This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (21 page)

At the Kilburn party venue the Real Mod left me in the car and went in to collect my records, returning with each one neatly replaced in its paper sleeve. He assured me he’d wiped them carefully with a tea towel and he was so meticulous about everything that I believed him. On the way home I listened as he relayed sacred advice about the beauty of a tonic suit with five-button cuffs and six-inch vents; how cufflinks must only be worn on shirts with double cuffs, never in single cuffs; how important it was to wear long socks so that you didn’t show acres of bare shin between sock and trouser leg when you sat down.

Although he’d progressed to a car, the Real Mod still revered the scooter and spoke of the joy of riding a Vespa through London on a sunny day, wearing a Fred Perry with Levi Sta-Prest trousers (never, never, jeans, which were a nasty American garment worn by greasy Rockers) and a pair of brown Hush Puppies.

I soaked it all up, every word. Here was a role model with whom I could identify: a young man from the slums who dressed with a style and confidence that personified his attitude. By the time he dropped me back at Walmer Road, the others had dispersed and Linda had gone with Cheryl back to her home in Sutton Dwellings. I sat alone in the front room pondering a new approach to life: ‘You may be poor, but don’t show poor.’

I’d known since primary school I wouldn’t be a draughtsman. I might be a musician. I would certainly be a Mod.

While Linda continued to take care of me during Lily’s spells in hospital, I needed less and less looking after as I got older. With Tony Cox in a different class from me at school, and our interests diverging outside it, we had completely grown apart by this time. Instead I’d become friendly with Colin James, a classmate who lived in Elthiron Road in Parsons Green. Colin came from a middle-class home but was doing his damnedest to rebel against his background. His father, who was a senior officer with Hammersmith and Fulham Council, would plead with me to exert a calming influence on his errant son.

The courtesy Lily had instilled in me often gave the parents of my friends (and later my girlfriends) the mistaken impression that I was more sensible and virtuous than I was. In truth, I didn’t have a great deal to rebel against, but I had certainly emerged from my shell and Linda didn’t have to worry that I was moping around at home on my own when she was out.

Colin badly wanted to be so many things he wasn’t. For a start, he wanted to be a tough street kid. It was becoming fashionable to be working class. On the London stage, aristocratic drawing rooms were giving way to kitchen-sink dramas as the spotlight was turned towards ordinary lives. On television, politicians were being lampooned and the workings of the Establishment held up for public scrutiny by
That Was The Week that Was
, which brought satire to viewers for the first time. The city was starting to swing and the cultural explosion of the 1960s was catapulting talented role models from humble backgrounds into the limelight. From East London came the photographer David Bailey and the actor Terence Stamp, the son of a Thames tugboat captain. West London produced
the hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, scion of an immigrant family and pioneer of the iconic geometric cut.

At thirteen, none of this registered with me and I doubt it did with Colin, either. But in keeping with the spirit of the times, he resented the stable, middle-class lifestyle his mother and father had provided and his resentment seemed to increase with every dirt-poor blues artist he discovered. Worst of all, try as he might, he found it impossible to upset his kind and loving parents. When he grew his hair his mother said it looked ‘nice’. When he informed his father that he and I (aged fourteen and thirteen respectively) would be hitchhiking around the south coast that summer, his dad merely offered to give us a lift to the station. He told both parents of our intention to spend Saturday night in Soho and they were unworried, saying only that we should be home by midnight. I could stay over and Mrs James would leave out a couple of glasses of milk and some biscuits in the kitchen for us when we got in. The more Colin attempted to rebel, the less inclined his parents seemed to give him a cause.

Colin longed to emulate his heroes, the Rolling Stones, but had no ear for music. There were three boys in our year at Sloane who could play the guitar, and he wasn’t one of them. As well as myself, there was Paul Swinson, whose father wrote comic songs for the Parlophone label, recorded by the likes of Peter Sellers, and a tall lad whose Mod stylishness was rather spoiled by Hank Marvin-type horn-rimmed spectacles. His name was Stephen Hackett, or Steve Hackett, as he was better known later, when he became famous as a guitarist with Genesis and GTR.

Stephen hung out with the toughest kid in our year at
Sloane, Terry Lawrence. Colin wanted to hang out with him too, but Terry considered him a wimp, unworthy of his patronage. Colin reacted by constantly seeking fights and improving with practice. He was tall and well built, but his major asset was his sheer bravado. He enjoyed walking on the wild side. If we were heading for somewhere in Fulham, for instance, and saw a crowd of rough-looking kids horsing around way off our route, he’d insist that we change direction in order to walk through the middle of them looking ‘hard’. Nine times out of ten it would be OK and our chutzpah would carry us through. As for the tenth time … well, we were very fast runners.

The fact that Colin could neither sing nor play any instrument didn’t deter me from making him bass guitarist in my band, the Vampires. The line-up was me on my Spanish guitar, Jimmy Robb, a Sloane pupil who was small, blond and good-looking, on drums (or, to be accurate, on Tupperware bowls) and Colin, thumping away on an old acoustic guitar to which I’d affixed four bass E-strings. We played in the cellar retreat Colin’s parents had kindly put at the exclusive disposal of their eldest son and his friends.

Those friends included two from the hitherto alien species commonly known as girls. Yvonne Stacey and Pauline Bright were in the corresponding year at Carlyle, the girls’ grammar next door to Sloane. They were also Colin’s neighbours. Pauline lived almost opposite him in Elthiron Road and Yvonne in a huge house overlooking Waltham Green.

The concept of having girls as friends was novel to me. Although Carol Smith had been in our little Bevington gang in the days when I knocked around with Tony Cox, she had been
such a tomboy that we never really thought of her as a member of the opposite sex. Now that I was a teenager, girls had become more interesting – and more frightening. After my trysts with Edna in Denmark the previous year my shyness had dissipated but the first time I went round to Colin’s house and found two girls in his cellar, it still came as a bit of a shock.

Colin introduced this duo – both dressed in identical slacks (as they used to be called), royal blue cotton and polyester stretched tight by stirrups at the ankle that had to be secured under the arch of each foot – as his friends. I think they’d all been to primary school together, but unlike Carol Smith, Yvonne and Pauline could hardly have been described as tomboys. We played records on the sleek, polished wood gramophone that was another excellent feature of this refuge. As was the cushioned seating area that Colin had arranged on the floor against the rear wall and under the stairs, out of the line of vision of any prying adult who might open the door to peer in and check up on us. Any uninvited guests would have to walk halfway down the wooden steps and look over the banister to see us, thus giving us plenty of warning of their arrival.

After a while, Colin suggested that we sit on the cushions. The four of us lined up with our backs against the wall: me, Pauline, Yvonne and Colin. The light from the single naked bulb that hung from the centre of the cellar failed to penetrate our shadowy corner.

Seeing Colin put his arm around Yvonne, I put mine around Pauline, tentatively, taking care not to pause or alter the tempo or subject of our inane conversation; trying to make it seem as if it were a natural reflex, like scratching an itch or blowing
your nose. Inside, however, my stomach fluttered and my heart pounded. We didn’t kiss or cuddle or go any further than that simple caress. Two boys’ arms around two sets of girls’ shoulders.

We never were anything but friends with Pauline and Yvonne. Pauline had a boyfriend Colin didn’t like and so wasn’t in our company often. Yvonne became a close friend of mine but our relationship was entirely platonic. That’s not to say she was not attractive. She was a lovely girl: slim and pretty with long, fair hair and an effervescent personality.

When Colin, Jimmy Robb and I got down to what was laughingly known as ‘band practice’, we were inspired by the marvellous musicians we saw playing live. Colin and I were frequent visitors to Soho, to the Marquee Club in Wardour Street and the 100 Club in Oxford Street. There must have been age requirement for admittance but we were never refused entry. Such regulations were far less rigorously observed in those days. We saw the Yardbirds, the Pretty Things and Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames. We went to the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond – where the Rolling Stones had played twice a week until they became too big for little local clubs – to catch Gary Farr and the T-Bones. We saw the Stones, believe it or not, at the Wimbledon Palais (twice). The raw excitement was exhilarating and although I was a confirmed Beatles fan, I had to confess that the Stones were more attractive in terms of their anti-establishment rakishness.

We’d heard a rumour that the band drank every lunchtime at the World’s End pub just down the King’s Road from our school and took to hanging around outside in our customized uniforms – by now we had cut six-inch vents into our black
school blazers. Such modifications attracted the unwanted attention of ‘Doc’ Henry, our headmaster, who was for ever sending Colin and me home to get our hair cut or to change various bits of our attire. When he tired of sending us home he began caning us for these misdemeanours.

At Sloane, I had found the methods of Bevington Primary’s resident sadist, Mr Hayes, replaced by a much more sophisticated brutality. There only the headmaster and his deputy were authorized to use the cane and instead of being beaten in front of their classmates, as had been the case at Bevington, boys would be caned across the backside in the privacy of the headmaster’s office.

To Colin, getting the cane meant so much – he’d achieved respectability as a rebel at long last. Even Terry Lawrence began to acknowledge him and agreed to join us once or twice as we posed outside the World’s End every lunchtime for months on end, never catching so much as a glimpse of the Stones.

As for Colin’s plan to hitchhike round the south coast, his parents eventually persuaded him to join them and his four siblings for a holiday in Burgess Hill, where they had arranged a house swap with friends. Colin’s mum invited me to go with them. We had a marvellous sun-kissed week and I remember spending one idyllic day sitting in the beautiful garden of this huge house reading the James Bond novel
Goldfinger
from cover to cover while Colin and his family went out for the day. For me it was a great holiday but Sussex didn’t quite provide the rock ’n’ roll adventure Colin had envisaged.

Earlier in that summer of 1963, before the school holidays, Lily had received a letter from her heart specialist at Hammersmith Hospital asking to see her to discuss a possible cure for the disease that had blighted her life. Ever since mitral stenosis had been diagnosed, she’d spent half her time in hospital having fluid removed from her lung tissue to make it easier for her to breathe and the other half being a guinea pig for the heart specialist, who was seeking a cure. From the moment this letter arrived she began to fret. What kind of remedy would this be? What would it entail? What were the risks?

In my memory this worrying period for Lily is intertwined with the fall-out from the Profumo scandal that was dominating the news. It had emerged that the secretary of state for war, John Profumo, had conducted a brief relationship with a call girl, Christine Keeler, at the same time as she was involved with a senior naval attaché from the Soviet Embassy. Having initially assured the House of Commons, under parliamentary privilege, that there was ‘no impropriety whatsoever’ in his relationship with Keeler, in early June Profumo was forced to admit that he had lied and to resign from the Cabinet and the Privy Council.