The Life of Lee (24 page)

Sarah’s appallingly arrogant behaviour unfortunately implanted a huge chip the size of a country estate firmly on my shoulder. It was so big, it would take me until I was forty years of age to rid myself of such negative thoughts. At the moment Sarah ran off in her Roller, a chip was born. It may have been irrational but, boy, it certainly added to the feeling of inadequacy that was already my constant companion.

Mind you, even now, I think I had a point. It really is quite odd to be picked up from a CND demo in a Rolls-Royce, isn’t it?

21. Teenage Wasteland

From that day on, art college lost a little of its romanticism and profundity for me. Now, instead of searching for a meaning in everything, I would instantly look for the cynicism and triviality of it all – not just in the art but the people who created it. It was a blow, but the reality was I suddenly realized there was quite a lot of bullshit in the world of Art (with a capital A).

I’m sure most people knew that already, but I didn’t. It was a shock to discover that, in most cases, art is made up of ten per cent effort and ninety per cent eyewash. That realization hit me like a truck delivering sledgehammers.

From then on, I began to get all my wires crossed. I was too young to understand what was going on in my head. Just when I thought I’d found the place I belonged, just when everything seemed to be falling into place, I’d suddenly lost my direction in life. I was now confused as to where I stood in the great scheme of things. Were the art students my kind of people … or were they chicken turd?

It eventually became clear to me that I was caught in the middle of a culture clash. On the one hand, there was art college and all its enticing middle-class ideals about freedom; and on the other, there was my dad’s constant rant about what it is to be working class and know your
place. Dad’s attitude clashed with all these middle-class studenty types urging me to: ‘Break free, man, stop watching the clock, be your own person, you don’t have to be a part of the system.’ Well, that was great and everything, but they didn’t have to worry about money.

On top of this, there were the old friends from school I still hung around with at weekends. It was as if I had a kind of split personality. During the week, I was attending art college, a place that encouraged calm, studious free-thinking and individuality, that urged you gently to take convention by the hand and lead it to the land of creativity. Then, at the weekend, I was out with the lads cruising the streets, looking for trouble. In some ways, the two apparently contrasting groups had similar outlooks: they both wanted to challenge the status quo – but with very different levels of violence! My old school friends had found that merely pondering the boundaries of what might be considered acceptable wasn’t enough. They became so angry, they wanted to grab the normal rules by the throat, throw them to the floor and kick the crap out of them. We were at that age. Rebellion was in the air.

And I was getting dragged into it. Having previously only shown a slight tendency towards unruly behaviour, I was beginning more and more to be surrounded by gangs of furious, discontented youths who seemed hell-bent on getting things off their chest.

The cult film
Quadrophenia
had exploded on to the screens of Britain’s cinemas. A huge hit with the young kids all over the country with its graphic scenes of violence, it had touched a nerve with our disenchanted teen
population. We were a frustrated generation of Punk safety-pin-and-bondage-trouser-clad aficionados that had set the country on a path towards anarchy in the UK. But a new tribe had also rolled into town on their Vespas and Lambrettas, wearing smarter, crisper clothes. By the late 1970s, Mods were all the rage – and they were certainly raging. Every teen’s urge then, it seemed, was to let off some steam in the name of their new-found tribe.

Following in the footsteps of their predecessors from the 1960s, these new-model Mods were just as anxious to get at their arch-rivals, the Rockers or Bikers. While the Mods liked to dress in natty clothes with clean-cut lines and neat haircuts, the Rockers by contrast favoured oily leathers and long, greasy hair. It was a discord made in heaven – or should that be hell?

It all cried out for an expression of violence. To add fuel to the fire, it was also the time of the menacing-looking skinhead, whose job was not just to look hard, but also to possess an insatiable desire for disorder. Your common or garden skinhead – more common than garden, to be honest – was willing to take on all-comers. On occasions, skinheads and Mods could be drawn together by a shared love of Two-Tone fashion and music – a ska-influenced genre played by bands such as The Specials, Selector and Madness.

But, above all, being part of a tight-knit gang meant belonging to a select group, whose rules demanded courage, a sense of duty to others and a strict obligation of loyalty. I, of course, fitted perfectly into the role every gang has: the funny, stupid kid.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Britain was suffering
from grinding mass unemployment. The UK was seen as the poor man of Europe and had undergone years of recession that had left its mark on our landscape. Housing estates were wastelands, shops in the local high street were boarded up and there was nothing but greyness and depression all around. Most of all, however, young kids had absolutely nothing to do. Having been so long in the doldrums, we teenagers were by this stage really pissed off and itching to express our frustration.

There were, naturally enough, stark disadvantages in belonging to such a gang. Once a card-carrying member, you were called upon to fulfil certain obligations – and they were chiefly of the violent kind. The gang’s sole purpose was to release its pent-up aggression. We were intent on causing nothing less than unholy commotion wherever possible. Our teenage explosive temperaments demanded delinquent, rebellious behaviour. If trouble didn’t find us, we would go out and find it. It wasn’t a decent weekend if we didn’t get blind drunk and have at least one punch-up. If we couldn’t get into a punch-up with strangers, we would simply start punching up each other.

The overriding law of our gang was that if there was any sign of trouble, you were expected to stand your ground and not even think about running away.

‘Do Not Run.’

That was always our mantra. It didn’t matter if you flailed around like a demented idiot when the action started – just so long as you never ran or left your post. If you were to turn and run, you would instantly be ostracized by the rest of the group, considered unreliable. So
you were conditioned to stand there, head down, and fight your way out, whatever the situation.

It was all about loyalty now, it was always the sticking together that counted. That was something that had been drummed into all of us, having grown up together. It was something we just did.

It helped enormously, of course, if you could actually fight. Despite all my years in the boxing ring, when it came to a real fight, I still didn’t really know one end of a fist from the other, and I was at an immediate disadvantage in a ruck. At the first sign of trouble, my motto would be: stand and get beaten up.

Me revving up for the big one!

There was always one small consolation. It appeared it was true what they say, that you don’t actually feel the pain while it’s happening to you, while you’re in the thick of it. It’s only afterwards that it hurts. It’s the adrenaline, I suspect; you feel the kicks going in, but somehow you’re numb to them.

Whenever there was trouble, I would more likely than not be curled up on the floor in my little ball of protection while my mates fought gallantly around me using their fists. When it all went off, as they say, I would try to fight, of course. But inevitably it was only a matter of time before I was peering out through a mass of shuffling feet that clattered around the ground where I lay, as the kicks rained down from whatever gang we had picked a fight with that week.

Let me tell you a bit more about the ethos of our gang. At that age, you believe you’re indestructible. You truly think there is all the time in the world. In those days, for us
bunch of mates, something risky would always present itself as a test, to see how far you could push the boundaries in a world of authority, rules and regulations. All boys do it to some extent, it’s a rite of passage, and hopefully always great fun.

We were no exception. For some insane reason, we always either had an ear to the ground or were on the lookout for the most pin-headed, pea-brained, high-risk scheme that would nudge us a couple of notches up the pecking order. Depending on the amount of risk you took, you could be hailed by all your mates as ‘A friggin’ nut-case’ – that was as good as a knighthood – or, better still, ‘You’re mental, you are!’ – that’s a military cross right there.

For example, I partook in any number of ridiculous, chicken-headed, dim-witted, clodpoll activities, that only a vegetable called stupid would think of doing, just so I could wring perhaps a laugh out of my mates. It would either be hitting myself full on in the face with a frying pan or any other object that might get a good twang, or a demonstration of how I could light my own farts without snapping my spine in the process.

Oh yeah, you name it, we tried it: sticking ferrets down our pants, eating live insects, learning to puke on cue (which always created an interesting chain reaction), keeping a stern face while one of your mates kicked you full in the testicles.

I was very proud to be proclaimed ‘a gourmet solid top bloke’ for daring, on one of our many night-time exploits, to crawl into a tomb for the night at a remote churchyard just outside Billericay. The graveyard was voted by
everybody as the scariest and most haunted place in the area. I spent the entire night there while everybody else sat in awe on the other side of the stone wall in the pitch black, admiring the way I shat my pants. Yep, there wasn’t anything we wouldn’t do.

For some odd reason, our gang of boys had the notion that climbing out of a perfectly comfortable bed, sneaking from our houses in the middle of a freezing cold night on any given weekend and meeting up to traipse down to the local industrial estate and find a rough place to sleep was good fun. Probably just because it was there and unexplored, we found it particularly hilarious to climb over a wall and down into the back of various factories at all hours of the night. There we would stumble around like fools in all sorts of chemicals, plastics and God-only-knows-what-that-was pools of hazardous crap in the pitch black as we rummaged amongst the loading pallets, containers and skips.

Giggling with excitement at the chance of being caught, we would clamber over boxes and through piles of various off-cuts, searching for a place to sleep for the night. We would much rather freeze our tabs off than sleep in something that was specifically built for sleep, called a bed. We would be woken by the factory as it heaved slowly to life with men wearing overalls in the early hours of the morning.

On the industrial estate, we thought it was a real bonus one night to stumble across what we all thought was a cotton factory. It was difficult to tell in such darkness, but the consensus among all of us as we descended the wall into the factory yard on the other side was that it was a
real stroke of luck. We were delighted by the prospect of a decent night’s sleep tucked like tiny mice in various little cracks and spaces found between the massive industrial rolls of cotton that were piled up as tall as a house waiting for dispatch.

So you can imagine our surprise when we were abruptly woken in a fit of absolute torture half an hour later. ‘Run! Run! Get out of here quick!’ Up went the cries, as the massive rolls of stacked cotton began popping out boys like popcorn from all sections of its mountainous honeycomb structure. We landed on the floor in a heap, jumping to our feet and running towards the wall and our escape.

We quickly realized there was definitely something wrong. Each of us suddenly broke into a sort of crazed-t’ai-chi-karate-kid-on-a-bucket-full-of-E-numbers jig. All our bodies were racked with some kind of furious plague of torment and itching. It seemed no amount of scratching or rubbing would ease the fire that buzzed right through to the bone. It felt as if someone had crawled inside my body wearing a suit of feathers and begun dancing the Macarena, such was the mass of tickling that afflicted the insides of the skin.

After frantically stumbling back over the wall and into the yellow street lights on the other side, we were even more alarmed. It was swiftly becoming clear that our faces were visibly changing to the colour of beetroot. Our features were sinking behind rapidly growing lumps the size of sprouts. We were like a bunch of extras who had burst out of the make-up truck on an episode of
Dr Who
.

We were so tormented from head to toe, all we could
think of was to run off slapping and scratching as if in some sort of imaginary wasp attack. We headed off in a random direction, thought to be somewhere, anywhere, less itchy, if such a place existed. This affliction would plague us all for a full week and a half. Even then, it took another week for our faces to go back to normal instead of looking like a yam pushed into a baboon’s arse.