7. Testing

‘You’ll enjoy this,’ says the man in the tweed suit. ‘Boys like this one.’ He hands me a pair of headphones the colour of sticking plaster. ‘They like to pretend they’re pilots … but your father’s one isn’t he?’

‘Ground crew,’ says the school secretary.

I repeat what Mum has told me; that my father failed his pilot’s exam five times in a row because he is colour-blind and can’t tell whether planes are flying towards or away from him.

The man in the tweed suit looks at me oddly. ‘Well, pop them on.’

I cover my ears and the world fills with hush. Tones appear in the silence. I have to raise my hand if I can hear them, drop it when they stop sounding.

It’s all a bit strange. I’ve been taken out of class by the school secretary to this windowless room that I never knew existed. There are other tests as well; pencil and paper games, maths puzzles … they go on all day. Only slowly does it dawn on me that I am the only one in my class taking them.

The school is a state primary attached to a Catholic church and has pupils from all over the world; Ireland, Italy, Mexico, India, parts of Africa—with a big intake from the local orphanage. Quite a few of the kids have disabilities and other problems that hold them back. Am I one of those? ‘He’s inattentive in class,’ the secretary tell my mother later when she turns up to collect me, ‘seems lost in his own little world … ’ They talk as if I were not in the room. It worries me. Am I headed for Junior Remove with the ‘slow’ kids?

But the problem turns out to be of a different kind. I’m not deaf, or slow. The problem is, I can read.

I could read already when I started school, only nobody noticed. So when they gave me Janet and John books—John, see the aeroplanes/See the aeroplane go up/See the aeroplane fly—I found them, frankly, dull. I spent the time looking out of the window instead; staring at the clouds and thinking about aircraft navigation lights—red on the left wingtip, green on the right. What must it be like when you can’t tell red from green, I wondered? How does a red rose look: do the petals blend with the leaves? Can you even tell a petal from a leaf if you’re colour-blind? (Somehow it never occurred to me to ask my father.)

‘Nothing wrong there,’ says the secretary. ‘In fact he’s exceptionally bright.’

After the tests, the teachers are a bit more attentive, even if I’m not. They try to discourage my Enid Blyton habit—chugging a Secret Seven a night under the bedclothes. They try to steer me towards more improving authors. But they get nowhere. Reading is a personal matter so far as I’m concerned, and I see their efforts as unwelcome interference.

I’ll read what I like.

8. Fadd9

‘I’m cold, Teresa.’

‘Do your jacket up.’

‘Rain’s dripping down my neck.’

‘Stop moaning.’

‘When will we see the Beatles?’

‘We’re not going to see the Beatles, we’re going to see the Beatles’ film.’

‘Are we going to see it now?’

‘No, it’s sold out, we’re queuing to get tickets for it next week.’

The line of rain-strafed young people stretches round the corner from the cinema’s glamorous façade into this side passage, all unrendered brick and fire escapes, which is where we wait – uncomfortable, cold and (in my case) bored.

‘Can we come back another day?

‘John-John! This the Beatles!’

And then, next week, the heat rising from the hundreds of over-excited heads in the popcorn-scented dark, the fervour and anticipation amped up by days of waiting released in one galvanic, transfixing stab of sound.

A lot has been written about the chord that opens both the single, A Hard Day’s Night, and the film of the same name. According to George Harrison (the shy one) it is an Fadd9 – though he says you would have to ask Paul (the winsome one) what the bass note was and George Martin (the posh producer) might have added another note on his Steinway. John (the lairy one) plays the same chord as George but on a 12-string and Ringo (the drummer) hadn’t even started playing yet. But all this technical stuff is irrelevant. What the chord really is, is a caesura: an end and a beginning. The minute I hear it Cliff is dead to me. Hank, with his twangy old Burns licks, is dead to me.

I watch the film open-mouthed. The Beatles are being chased by fans and evade them wittily (wittily is how they do everything) by getting in one side of a taxi and then straight out the other. They catch a train and play a number in the guard’s van behind a wire partition, so it looks like they’re in a cage. The whole film, in fact, is about them being caged and trying to break free. They are caged by love. Everybody loves the Beatles, but the strange thing is that the people who love them most are the ones they run hardest and fastest away from.

Later after a rehearsal in the TV studio the Beatles get out by a fire escape and run around a field doing stupid stuff, just like kids would. That feeling, like the feeling of being out of school when it isn’t even lunch or break time, is one I instantly recognise. So strangely, although they are gods, the Beatles are in this very small way a tiny bit like me. (More so than Cliff, who I now see as a bit of a faker, having a fake American accent and not even using his real name).

That year I buy my first ever single, She’s a Woman backed with I Feel Fine.

4. Blade

Out of nowhere, a scarlet bead appears on my thumb and begins to swell.

‘Ow!’ What could cause such indescribable pain?

My attention moves to the blade of grass I have just dropped to the asphalted pavement, and I notice a smear of blood along its edge. Can grass cut you? Is grass sharp? When will this world stop springing unpleasant surprises?

‘What’s the matter with your brother, Teresa? Why is he blubbing?’

‘Oh my godfathers, he’s cut his finger. Anyone got a hanky?’

‘Not if he’s going to bleed all over it.’

I’m sitting on a roadside verge at a bus stop with my big sister and her cool friends. We’re either on the way to see, or on the way back from seeing, the latest Cliff Richard film. I’m four or five. My sister’s cool friends have been doing duck calls – picking blades of the broad, coarse grass that grows by the roadside and stretching them taut between their thumbs to form reeds. Monkey see, monkey do: I was trying to copy them, but they’re five years older than me and better acquainted with the treachery of nature. I fucked up, and now must bleed. Such is the rule of the world I have landed in.

‘Maybe this will shut him up … Here John-John, look at this.’ I am passed a magazine. ‘Press the hanky tight: don’t get blood all over it.’ The magazine is packed full of pictures of Cliff and his cool gang. In one of these, they are draped around a park bench eating chips. That’s what it’s like when you’re a teenager: you lay around the place eating chips, looking cool and wearing American clothes. Cliff’s bird has a fuzzy angora sweater. One of the guys sports the most fantastic pair of cowboy boots. It must be great being Cliff, I think: you walk into the room and you say ‘Hey guys, what’s up?’ —Just like an American. And everybody pays attention to you because you’ve got brilliant hair and American teeth, and you’re not just a normal boring person but some kind of god.

Elsewhere in the mag there are pictures of Cliff’s band, the Shads, and his specky mate Hank, who looks like a horse and plays the guitar. Hank’s guitar is all echoey, like he lives in a tunnel, and he makes the sound wobble with a thing called a tremolo arm. I love the sound of Hank’s guitar. It’s the music they play at the pictures when the lit curtains are still closed, and you’re humming with anticipation. They play those tunes (Apache, Wonderful Land) even when it’s not a Cliff film you’ve come to see. So in a way, the Shads are even better than Cliff. Now I want to be Hank.

The magazine is full of useful, vital information. But perhaps the most startling fact I learn is that Cliff isn’t really called Cliff, and he isn’t even American. He was born in India and his real name is Harry Webb. Cliff Richard is really Harry Web.

So I’ve learned two things today: a blade of grass really can be a blade – and a person can be two people.

Production still from The Young Ones (1961)
THE YOUNG ONES UK 1961 Sidney J. Furie The Young Ones: Nicky (CLIFF RICHARD), Toni (CAROLE GRAY), Chris (TEDDY GREEN), Barbara (ANNETTE ROBERTSON), Ernest (RICHARD O’SULLIVAN), Jimmy (MELVYN HAYES) Regie: Sidney J. Furie

3. Piano

‘He’s an intelligent child,’ says the childminder, with a clear implication in her tone that this is a compensatory trait—an entry on the plus side of an otherwise lacklustre personality profile. ‘… He just doesn’t seem to want to play with the other children …’

She runs a playschool in her house near to us in South London, and I can tell even at this young age that my mother is intimidated by her posh voice and fancy ways. The house is very similar to ours in layout: we play mostly in a back room with French windows onto the garden. Children trot in and out as we are talking; the boys with guns, the girls with dolls.

‘He does seem to like the piano though, I see him drawn to it, picking out little tunes and so on … Are you a musical family?’

Mum’s face lights up. ‘Yes.’ Mum loves music. She’s always singing at the stove. Her forefathers, so she says, were Hungarian Gypsies who made their way to Britain via various parts of Europe, playing music in the street for a living.

‘Aha! Do you play?’

‘No.’ The lights abruptly dim. Whatever the past, nobody in my immediate family plays an instrument (although my Great-Grandfather tuned pianos at a piano factory).

The children behave much better at picking-up time, I notice. If my mother had been here just a half-hour earlier she would have witnessed a scene of unbelievable carnage; kiddies running full pelt in and out from the garden, hitting each other with sticks, trampolining on the sofas, hair-pulling, biting, rolling around on the floor in tearful jags … seemingly it is only my mum that the childminder can intimidate with the BBC vowels: her charges run riot.

Perhaps it’s fear of this chaos that has moved me towards the piano. I like the variety of sounds you can get from it—the twinkly-twonkly top end, the gong-like middle and the rumbling bass. And so pleased am I that the childminder has noted my interest in the instrument that on my next visit to her playgroup it’s my first destination.

I get more adventurous this time. I investigate the pedals, one of which makes the sound go on forever, while the other mutes it down so low you can hardly hear it beneath the battle-roar of infant hyperactivity. I explore dynamics. I notice that when you hit the keys harder, you can really move the mood around: the high notes become more plangent, the bass booms and crashes. Piano, I realise, is a percussion instrument. Which is not to downplay the impact of creative harmony. While playing two notes that sit sweetly together might give you the idea you are producing actual music, nerve-shredding discords, I find, get best cut-through in this environment—especially if given some attack. Excitement grows as I fire off volleys of explosive dissonance, raining storm-fronts of sound on my warring playmates; laying into the keys with a raging passion. It gets attention. I have to fight off potential joiners-in who would pollute the pure stream of my expression with their sticky-fisted hammerings. Dominance asserted I reign supreme; a vengeful god defiant in my broadwood thunder-chariot.

And then two hands pull my shoulders roughly back, and the lid of the piano slams shut.

‘That will be quite enough of that, little Beethoven’.

2. Quaggy

‘Mum, can I go play on the Quaggy?’

It’s early evening and the light is dying. My mother, who is pushing me home for tea, pauses at the gates of the park at the end of our road to have this conversation with my older sister.

It’s the first time I’ve heard the word quaggy. It feels nice in my mouth.

Maybe the quaggy is an abandoned mattress, like the ones I’ve seen bigger children playing on. That’s the noise the springs make as they bounce up and down: quaggy-quaggy-quaggy. Except that Mum is now saying Teresa shouldn’t go because it’s dangerous—and how dangerous could a mattress be?

I suppose you could bounce yourself off and break a limb. Or the metal in the springs might pop out and spear you in the leg … But still its seems unlikely that Teresa could be so careless as to get her leg speared by a mattress: she’s not a careless girl.

The quaggy take on a more sinister character, and I think of the quicksand that dragged a cowboy to his death in a programme on TV. But then Mum relents and lets Teresa go play on the quaggy after all, so surely the quaggy can’t be something really dangerous or Mum wouldn’t do that? As we leave the park, I continue to worry away at possible meanings of the word.  Is it some kind of animal? I imagine a huge woolly dog-like thing the size of a Shetland pony, with half a dozen children on its back.  Again, not much of a threat.

I think about the word so much that eventually it floats free of all meaning and with time becomes nothing more than a sound. Quaggy: just one more inexplicable thing from childhood: two notes from a half-remembered music.

Much later, half a century later, I will be idly googling around when I come across the word written down for the first time, and in an instant all its possible meanings—mattress, quicksand, shaggy dog-horse—will be displaced and bald reality asserted. The Quaggy will become nothing more nor less than what it is, a solid object in the real world. Later still I will catch a train to Grove Park station and walk round the corner to Chinbrook Meadows, which I will have discovered was the name of the park at the end of our road, and there will see the actual Quaggy. In the 1960s it will have been chanellized into a concrete culvert and hidden behind fences; but a 2002 restoration will have restored it to plain view. So when I visit in 2003, I will see it straight away as I pass through the park gates; there right in front of me: the echt, the actual River Quaggy.

I will fill with emotion. The joy in the discovery will be like fishing the last piece of a complicated jigsaw puzzle you were never able to complete out from down the back of the sofa. But in the backwash of feeling will come also a sense of sadness, that in the process the word has lost the thing that made it magical and solely mine.

1. Shellac

There were always records in our house. One of my earliest memories is of a heavy old 78 of Hound Dog by Elvis Presley. I remember destroying it with a hammer. I suppose I must have assumed everyone would be OK with this because we never played these old shellac discs, the family legend being that they had been ruined by sand from the desert that got into the grooves when we were in Iraq.

This seems fanciful, but it is certainly true that we were in Iraq. My father was sent to Baghdad by BOAC, his employer, on secondment to Iraqi Airways, and the family went with him. I was too young to remember much but my sister, who is five years older than me, has proper organized memories of that time—organized, but not particularly pleasant.

Ten days before my second birthday a group of Iraqi officers mounted a coup d’etat and slaughtered the ruling family. The body of the reigning monarch (Harrow-educated Faisal II) was strung from a lamppost outside the Defence Ministry. Abd al-Ilah,the Crown Prince, had his mutilated corpse trailed through the streets and cut into pieces. Mass rioting followed. Baghdad wasn’t safe for westerners. Guns pounded at night (a sound that haunts my sister’s nightmares to this day). During all this my father, a taciturn and withdrawn man, would apparently go out for walks just to see what was going on, disappearing for hours at a time. While he was out one day the servants took all our furniture and drove off with it in a truck. After that we were corralled in a compound with other British families until a flight out could be arranged. When we left my father stayed on, and we didn’t see him again for six months.

The flight home was in an unpressurised plane. As we climbed to get over the mountains I apparently turned blue, and my mother, who was heavily pregnant, almost gave birth to my younger brother Paul over Cyprus. We landed in Britain at Southend Airport. As we hit Arrivals, the horror of what she had been through welled up in my sister and she started sobbing. ‘What’s that little brat got to bawl about?’ remarked a passing Southender.

The records we had at home when I was growing up betrayed some influence from our time in the Middle East, but in truth it was a pretty watered-down one. We had an Eartha Kit record or two, a soundtrack recording of the film musical Kismet set in a Hollywoodised Baghdad but using the music of the Russian composer, Borodin. And there was a seven-inch of an instrumental by the Italian-American band leader Ralph Marterie and His Orchestra called Shish-Kebab, all snake-charmer melody and twangy, pre-surf guitar, which years later I covered with my street busking band Pookiesnackenburger. Otherwise, it seems, the sands of the desert hadn’t penetrated very far into the Helmer grooves – which is not to say the experience didn’t mark us.