Читать книгу Ginger Baker - Hellraiser - Ginger Baker - Страница 9

Mum and Aunt Rose had always managed to get out and about enjoying themselves, and during the war they attended quite a few firemen’s dances, at which they were known as The Merry Widows. Rose met up with a really nice fireman called Arthur, who was a carpenter, which was another reserved occupation, and worked building sets at the film studios. They got married and moved just down the road to Forest Way in Sidcup, so my cousin John and I continued to be inseparable mates.

One day Mum met her old fiancé George Streatfield on the top deck of the bus to New Eltham. She later told me he turned to her and said, ‘I’d marry you tomorrow if you’d have me.’

It transpired that, although George had also married, he’d returned from the war to discover that his wife had given birth to three children by different American servicemen. Through this chance meeting, Mum and George got together again and they married on 27 December 1947.

We called our new stepfather Pop. He brought his dog Rex with him and he very soon became my constant companion. As children we were enthralled by Pop’s amazing war stories. He had been in transport with Monty in the 50th Division of the Eighth Army in the desert at El Alamein and Tripoli. He was also at the liberation of Belsen concentration camp. From his numerous tales we gathered that he was lucky to have survived and he hated the Yanks and the Germans with equal fervour.

One day I told Mum I wanted to sing in the church choir. She had had a big row with the church about the money they’d requested for my dad’s name to be included on the stalls among the other local men who’d fallen. Mum thought that this was out of order and I’d often heard her say that the church had quite enough money without demanding cash from the poor. I wasn’t very religious either, but the way I saw it I was getting paid sixpence every Sunday. As I sat in the stalls listening to the parson preaching his endless sermons, I began to agree with Mum even more. It was so boring that I acquired a game of chess on a little pocket-sized board, which I played with the boy next to me throughout the proceedings.

At the end of the first three months, we received our pay in sixpenny pieces and my chess partner showed me how to spend my earnings. Outside the newsagents was a vending machine that distributed two Players cigarettes and two red-tipped, strike-anywhere Swan Vesta matches. We piled our tanners into the machine and, with our pockets bulging with cigarettes, we retired to the vestry gardens and lit up. Although I felt a bit dizzy after smoking two cigarettes, we felt very cool and grown up.

I got to sing solo on ‘For the Wings of a Dove’ in the choir and the parson agreed that I was a wonderful addition – until he looked down one day and saw us playing chess. I was out, so I got a paper round and after an early finish I was off on a milk round as well. At the weekends I also went on a baker’s round for a few more shillings. In his younger days, Pop had been a keen cyclist, so he built me a bike out of various bits and pieces and with that Rex and I could do my rounds quicker.

I attended Pope Street School where I enjoyed being in the football team and was considered to be one of the better players. I was also considered to be a troublemaker and a bit of a dumbo, but before the 11-plus exam they gave a general knowledge examination and to everyone’s amazement I came top of the class. But when it came to the actual 11-plus, the headmistress still told my mum not to expect anything more than a place at a secondary modern. Again everyone was surprised when I passed and was offered the choice of local grammars. My friend Dave Dormer was a year older than me and attended Shooters Hill Grammar so I got a place there.

I got into a lot of trouble for disobedience. One thing I was well known for was drumming on the desks. At this time I was listening to big band music, Jack Parnell and Ted Heath, and we used to go to the local trad jazz clubs where I would focus on the drummer. If the teacher went out of the class I’d drum on the desk and the other kids would all start dancing. I’d get so into it that I’d never notice the teacher come back in. Everyone would down and I’d still be drumming. I got the cane several times and a prefect set me an essay to be written about prefects, so I described how their desks were always filled with empty beer cans and cigarette packs. I was made to read it to the headmaster and received six of the best.

In our first year we had scripture lessons. I put my hand up and said, ‘Sir? Is it true that Christ was a Jewish bastard?’

The whole class erupted with laughter, the teacher went purple and I was taken off to the headmaster’s study. Again I had to repeat my contribution.

‘Where do you get this rubbish from?’ he shouted.

‘From my mum,’ I replied.

She verified this and I was excused scripture lessons for the rest of my time at the school. This was pretty cool and I used to go and smoke cigarettes out in the playground, while everyone else did scripture. I also gave up French and Latin to concentrate on German, which I was good at.

Shooters Hill was into rugby rather than football. They decided I should be a scrum half, but when you pass the ball you get jumped on by two wing forwards who are twice as big and heavy as you. This was OK when it was wet and muddy but not when it was hard and dry, so I wasn’t very keen on rugby. I was useless at cricket, too: I couldn’t hit the ball.

My ambition at this time was to go to RAF Cranwell and become a pilot, but the school was affiliated with the Navy and they were all sea cadets. I joined Squadron 56 of the Air Training Corps (based at Woolwich) instead and stayed with them for two or three years. I really enjoyed the whole experience, especially being brought into the band and going on parades through the High Street. I wanted to play a drum, but they gave me a trumpet instead; it had no valves and you had to lip all the notes. I got to play well and would often add in little jazz licks as we went along, which sent them mad; but they could never figure out who was doing it. When the sergeant major did find out, he was furious!

Drummer Geoff Downs and I used to get all the drums out, set them up and have drum-ups. We also camped out on an airbase at Thornton, down near Portsmouth, where I had my first flying experience in an Avro Ansen. I loved it.

All this came to an end when I was 14 and got involved with the school gang. Although Shooters Hill was renowned for producing a high number of university graduates, it was also known for the number of criminals who passed through its portals. The ringleaders of this gang were Paul Edwards, Don Emanuel and Mick Grayley. These were the school heroes, so to speak, all good at sports. I got involved with the gang because of my ability to climb anything. I was light and skinny, so my gig was to get into the local golf club by going through a skylight and then opening the door. They’d nick all the booze and cigarettes, which would then be sold to the prefects.

On the way home from school, we’d visit the record shop in Eltham. I’d go in and listen to records while the rest of the gang stuffed records under their coats and walked out. We did this quite successfully for several weeks. We were all jazz fans and to date I’d been listening to Gerry Mulligan. Then one day I picked out Quintet of the Year with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Bud Powell and Charlie Mingus. It blew me away – I just had to have it, so I put it under my raincoat. I’d never stolen anything before but when the gang saw that I’d got a record as well I was accepted as a full member.

Then we moved on to record tokens and over a period of a week or so we must have stolen hundreds; we’d all got stashes of them. One Saturday, the gang called round to see if I was going out on a ‘Saturday loon’ with them, but I couldn’t because my aunt was visiting. The original plan was to hold on to them for at least six months for the heat to die down, then go a long way away to change them. But what did they do? They went to Sidcup, where the record shop is two doors away from the police station. While the guys were trying to cash up the tokens, one of the shop assistants nipped over to the police station.

This was a huge scandal and my mum went super-crazy. It all came to a head when we were in art class at school. Edwards was called out first and then me. I passed Edwards coming out of the head’s study and his face was white as a sheet. There were record tokens all over the headmaster’s desk. ‘Do you know what these are, Baker?’

I said, ‘Yeah, record tokens.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Well, it’s written on ’em.’

End of headmaster’s interrogation! A plain-clothes officer took over and came to the conclusion that I hadn’t been involved because I hadn’t been there when they’d all been caught. I still had some record tokens at home, but I couldn’t remember where I’d hidden them.

A few days later on Saturday morning, I heard Mum’s voice shout, ‘Peter!’ When she said ‘Peter’ and not ‘Pete’, I knew I was in trouble. She’d found the record tokens hidden under a paper drawer lining and she went totally crazy. I told her that I’d been keeping them for the others. But her face was white with anger and she told me she would call the police herself if I didn’t leave the gang.

The result of this was that I got beaten up several times. One day they caught me on my bike down at New Eltham station, but luckily some guy parking his car saw it and came and rescued me. On another occasion at the end of school, they got me in the classroom. This time they were armed with a taped razor blade with which they carved my arms and face into all sorts of patterns. Now this was at the same time that I’d been given my dad’s letter and I remembered the advice he’d given me about learning to use my fists. Up to this point, whenever I’d been beaten up I would cry and couldn’t understand why people had hit me.

But this time, when I was on my way home, I met one of these same kids, whose name was Irwin, standing at the bus stop. He started taking the piss and I just went for him. I was going to kill him and I was bashing his head on the pavement when a copper came along and stopped it.

When I got home, Mum was aghast at the state I was in. ‘What on earth happened to you?’ she gasped.

I told her I’d fallen off my bike into a rose bush.

‘Oh yeah! You get straight-line cuts like that from falling into a bush,’ she replied.

So I changed the story and said that some Teddy Boys had got me in Woolwich. Mum called the police who checked out my story and then came over.

‘It didn’t happen in Woolwich,’ the copper said. ‘It happened in school, didn’t it?’

‘No,’ I lied.

But they’d interviewed loads of kids at school, many of whom had been on the periphery of the attack, and the copper who’d pulled the fight apart at the bus stop had reported that I was already cut. So the truth came to light, not through me, but through the other kids. Edwards, Grayley and Emanuel were caned in front of the whole school and expelled. I kept my head down for a couple of weeks after this and stayed over at my aunt Sue’s. When I did go back to school, I wasn’t exactly a very popular kid, so I got into cycling.

My mum lent me the deposit to get a racing bike and I found that I could easily burn off all the kids who already thought they could ride. Outside the school was a steep hill called Red Lion Lane leading up to the top of Shooters Hill. We’d race up this hill and I’d always leave them all behind. One day when we were out riding, we went up River Hill outside Tonbridge and I had to wait about half an hour at the top before they arrived.

When I was 15 and about to take my O level exams, I joined the local club The Cambrian Wheelers. Things still weren’t good at school because I got the blame for getting the other three expelled, even though it hadn’t been my fault. But I did get on well with one teacher, a Welshman named Prothero. At one point, he told me in front of the whole class that I hadn’t got a ‘snowball’s chance’ of passing the English exam. But, a week or so after this, he wrote on one of my essays, ‘Write another essay like this and you’ll pass without a problem.’ This was the only exam that I did pass.

I left school before the results came out and got a job doing price signs at a ticket-writing firm. I cycled into central London every day from New Eltham and I could do it a lot quicker than the cars could. I met a guy called Danny Talbot, who rode in the Tour de France for the Hercules team, and he got me some Weinmann rim racing wheels with BH hubs. I didn’t have a ‘double clanger’ (two chain wheels); I only had one big chain, 52 wheel, so I was at a great disadvantage because all the other guys had ten gears. I only had five but I compensated with my choice of Avery large 24 (low gear) down to a 13 high gear.

I was training every weekend, doing time trials and massed starts. A massed start is like the Tour de France and is covered by the British League of Racing Cyclists (BLRC). Time-trial riders start at one-minute intervals and ride against the clock, according to the Road Time Trial Council (RTTC). To take part in a massed start you had to be a member of the BLRC and to ride time trials you had to be in the RTTC. I took part in many massed-start races on the roads of England – you had to be good enough, otherwise you couldn’t do it.

We used to have massed-start circuit races at Brands Hatch on Thursday nights. One of these nights was 13 August; I was number 13 and the Cambrian teams were taking the piss out of number 13. I needed some new ‘tubs’ (tubular tyres) and the prize for whoever was first across the finishing line of lap 13, a prime (pronounced ‘preem’) lap, was a pair of tubs. I thought I’d got it made, but, just as I came flying through the front of the bunch, I somehow got my handlebars entangled with those of a guy called Ginger Booker from the Woolwich Team. I went bam! and brought down half the bunch.

I turned up at work that Friday morning (after having got the train) with my arm in a sling and road burns on my shoulder and face. Obviously, with one arm in a sling I couldn’t do any work and the art director said, ‘Either stop cycling or leave the job.’

And I said, ‘Goodbye, I’ve left the job.’ This is the kind of support you got in Britain when you’re trying to excel at sports.

I sent some of my drawings in to the Robert Freeman Advertising Company and on the strength of them I got a job as a trainee layout artist. I hadn’t done well at art in school; in fact, I thought it was a load of bollocks. I wasn’t interested because I didn’t like the art teacher. But at home I got ideas for my drawings from the great pen and ink sketches my dad had done and I copied several of them. I would also draw pictures of models in magazines and it was a collection of these that I sent to Robert Freeman. I was surprised I got the job. But I’ve always liked art; Constable was an early favourite, then Matisse, Modigliani, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Jackson Pollock, but I was basically self-taught.

I was some three months into the job when, one very wet and dismal evening, I was riding down the cobbles of Duke Street St James and a taxi went past, the passenger door facing the opposite way to an ordinary car door. It went into my cape and all of a sudden I was attached to a taxi! I managed to extricate myself but my bike went under. The taxi crushed the frame, wheels, everything – it was totally wrecked. I borrowed a bike for the last 50-mile time trial but now I didn’t have a bike to go training with.

One of the few friends I’d kept at school was a guy called John Finch. He had auburn hair and glasses and came from quite a well-off family. One day he invited me to a party in his house where a band was playing. There were also a lot of kids from school there who well remembered my drumming on the desks and they began urging, ‘Go on! Get on the drums!’

I’d never sat on a kit before in my life, but they all seemed to think that I could play. I’d been watching drummers for years, so I sat down and just played. Two of the horn players turned to each other and said, ‘Bloody hell, we’ve got a drummer!’

A light went on in my head and I thought, Wow! I’m a drummer! And that was the end and beginning of everything.

Eruption thunders over a cold calm sea

Ecliptic symbols beckon to me

Emphatically stating behind the band

Effective cymbals, sticks in hand.

Evolving with music, flying feet on the ground

Effigurate fill-ins complementing sound.

Edificial manoeuvres ’neath a wailing horn,

Egregious in time, a drummer is born.