. Other than myself, only the girls in my year seemed to be equally upset about departing. So, in an attempt to disguise my watery eyes from the rollicking chaps, I pretended to fall over in the street. The six-week summer holidays that lay before me suddenly seemed like a pointless stay of execution until my attendance was required at West Greenwich Secondary Boys. For the first time I wondered if I had done the sensible thing here. Because I had finished first-in-year I had automatically been offered a much sought-after place at the only grammar school in the district, Addey & Stanhope, but to the shock and consternation of my headmistress, I had turned this opportunity down in order to go with my friends to the unassuming but quietly notorious rough-house up at the top of Deptford High Street.

My berth at the grammar school then went to John Lacey, who had placed second. It wasn’t until I eventually saw John in the excremental brown blazer and the pink/blue tie around which the A&S uniform centred that I finally knew I had made the right choice. Surprisingly, my parents weren’t that bothered about my snubbing the local ‘good’ school to be with the gang. When they were contacted to confirm they were aware of my controversial decision, my father said something I still find quite profound:

‘Boy,’ he said, ‘if going to a top school made you clever then the Houses of Parliament would be full of fucking geniuses. But it ain’t, so you do what you like.’

And so, on the morning of 2 September 1968, I knocked at Stephen Micalef’s house and from there, with my mum and Dolly waving us off, we caught the number 1 bus into the future.

West Greenwich was the kind of single-sex inner-city comprehensive that set aside entire mornings for metalwork – at which I was lousy – and entire afternoons for games – at which I excelled. Like Rotherhithe, it had been built at the turn of the nineteenth century and its narrow stone stairways, long looming halls and high classrooms felt completely familiar to me. The cramped tarmac playground was dominated by two large, low workshops that housed the benches, lathes, vices and rugged array of tools with which to train us boys in all aspects of manual labour. Working with your hands formed a major part of the curriculum and one of the biggest crimes at the school was to forget your ‘protective’ cloth apron on any day where you’d be up to your jowls in flux, flying metal and spoke-shaves. I never understood this. Here we were, working with huge whirring open machinery that even then looked like it was from the Eastern Bloc’s 1949 winter clear-out, and the only thing that they seemed concerned about was the risk that we might soil our already murky shirtfronts. Woodwork teacher Mr Farr – who had put a chisel into the fleshy part of his palm in 1964 and consequently had no feeling in his thumb, a fact he demonstrated to all new pupils by putting the digit over a Bunsen burner – would tell us that the wearing of the apron would one day certainly save our lives. I remember thinking that if only JFK had worn his apron that fateful day in Dallas, how different the world might have been.

As Steve and I stepped off the double-decker at Deptford Broadway on that first day – accompanied by an avalanche of other kids, all of whom seemed like seasoned old lags – I must confess my famous confidence was on the wobble. I was very aware that life in Rotherhithe had been an Eden-like existence, not much more than colouring and doing puzzles, where smiling teachers called you by your first name and parents lined up to praise your groundbreaking work in the theatre. At least, that’s how I chose to remember it as we now made our way on foot past the grim monolithic exterior of Carrington House. This was the biggest men’s hostel in London, a notorious dosshouse, where alcoholics lay pissed on the pavement and ancient old whores with sweaty red mouths and wonky eyebrows painted thick on their foreheads, stood outside the neighbouring Fountain pub at all hours, ready to do business for little more than the price of a beer. It was impossible to reach our school without walking past Carrington House with its teeming human detritus and every day the overpowering stench of shit and carbolic filled your senses and settled in your hair even if you walked on the other side of the road. Once past this last retreat for the wretched you turned a sharp right up the next road toward the school. This turning was actually called Friendly Street. This irony was certainly not lost on me as we trudged on toward the black iron gates of our new alma mater. For the last few weeks rumours had been circulating about the violent initiation ceremonies new conscripts would be subjected to: heads pushed down toilets, ink tattoos administered via the point of a compass, big boys’ boots that were required to be cleaned by tongue. The only one we knew to be fact was the ritual of ‘tagging’. This involved the older kids seizing a first year and inspecting the back of his pristine new school tie. If it still had its tag, or maker’s label, affixed, it meant you hadn’t already received a welcome beating – a ‘poggering’ – and you were absolutely due one. Once you had been thoroughly poggered, the maker’s label would then be ripped from your tie as proof. Forewarned about this vicious rite by various elder brothers who had already been through the school, we paused for a moment on Friendly Street and ripped the tags out ourselves. Unfortunately, this also yanked out most of the tie’s rear stitching and now the back flapped open like a filleted fish. Needless to say, once we arrived in the playground it turned out that tagging was a total myth and nobody took a blind bit of notice of us except to ask what had happened to our ties. Indeed, in that ten or so minutes we stood around tentatively checking out the gathering throng and waiting for the morning bell to call us all in, I got the growing feeling that this was going to be a very cool place in which to pitch up for the next few years. Unlike Rotherhithe, there were no toddlers, sandpits or even mums ligging about, and the whole place had an air of sturdy male independence. I also noted with something approaching awe that several of the older kids had really long hair.

By lunchtime on my first day at the ‘notorious’ West Greenwich I felt totally at home and had already seen enough of my peers to know that there was a healthy groundswell of boys who, like me, knew there was something more going on in the world than designated kids’ TV and the Top 10.

Being in the Lewisham/New Cross catchment area, roughly a third of the boys were Afro-Caribbean though the divides and tensions this might be presumed to have thrown up were negligible, probably because they formed such a sizeable minority. Indeed, I am struggling to remember any way in which barriers or groupings were racially marked, other than I could never get a place in any of the ‘penny up’ petty gambling rackets many of the black kids had going during playground breaks. Some of the worst of the fighting tended to be between the African boys and the much larger contingent from Jamaica. One term, an enormous Nigerian kid arrived called John Abinooji. He was built like an ox and soon took to terrorizing even the school’s top fighters for their dinner money, until one day, as he walked between the woodwork and metalwork buildings, he was ambushed by them all at once. I watched as he received the most ferocious beating, blood pouring from his face, and yet he refused to go down. Eventually he was smashed over the head with a hard wooden box and collapsed to the ground amid a frenzy of lashing boots. An ambulance arrived shortly after and the still-dazed African was loaded into it wrapped in a bloodied orange blanket. He never returned to the school again; not from any lingering trauma, but because on being admitted to hospital it was found that he was actually twenty-two years old.

Elsewhere there may have been the usual cliques, feuds and vendettas, often shockingly violent, but I can’t recall them ever being based on colour alone. True, the language in the hallways may have been vile, slangy and racist, but that was very much a two-way street and in no way restricted to, or sharpened by, race. Conversely, when the science teacher called Martin DeSousa a ‘black twot’, word went around other classrooms fast. No official action would be taken about it in those days, but we boys thought it was a sensation. I mean,
we
could all talk like that but
they
couldn’t. There were quite a few black and Asian teachers at the school too – what would they make of it?

There was Mr Mqotsi from Lesotho who made the heinous error one day of telling us that, back home in Africa, the ‘q’ in his name was pronounced via a loud clucking drop of the tongue. From then on we would address him no other way and often en masse, so that his classes would sometimes sound like somebody had tipped a box of table tennis balls down a flight of concrete stairs.

There was Mr Kistasami who taught Geography but mainly used his lessons to lecture us in his slow weary voice about the utter vacuity of Western life. A tubby, bow-tie-wearing academic from what was then Ceylon, he could easily be incited into one of these prolonged rambles and I became expert in prodding him toward them. Noticing he had yet to set any homework, I would raise my hand and say something provocative along the lines of, ‘Sir, I think I saw something on television about alluvial fans the other day, it wasn’t very illuminating.’ Placing one brogue-encased foot up on to his chair, he would conjure up a pitying smile and we were off. ‘Television? Television? That’s it for you helpless drones, isn’t it? Nothing exists if not for your “televisions”. Not Mum. Not Dad. Nothing. Just TV, isn’t it? Well, let me tell you what television is and what is its influence and ultimate purpose . . .’ Bingo. We were good now for at least ten minutes of low-wattage lecturing, by which time the bell signalling the end of the lesson would have sounded and homework would have been escaped once again.

Then there was Mr Kaye. Oh, what a piece of work was Mr Kaye! He had spent some time in the US marines and like most of the masters he could be very physical with the kids – and by that I mean he’d hit you hard if you failed to belt up on cue. Of course, West Greenwich had no shortage of boys who, even if walloped by ex-Vietnam paratroopers, would fight back. In those instances Mr Kaye would use all his military training on the kid, who would wind up dazed and helpless on the deck, with Mr Kaye in combat stance, his foot hard across the insurgent’s throat. Sometimes, upon release, the boy might threaten, ‘I’ll get my dad up here after you,’ to which the teacher would calmly reply, ‘Good. I look forward to it – I’ll do that to him too.’ It would end there because everybody knew he was as good as his word.