1

FAMILY OF NOISE

‘HAS SHE HAD IT YET?’

‘Yes, Mr Goddard. At six-twenty this morning. Congrat—’

Before the nurse could finish, my father Les had dropped the receiver, raised a clenched fist to the heavens and raced to the nearest pub to celebrate with his mates. Only after much toasting and backslapping did it dawn on him that he hadn’t asked if ‘it’ was male or female. The news that he had a son prompted an even more joyous return to the bar, where Les continued drinking with renewed vigour. Why shouldn’t he? After all, it was what Les did. Everyone knew that. Les Goddard could drink for England and didn’t have to be asked to volunteer, either.

His first and only son had been born at Middlesex Hospital, Mortimer Street, London W1. It was 3 November 1954. Scorpio rising, whatever that means. My mother remembers it as being a ‘difficult’ birth, her memory not made any sweeter by the fact that after several hours of agony she passed out, exhausted, before her firstborn appeared. My father was the first to see me; he eventually left the public bar and stumbled into the maternity ward in order to hold me in his arms. It was just one other thing that Mum never forgave him for.

They named me Stuart Leslie – Stuart after my Scottish uncle Mac, who was a sergeant in the legendary Black Watch Regiment, and Leslie after my father. Had I arrived two days later, on Guy Fawkes Night, Mum swears she would have called me Guy.

Guy Goddard.

So I’ll always be grateful for my date of birth.

My parents met in 1947. Mum, or Betty Kathleen Smith, was just fifteen years old at the time, a sultry, dark-haired, brown-eyed beauty working as an embroiderer for Norman Hartnell, Queen Elizabeth’s dressmaker. Dad, Leslie Alfred Goddard, was twenty and an ex-RAF corporal just back from National Service in Iraq, Iran and Palestine. Now earning a living as a driver for the News Chronicle, he was apparently something of a snappy dresser, a picture of sartorial correctness. ‘Always cravats,’ my mum recalls. ‘He was lovely, so handsome in his double-breasted suits with the big shoulders. Very smart.’

That first day they met, my mum was taken with this sharp-dressed man and he with her. He was waiting by his car in Nottingham Place, W1, when Mum, on her lunch break, walked past him and he let out a low whistle. She stopped, called him cheeky and they got talking.

Photographs of Les from the time show a cocky-looking young man, often with a beer in his hand, and always with Brylcreem in his hair. Les seemed to believe that without a head full of the white greasy stuff you were somehow undressed. (A belief that he held to his last day.) His job was to get Chronicle reporters to the scene of the big story first. Very Raymond Chandler he liked to think it was, screeching around corners in big black Buicks carrying reporters with names like Ronnie Fortune, hungry for a story and a sensational photograph. During his time in the job Les covered the infamous Christie and Hanratty cases, the death of King George VI, and the tragic Ruth Ellis murder case. He once told me that he met Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in England for shooting her unfaithful lover outside a pub in Hampstead, a few years before her death. ‘Such a nice woman, a bloody shame if you ask me,’ he’d say, shaking his head and having another pull on his pint.

When my parents met, Les was a keen motorcyclist. Some of their Friday evening courting took them to the Crystal Palace speedway races. Unable to afford his own car at the time, like many ex-servicemen he made a very sound investment by acquiring a classic AJS motorbike instead. What Les didn’t know about cars, bikes or their engines was not worth knowing, so they always got my mum and dad there and back, despite his rather unorthodox riding style which meant that Les always had to drop Mum home a few streets away from where she lived. He had to do that, to prevent my grandfather killing the both of them – a threat he had sworn to carry out if he ever caught her riding on the back of ‘that bastard dangerous thing’. It was hardly a surprising threat, made as it was after he had seen Les riding his bike up and down the street standing, Eros-like, on the seat.

Four blissfully happy years after their first date, Les and Betty went and spoiled it all by getting married at Marylebone parish church on St Patrick’s Day 1951. After a brief and predictably romantic stay at a room above a shop in St John’s Wood High Street, they moved to the infamous De Walden Buildings just around the corner, in Allitsen Road, NW8. Why my mum fell for this I have no idea, but I guess it was love and this was only just the 1950s. There was still rationing in England, and after several consecutive winters of murderous smog and with scores of servicemen still stationed overseas, number 4 De Walden may well have seemed like a little slice of heaven on earth to 21-year-old Betty.

In fact it was a two-roomed chambers in a big, brown-bricked Victorian slum. When they moved in there was no electricity or gas, no toilet or running water. Mum intended to use her thirteen pounds maternity money putting the electricity on, she told me. But Les was arrested and jailed for drunken driving just after I’d been born, so he needed the money to bail himself out. Only much later did she discover that there had been no fine, and he’d spent the money on more booze.

In the mid-1960s a cold-water sink unit was put in the flat, but until then the only water supply came from an ancient brown stone sink with a rusty, mildew-coated tap on the landing outside. This was shared with eight other families, all as hard up as us. However, by far the biggest worry for all the families on our floor was the community ‘crapper’, aptly named and situated at the darkest and coldest end of the landing. It was a black hole that warned you off from several feet away with a stench guaranteed to give you instant constipation. Until I was almost twelve, we would have to use buckets of water to flush it out every morning. Number 4 was, to say the least, cosy, consisting of a kitchen/living room area, and a bedroom.

That was it, there was no more.

The kitchen had a single window, framed by red-striped 1950s curtains with a floral motif. Mum had made matching seat covers, tablecloths and casing for the folding Z-bed that I later slept on. Nearby stood a huge kitchen cabinet, which contained everything that we owned and needed. I pulled this cabinet down on top of me when I was eighteen months old or so, trying to reach a bottle of garlic salt I’d taken a liking to which lived inside. I lay there surrounded by the smashed remains of my mum’s favourite Wedgwood dinner service, milk, red varnish and blood from the gash on the back of my head. All over the lino, it was. My mum took it quite well, I guess, by which I mean I’m still here to tell the tale.

The kitchen table was the focal point of the room, because there we not only ate and drank, we leaned. We leaned on the table to watch the almighty television that stood right next to it in the corner by the bedroom door in a place all its own. It became very important to me, that television. At times it would seem as if it was the light of my life.

A door separated the two rooms of our flat. On it was a brass doorknocker in the shape of a bust of Charles Dickens, in profile. Behind Charles was the bedroom, a very simple affair, as the double bed took up two-thirds of the available space. A chest of drawers and a glass-topped dressing table were squeezed in there too somehow. The lack of furniture was supplemented by the quality of Mum’s hand-crafted surrounds: her pleated bedspreads and cushion covers. The flat was always immaculate, reflecting my mum’s house-proud nature.

By the time I arrived, Dad was a private chauffeur for a wealthy family named Wallace. With the job came two uniforms, complete with a peaked cap. One was a dark blue pinstripe, the other grey. Each morning Les would don a clean white shirt and then lift up the mattress and remove the trousers he’d placed there the night before. It was a primitive but effective method of getting a good crease.

The thick lingering smoke of my father’s roll-ups was always present throughout the flat. Old Holborn tobacco wrapped in green Rizla papers, lit with an old chrome Zippo lighter and smoked down to a soggy butt, too wet for his attempt at a mouse-coloured moustache to burst into flames. Not that I was always averse to Les’s cigarettes, apparently. My mum tells me that she would often find a blissfully happy baby Stuart staring at the blank screen of our huge television set, clearly entranced and sucking and gumming his way through an ashtray full of cigarette butts. I had some strange habits, and I was a far from gorgeous child. ‘You weren’t a very pretty baby,’ my mum later told me. ‘People would come over to have a peek at you and say, “Oh … what a lovely pram”.’

The lovely pram, which must have been hell to carry up and down the four flights of stairs to our flat, was a source of amusement for me when I was small. One day I managed to unclip the undercarriage of it as we were crossing the main road by Lord’s Cricket Ground. ‘The wheels fell off and rolled away. You just laughed as the cars hooted. It cost me fifteen quid, that pram did.’

My mum tells horrible tales of a horrible child with horrible ways. Those early months at De Walden still bring painful memories flooding back for her. ‘Oh Jesus, you were never one for much sleep. Wanted attention all the time. Had to be played with, and only a half-pint of full (and she stressed the full) National Dried [milk powder] would shut you up.’

In the flat I would strip off and throw my baby clothes out of the window, so they moved my cot away from the window. But that didn’t stop me. En route to the clinic, beautifully fresh, immaculate knitted outfits would also hit the dirt. I’d arrive a complete disgrace, while all the other babies and their mothers looked down their noses at us. Locking my mother out of the flat was another of my great feats. The most serious occasion involved leaving her stranded on the landing as, inside, a cauldron of boiling water attempted to bleach my soiled nappies back to a respectable whiteness.

‘I’m a good boy,’ I gurgled.

‘Yes, you are, my darling,’ my mother lied, shoving dozens of chocolate Smarties under the door at me in order to keep me away from the boiling pan. She needn’t have worried, though. My appetite far outweighed my enquiring mind. I bawled my eyes out when an exhausted policeman, having climbed up the drainpipe and broken the window to get in, tried to pull me away from the foot of the door.

I had little practical musical experience as a baby. Rattles, drums or any other slightly percussive toys were entirely out of the question at my house. No sooner had some kind heart been thanked for the lovely present and assured that I’d have hours of fun playing adorable little tunes on it than my new musical toy would be wrenched from my stumpy hands and thrown in the nearest dustbin.

My childish pranks could have contributed to the fact that my mum went out to work when I was barely out of nappies, but it’s a less likely reason than one of pure need. My dad’s job may have paid very well, but since he could never pass a pub on the way home without popping in for an hour or five, by the time he got home with a pay packet there was significantly less in it than when he had left work. So Mum took a job in a small restaurant called the Black Tulip, situated in the High Street, St John’s Wood. The place did a good business serving a variety of dishes centred mainly on bacon, eggs and chips, although not necessarily in that order. There was always just enough grease to please everybody. She wore a black dress with the white frilly collar and cuffs like the other waitresses Joan Pockett and Kathleen Hanzewiniak, both of whom would become lifelong friends of hers.

These two delightful women became my surrogate aunties and were somehow closer than the real ones. Auntie Joan was a ‘Forces favourite’-style of lady with an hourglass figure, and she sported not only the biggest, reddest head of intricately rolled hair I’d ever seen, but wore make-up thicker than a kabuki actor. Her face was literally painted on. This both delighted and fascinated me. (I’m convinced that this is one of the reasons why I was attracted to make-up in later life.) Auntie Kathleen on the other hand was a Bette Davis type, who for her sins was divorced but still plagued by her crazy Polish husband, Michael. He was an architect, very tall, skinny, and with a big crooked nose and a big black moustache. His clothes hung off him as he sat in Kathleen’s parlour chain-smoking and demanding endless cups of tea. Once considered (mainly by himself, I suspect) quite a ladies’ man, he ruled the roost. He claimed he could never return to his homeland because of his mysterious activities in the Polish Underground during the war. I’d wonder if this ‘underground’ business referred to a career as a partisan or as a platform porter.

While Mum, Joan and Kathleen waitressed I was looked after by Nanny Smith, at 17 O’Neil House, just around the corner in Cochrane Street. Even by my tiny standards Nan was small, with a face similar to Geraldine Chaplin, Charlie’s actress daughter. Then in her late sixties, Nan looked much older, with a thin, kindly face and a body so delicate you wondered how she had borne seven children (four boys – Tommy, Tony, Wally, Bert – and two girls – my mother and Peggy, who had died at two years old. There was also a stillbirth, ‘but we don’t count that,’ said Mum).

Born Lily Ada Jopson, in Tiptree, Essex, Nan had spent her life as a nurse. She began nursing during World War I, when she met my grandfather. Later on she worked at the Children’s Hospital in Paddington Green. She had been one of the first supporters of the Marie Stopes movement demanding birth control for women. (It’s a pity she was never able to practise what she preached.) Almost stone deaf and constantly peering over wire-rimmed granny spectacles, she would fuss over me in her own silent way.

Lily Ada had married by far the most important man in my life as I grew up, my maternal grandfather. Born a Romany gypsy, Walter Albany Smith came into this world in a caravan in Oxford in 1898, and his life reads like a romantic lead in a D. H. Lawrence novel. It’s impossible to trace his family tree before this time as, in true gypsy tradition, the less contact with officialdom or society in general that his people had, they considered, the better. It is believed they were of Rumanian heritage. Judging by the thickset Slavic head and jawline that the whole family inherited, I think this is quite possible. The young Walter, or Wally as he became known, lived through a childhood of abject poverty. He wore no shoes on his feet until he ran off to join the army in 1914, aged just sixteen. Thankfully his mother reported him to the military authorities, and he was saved from almost certain death when he was returned home by MPs before he could get to the front.

Food was so scarce for his family that often they would be reduced to eating an obnoxious soup made from dandelions stewed in water. Despite the old Queen being long dead, the discipline employed by his father was thoroughly Victorian and he fully believed that sparing the rod meant spoiling the child. So Wally would be beaten with his father’s huge leather belt, the buckle of which would tear into his back, scarring him for life, at the merest hint of dissent from the boy or the silliest, mistaken, ‘bad’ behaviour.

Great-Grandma Smith was a much kinder soul altogether. My mother remembers her as a strikingly dark woman with a thick head of gypsy hair and large earrings dangling from her ears. She wore a ring on every finger and a black shawl embroidered with large flowers in vivid colours which was fringed around the bottom. In later life Great-Grandma Smith lost her sight, but before she did she was able to read fortunes from the tea leaves. She warned my mum not to marry Les, as it would be ‘stupid, and you’ll never be happy’, she told her. She then told my mum that she would bear one child, and one day meet an older man and be happy. All of which came to pass.

Given his father’s brutal nature, it’s little wonder that Wally was desperate to join the military and go off to fight someone his own size. His second attempt to join up, this time in the Royal Navy in 1916, was successful, and at last he owned his own pair of boots. While serving on HMS Colossus, Granddad spotted a torpedo, let out the warning, and saved the ship, for which he was decorated. He then fought at the Battle of Jutland before transferring to the new and very fragile submarine fleet. He did extremely well there, eventually earning the rank of leading torpedoman as the result of a peculiar incident. One day, apparently, the submarine’s engines gave out and the craft sank quietly to the bottom of the ocean. After a few hours without power and with the air running out, along with any hope of survival, the crew, in a true display of wartime heroics and British Bulldog mentality, broke out the rum ration and decided to meet their maker as painlessly as possible. They were all soon blind drunk. But Granddad and another torpedo-man kept working at the engines and were eventually successful in getting them going. So the crew woke up in an afterlife all too familiar to them.

Because of his tough background it’s perhaps unsurprising that Wally became a champion in the Navy boxing team. It’s also unsurprising that back on civvy street after the war, Granddad was considered by those who came to know him as rather a tough cookie. My mother describes him as being a ‘bit of a villain, with a hot temper’. She tells a story of how ‘once Tony, Tom and me were at the Odeon [cinema] Edgware Road, and met him at the Westminster Pub. All of a sudden Dad was in a fight with a couple of blokes in an alley. He came out a few minutes later. They didn’t.’

Wally swept Lily Ada, the nurse, off her feet, married her and went out to try and bring home the bacon. Right after World War I this was no easy task. Three long years of unemployment followed until he landed a job as a driver for Broads, a building company. At first Wally drove a horse and cart. Then came the early lorries that he learned to drive by trial and error. For three consecutive days he crashed into three unsuspecting milk carts. ‘Then I got the hang of it,’ Granddad would comment laconically. He spent a whole lifetime working for Broads and earned enough to support his wife and kids. They weren’t well off, but there was always food on the table, and a love that bonded them together.

Wally became my first true hero when I discovered that he was the reason that my father Les wore dentures where his four front teeth should have been. Granddad Smith had dragged Les out of a pub and knocked the teeth (and him) out with a single punch after he’d found out that he’d hit my mum. Wally was a person to be looked up to, respected. And feared – if you were bad, that is.

My father’s father, Granddad Tom Goddard, was an unlikely combination of musician, immaculate taxi driver, drinker and heavy gambler. He was a fine musician and led his own band; legend had it that he could play any instrument he tried. However unlikely this may seem, Granddad Goddard was an excellent pianist and probably could have squeezed a tune out of every instrument in his own band’s line-up. At their top-floor flat at 151 Bravington Road, Paddington, my grandparents would play host to many a World War II knees-up. Granddad’s upright piano stood against the front parlour wall, just up the stairs from the landing of their large flat. On Sunday afternoons as a child I’d sit up there mercilessly banging away at the keys. The noise was made worse by my use of the foot pedals, which would echo and extend the disastrous chords I’d concoct as I ‘played’. Every now and then I’d try to remember how to play ‘Chopsticks’, an impressive tune requiring the use of only two fingers that my dad repeatedly tried to teach me. A certain record entitled ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’ had convinced me that it was only a matter of time before my chimp-like compositions would suddenly transform into a classical masterpiece. Funnily enough, that never happened.

Granddad Tom was memorable for his nose more than anything else. A huge, outstanding one it was, which at my young age seemed to me to be quite out of the ordinary. I can remember when it first came at me in my pram, through blinding white sunlight in the courtyard at De Walden. It was potato-shaped, with red veins mapping out curvy roads around the bulbous fleshy mainland to the hidden caverns of his nostrils. Secondary roads of green skipped around these highways. Every part of it seemed to throb, and I wondered if he was in pain of any kind. But no, for here was a prime example of the true cockney boozer’s conk, made so famous by the legendary wartime actor Stanley Holloway (along with the greatW.C.Fields, of course). Years of knocking back alcohol of every description had left its mark, the particles of distilled sugar travelling to the furthest extremities of his nose. A gout of the face, it was to be worn with pride, almost.

Otherwise, Granddad was a bit of a dandy, especially when driving his cab. He always wore a pinstriped suit, freshly pressed, with a starched white shirt, regimental tie in a Windsor knot, a fresh carnation, highly polished brogues, bowler hat and gloves. When my mum first met him, she thought he resembled former British prime minister Sir Anthony Eden. There, unfortunately, any similarities ended. He was a difficult man for my gran to live with. A heavy drinker, he ruled the home with a fist of iron. Over the years he developed stomach ulcers, which by the time I arrived had restricted his drinking to an unlikely mixture of Guinness and milk. But he’d drink as much of that as he could.

Tom loved a gamble, and card games were a regular feature at Bravington Road. This must have been torture for my gran, who often saw her housekeeping money change hands the wrong way in her own parlour. Whatever happened, though, outside appearances had to be kept up, and Tom would just continue, feathers unruffled, never mind that he didn’t have a pot to piss in. Without doubt, the most tragic consequence of this was the time he gambled away the beautiful house they owned in Golders Green. There ended the family’s prospects of lower-middle-class status, comfort, security or fortune. Instead the taxi was loaded up and off they travelled to bombed-out, filthy old Paddington. Not that Tom seemed to be too bothered, and he always seemed to have money, laying out rounds of drinks for his mates.

My gran told me in the 1990s that he had been a Freemason, in a Scottish lodge. ‘Because it was cheaper to join and easier to get in,’ she recalled. It fitted with Granddad’s image of himself – that of a successful tradesman, looking to do his secret buddies a favour whenever he could. The truth about the organisation, however, is less impressive, according to my gran. She apparently had an argument with someone at the annual Masons’ ladies’ night, and was never invited back. Not that she considered it any great loss. When Granddad died she was assured by the Brotherhood that she’d never have to worry about money with the Freemasons behind her. ‘They sent me a fiver,’ she remembered years later, adding, ‘I was going to put it on the wall and frame it.’

Granddad Tom had a pathological dislike of my father, his son. Through no fault of his own, Les suffered for the death of his elder brother Charlie. Granddad had worshipped Charlie, his firstborn. By all accounts the boy was something of a prodigy, well behaved, intelligent and loving. Perfect. When he died of pneumonia at the age of five, Les didn’t stand a chance. To my heartbroken granddad, Les was nothing more than a poor substitute, and a constant reminder of his great loss. My father, a remarkably pretty child with curly blond hair, was referred to as a ‘girl’ by his father, and as soon as he could string a sentence together (and Tom could scrape the money) Les was sent off to private school. All Les’s efforts at school were dismissed by Tom as never being up to scratch, while any display of love from my grandmother towards her son was punishable by Tom. I gathered all this information from my Great-Aunt Mary, who would look after Les in London at the time. She firmly believes that his father’s behaviour led to Les’s drinking problem as well as other problems he suffered from in later life.

My father’s mother, my grandmother Caroline Anne God-dard, was usually referred to by her nickname, Bill. (I think that after six daughters my great-grandfather just decided it was time he had a son, and my gran, being a bit of a tomboy, was the closest he could get.) One of eleven children of the Hutchens family, her childhood was truly happy and not particularly hard. The family moved from Romney to the delightful village of Cookham in Berkshire just before World War I. She recalls running from her classroom to see a Zeppelin float over the town of Dean.

As old ladies, Grandmother Billy and her sister, my Great-Aunt Mary, would describe their life in service to me, and I was riveted from the start. Their family had long been ‘in service’, that is, working as domestics to the upper-middle-classes of Victorian and Edwardian England. Like her sisters and family before her, Billy left school at the age of fourteen and went directly into service as an under-parlourmaid for a wealthy family nearby. Up at five, her duties were scrubbing floors, polishing everything that could be made to shine, helping to prepare the food, and generally doing the shit jobs no one else wanted. Only Sunday afternoons were free, and even then, if she wanted to go out on a date, she had to have permission from ‘the missus’.

One term of employment ended rather dramatically for her when she fell prey to the amorous designs of the master of the house. This was not an uncommon occurrence at the time, and many an innocent working-class girl was seduced, used, then thrown out in disgrace when the bump began to show. My gran was chased but not caught, rescued by her younger sister Mary, who was working in the room next door. Both were dismissed the following morning, disgraced but still pure.

I used to bear this sort of thing in mind when watching the endless sagas of our British aristocracy on TV or in the cinema. Upstairs, Downstairs, Maurice, Room with a View, Brides-head Revisited or, worst of all, Howard’s End never quite impressed me as they glorified a corrupt society, stereotyping and patronising working people. I couldn’t care less about the turn-of-the-century rich and their problems trying to occupy their time or deal with their sexuality. I always found myself more interested in the faithful servants, and the extras with no lines who portrayed people like my grandmother, treated with all the respect of a well-behaved dog, tugging at a greasy forelock or curtseying.

Eventually Billy progressed through the ranks to the position of cook, for a Prussian archduke, no less. Then she met and married Tom and carried on doing the same thing, but without a wage.

As far back as I can remember, the food prepared by my gran was (and remained) of the most exquisite quality. Her Sunday roasts are memorable to this day. Perfect sides of roast lamb, beef and pork have passed my grateful lips, dressed with lashings of vegetables. Leeks, swede, parsnips, carrots, peas, as well as perfectly roasted potatoes and the ultimate Yorkshire pudding were all part of her repertoire. I was very lucky to have a forward-looking gran, who preferred the new to the old and who possessed a wonderful sense of humour. With the help of a gin she could also be encouraged to sing a song or two. There were no charming little folk songs in her set list, but, being a boisterous ball of energy, she’d belt out her own compositions and arrangements of old vaudeville tunes. Among them was ‘The Fiddle Is My Sweetheart’, which went like this:

Gran would let out a wonderful naughty laugh. Or rather, a cackle. She was like a high-pitched ‘Singing Policeman’, laughing at her own jokes.

Billy was tough and smart and she had to endure an incredibly hard life, which she did with humour. Her life, like that of my mother, was blighted by her husband’s drinking to excess and the effect that had on the family.

•

Because both my parents worked and there wasn’t always someone around to leave me with, I would spend hours, possibly all day, alone and creating an imaginary world. I’d imagine the bed was a huge steamship, for instance, and stand on the imaginary bow, my father’s chauffeur cap on back to front. I was a sailor and the floor surrounding me a turbulent sea, filled with the most dangerous of sharks and exotic fish. I memorised every inch of that flat. Every corner offered a particular challenge for me to get to. A white, one-eyed teddy bear named Chessy would accompany me on Amazonian adventures through the infamous Bedstead Pass to the Plains of the Kitchen Table or Sideboard Mountain. Over the years I became quite partial to being away from the other kids at school or in the yard, for I knew nothing could match the excitement of my imaginary games.

My nights were spent sleeping first in my parents’ bed, and then on a folding Z-bed in the kitchen, to which I’d be carried after Dad got home. Dad never got home before the pubs closed. That was the golden rule. Together with the rule that he ruled. I’ll never forget the sound of his footsteps crossing the yard below. That low, boozy cough as he approached the stairs. These sounds would wake me up like a terrible alarm clock. Then I’d have to pretend that I was asleep, because I knew what followed would be awful, and I wanted no part of it.

His key twisted in the lock and in would come that night’s Mr Hyde. The mighty arguments soon followed the first icy moments of silent hatred that stood between them. Mum was in a no-win situation. If she didn’t start up the proceedings with a, ‘So what time do you call this?’ he’d pick on her with, ‘What are you looking at?’

Then he’d attack her with a stream of vile, abusive language, making hurtful, unjustified accusations about anything he considered her guilty of. Slow, ugly words spat out of his purple, puffy, twisted face. It wasn’t an experimental concoction that transformed this Doctor Les Jekyll, the kindest of men, into the nightly Beast, but a dozen or so pints of Whitbread light ale. Angel to Arsewipe. Every night. Like some sick magic.

The magic was at its sickest when I’d hear my mum’s screams suddenly turn into a low moan. Then I knew he’d hit her. In the stomach or in the face were the usual places. It was only this that stopped my pretending to be asleep, and I’d run to her where she’d fallen, crumpled in the corner, holding her stomach, fighting for breath. I’d press my face to hers, still wet with tears and streaked by comical streams of running make-up.

All the nightly nonsense eventually affected me. I started to sleepwalk and hallucinate. It began at an early age, although exactly when is hard to say. I may have been two, three, four or six when these moments of pure hallucination started occurring. The sleepwalking, so I am told, usually took the form of me desperately trying to open the front door and get away. To be fair, it’s quite common in growing children, but the hint to my father couldn’t have been stronger.

The hallucinations were terrifying. To this day I can recall what used to happen. Sitting wide awake in the early hours of the morning, I’d be in the middle of a giant aquarium. Perfect, three-dimensional, technicolor fish would swim all around the room. Sharks, stingrays and Portuguese men-of-war would slide past within inches of my pyjamas. I would shake my parents awake to ask them what was going on, pointing at the different creatures as they passed. This usually scared them enough for Les to promise that he would mend his ways. Which indeed he would, for about two days. Then he was back on form, soaking his bread in it, as my gran used to say.

As the child of an alcoholic I find it easy to be a teetotaller. After twenty years I began to feel a certain amount of empathy with my father and the millions like him. Empathy, yes; sympathy, no. As a man, at any social gathering I attend there will inevitably be people who try to get me to have ‘just a sip of wine or champagne and not be such an antisocial bastard’. I have always refused, and continue to do so because I am perhaps lucky to have first-hand experience of this disease and to see that there’s no romance in it. I’m not brave enough to believe that I might not have inherited this gene after all, given that my father and his father both suffered from alcoholism. I’m a coward when it comes to drink.

•

Our flat was one of four situated on the first floor at De Walden. The stairs leading up to it were lined with old brown tiles that had only sparse patches of the original enamel remaining. The hard, grey, stone steps were cold in both summer and winter. Always dark, there was a single bulb throwing out just enough light to determine the numbers on the doors in each corridor. With its lack of sunlight, the hallway was always damp, the air moist and smelling of cheap, strong disinfectant. However, a true spirit, reminiscent of the Blitz a little more than a decade earlier, existed between the families who lived along it. This sense of belonging lifted us out of our surroundings, offering some relief from what could otherwise be described as a Dick-ensian scenario.

The neighbours were an interesting bunch of characters. Next door at number 3 lived the Hill family. Brenda was a mother of two daughters, Susan and Sandra. She was a big, powerful woman. Her ebony beehive hairdo and plump, voluptuous figure gave her a most imposing authority. Under skin-tight pencil skirts, her great fleshy white thighs would rub together as they fought for space and air, and beneath the skirts her white ankles were always overflowing from stiletto shoes. Brenda took shit from no man, woman, child, animal, vegetable or mineral. But especially man, and in particular her husband, who lived, shall we say, under the thumb.

Her youngest daughter Sandra seemed to adopt her mother’s approach to boys from an early age. ‘Boys’ in this case being me. Putting up with her superior behaviour was never easy, and one sunny day my patience gave in. I struck her on the back of the head with the polka-dot handle of my Lone Ranger cap gun. When Sandra returned from the hospital, bravely bearing eight neat stitches, she forgave me instantly and we became closer than I’d ever dreamt we could be. I had, incidentally, cried my eyes out at the sight of what I’d done to poor Sandra. So upset was I that neither Brenda nor my mum could stop the tears. Promises that they wouldn’t punish me, that it wasn’t my fault or even that she deserved it made no difference whatsoever. Only the sight of my bandaged victim and her ultimate forgiveness put me out of my misery.

At number 2, the flat opposite ours, lived the Dumbletons. Mary was a tiny, attractive platinum blonde, with big eyes enhanced by loads of make-up and plump lips. Her husband Terry was an authentic Teddy boy, always combing his thick, oily, rolled-elephant-trunk DA into a kiss-curl just below eye level. They also had two daughters, Kimmy, the eldest, and Tracey-Lee the baby. The girls were the spitting image of their mother, and playing with Kimmy always felt special.

Around the corner at the end of the landing lived Anna, a mysterious Dutch woman who kept to herself. A kind enough person if you took the trouble to get to know her, I fear she was the subject of much gossip due to having a live-in lover and a son no one ever saw. (My mother was, however, godmother to the poor boy, so poor Anna was not without her allies on the landing.) Of course, at this time, merely having a European accent gave rise to ample suspicion amongst the cheeky, chirpy, cockney fraternity – ‘salt of the earth’, my arse.

The ‘black sheep’ family of De Walden was, without question, the Stewart clan. Originally from Scotland, they lived at either end of the building. On the top floor of our block lived Susie, the eldest Stewart sister, with her husband, two daughters and a baby son. A slight, fair-haired woman, Susie was a firm but fair type who possessed enormous strength of character. This was just as well, for it was poor Susie who had to bear the brunt of responsibility and embarrassment resulting from the scandalous activities of the rest of the family, situated a hundred yards away in the end block. They were nicknamed ‘the gruesome threesome’, and not without some justification, for here were three truly intimidating people.

To begin with there was Jim, the alcoholic father, a tiny, inconspicuous man, never without a cigarette pinned between thin lips. Unassuming and polite when sober, he would transform into a wild, abusive, violent little shit after a visit to the pub. One night he burst into our flat by mistake after leaving the pub. He was so drunk that he’d staggered right instead of left at the main gate. An enormous crash heralded his entrance, when, unable to open the door with his keys, he simply kicked it in. After a quarter of an hour of vicious swearing, belching and farting, Susie was able to convince Jim of his error and drag him to his home. ‘Fuck aaaallaya anyway,’ were his parting words as he tripped down the stairs, hit his head on the wall and threw up all down himself.

And so to his two other unfortunate offspring, Rita and Dave. I liked Rita enormously, as did all the other kids. She always gave us a good tip to buy ourselves sweets whenever we ran errands for her. We could never understand why our mothers warned us against her. Perhaps it was because of the loud plastic raincoats she favoured, or the regularity with which she changed her hair colour. I thought she was very beautiful. (Not as beautiful as Kimmy Dumbleton maybe, but an eyeful all the same.)

One afternoon a number of policemen turned up asking for Rita. Then we didn’t see her for a while. Our mothers seemed to be unsurprised by all this, and they kept whispering the word ‘prostitute’ under their breath. It appears that Rita was a working girl whose profession, although one of the oldest in the world, coupled with the abortion she’d supposedly had, outraged the hypocritical morals of the De Walden majority.

This left only Dave, who was the closest twentieth-century London has come to producing an authentic Dickensian street urchin. Had Fagin existed he would certainly have keenly wanted to enrol someone like Ian instead of the twerpish Oliver Twist. And if he had, then the Artful Dodger would have had the shit beaten out of him, and Fagin’s gang would have gained a new and far more formidable leader. Dave was without doubt a blueprint for the professional criminal. Dirt poor, filthy and motherless, he roamed the streets as he liked. His clothes were threadbare, and even in the middle of winter, in the snow and slush, he’d run around wearing just a T-shirt, a pair of shorts and worn-out shoes. Many of the mothers took pity on the boy, feeding him a hot meal whenever they could. The trouble was that Dave was a very talented thief, and if you weren’t careful the meal could turn out to be rather expensive. Watches, cutlery, clothes or anything saleable would disappear like magic after he’d visited.

At the front of the buildings, in a basement flat, lived a kindly old woman known to me as Scotch Annie. A big, fat old dear she was too, and would occasionally babysit me. I always loved my stays with her, as they invariably meant a slice of cake or a cup of cocoa, or some chocolate, as long as I ‘didna tell ma mother’. She talked lovingly of her dead husband, Noel Tinni-son. Born on a Christmas day, and appropriately named, Noel had the distinction of having served as a navigating officer on the disastrous maiden voyage of the Titanic. He had survived but never fully recovered from the injuries or the awful memories. He gave my mother a Bible he had carried with him on the trip, which she still has and cherishes. Scotch Annie also introduced me to the fortifying wonders of porridge, which I still consider a delicacy (when it’s made right) and a close favourite behind rice pudding, the culinary delight of my life.

The only other family of note in the buildings were the Palmers, who lived on the top floor of the block opposite. Harry, the father, was a sour-faced, bald-headed, bolshy type. Barbara, his wife, was a thickset European. You could imagine her at home serving huge kegs of beer to a rowdy band of Bavarians in a bierkeller. Fitting the stereotype of a ‘Fraulein’, her thick Slavic accent didn’t exactly endear her to the rest of the community. Despite her continual assurances that she was Polish or West-phalian, she was considered to be an undercover Nazi. She didn’t help matters much by dressing her son François in leder-hosen and parting his hair to the side. But in my eyes, all of Harry and Barbara’s faults were forgiven by the fact that this unlikely pair had managed to produce the lovely Sonya. Sonya, with her plaited hair and braces on her teeth was the first time love of my life.

After television, of course.

Television, the big brown box tucked away in the corner of our room. Just below it, almost as holy, almost as important, sat the red Dansette record player with white plastic piping. My other saviour, music, often filled the air at De Walden, providing comfort, adventure, excitement and escape (at least when Les wasn’t around). Here was my first education, leaving images and sounds so strong in my subconscious that they still flash into my mind today, crystal clear. I shut my eyes and think back to those times and feel a warm glow inside, especially when I remember Ricki, another babysitter. A blonde beatnik, she played down her considerable looks and figure wearing slacks, huge ‘sloppy Joe’ pullovers and wild, ornate glasses which swept out at each side of her face like the wings of a Cadillac. I grew very fond of Ricki. She brought her teenage energy with her, along with a sense of joy and laughter, when she came to see me. But above all, she brought her record collection, and with it my introduction to the wonderful world of rock ’n’ roll. And just in time. For up until then I’d been exposed only to the more sober tastes of my parents. Not that I minded Perry Como’s sugary invitation to catch a falling star or pass some magic moments with him. They still rate as two of my all-time favourites. There was also the high-kicking mensch himself, Frankie Vaughan (looking like Sylvester Stallone’s older brother), asking sex-starved housewives everywhere to give him the moonlight. Frankie also recorded an extremely nifty Elvis-type rocker entitled ‘Honey Bunny Baby’, which would surprise a few people listening to it today.

Mum adored the cheeky cherub Dickie Valentine, the wholly underrated and tragic Michael Holliday, Big Frank (Sinatra), Nat King Cole, and Frank Ifield, the yodel master, who blamed his girlfriend for the state of his voice. She taught me to yodel, he claimed. (I’m convinced that it is as a result of listening to his ‘I Remember You’ record that in my early recordings with Adam and the Ants, yodelling accounted for a large part of my vocal repertoire.) But by far the most played song at our house was by the late great Matt Munro – ‘Softly As I Leave You’.

Les considered all this stuff to be ‘crap’, of course, insisting that trad jazz was the world’s only legitimate form of popular music. In reality his interest went as far as his collection did – that is, one copy of the single ‘Midnight In Moscow’ by Acker Bilk and his Paramount Jazz Band. This disc was sacred. Mum and I knew better than to even dare to look at, let alone touch it. ‘Knackers to Acker’, Mum would often quip, from a safe distance.

On Sundays, as the roast whatever cooked away in the oven, we would listen to the radio, usually ‘Three-Way Family Favourites’, when the poor, lonely, brave members of Her Majesty’s forces could listen to requests sent from their more idiotic relatives back home in Crawley, Bristol, Burnley, or even up there in bonnie Scotland. For some reason, every tune played was middle-of-the-road, light orchestral or a showtune. However, worse than this had to be Les’s other favourite radio programme, ‘The Billy Cotton Band Show’. A throwback to wartime vaudeville, the show began with Billy’s memorable cry of ‘Way-kee wake-aye!!!’, delivered as if he’d just coughed up a wad. Billy would then treat us to his own very special brand of third-rate comedy sketches. Now, I’m sure that Billy could have got away with his dull jokes during the Blitz, when a fucking great bomb could fall on your head at any second, but we were now living in the age of the comic genius. The Goons (including Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan), Tony Hancock and Norman Wisdom were all performing and making people laugh about an apparently different Britain from the one in which Billy Cotton seemed to live. Yet still Billy would make ancient jokes and Les would laugh along. Maybe it made my dad recall a time when he wore a uniform that commanded more respect than the one he wore as a chauffeur.

Ricki saved me from all this. Suddenly a new wave of music filled the air when she was around, and it was the real thing: Elvis, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Sam Cooke. All down and dirty and American, from the land where everything was bigger and better. Like any other English new-breed teenager, Ricki also subscribed to the rock ’n’ roll gospel as sung by home-bred idols. British rockers were a bunch of lightweights compared with the real American article, though. Only the chirpy cockney Tommy Steele stood out to my infant, but no less discerning, ears. Blasting away at ‘Rock With The Caveman’ or ‘Elevator Rock’, Tommy managed to at least match some of the Yankee efforts. He did so despite the musical backing of the Val Parnell big band, which, like the rest of the British music establishment at the time, thought the rock ’n’ roll revolution a passing comedy fad and performed accordingly. But the boy from Bermondsey had captured my imagination, and a few years later, when I saw Tommy Steele leaning on a Wurlitzer 1800 jukebox in the coffee bar scene from The Duke Wore Jeans at the Saturday morning pictures, Odeon Swiss Cottage, my interest in becoming a singer began.

Lonnie Donegan was also a regular performer at De Walden. With his unique vocal range, and in the best spirit of Woody Guthrie, ‘The Battle Of New Orleans’, and ‘Rock Island Line’ were belted out, even louder later with the humorous ‘Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On The Bedpost Overnight?)’ and ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman’.

Ricki was obviously inspired by the skiffle craze (in 1958 garage bands sprang up all over the land, equipped with three chords, cheap guitars, tea-chest and broom bass and kazoo) and bought me a plastic Woolworths guitar. Ricki would stand me on our table, in front of the polished side of the TV. Here, looking at myself aged six in the mirrored wood, I was encouraged to mime and sing along with the music. The bright light thrown from a table lamp above created a truly stagelike setting, as I strummed away at the imaginary strings (Mum had removed them right after I’d unwrapped the guitar).

Ricki eventually married a technician who worked at the St John’s Wood television studios and was gone from my life, but the influence she had on me was not. I was too young to realise it, but the rock ’n’ roll education I received buried itself deep inside me; it was forever under my skin. There it waited, maturing, always capable of lifting me out of boredom or a bad situation: I would simply hum the opening bars of the songs I knew by heart.

After Ricki left, I returned myself to the power of the great god Television. I was a member of the first true television generation. Rationed though my viewing was, the telly was the ultimate in early 1960s pleasure and entertainment. I never argued with it. Whatever it had to offer suited me just fine, particularly the Sunday film, with its Gainsborough Studio releases, or Ealing comedies. These black and white films were usually something to do with the recent war, and always starred John Mills, Jack Hawkins, Anna Neagle, and Sam Kydd in a bit part. In a league all their own stood the marvellous Alastair Sim at his creepy best and Alec Guinness in many guises. Thrown in with these were Hollywood’s finest, Errol Flynn, John Wayne, Clark Gable, and James Stewart, and, all too often, the second-division stuff too, with Stewart Granger and Victor Mature. To me, they were all sheer pleasure.

I witnessed the first TV shows catering solely for children, all of which came courtesy of the BBC. The Watch with Mother series, which showed twice a week, was a marvel for kids like me. Compulsive viewing, addictive, and speaking my sort of language. The big paper flower that opened at the start of each show, and the charming piano tune that went with it, guaranteed perfect silence and a hundred per cent attention from children who only seconds before would be shouting, screaming or smashing things up. For the next twenty minutes I was in another world entirely. As the primitive wooden puppets, strings clearly visible, hopped around the screen, a woman sounding remarkably like Queen Elizabeth II would tell us a story. Unfortunately, television was inevitably replaced in my daytime schedule by the legal necessity of attending school.

•

My first school was Robinsfield Infants, situated around the corner from De Walden in Townshend Road. One of the prefab-style ‘modern’ structures, the school was large, new and boasted two enormous grey concrete playgrounds. Mum took me to school on the first day with surprising ease. There were no tears, no screaming or clinging like the bulk of the other kids. For me this was the beginning of a new adventure. Never before had I seen so many other children in one place. The deal I made with Mum was that I would have my own desk, and be on my own at school, so I went quietly. At first. Little did I know that here was a place that would introduce a number of ‘firsts’ in my young life.

My time at Robinsfield was happy enough - from my point of view, that is - but less enjoyable for my teachers, I fear. ‘You were a little sod,’ Mum recalls, and not without some justification. On two consecutive days I smashed one of the headmistress’s office windows with a brick - these were plate-glass windows, about twelve foot by six foot. The first time I did it I was undoubtedly showing off in front of another boy. It was a demand for the kind of attention that I was used to getting on the landing at De Walden. That time I was given the benefit of doubt as to whether I meant it. However, when I threw a brick through the window the second time - mainly to hear that fantastic sound of breaking glass, but also because I’d liked being the centre of attention the previous day - Mrs Phillips, the headmistress, summoned Mum to the school. She demanded a drastic improvement in my behaviour, and threatened expulsion. She also informed Mum that I was ‘by far the most horrible child’ it had ever been her misfortune to meet, let alone teach. I remember little about the incidents, other than that superb smashing sound as the glass broke, the playground population parting like the Red Sea, and dozens of fingers pointing me out as the offender to the teacher who arrived a short while later.

Robinsfield was the first place I became aware of girls as interesting playmates. (More interesting than just people to fight with verbally or hit over the back of the head with the polka-dot handle of your Roy Rogers cap gun, that is.) The pure and innocent desire to see what it was that little girls had that I didn’t have, and vica versa, took a strong hold of me. This desire was manifested in a game, played in secret, and known universally as Doctors and Nurses.

My first game took place under a table in the front classroom at Robinsfield, at the invitation of a beautiful blonde girl named Harriet. I was as impressed with her looks and knowledge of the game as I was with myself for being able to pronounce her name all in one go. There, under the formica top, we pulled at each other’s elastic. ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’ Wee Doctor Stuart examined the secret treasures of that little peach down there as Nurse Harriet peeked at nature’s only acorn with balls attached. We were both very serious, almost religious in our explorations of each other’s private parts. We had no idea why, but the fact that it was an area obscured by clothes suggested some naughtiness. Afterwards, Harriet and I would hold hands as if some special silent bond now existed between us.

It wasn’t my first sexual experience; that had happened at a very early age. I make no ridiculous claim that I had any idea of what was stirring in my young loins, or why, but what set me going was my first look at a fine pair of women’s legs. It was at a time in my life that is too early to pinpoint, but I can’t have been older than five or six. A close friend of my mother, a French au pair named Vivien, was at our flat one day. I recall standing opposite her as she sipped her tea. Suddenly she sat upright and slid forward on the armchair, possibly to get closer to Mum’s conversation. As she did so, her tight skirt rose up above her tanned, shapely, athletic-looking legs.

Then it happened.

My short trousers showed no sign of an erection or anything remotely smutty, but a warm, gleeful, satisfying glow started to spread all over my body. Inexplicable though it was, I had to go and tell my weather-beaten teddy bear and confidant, Chessy, all about it. I told him I was going to take him with me to meet French Vivien, and he should ‘prepare himself for something special’.

The first woman I had a major crush on, though, was Mrs Joanna Saloman, my form mistress at Robinsfield School. Maybe it’s coincidence, but she was not only a tall redhead of outstanding beauty, she also had the most wonderful figure, with long, shapely legs. The time I spent gaping at her became almost a religious experience for me. Of course this went unnoticed by her, as she was concerned only with helping me to learn something, and save me from the life of delinquency I was clearly headed for. But importantly, she returned my ‘love’ by the encouragement she showed me, especially for painting pictures.

One day she noticed my enthusiasm during the painting of a picture I called Mother Goose, which featured a large duck-shaped creature, in profile, surrounded by a bright blue sky, white fluffy clouds, and feathers of many colours, all individually painted with nifty wavelike strokes of my brush. Mrs Saloman congratulated me, and called the rest of the class over to have a look. I was naturally pleased with myself, but more elated by the belief that I’d painted my way into her heart. I imagined that regardless of my size and age, we’d simply fly off somewhere together. She would cuddle and kiss me, and let me kiss her back. I memorised every inch of her face – the pale orange and browns of her eye make-up, her high, delicate cheekbones, her small, full mouth. She was somehow Victorian-looking, like a Dante Gabriel Rossetti model, with skin so pale, enhanced by a light powder. Framing all this was her waterfall of tumbling red and auburn ringletted hair.

Mrs Saloman’s son Nick was a good two or three years older than me, but we would later become good friends. He introduced me to long hair, Jimi Hendrix and electric guitars, which he played wildly, and not without skill.

My crush on Mrs Saloman was necessarily impossible, but simple and perfect in its sincerity and innocence. I had a huge desire to impress her, without quite knowing why or what to do about it, but was nevertheless blissfully happy. I tried not to think of the inevitable day when it would all end and I’d have to go to big school. Barrow Hill.