Life (7 page)

The route to my school from Temple Hill was the street without joy. Up to the age of eleven I’d bus it there and walk it back. Why didn’t I bus it back?
No fucking money!
I’d spent the bus fare, spent the haircutting money, done it myself in front of the mirror. Snip, snip, snip. So I had to make my way across town, totally the opposite side of town, about a forty-minute walk, and there’s only two ways to go, Havelock Road or Princes Road. Toss a coin. But then I knew that the minute I got out of school, this guy would be waiting for me. The guy always guessed which way I was going. I’d try to figure out new routes, get busted in people’s gardens. I’d spend the whole day wondering how to get home without taking a beating. Which is hard work. Five days a week. Sometimes it didn’t happen, but at the same time you’re sitting in the classroom churning inside. How the hell do I get past this guy? This guy would be merciless. There was nothing I could do about it and I would live in fear all day, which ruined my concentration.

When I got a black eye from being beaten up, I’d go home to Doris, and she’d say, “Where did you get that from?” “Oh, I fell over.” Otherwise you’d get the old lady wound up about “Who did it?” It was better to say you fell off your bike.

Meanwhile I’m getting these terrible school reports, and Bert’s looking at me: “What’s going on?” You can’t explain that you spend the whole day at school worrying how to get home. You can’t do that. Wimps do that. It’s something you’ve got to figure out for yourself. The actual beating was not the problem. I learned how to take beatings. I didn’t really get that hurt. You learn how to keep your guard up, and you learn how to make sure that somebody thinks they’ve done far more damage to you than they really have. “Aaaaaah”—and they think, “Oh my God, I’ve really done some harm.”

And then I wised up. I wish I’d thought of it sooner. There was this very nice bloke, and I can’t remember his name now, he was a bit of an oaf, he wasn’t made for the academic life, let’s put it like that, and he was big and he lived on the estate —and he was so worried about his homework. I said, “Look, I’ll do your fucking homework, but you come home with me. It’s not that far out of your way.” So for the price of doing his history and geography, suddenly I had this minder. I always remember the first time, couple of guys waiting for me as usual, and they saw him coming. And we beat the shit out of them. It only took two or three times and a little ritual bloodletting and victory was ours.

It wasn’t until I got to my next school, Dartford Tech, that things, by a great fluke, righted themselves. By the time of the 11-plus exam, Mick had already gone to Dartford Grammar School, which is “Ooh, the ones in the red uniforms.” And the year after that was my turn, and I failed miserably but not miserably enough to go to what then was known as secondary modern. It’s all changed now, but if you went there under that archaic system, you were lucky if you got a factory job at the end. You were not going to be trained for anything more than manual labor. The teachers were terrible and their only function was to keep this mob in line. I got into that middle ground of technical school, which is, in retrospect, a very nebulous phrase, it means you didn’t make grammar, but there’s something worthwhile in there. You realize later on that you’re being graded and sifted by this totally arbitrary system that rarely if ever takes into account your whole character, or “Well, he might not be very good in class, but he knows more about drawing.” They never took into account that hey, you might be bored because you know that already.

The playground’s the big judge. That’s where all decisions are really made between your peers. It’s called play, but it’s nearer to a battlefield, and it can be brutal, the pressure. There’s two blokes kicking the shit out of some poor little bugger and “Oh, they’re just letting off steam.” In those days it was pretty physical at times, but most of it was just taunts, “pansy” and all of that.

It took me a long time to figure out how to knock somebody else out instead of me getting it. I’d been an expert at taking beatings for quite a long time. Then I had a lucky break where I did a bully in by total sheer luck. It was one of those magical moments. I was twelve or thirteen. One minute I’m the mark, and with just one swift move, I put the big man in school down. Against the rockery and the little flower bed, he slipped and fell over and I was on him. When I fight, a red curtain comes down. I don’t see a thing, but I know where to go. It’s as if a red veil drops over my eyes. No mercy, mate, the boot went in! Pulled off by the prefects and all of that. How are the mighty fallen! I can still remember the astounding surprise when this guy went down. I can still see the little rockery and the pansies he fell over in, and after that I didn’t let him up.

Once he was down, the whole atmosphere in the schoolyard changed. A huge cloud seemed to be lifted from me. My reputation after that suddenly released me from all that angst and stress. I’d never been aware the cloud was so large. It was the only time I started to feel good about school, mostly because I was able to repay a few favors some other guys had done for me. An ugly little sod called Stephen Yarde, “Boots” we used to call him, because of his huge feet, was the favorite to be picked on by the bully boys. He was being taunted all the time. And knowing what it was like to be waiting for a beating, I stood up for him. I became his minder. It was “Don’t fuck with Stephen Yarde.” I never wanted to get big enough to beat up other people; I just wanted to get big enough to stop it happening.

With that weight off my mind, my work improved at Dartford Tech. I was even getting praise. Doris kept some of my reports:
Geography
59
%, a good exam result. History
63
%, quite good work.
But against the science subjects on the report sheet the form master put a single bracket that enclosed them all—there was no daylight between them for abjectness—and he wrote them all off with
no improvement
in mathematics, physics and chemistry. Engineering drawing was
still rather beyond him
. That report on science subjects contained the story of the big betrayal and of how I was turned from a reasonably compliant student into a school terrorist and a criminal, with a lively and lasting rage against authority.

There is a photograph of our group of schoolboys standing in front of a bus, smiling for the camera, in the company of one schoolmaster. I am standing in the front row, wearing shorts, aged eleven. It was taken in 1955 in London, where we had gone to sing at a concert at St. Margaret’s Church in Westminster Abbey—a choir competition between schools, performed in front of the queen. Our school choir had come a long way, a bunch of Dartford yokels who were winning cups and prizes for choral work on a national level. The three sopranos were Terry and Spike and me—the stars, you might say, of the show. And our choirmaster, pictured by the bus, the genius who had forged this little flying unit out of such unpromising material, was called Jake Clare. He was a mystery man. I found out only many years later that he’d been an Oxford choirmaster, one of the best in the country, but he was exiled or degraded for boinky boink with little boys. Given another chance in the colonies. I don’t want to sully his name, and I have to say this is only what I heard. He’d certainly had better material to work with than us—what was he doing down here? Around us, anyway, he kept his hands clean, although he was famed for playing with himself through his trouser pocket. He hammered us into shape to the point where we were clearly one of the best choirs in the country. And he picked out the three best sopranos that he was given. We won quite a few trophies, which hung in the assembly hall. I’ve still never played a better gig prestige-wise than Westminster Abbey. You got the taunts: “Oh, choirboy, are we? Fantsy pantsy.” It didn’t bother me; the choir was wonderful. You got coach trips to London. You got out of physics and chemistry, and I would have done anything for that. That’s where I learned a lot about singing and music and working with musicians. I learned how to put a band together—it’s basically the same job—and how to keep it together. And then the shit hit the fan.

Your voice breaks, aged thirteen, and Jake Clare gave the three of us sopranos the pink slip. But they also demoted us, kept us down one class. We had to stay down a year because we hadn’t got physics and chemistry and hadn’t done our maths. “Yeah, but you let us off that because of choir practice. We worked our butts off.” That was a rough thank-you. The great depression came right after that. Suddenly at thirteen I had to sit down and start again with the year under. Redo a whole school year. This was the kick in the guts, pure and unmixed. The moment that happened, Spike, Terry and I, we became terrorists. I was so mad, I had a burning desire for revenge. I had reason then to bring down this country and everything it stood for.

I spent the next three years trying to fuck them up. If you want to breed a rebel, that’s the way to do it. No more haircuts. Two pairs of trousers, the skin-tight ones under the regulation flannels, which came off the minute I was out the gate. Anything to annoy them. It didn’t get me anywhere; it got me a lot of black looks from my dad, but even that didn’t stop me. I really didn’t like to disappoint my dad, but… sorry, Dad.

It still rankles, that humiliation. It still hasn’t gone out, the fire. That’s when I started to look at the world in a different way, not their way anymore. That’s when I realized that there’s bigger bullies than just bullies. There’s
them,
the authorities. And a slow-burning fuse was lit. I could have got expelled easily after that, in any different way, but then I’d have had to face my dad. And he would have spotted that immediately—that I’d manipulated it. So it had to be a slow-moving campaign. I just lost total interest in authority or trying to make good under their terms. School reports? Give me a bad one, I’ll forge it. I got very good at forgery.
He could do better
. Somehow I managed to find the same ink, make it
He could
not
do better
. My dad would look at it. “
He could not do better
. Why does he give you a B-minus?” Pushing my luck a bit there. But they never detected the forgeries. I was actually hoping they would, because then I could be done, expelled for forgery. But apparently it was too good, or they decided that that one is not going to work, boy.

I lost total interest in school after choir went down the tube. Technical drawing, physics, mathematics, a yawn, because it doesn’t matter how much they try to teach me algebra, I
just don’t get it,
and I don’t see why I should. I’ll understand at gunpoint, on bread and water and a whip. I would learn it, I could learn it, but there’s something inside of me saying this is going to be no help to you, and if you do want to learn it, you’ll learn it by yourself. At first, after the voice broke and we were given that boot down, I stuck very close together with the guys I used to sing with, because we all felt the same burning resentment for winning them all the medals and shields that they were always so proud of in their assembly hall. Meanwhile, we’re cleaning their bloody shoes round the back, and that’s the thanks you get.

You cut some rebel style. In the High Street there was Leonards, where they sold very cheap jeans, just as jeans were becoming jeans. And they would sell fluorescent socks around ’56, ’57—rock-and-roll socks that glow in the dark so she always knows where I am, with black musical notes on them, pink and green. Used to have a pair of each. More daring still, I’d have pink on one foot and green on the other. That was really, like, wow.

Dimashio’s was the ice cream parlor–coffee shop. Old Dimashio’s son went to school with us, big fat Italian boy. But he could always make plenty of friends by bringing them down to his dad’s joint. There was a jukebox there, so it was a hang. Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, apart from a load of schlock. It was the one little bit of Americana in Dartford. Just a little store, counter down the left side, jukebox, some seats and tables, the ice cream machine. At least once a week, I went to the cinema and usually to the Saturday morning pictures, either at the Gem or the Granada. Like Captain Marvel. SHAZAM! If you said it right, it might actually happen. Me and my mates in the middle of the field, going, “SHAZAM! We’re not saying it right!” Other blokes laughing behind our heads. “Yeah, you’re not going to laugh when I get it right. SHAZAM!” Flash Gordon, those little puffs of smoke. He had bleached-blond hair. Captain Marvel. You could never remember what it was about, it was more about the transformation, about just a regular guy who says one word and suddenly he’s gone. “I want to get that down,” you’d think. “I want to get out of this place.”

And as we got bigger and a little brawnier, we started to swing our weight about a bit. The ludicrous side to Dartford Tech was its pretensions to being a public school (that’s what they call private schools in England). The prefects had little gold tassels on their caps; there was East House and West House. It was trying to recapture a lost world, as if the war hadn’t happened, of cricket, cups and prizes, schoolboy glory. All of the masters were totally substandard, but they were still aiming for this ideal as if it were Eton or Winchester, as if it were the ’20s or the ’30s or even the 1890s. In the midst of this there was, in my middle years there, soon after the catastrophe, a period of anarchy that seemed to go on for a very long time—a prolonged period of chaos. Maybe it was just one term in which, for whatever reason, these mad mass bundles would go on in the playing fields. There were about three hundred of us, everybody leaping around. It is strange, thinking back, that nobody stopped us. There were probably just too many of us running about. And nobody got hurt. But it allowed a certain degree of anarchy to the point that when the head prefect did come along and try to stop us one day, he was set upon and lynched. He was one of those perennial martinets, captain of sport, head of school, the most brilliant at all things. He swung his weight around, he would be really officious to the younger kids, and we decided to give him a taste. His name was Swanton —I remember him well. And it was raining, very nasty weather, and we stripped him and then chased him until he climbed a tree. We left him with his hat with the little gold tassels, that’s all he had left on. Swanton came down from the tree and rose to become a professor of medieval studies at the University of Exeter and wrote a key work called
English Poetry Before Chaucer
.