Читать книгу I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau - Gary Kemp - Страница 11

The year 1968 was one of revolution: Tariq Ali, striking a symbolic hue in his red mac, raging against Britain’s embattled blue line; Vanessa Redgrave, Joan Bakewell and a horde of angry young people storming the steps of the American embassy; students sitting-in and, at various points of confrontation around Britain, taking up arms and flowers. Change was in the air.My parents, however, were busy looking after us at the time, and anyway, we were all watching telly.

The revolution never came to our street, although we heard the Beatles singing about it on the new Radio 1 station. My parents preferred the group’s earlier numbers and style, but anything was better than the band they considered to be dark and filthy miscreants—the Rolling Stones. I attempted a moment of pre-prepubescent rebellion around then and told my parents that the Stones were my favourite group, even though I had no idea what their music was like, my only record being a Pinky and Perky one that Aunt Lil had bought me.

The hippy extravagances and their worship of all things floral and herbal were not to be seen on our impoverished side of the Essex Road, but as through that swinging door at the Clarence pub, the glimpses I managed were intimidating yet tantalising. Camden Passage, a narrow lane of antique shops, Italian restaurants and men walking poodles, was also home to a mini-commune. We sometimes passed through this Islington lane when going to the market, and one Saturday morning, on our way to buy cut-price cleaning goods, underwear or maybe a pie-and-mash lunch, I peered in through a window, into an orange-painted room hung with posters where a group of long-haired men and women lounged in strange, pantomime-like clothes. It’s hard to imagine now how shocking and exotic long hair looked on a man back then, but a divide was occurring between my parents’ generation and these new adults and, even at my age, I was aware of the tension. For people of my parents’ age, who’d lived through the war, it was a snub to their struggle; but the new generation was looking for their own identity, and their own battles to fight.

The mods no longer frequented the pub, having split in two directions: the aspirational, better-off ones began making their own version of San Francisco somewhere in property-owning North London, growing their hair and collars, morphing with the middle classes, trading pasties for pÂtÉ, and finding an accent somewhere between the Harrow Road and Harrow School; the other half shaved their heads, shortened their britches and donned the braces and boots of an earlier generation of proletarian males, forming a tribe of symbolically deloused Roundheads.

My father was a Labour man and my fifth birthday brought an extra reason for him to celebrate: Harold Wilson had brought Labour to power, albeit with a small majority. The anachronistic, Edwardian-styled gentlemen of politics, with their euphemistic cricketing metaphors, were making way for the ordinary man.Maybe even a bottle of brown ale was opened at 138 Rotherfield Street. Even so, Dad was part of an age that unquestionably toed the Establishment line and respected the institutions that ran the country; after all, they had witnessed and suffered the war in order to keep them. But the counterculture of Baby Boomers was here and beginning to affect everything. Anna Scher was part of that revolution, and in 1968 she began something that would change my life.

Stephen Brassett led me to her. An angelic-looking ten-year-old with hair as white as a Midwich Cuckoo, he had recently lost his father, and his mother was now looking for her deceased husband at local seances.

Stephen dipped his chip into a blob of brown sauce and blew on it. ‘You should come to my drama club. It’s on tomorrow.’ He folded the chip into his mouth.

I was around at his for tea. On the settee his mother was skimming the latest edition of her Psychic News; in front of her, on the coffee table, a Ouija board held an upturned glass like a telephone on the hook.

‘Go on, Gary, why don’t you go with him?’ Like my mother, Mrs Brassett tactically disguised commands as questions. ‘Stephen likes it, don’t you, Stephen?’

As with music, theatre was not a part of the Kemps’ culture and I have no memory of putting on any front-room performances for my parents. The only time we went to a show was to see the Black & White Minstrels one Christmas. Children’s drama schools tended to be the place of wealthier working-class kids whose parents could pay the fees. This often meant the progeny of the more successful villains—the Little Princess pushed up on to the kitchen table with guests forced to watch her singing songs from the shows, as Dad swallows back tears of pride, convincing himself, and Princess, that one day she will be a star, and thus creating a permanently dissatisfied social monster.

The Anna Scher Children’s Theatre in Islington, to give it its full title, was different. First, it was a club, not a school, and second, there wasn’t any singing or dancing, although some of the parents were probably villains. Stephen had gone to her drama classes when she’d first started teaching in his annoyingly long-trouser-wearing school, Ecclesbourne, Rotherfield’s rival primary and the home of our tormentors. Now, at the end of ’69, owing to high demand, she’d moved to the community centre in Bentham Court and, given its proximity to me, it seemed churlish not to have a look. In any case, I was a little frightened by the kind of people Mrs Brassett could talk to through her board.

The following afternoon, without telling my parents where I was going, I left the house and crossed the street. The community centre in the middle of the estate’s central open space was an unloved, soulless, two storey brick building. On entering I made my way up its wide stairs and past its communal washroom and notices for judo meetings and women’s groups. A girl’s voice reverberated from the hall above. She seemed to be in an argument with another girl.Maybe this was a bad time to go in but, reaching the hall, I peered through its glazed double doors.

At the near end of the room, on either side, chairs were stacked into small uneven towers and stood like sentinels, while in the far half of the room about twenty kids, mostly a year or so older than me, sat in a loose semicircle facing the other way. In the two seats directly in front of me I could see the backs of a woman and a man, blonde and dark respectively. Everyone was watching two girls argue at the end of the hall, one sitting on a sofa, the other standing with arms folded. Behind them were boxes and hats spread on a large table; a small mobile bus stop stood to one side, and a red-and-cream Dansette record player was perched on a small stage. The attractive standing girl furiously shouted something at the fat seated one and with a spin stormed off to the edge of the room. The fat girl stared after her, then turned her head sharply and looked at the woman, who immediately started to clap. The kids quickly followed her lead and relaxed in their seats. I took the opportunity to push open the heavy door and walked in.

I had the self-conscious awareness of the outsider as I stood in the open space, committed to the moment between piles of watching chairs. No one had seen me enter but, thankfully, I spotted Stephen sitting among the group and willed him to notice me. He did, and, smiling, crossed and spoke to the woman. I felt the room grow silent and slowly turn its focus upon me. Outside I heard boys playing football. Maybe I should have been with them.

The woman stood. She was young.

‘Hello, Gary,’ she said, ‘it’s lovely to meet you. I’m Anna Scher.’

Her beaming face and the lightly tongued Ts of her Irish accent rapidly melted me into the semicircle of people and, with a fragrant hand upon my shoulder, she introduced me as though I were the answer to all their problems, the missing piece to their puzzle, the most important person to ever enter the room. This was her skill and it made me stay for the next eight years.

Anna Scher was a diminutive, twenty-three-year-old Irish Jew from Cork. Coming to England at fifteen, she found her desire to be an actress squashed by her authoritarian father and, as a compromise, she went into drama teaching. Her long, blonde hair, plump mouth and honeyed complexion were made all the more striking by her fierce control of some of the wildest kids from the borough. She managed to exert this power while dressed in miniskirt and suede boots. I fell in love with her.

The man sitting next to Anna, with long, dark hair and skinny-rib tank top, was Charles Verrall, Anna’s assistant. He gently played second fiddle to her strident lead, yet they seemed to quietly harmonise. Although their relationship was never apparent to the students, he was in fact Anna’s lover. Tall and thin, with a patient temperament, he’d studied to be a scientist at Oxford but found himself enjoying the rewards from teaching working-class kids how to act. Charles was everything we weren’t: upper-middle-class, well spoken and gentle, but contrary to the fashion of the time, neither he nor Anna attempted to be one of us or change themselves to suit. Yet the respect that they received was palpable.

Anna’s technique was praise mixed with discipline and she delivered it for just two shillings a lesson. Even if your kernel of talent was extremely small, she would highlight it and sing its praises.Many of the children had never experienced approval or encouragement and this was hard for them to trust, but very quickly their spirits grew.

Her method was improvisation. We never looked at scripts or texts, and Shakespeare or Pinter were never mentioned, although Martin Luther King and Gandhi may well have been. We were, on the whole, not literary creatures, and generally frightened of books or anything that resembled schoolwork, so, without any level of condescension, Anna cleverly built her classes around what we could create ourselves. She would get us to play out mini-dramas based on problems that we all knew uncomfortably well: communicating with teachers or parents; issues of unfinished homework or coming home late; and, more importantly, bullying.

It might begin with one of us playing the role of the Parent and the other the Child returning from school or play, trying to hide the fact that he or she is suffering; a simple exercise that was set in the world we knew. As a by-product we’d gradually learn how to deal with those situations and, by acting them out at Anna’s, exorcise any frustrations that we felt in real life. It was a kind of gestalt therapy by default, spooling out our inner anxieties, giving them a voice and, to a certain extent, freeing us of them. Acting is about tapping into one’s emotions and, with Anna’s kids, the emotion that poured out initially was anger.

At that time, we were mostly young people from the poor side of Essex Road, but Anna’s would gradually become a meeting place for the different classes and cultures of the Islington kid. The borough was divided into two distinct sides by its main road, which ran from Newington Green to the Angel. On our side, the treeless streets of council accommodations, rough and rented; on the other, the leafy lanes of mortgaged Georgian homes, proud and well-proportioned. Here, three families to a house; there, one (plus, of course, an au pair or two). The child of the printer will also meet the child of the professional at Dame Alice Owen’s grammar school, but that is for the future, a future that will have Anna take her theatre across the Islington divide and lose it to a group of trustees, and the attractive standing girl and the fat one from the sofa become household names. But for now we are at the beginning, and it is gloriously innocent.

‘I’m going to be in a film.’ Stephen was behaving quite normally considering his news.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘It’s called Junket 89.’

He was about to take on the lead role in a Children’s Film Foundation production. His mother seemed unimpressed and carried on with her tidying, but then, to our parents, born before the age of desperate celebrity-craving, it was all childish frivolity, and to be too excited would only encourage us to let it get in the way of normality. A picture of Stephen’s father looked on stoically. I glanced at the upturned glass on the Ouija board. It remained unmoved.

As for me, I was amazed and envious. Every Saturday morning from the age of six, I’d walk up the Essex Road to the Ancient Egyptian styled ABC cinema. In my jeans pocket (not Tesco Bombers, but some equally cheap market-stall pair) I’ve two bob, round my waist maybe a snake-belt, on my feet possibly Trackers (the ones with the animal footprints on the sole and the tiny compass in the heel—on the other hand, it could have been the later design, Grand Prix, with the racing-car tyre I Know This Much (4thEstate) 22/7/09 13:44 Page 31 tread), and in my mouth an anatomically pink Bazooka Joe. I was on my way to Saturday Morning Pictures.

I was an ABC Minor and would faithfully belt out the song that began the morning’s programme: ‘We are the boys and girls well known as the Minors of the ABC…’ as about two hundred of us, wired to the tits on Jublees, Munchies and Kia-Ora, infested the cinema with such virulence that even the toughest usherettes would scurry off to cleaning cupboards for a couple of hours and smoke themselves sick. But the manager, in our case a balding Uriah Heep, hard bitten and seasoned from years of abusive children, would have no truck with us urchins, and if the noise became too much—which was inevitable, given the combination of parental absence and unnatural food colouring—would halt the film in a second, march down the aisle in his tired maroon blazer, and threaten us with early expulsion into the light.

The first half of the programme had not changed since my father was a boy and invariably started with a cartoon. This was followed by a non-sequitous episode of either the 1930s Flash Gordon or the original 1940s ‘fat’ Batman serial, and then a Western. In accordance with some long-forgotten lore of cinema, the cavalry coming meant you had to lift your seat and drum your feet rapidly on its underside until the manager turned the lights on or the cavalry arrived.

The programme would always end with a Children’s Film Foundation movie. This might be a fifties, black-and-white, gritty, Osborne-for-kids, kitchen-sink morality tale, with a gang of malnourished children with dirty knees finding a stolen FA Cup or whatever else would have them and a dog scurrying over a bomb site; or it could be a full-colour, contemporary story, set in a world where children looked like us and were always right.

The CFF had been making movies for Saturday mornings since 1951, all shot on 35mm and aiming for a high quality of directing and acting. Junket 89 was to be their next production and it would co-star a thirty-six-year-old Richard Wilson—who would later become popular as the grumpy old man from One Foot in the Grave—as an absentminded science master, and my mate Stephen as his eponymous pupil. The other child roles and minor parts were all to be filled by Anna Scher kids and, as I would soon find out, that would also include me.

The story has Junket stealing a ‘matter-transporter’ from the science master and keeping it in his locker, number 89. It allows its user to ‘jump’ to different locations. A ‘returning device’ is in the shape of a cricket ball, a ruse to end up at Lord’s Cricket Ground and have the real Gary Sobers appear as himself. On the way there are many high jinks involving two stupid bullies who get their comeuppance, a tap dancing mummy’s boy whose mother (played wonderfully by Fanny Carby, one of the original members of Joan Littlewood’s company) becomes embroiled in some clothes swapping with the headmaster, and the Benny Hill-style appearance of a sexy French maid.

I have a tainted recollection of filming Junket 89 that summer of 1970. The producers and the director, Peter Plummer, had been coming to watch us at Anna’s and picked their leads without auditions. I was to play one of Junket’s classmates, a non-speaking role but one that required quite a few filming days. Around then I became the brunt of some hurtful teasing, or, more correctly, bullying. I was a skinny new boy, not good at football, shy with girls and getting lots of attention from Anna. I was very close to Stephen and always sat next to him, all of which prompted two or three of the lads, including a spiteful one named Norman, to decide I was a ‘poof’ and ‘definitely queer’. I didn’t even know what it meant. For them, Anna’s ‘therapy’ wasn’t quite working yet. One day’s filming became horrendous for me, with some brutal teasing. I wasn’t physically scared of them, just humiliated, a painful experience that still makes me wince to remember. The pain had everything to do with separation and not belonging. The next day I didn’t want to return.

The meeting place for everyone was on the corner by the post office opposite my house, where a bus would take us to the set. I peered through the net curtains and saw them gathering there like a storm; all friends; a clucking gang. My mother was having none of it, and to my horror, marched across the street to talk to Anna. I cringed as the main antagonists watched the conversation. Oh my God, she’s made it worse. I will be killed if I go there now. I sank lower behind the sill. She returned, and with a tone oddly sharp, considering she was on my side, told me that it’d be all right and to get over there now. With stomach-churning apprehension, but abiding faith in Anna and my mother, I crossed the road and went immediately to Stephen. Thankfully, she was right, and Norman et al. never made another snide remark about me again.

Recently a series of the best of SaturdayMorning Pictures was issued on DVD and Junket 89 was one of them.With some curiosity, I slip the disc into the machine, hit play, and the movie fades up. The CFF opening titles have a familiarity that comes from being burned into a fresh young brain. The shot is of the fountains at Trafalgar Square with St Martin-in-the-Fields dominating. The bells are ringing out across the square and then the feeding pigeons suddenly take wing into a perfect sunlit sky. It’s a symbol of Britain at its Ladybird Book best. Fade out and up on to hands filling the screen and a football-terrace clap begins. And here’s Stephen, blond and squinting in the early seventies sunshine, just how I remember him. And there’s Linda Robson, the attractive ‘standing girl’ from my first visit to Anna’s, in miniskirt and long white socks. Twenty years later, Linda will become nationally famous in the hit sitcom Birds of a Feather, along with her best friend, the ‘fat girl’ from the sofa, Pauline Quirke. Pauline will appear any second now, in her sulky ten-year-old incarnation, but before then the camera pans down a school building and follows a young Christopher Benjamin as the pompous headmaster. A school bell rings for playtime and here’s an interior shot of kids coming down the stairs, screaming and fighting. The faces are all familiar. Here’s my good friend, Tony Bayliss, the coolest dresser I knew at the time. He’s the only one wearing Levi’s, narrow, of course, and also a Brutus check shirt with button-down collar and a half-pleated back (both bought from a small boutique at the Angel run by ex-mods), a real suedehead look, and one that I would soon aspire to. He’s already ahead of the game and starting to grow his hair. Here’s Ray Burdis, who would enter my life again twenty years later as one of the producers of The Krays. And here is Mario, playing the ‘mummy’s boy’, who, in a few years’ time, will try to seduce me to the sound of a Diana Ross record. Hopping down the steps comes a sweet-looking black girl, hair pinned up. I can’t see her clearly, but now she appears again, face smiling, and I see that it’s Hyacinth, gaily unaware that she would, sadly, only have a short life.

Cockney voices sing the title song: ‘Who takes the cake then lands in ‘ot wa’er? I know because he’s a mate o’ mine. It’s Junket eigh’y nine!’ This was what the producers wanted when they picked Anna’s children, genuine street kids, not drama-school fakes or hams. It’s a different cockney to the London voice of a ten-year-old today, but this is the London of my memory, and here I am, coming down the stairs.

During this process of thinking and writing about my past I suppose I’ve envisaged myself as a slightly smaller version of who I am today, albeit younger, obviously. But as I rewind and play again, the boy I see here is not the one I’ve had in my mind; he’s fresher, with no great experience or aspirations; he’s not seeing this moment through any nostalgic haze or wry cynicism, and hasn’t even thought about playing in a band yet. He comes from a different world to the man watching him now.

I suddenly feel a sadness, a pathetic desire to speak to him, and, with a deep sense of loss, realise that I miss him; because he no longer exists.