Читать книгу I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau - Gary Kemp - Страница 10

Rotherfield Primary stood at the end of the street; a typical redbrick Victorian state school, infused with the smell of sour milk and hot plimsolls. The rule for boys was to wear shorts until they were eleven, which gave the local long-trousered schools great ammunition to abuse us with. In June, shorts made sense, but in winter we were a swarm of goosebumps. Towards the end of my time there my mother thought it too extravagant to buy me a new pair, even though I’d reached a size where my hulking thighs were bursting out of my shorts like escaping sausage meat, and when I sat down they’d ride up and resemble a pair of worsted underpants.

My parents were constantly pushed to the limit of their purse just buying what was necessary, and so to give love and save cash my mother knitted jumpers for us. I particularly remember a rusty brown one that I wore proudly for school the day it was finished, although I was a little unsure about the jagged blue ‘G’ she’d sewn on its breast. Martin, of course, had a perfectly straight ‘M’.

I was spotted—for rust can be a little lurid—as soon as I entered the school gates. I’d forgotten about the ‘G’.

‘That stands for Germ!’ A playground nasty confronted me; even at eight, he already had the worn face of a man. ‘Look! G for Germ!’ He was now pointing out his witty discovery to his host of sycophants. The phrase became a ringing tune repeated endlessly for my benefit by more and more of his cronies. I never wore the jumper again without tears.

Even visiting barbershops seemed frivolous when my dad could easily do it himself. It was the era of the as-seen-on-TV gadget, and the kings of these domestic necessities were K-Tel. They’d sell you things that you never knew you needed, with chirpy, urgent voiceovers and slick demonstrations. Vegetable choppers, knitting machines, even hair trimmers arrived at our house. This last device was designed to trim the hair by just combing it through. In actual fact, it tore the hair in random places as it ripped its way down; a medieval torture instrument by any other name. My father would force us on to a chair and then begin his Sweeney Todd-like operation. You’d sit and pray for no pain, but then it would catch on a knot or a curl and successfully remove your hair whole from its follicle. It felt as if it had been yanked from the back of your eye and you jumped like a galvanised frog. To make things worse, the more haircuts my dad administered the blunter the ‘trimmer’ became. When it was over I’d sit in the chair, shoulders covered in broken pieces of hair, and wipe away tears. I’m not sure if these homemade haircuts were actually to save money or simply to satisfy my father’s love for DIY.

He was creative with his hands, and apart from the usual shelves and decorating, if there was a fancy dress competition or an Easter hat parade then Martin and I would invariably be wearing something grand, often mechanical, and always of a winning formula. I felt his love for us through the time and effort he put in, and the Kemp boys stood out at school because of it; though not always in the way we would have chosen.

My brother had a fully working windmill bonnet made for him once, and I remember awkwardly walking to school dressed as a knave-of-hearts playing card—a large painted box hung on me from braces, while a hat and straw wig finished off my nursery-rhyme look. Embarrassingly, I won. As usual.

On one awful occasion, though, my mother cried over what I had to wear. I was crossing the street and must have been struggling to walk as my shoes were too tight. My poor mother was mortified—they had no money at the time to buy me a new pair. I didn’t think we were any different—everyone we knew owned very little; houses were rented, and everything we sat on, slept on, drove in and watched was on HP. Constant saving through ‘Christmas Boxes’, coupons or Green Shield Stamps would pay for holidays, and bottles were always returned promptly for their thruppence deposit.

My parents needed to work hard for money, and at times our front room resembled a factory. My father not only worked Saturday mornings but also brought home work for some extra cash, and for a while we had a small printing press squeezed into a corner. The smell of ink soon became a familiar, homely one. My mother also worked from home as a machinist, stitching up ‘golliwogs’ among other things, and the rattle of the Singer sewing machine andMum’s frantically pedalling foot became our constant soundtrack.

To a child, things reveal themselves in symbols. Once, for a curious, forgotten reason, but probably to find money for sweets, I reached into my mother’s coat pocket as it hung over a chair. Not only was I surprised to find the pockets empty, but also both of them had holes, and my hand reached down into the dusty lining. It shocked me and I snatched my hand away. It felt as though I’d discovered something hidden about my mother. And, possibly, about us.

Like Dad,Mum was the youngest of a family of five children. She knew very little about her father, Thomas Green, as he’d died from gangrene before she was born, and so hated was he that he was never mentioned thereafter. A drinker and a bully, this road-worker of Irish descent, proudly born on St Patrick’s Day, would terrorise the home—when he chose to be there, as he often vanished for long periods of time. His background is unknown, his Catholic family having ostracised him when he married Elizabeth Bristow of Shoreditch, an Anglican with no previous pious convictions. ‘Liz’—ten years his junior—worked in the local bathhouse and blamed her later debilitating rheumatoid arthritis on the dampness of her workplace. A woman in constant pain when I knew her, she rarely spoke to me, and because of her ‘bad legs’ played little with her grandchildren.

I picture her, grey hair, grey face, puffing billows of grey smoke around the room, as if her body were making grey at such a rate it needed to expel the surplus. Sitting toothless and pinnied in her twelfth floor flat, bloated legs on a leatherette pouffe, mechanical ashtray perched on a metal stalk by her side, she would talk to my mother while Martin and I sat motionless on the sofa, letting her clouds slowly embrace us. When Nan’s constant smoking had filled her faithful ashtray, I was allowed the privilege of operating it, and with a press of a button would watch its little trapdoors open and the dirty butts vanish into its ashy bowels.

My parents would often take my grandmother out in our black Ford Popular on summer day trips. Southend-on-Sea was a favourite, and Martin and I would sit trapped in the back of the car, windows closed, while Nan puffed solemnly away for four or so hours on her Player’s Weights. These were pre-service-station days, and Nan’s bladder had to be emptied in numerous lay-by bushes along the route, making it a journey of immense proportions, but at least allowing us some respite from the fug. We’d finally arrive, set her down on a deckchair, put a plate of whelks in her hand, and play in the mud for a few hours before the return journey home and another gassing.

I could leave her there, in the back of the Popular, heading home towards Shoreditch, or maybe jump-cut to 1978 and the last time I saw her, waving me goodbye from her hospital bed, ancient against the smooth, fresh pillowcase; either way I would be doing this woman a disservice, the woman I never knew, the one that existed before the broken version that I met. So I want to wave goodbye to you again Nan, and try to see the young, cockney girl who once fell excitedly in love; the woman sadly resigned to the constant disaffection of her husband; the mother who was forced to say goodbye to her babies at a wartime railway station; the fighter who worked all the hours she could to feed her five children; and the brave widow, who once crawled from a shelter to see her home and all her lovely things crushed by a German bomb.

The Duke of Clarence was a busy Victorian pub, full of etched glass and polished wood, with a well-worn upright piano pushed against a nicotined wall. Part of the terrace, it adjoined our house and was the venue for my parents’ wedding celebrations. Of a winter’s evening, returning from shopping or a family visit with my mother, I would hear the liquored ribaldry coming from the smoky warmth inside, and through the swinging door witness flashes and hints of this secret, prohibited place of adults, brilliantly lit in all its bottly glitter. My parents weren’t drinkers—I don’t think they’d been inside a pub since the night of the broken gas mantle—and so the people within held some kind of illicit attraction for me. My father would occasionally have a bottle of brown ale on a Saturday night—his glass perched on the mantelpiece as a symbol of the weekend—and manage to make it last the entire evening, whereas it would take at least a wedding for my mother to drink. My bed was next to the pub’s adjoining wall, and at night I would lie and listen to the muted devilish sounds of the piano accompanying hearty, raucous singing. Those old, boozy music-hall songs that swam through the wall—still part of the prevailing culture in the mid-sixties, albeit waning—became my lullaby, and to this day I’m home when I hear them.

Once a month, local mods would converge on the pub and I’d stare out of my bedroom window, thrilled by the scooters gliding down the street, a dream in white sparkle and mirrors, reflecting the sharp, neat lines of their riders. This was certified mod country—a greased rocker wouldn’t dare walk the Essex Road. Young men here took a feminine level of time in their grooming, and my cousins’ boyfriends would be all slim suits, burned-in partings and geezer sovereigns.* The mods would reincarnate themselves here one day as soul boys and I would join them, but that’s for the future. Right now, my Aunt Dolly is drinking inside, blonde and beehived, her voice warm with rum and black.

Dolly lived two doors away from us with her mother and her brother, David, and she’d occasionally pop in on her way to the pub. I’d never smelt perfume before, and she was all sweets and smoke on our sofa, with a great big laugh that denied the cancer swelling within her. When she died, David’s ‘mum’ revealed to him that she was really his grandmother, and that Dolly was not his sister at all, but in fact his real mother. I was beginning to realise that it was what people thought you were that was important, even if it wasn’t the truth.

In front of me is a grainy black-and-white photograph of my family, taken in the Clarence’s upstairs function room during the wedding reception for my pretty cousin Janice. It’s about 1967, and she has just married one of the Nashes, an appropriate moniker for the family who ferociously dominated the Islington underworld. Here’s Ted, my great-uncle who fought in the First World War, standing proud in a three-piece suit, face as white as his hair, homburg settled on a cabinet behind him. Here’s Aunt Flo, looking mischievous and twinkley in winged spectacles, and here’s my cousin’s husband, wearing a pin stabbed through his collar and, like the other men in the picture, hair trimmed neatly and Brylcreemed. The men wear dark suits, white shirts and sombre ties with small, hard knots pushed up to strangling point. The younger women have their hair high in beehives, while the seated, older ones look comfortably ample and matronly as they contribute to the ashtrays that spill over on the table. My parents are both sporting tans, telling me that we must have just returned from our annual summer visit to my Uncle Tom and Aunt Joyce’s family home in Swansea, and that there had been good weather that year on the Mumbles. I’m stood behind my brother, but you can only make out the top of my head, hair newly trimmed—probably by Dad’s do-it-yourself shearing tool.

Staring at the photograph now, I’m reminded that I may have been a little tipsy here. The reception had deteriorated into post-speech raggedness, the children starting to be ignored in favour of flowing booze and knees-up music. Women were kicking off shoes and dancing in stockinged feet on the now sticky carpet that had, over the years, cushioned many a cockney do. Lured by fascination with what my parents had claimed was a reception full of bookmakers and villains from the Angel, an area of Islington where Essex Road met Upper Street, I wandered around the edge of the room. I was attracted to a mucky, lipstick-stained glass of thick, yellowy fluid, and, lifting it from the deserted table, drank its sweet contents. The elixir was—magically, I thought—called a Snowball; is it any wonder that I wanted to drink one of those? Head curiously light, I loitered around the male conversations at the bar, now heavy with cigar smoke and braggadocio. It was here, in hushed tones, that I overheard a cousin mention the Krays to another man. Was it a gang? A new musical group even? There was such reverence and awe in his voice that it struck me, even at that age, that whoever or whatever they were, they were to be feared and, disturbingly, this wedding was somehow bringing them closer to my door.

And then the bragging men were rushing past me. A fight, outside somewhere, between some of the wedding party and a gang of interloping rivals. The excitement that suddenly swept through a number of the male guests as they ran into the street was palpable. Someone told me to stay where I was but I was thrilled by these heavy, bristling blokes, hot in their brinylon shirts, as they strode back into the hall, pumped with adrenalin and beer, cigars still smoking in hands, breathlessly recounting what had either just or, more realistically, almost occurred. Many years later, these would be the kind of men that I would draw on when asked to play one half of that feared East End fraternity.

With friends from show business and politics, and pictures of them by Bailey and other society photographers, the Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie, were supreme rulers of London’s underworld, and their name had fast become a byword for proletarian power. They dressed in the stark, dark uniform of the working-class male, which owed more to the sartorial sobriety of the forties and fifties than anything that could be considered ‘swinging’ in this new age. The Krays put the Nashes in the shade.

We poured out of the Clarence and into the warm night air. It felt grown-up to be part of the noise in the street, the noise that usually woke me, and I was thrilled by our loud, carefree voices echoing off the redbrick housing estate opposite. Bentham Court had been built in the hole that the doodlebug had made and it would be there, within the next year or so, that I would meet a dynamic young Irish woman who’d set my life on a course that would one day take me to Broadmoor prison, and a meeting with Mr Ronnie Kray himself.

* Local legend has it that you could purchase these huge masculine rings, sotto voce, at the sarsaparilla and apple-fritter stall in the local market. The trader, apparently, kept them secreted at the bottom of his fat fryer.