Over the Moon (6 page)

Life was good, and my parents were pleased I was doing OK and happy, but doubtless secretly also felt that playing drums in a pub wasn’t A Proper Job. When Plessey’s wrote to tell me I had passed their exam and offer me a five-year apprenticeship as an electrical engineer, Mum and Dad felt I should get a trade under my belt in case the music dream didn’t work out. I was in two minds, but saw their point and agreed.

Two weeks later, I showed up for my first day at Plessey’s in Ilford, makers of electronic parts for the telecommunications and aircraft industries. As a trainee electrical engineer – and I still wasn’t sure what that involved – I would clock in at 7.25 each
morning,
clock out at 5.25 each evening, and be paid £3 19s 11d per week.

Plessey’s was a huge sprawling complex and seemed pretty intimidating as two other new boys and I were led from the personnel department to the shop floor. Yet I quickly got used to the routine there and even though it never remotely felt like my vocation in life, I came to sort-of enjoy it.

The apprentices’ main duties were setting up lathes and presses for the skilled workers to assemble the airplane parts. These workers were on piecework and had to make so many parts each hour to get a bonus payment, and if an apprentice made a mistake that slowed them down we would get a terrible bollocking – especially from the women.

Plessey’s was not short of characters. One woman from Oldham would talk non-stop, only breaking off to demand a kiss and a cuddle, which thankfully she never got. We were also warned about a homosexual man in the stores who went by the rather unappealing name of Squeaker, who used to materialise beneath you looking for a quick grope if you were up a ladder getting parts off a shelf. He would be hauled before a tribunal today, but I guess things were different back in those days.

I quickly got used to the Plessey’s routine. By now I had bought a Lambretta scooter and used it for the two-mile journey to work each morning. At lunchtime, we’d play football on some grass behind the factory. The job didn’t even interfere with the Everons too much, apart from the early mornings after a late gig.

Yet a steady job and playing with the band were not enough to quieten some deeper stirrings. When you are a sixteen-year-
old
boy, girls are never far from your thoughts, and I was about to fall head-over-heels in the way sixteen-year-old boys do. The object of my infatuated devotion was a girl called Carol.

Carol was a face down the local youth club, a pretty brunette with a sunshine smile and sparkly green eyes, and, like me, she was a bit of a Mod. Probably I should have been a rocker, with my taste for blues and rock ’n’ roll, but I liked the Mods’ threads as I fancied myself as a bit of a natty dresser. Plus, of course, I had the Lambretta.

As a boy, I was painfully shy, and it’s a condition that has never fully left me even half a century later. I had managed to make occasional eye contact with Carol and maybe even exchange a smile, but I was genetically incapable of swaggering over to her and trying to chat her up, as many boys would do so easily. I would just freeze, paralysed by nerves and self-doubt.

This all changed one night when Brian from the Everons invited me to go to a dance with him to check out another local band, the Falcons. Having arrived early, I was hanging around outside the hall aimlessly, watching people go in as I waited for Brian, when my heart suddenly missed a beat. It was her! Carol was in the middle of a group of girls making their way towards the door.

I could have turned away and pretended not to see her, or shrunk into the background as per usual, but somehow I made the superhuman effort to meet her gaze and say ‘Hello’. Her mates giggled at this, but Carol nodded at me, said ‘Hello, David’ and smiled as she walked off. What an amazing development! I hadn’t even been sure until that moment that she knew my name.

Brian arrived and we parted with 2/6 each and went into the gig. It was busy. In the traditional British disco scene, groups of girls danced round their handbags while the boys leaned against the wall, drinking. Brian wanted to go backstage to say hello to the Falcons but I always felt awkward doing that sort of thing, so it was a relief when the band appeared on stage.

A five-piece, they looked pretty nifty in their suits and Beat-les-slash-Rolling Stones shaggy cuts. Like the Everons, they ran through a succession of old classics and chart hits, and I remember that I liked their version of Screaming Lord Sutch’s ‘Jack the Ripper’. Yet for once in my life, my mind wasn’t on the music.

I could see Carol dancing near the stage – she was only a few feet away, but for a romantic coward like me, those few feet were a million miles. What would I say? What if she blanked me? I went through agonies as two or three braver souls than me asked her to dance, and was delighted when she turned them down. Then as the Falcons aped the blues boogie of Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis Tennessee’, she turned around, saw me, and smiled. I was rooted to the spot. Did that really happen?

The Falcons finished with a flourish and strode offstage and Brian scuttled back to congratulate them, leaving me alone. It was now or never. As the DJ started the sequence of records leading up to the slow dances that signified the end of the evening, I somehow willed my legs to lurch across the floor to her and my mouth to shape the timeless question: ‘Do you want to dance?’

‘Yes,’ said Carol. It was that easy.

I have never been one of life’s dancers, but luckily for both of us, Carol was seriously good. She started off doing the Bird as I
moved
awkwardly from foot to foot next to her, but then the ska records gave way to a classic old-school slowie. Would my nerve fail me? No: I took her hand, she put her arm around me and we swayed gently to the rhythm, her hand on my shoulder.

So this was what it felt like: the feel of being close to a girl you adored, inhaling her perfume, feeling the contours of her body and her gentle skin against yours. It felt amazing.

There was only one place to go from here: the bar. ‘Would you like a drink?’ I asked, and led her by the hand across the dance floor to a serving hatch, where I bought us two Cokes. After we chatted for a while, I posed the all-important question: ‘Can I walk you home?’ Certain of rejection, I could hardly believe my ears when Carol said, ‘Yeah, all right.’

We wended our way through the throng and towards the door with me doing my best to ignore Brian’s lairy ‘Give her one from me!’ thumbs-up and wink as he watched us go. Out in the night air, we did our best to make self-conscious conversation but the words faded awkwardly to nothingness, so we turned into an alleyway and kissed.

It was wonderful. There were no noses in the way, no banging of teeth, no slobbering tongues: just a warm, gentle kiss. We hardly said another word as we walked slowly, our arms around each other, back to Carol’s door, where we shared another lingering goodnight kiss. I could hardly believe it. I had a girlfriend.

I floated back home on a cloud of happiness, even at one point jumping in the air and clicking my heels Charlie Chaplin-style. Mum and Dad were just going to bed. Dad asked me his usual question: ‘Have a good night?’ ‘Brilliant!’ I told him, went
to
bed and replayed my big romantic scene in my head, over and over again.

The next day was Saturday and my parents were coming to see the Everons play a gig in Bermondsey in the evening. I woke up early, greeted them in the kitchen with a smile and broke my big news: ‘I’ve got a girlfriend. She’s really nice. Can she come with us tonight?’

‘That’ll be all right, won’t it, Albert?’ asked Mum. ‘OK by me,’ said Dad, picking up his crash helmet and heading off for the docks. There we were, then. We had our first date.

Carol didn’t know this yet, of course, so I donned my snazziest gear – I believe pink jeans were involved – and walked over to her house. On the way, nerves kicked in again. Maybe our kiss had been a one-off and meant nothing to her? Maybe she had a boyfriend already? I was reassured when her younger brother opened the door and called Carol, who greeted me with a kiss on the lips and invited me in to meet her parents.

It went OK. Carol’s dad had a moustache and was fairly quiet. Her mum was pretty glamorous and looked like she wore the trousers. They gave me a cuppa and asked me a few questions about myself before agreeing that, yes, Carol could come with me to Bermondsey that night.

As I left in the late afternoon, Carol told me she was nervous about meeting my parents. ‘They’ll really like you,’ I assured her. ‘I do.’ ‘I really like you too,’ she said. Her words rang in my ears like music.

That evening, Carol and I, Mum and Dad and my Slingerland drum kit headed off to Bermondsey in the Ford Popular. They
seemed
to get on fine, and I was delighted to see Carol up and dancing with my mum during the Everons’ set. The band went down pretty well – as we always did in that particular pub as long as we stuck to chart hits and went nowhere near the blues.

My life now settled into a new, fairly satisfying routine. I was setting up the lathes and presses in Plessey’s from Monday to Friday, rehearsing and playing gigs with the band and seeing a lot of Carol. We got on great, and I felt sure we would stay together for ever and eventually get married.

In fact, we followed the trajectory of almost every first teenage romance. Initially, we were inseparable, devoted young lovers keen to explore each other in every way. Our romantic fumbling and fondling got more intimate, and often my heart was beating not only with passion but also because her parents were sitting the other side of a council-house door.

Carol and I also had plenty of days out on the Lambretta that I had bought from a workmate at the factory, which proved to be a complete disaster. It virtually never made a bank holiday run to Brighton or Clacton without breaking down, leaving the two of us stranded in a lay-by. I spent way too many hours glumly pushing that bloody thing down the road in my Mod parka and beret.

Actually, the parka and beret were the least of it. As my interest in clothes and fashion grew, I took to sporting a mohair suit, tab collar shirts, knitted ties and chisel shoes. There was even a bizarre short-lived craze involving Pac-a-Macs and Hush Puppies, although I am glad to say I drew the line at blue hair, as sported by one of my more sartorially daring mates.

Apart from my recalcitrant Lambretta, there was nothing too wrong with my life in the summer of 1964 – though it maybe lacked a touch of glamour. Happily, this was to arrive courtesy of Ted, the father of Brian and Sandra from the Everons, who helped to get bookings for the band. We were gobsmacked when he told us that he had possibly secured us a new gig – in Cattolica, Italy!

The plan was for us to fly out on a package holiday, attend an audition at the club Ted had spoken to, and hopefully impress them enough to get a mini-residency. Mum and Dad didn’t just give me permission to go: they said they’d come with me.

This was a huge deal. It would be my first time on an aero-plane – in fact the first time abroad for all three of us – so Mum started to make detailed inquiries about what we needed to pack. She asked important questions of the very few people we knew who had been as far as France, or even the Isle of Man: could you buy things like teabags, milk and soap, you know,
abroad
?

For Carol and me, it would be our first time apart. We had now been going steady for more than a year, and while things were essentially OK between us, the odd niggle and argument had crept in. Maybe I subconsciously felt that we were slipping into a bit of a cosy routine the night that I suggested to her that she should dye her black hair blonde.

My fortnight’s break from Plessey’s began. The Cooks and the Everons were flying to Cattolica on a Saturday morning, so after work on Friday I called for Carol and we sat outside a pub with a pint of brown and mild (my drink of choice at the time) and a Babycham. She was sorry I was going away. I figured I
would
miss her, but my main feeling was of rising excitement at the next day’s big adventure.

There are some rite-of-passage moments that you never forget: your first day at school; your first kiss; driving your first car; losing your virginity. Your first trip abroad is definitely one of them, and I will always remember walking down the steps of the plane in Italy.

The very air was different. It felt warm, sultry and, well,
foreign
. The sun seemed somehow hotter, more intense, and the artfully dilapidated buildings appeared impossibly exotic, as did the whiff of coffee that pervaded the air. Cattolica is arguably the Italian equivalent of Blackpool, but to me it appeared the most glamorous place on earth.

Likewise, our bog-standard package hotel seemed like The Ritz to me, accustomed as I was to cramped council flats. Brian’s dad, Ted, a more cosmopolitan soul who had seen a bit of the world, took it all in his stride. He wasn’t even fazed by the bidet in the bathroom: the Arabs used them instead of loo roll, he informed us.

My parents hit the beach, although my normally easy-going dad was put out by what he perceived as the Continental racket of charging sunbathers for loungers and parasols. They wouldn’t get away with
that
in Clacton, he would grumble, fiddling in his pocket for some spare lira.

Brian and I spent some time on the beach but more cruising around the town and soaking up the sights. We were surprised to find we were quite a hit with the local girls, who regarded us as dapper emissaries from swinging London. Brian loved the
female
attention, but I was far too gawky and awkward to do much with it – plus, of course, I had Carol waiting at home.

Even I couldn’t deny the chemistry with one dark-haired signorina, though. One afternoon, a gorgeous brunette served me an ice cream in a bar. She spoke no English, and Italian had not been big on the curriculum at Shipman County, but there was a strong frisson as I held out my hand for her to take the money for the
gelato
. Our eyes met.

‘David,’ I told her.

‘Margarita,’ she replied.