Tag: 1962

6. Tape

When I get back from North London it turns out my parents aren’t dead. But there have been changes. They’ve moved the furniture around and there is a set of wooden runners over the three steps down to the garden from the French windows, freshly carpentered in new wood. Carpentry is something my father does. Dad built us a swing in the back garden, excavating a pit for its foundations in which he discovered a load of empty bottles buried by the previous owner of the house, ‘he was an alcoholic,’ my Mother muttered darkly. At the end of the garden now, near to the swing, is a pram. Howling sounds are coming from the pram.

It is around this time that I decide I am not getting enough affection from my family members. ‘Nobody loves me,’ I wail at mealtimes, hoping perhaps that someone will contradict me. Instead they laugh, and give me a new nickname: Pathetic Lobster. I go into crying jags that last until I give myself too bad a headache to continue. I get myself locked in the cupboard under the stairs just to find out, perhaps, whether anyone will bother to come and find me. They don’t – and I scream at the top of my lungs until my mother comes to let me out. ‘Nobody loves me,’ I continue to complain. ‘Pathetic lobster,’ they reply. I decide to look outside the family circle for love.

Being a Roman Catholic, I seek intercession from the Virgin Mary. In between all the other things we are constantly being enjoined to pray for at my Catholic primary school – the starving children in Africa, forgiveness for our sins, that Canon Dobson’s sciatica be relieved – there is a space for personal prayers: ‘don’t just ask for toys and sweets children,’ my teacher, Miss Henderson, says with a smile. We wouldn’t want the Holy Mother to think us superficial.

I pray for a girlfriend.

About this time I become aware that a girl in my class at school lives in our street. Her name is Karen Wells. She has a round open face, a nice smile and bright blue eyes. I tell Mum that I have special feelings for Karen and she says, ‘look at the mother, I would’ —Mrs Wells is Italian and a bit overweight— ‘that’s how she’ll turn out’.

Undeterred, I go round to Karen’s house one afternoon and ask if I can play. There’s a whole mob of kids, led by Karen’s older brother Kevin, who teases me, and I don’t get to talk to Karen.

For my birthday that year I get a tape recorder (a proper reel-to-reel tape recorder) and a toy guitar.  Inspired by Cliff, who is always singing song to girls in his films, I write a song about my love for Karen and, accompanied by some exploratory strums on the guitar, sing it into the tape recorder. Perhaps I am intending to play it to her, or send her the tape. There is no fixed plan.

When I get home from school the next day I hear laughter coming from the kitchen. I walk in to see my sister and mother playing the song back on the tape recorder and pissing themselves laughing. It sounds terrible. Tuneless. And the lyrics are stupid: I love Karen, sitting on my knee/oh how happy together we will be.

I never touch the tape recorder again, or the guitar, and Karen does not become my girlfriend. It will be twelve years before I write another song.

5. Oil

In a black Zodiac Zephyr we cruise the darkened streets of North London. The radio plays Johnny, Remember Me and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.

At the wheel is my uncle Terry, who drives an oil tanker for a living and the Zephyr for fun. His face is dark and cruel-looking, like a crueler-looking Kirk Douglas. Terry was in the merchant navy during wartime, and boxed. He has belts for it in the cupboard in the house in Theobalds Road where I am staying. There is another belt in there, my cousins tell me, that he will beat me with if I get out of line.

They tell me a lot of stuff like that, my cousins; some of it I believe, other things I’m not so sure about. I’m only six – and a naïve, dreamy six at that: not London street-smart like them. Normally I live in Prittlewell, Essex, close to Southend Airport where my dad works as an Aircraft Inspector. I have been sent here to London to stay with my mother’s brother and his family for the Summer. I have no idea why. The latest thing my cousins have told me is that both my parents died in an accident but nobody has the heart to break it to me.

‘No they haven’t,’ I say.

‘Yes they have.’ Apparently, I’ve got to keep it to myself. ‘Don’t cause a fuss.’ I think of the belt lurking in the cupboard.

I look at the back of my uncle’s head; the blue-black teddy-boy hair, slick with oil.  Aeroplanes run on kerosene, lorries on diesel. My Father smells different to my Uncle, and they are different in other ways too. My father doesn’t hit me with a belt: he uses his hand.

Next to Terry’s head on the front bench seat of the Zephyr is his wife Audrey’s. Audrey has button eyes and a soft smile. She washes her legs in the sink – they have no bathroom – and cooks Dambuster pudding with custard. Auntie Audrey reads to us at night from an Enid Blyton book, The Faraway Tree. At the top of the tree is a ladder the children climb up to a magical land. The land changes with each visit, but if you stay too long in the land it is possible to get stuck there, and you might never find your way back to the tree and home. The chapter where this happens – where the land moves and the children get stuck – is terrifying.

The music changes on the radio to a sad harmonica tune. Terry and Audrey talk together in low voices. I’m in a strange mood, feeling oddly disconnected from the wet streets and the lights of shops as they flash past.

Maybe they’re working out a way of breaking the sad news to me, so that I’ll take it well and not cause a fuss. But then they start laughing and I realise they’re not talking about me at all.

The shops and cafés glide past, lit-up cafés with Gaggia machines and red checked tablecloths. We stop at traffic lights outside a civic building – a modernist new build, all concrete and big glass windows. The lights are on and something is happening in there, some type of Town Hall discussion, perhaps; people in banked seating. But their top halves are screened off and all I can see are shoes and knees, trousers and skirts.

The lights change, the car moves on.

(Image credit: Charlesfrederickworth)