Читать книгу Bindon: Fighter, Gangster, Lover - The True Story of John Bindon, a Modern Legend - John C Bindon & Wensley Clarkson - Страница 9

Ned and Mary Monaghan always wanted the best for their eleven children, so it was only natural that, when they moved over from Ireland in the late 1920s to west London, Ned got himself a job – at Battersea Power Station overlooking the Thames – and started saving every penny he could manage. Ned was a tough character with a face as hard as granite and bright-blue piercing eyes that lit up when he had a pint of Guinness in front of him

By the time the eldest of his many children were in their late teens, Ned had saved up enough cash to buy a row of dilapidated workmen’s cottages a mile up the Thames from Battersea in a quiet Fulham street near Wandsworth Bridge called Hugon Road. When daughter Cicely – known as Ciss to everyone – married a shy giant of a Cornish man called Dennis Bindon in the late 1930s, Ned gave the top half of 25 Hugon Road to the couple. It was a time of extreme hardship, so without Ned’s help they might well have ended up in a workhouse somewhere along the river’s edge. Ned and Mary were devout Catholics, so the only condition attached to Ciss and Dennis’s new home was that they had to make the ten-minute walk each Sunday to attend the Holy Cross Catholic church at the back of nearby Hurlingham Park.

As Ciss’s nephew Gordon Wilson said many years later, ‘Old man Ned was bloody clever to buy those houses, but his main aim was to keep the family together. That’s what it was like back then. You stuck to your own whatever the circumstances.’

‘Monaghan Terrace’, as Ned’s houses were known, eventually became home to all eleven of his children and their respective families, and no one dared challenge the Monaghans. ‘They were a polite, well-brought-up family, but if you crossed them you did so at your peril!’ recalled one neighbour who still lives in Hugon Road to this day.

Three of Ciss’s eight brothers, Tommy, Nobby and Jackie, were a fearsome bunch always on the lookout for their three sisters. ‘They was good street fighters,’ explained Gordon Wilson. ‘Not in a villainous way, just in a way that if someone was rude to a woman then they’d offer them outside. On a Friday night those three brothers would give all challengers a right seeing-to if they asked for trouble. I don’t think they ever lost a fight.’ Jackie especially was renowned as an amateur boxer of great note in west London, and went more than thirty bouts without defeat.

Eventually all three brothers joined the merchant navy, as did Dennis Bindon, as an engineer, shortly after his marriage to Ciss. ‘They were attracted to the merchant navy because you weren’t told what to do like you were in the services,’ said Gordon, but following the outbreak of war in 1939 it proved in many ways a much riskier career. U-boats prowled the Atlantic looking for ships to sink, and often there was little or no cover for such convoys – Nobby Monaghan’s ship was torpedoed, although he miraculously survived to tell the tale.

The only good news for Dennis and Ciss Bindon in the early days of the war was the birth in 1940 of their first child, a boy called Michael. However, Dennis only first met the boy on home leave nearly a year after he was born. Ciss was determined to have a big family because that was how she had been brought up, and John Arthur Bindon was born on 4 October 1943, nine months after another brief spell of home leave for Dennis. As the second son, little John might have expected to be relatively ignored, especially when his sister Geraldine turned up a few years after him; but Ciss had a soft spot for her middle child because he was always smiling and never seemed to cry much compared to his older brother.

Home for the Bindons remained the top half of that rundown terraced house bought by Ned Monaghan a few years earlier. Below them, another of Ciss’s sisters was also bringing up her young family. By the time John was born, Germany’s spread across Europe had already been stemmed, but the air raids on London continued. Many times baby John and brother Michael were woken by the sound of falling bombs as Ciss checked the blackout curtains and stayed close to her two sons until danger passed. Little John never forgot his mother’s comforting hug. It was his security blanket. With Hitler’s bombs targeting riverside factories and homes, there were still times when the sky was bright red from the fires burning through the night, people standing blankly on street corners with their homes reduced to piles of rubble. John Bindon later said that all this death and destruction taught him from an early age not to worry about money and possessions, because you never knew when it might all end.

The war-torn backstreets of west London were filled with shabby-looking characters shuffling around trying to scratch a living. Children roamed the streets in threadbare clothes while just a mile up the King’s Road in Sloane Square the wealthy continued shopping at Peter Jones department store. Baby John was too young to be taken from his mother and evacuated to the countryside, so occasionally he was pushed in a makeshift pram – little more than a wooden box with wheels on it – up the King’s Road to ‘where the rich people lived’. He told a friend many years later that one of his first memories was entering a department store in Oxford Street to have his hair cut, a special treat for a youngster from a poor background.

Life was undoubtedly hard back then, although it all seemed full of fun to cheery little Johnny Bindon. The family might have struggled to put meat on the table for dinner, but there was an optimistic, uplifting Irish spirit about Ciss, and, since Dennis was away most of the time on the high seas, she was the driving force behind the family during those early days. The Bindons weren’t exactly living in the most affluent part of town. Hugon Road was so close to the river that rats would pour through the back yard most nights and the noise of the hooters of the tugs towing barges upriver often went on all through the evening and into the early hours. The Bindons even accepted hand-me-down clothes from some of the rich families in the big posh houses of nearby Chelsea and Belgravia for whom Ciss did the cleaning. But Ciss made sure that John and his brother Michael were always well fed and looked after, although, as a virtual single parent, she didn’t always manage to keep tabs on the youngsters.

Behind the property in Hugon Road was an outhouse with a tiny kitchen and a bath and toilet. The kitchen area was for cooking, eating and keeping warm. Cheese and meat hung in the larder and the smells that wafted through the small house were a strange combination of bread and slightly off ham, a luxury bought from local spivs and kept for special occasions. Meals included potatoes three times a day and the occasional joint of beef or lamb if Dennis was back from overseas. A special treat would be apple pie or rhubarb crumble for pudding. Depending on the state of the finances, there would be fish and chips on Fridays.

Many years later, John Bindon agreed that no child could have asked for more love than he received from his mother. His father, on the other hand, was a harder, more distant character, although he never shirked his duty to ensure that Ciss was provided with the money to keep the family afloat. Back home in Hugon Road, little John – already clearly his mother’s favourite – would sit on her knee as she bewitched him with glorious stories of her Irish heritage. Bindon said later that he adored listening to Ciss telling stories about Ireland before singing her heart out with her sister and other relatives at the sing-songs they held at home virtually every weekend. She would be surrounded by the other wives in their flowery pinafores and the men in their cloth caps and mufflers. Many of Bindon’s young cousins would watch as Ciss and her sister entertained everyone.

But there were other memories which provide a definite clue as to why John Bindon took such an extraordinary course in life. He was just a toddler when he first encountered his father’s detachedness. He had been sitting at the family’s bare wooden kitchen table with a Formica top when Dennis Bindon arrived home from yet another long sea voyage. He was hungry and not very communicative, and, when little John asked his father if he had brought him a present from his travels, he yelled at the child to keep quiet. Bindon was so terrified he slid down underneath the table and sobbed. For the following few years, Bindon often cowered beneath that table when his father came into the kitchen: clearly Dennis’s presence in the Bindon home provoked a change of atmosphere. As Bindon grew older, he started to understand the problematical relationship between Ciss and Dennis and how much pressure his father was under just to provide enough money for the family’s weekly shopping bill. As one relative explained, ‘Dennis wasn’t a violent man but he was a very quiet, reserved individual, and that made him seem more stern than perhaps he really was.’

Dennis Bindon had a near obsession with crosswords, and would spend hours filling in The Times crossword. Dennis was also keen on games such as chess and draughts, and was an avid reader. It was only natural, therefore, that he should try to encourage his children to indulge in his passions. But John used to retreat from the sitting-room area the moment he saw his father take out his glasses and begin studying the latest crossword puzzle in complete silence. ‘You could say they weren’t exactly close,’ one of Bindon’s oldest friends recalled. ‘Dennis didn’t like aggressive behaviour, and Mickey and Johnny could be aggressive little buggers at times, although it was usually in a very jovial way. They’d do things to each other to make the other one laugh, but they also fought like cat and dog. The old man used to say, “If you behave like an animal, I will treat you like an animal.” That was his way of telling them to behave.’

Nevertheless, Michael and John often competed for their father’s attention. Gordon Wilson explained that ‘In those days many types of food were scarce and one day Ciss bought Dennis two cream cakes for his tea and cream cakes were things you didn’t see very often back then. So Johnny, having a wicked sense of humour, removed a bit of the cream from one of the cakes and placed it on the corner of his mouth so, when Mickey came in, he saw it and said, “What have you done?” John immediately offered Mickey the other cake and said, “It’s yours,” so Mickey grabbed it and wolfed it down – at which point Johnny produced the other one and said, “You just ate Dad’s tea.” Mickey started crying in fear of what would happen, while Johnny was killing himself laughing. Then his dad walks in and he grasses Mickey up and tells Dennis he’s eaten one of his cakes. Then Mickey tells his dad what really happened and Dennis says, “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, for being so devious.” Then he took the other cake and gave it to Mickey and let him eat it as well, which made Johnny cry because Mickey ended up having both cakes.’

Practical jokes were soon little Johnny’s stock-in-trade. On one occasion, Ciss and her sister were downstairs in Hugon Road when they heard a lot of banging and crashing. They went up to see what was happening. ‘There’s someone in the wardrobe, there’s someone in the wardrobe,’ screamed out one of Bindon’s cousins. The others appeared to be under their bedclothes fast asleep. ‘Go back to sleep and stop being so stupid,’ said Ciss. But the child was insistent. Ciss threw open the wardrobe and there was Johnny on Michael’s shoulders with Dennis’s overcoat on and wearing a cheese-cutter cap. They were about seven foot tall and they screamed at Ciss who passed out with fright.

Ciss’s role as organiser and disciplinarian at home meant she could sometimes be a hard taskmaster. ‘There was a side to her you didn’t mess with,’ Gordon Wilson explained, ‘but the other side of her would give you her last penny. She was so soft-hearted. One time, we pulled up at some traffic lights on Putney Bridge and she made us wait while she got out the back of the car and went over to a tramp sitting by a wall and gave him a few cigarettes. She would do anything for anyone who had a hard-luck story.’

A lot of John Bindon’s young playmates’ homes were destroyed by Hitler’s bombs, and many ended up being housed in so-called prefab buildings on available wasteland in the area. Many of these plots sloped down to the River Thames on sites that, until a couple of years previously, had been rows of neat two-up two-down terraced cottages similar to the one in which the Bindons lived. John went into a friend’s pre-fab and was impressed by what he saw: Bakelite and Formica fittings, fold-away ironing boards and tables. They were warm and cosy and each property even had a plot of land, an asbestos shed and a mound of topsoil to make into a garden.

Sometimes John and Michael would sit on the precarious roof of the bombed-out factory at the end of nearby Distillery Lane with a mob of other tearaways and watch planes fly past to Heathrow Airport. The boys would wave up at the aircraft in the hope they would be spotted. Both brothers were soon raising extra cash by stealing empty glass bottles and taking them back to the local sweet shop for their deposits.

With the war well and truly over, life started looking up. One neighbour even bought a car, which he allowed all the local kids, including Michael and John, to sit in outside his house. And the boys were overjoyed when one of their uncles purchased a Ford motorcar and took them and their mother on a trip to Kensington High Street. They were awestruck by the big stores – C&A, Barkers, Derry and Toms – with their windows dressed and illuminated; then they saw Harrods, and men and women walking along Knightsbridge in fancy suits and £30 dresses. It was all a far and distant cry from downtrodden Fulham, just a couple of miles down the road.

On another occasion when John and Michael were out with their uncle, they drove along Piccadilly and spotted lots of well-dressed women in seamed stockings talking to soldiers and civvies on the pavement. John later recalled that all the women looked very pretty. Their uncle called them ‘brasses’, and it was only years later that the Bindon boys actually learned what that expression meant.

During another trip to the West End, the family made it as far as Soho where people of all colours and creeds seemed to pop out from anonymous doorways. They paid a visit to the cinema, whose wall-to-wall posters of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny caught their eyes. The boys were spellbound when they sat in front of the huge screen and watched all their cartoon heroes in action. Back out on the pavement, throngs of buskers, soldiers and girls filled every street corner. Crowds of people flocked into amusement arcades with bare floorboards and rows of pinball tables. John wasted a lot of his money trying to pick up a weighed-down, silver-looking wristwatch in a glass case with a toy crane which never quite griped the watch.

John was particularly impressed by the way the American GIs could smoke and chew gum at the same time. The GIs were very generous and handed out pieces of gum to every kid in the arcade. When Ciss Bindon noticed, she made John spit out his gum.

John Bindon’s first school was the strict Catholic Holy Cross in the nearby New Kings Road, where the pupils were obliged to attend Mass every day. Bindon later told friends that his memories of the school were not very good. Being a strong-willed youngster, he was regularly punished for misbehaviour, and some teachers seemed more interested in abusing the children than educating them. He was soon regularly playing truant and hanging around amusement arcades on the popular North End Road, where the daily market attracted working-class families from all over Fulham. Bindon spent much of his time playing on one-armed bandits, and was soon hooked.

Bindon’s best friend back in those days was Barry D’Arcy. ‘I had more fights than John at Holy Cross,’ he later recalled. ‘John had spindly thin legs and big shoulders, but he was definitely school leader in the playground. Most of us kids lived in a permanent war-footing fantasy world where you always had your raincoat done up around your neck and you raided the other schools by pretending to be Spitfires. We’d raise our arms and start swerving all over the place. Those were our wars, and I can tell you John and I won them all!’

John and his friends were the original baby boomers. ‘I suppose we were the first generation to have an opinion and it showed even back when we were small kids,’ says Barry. ‘Miss Watson was headmistress at Holy Cross and she was considered a fair but tough character by her pupils. Mr Flanagan taught us sport and he was all right, but one teacher was a bitch and used to whack us with a ruler on the back of our legs all the time. We were also caned on the hands and back of the legs.’ Both boys were given a particularly severe caning after admitting raiding the nearby Peterborough Road School where they fought pupils and then ran around the playground making a hell of a racket. John didn’t have to wear a uniform after his mum told teachers the family couldn’t afford to pay for one. He and others were given token shoes that were sturdy boots with thick soles and straps. ‘Problem was, they marked you down as being poor, which caused a lot of aggro at school,’ one of John’s oldest friends later explained.

Other kids at the Holy Cross included Bindon’s cousin Diane Langton who later became a well-known television actress. ‘Diane had curls like Shirley Temple and she and another girl called Linda Marshall used to run after us in the playground playing kiss and chase all the time,’ recalled Barry D’Arcy. And everyone noticed Ciss when she turned up at the school. ‘Ciss was a very attractive lady with a lovely character, and John was clearly her pet. She’d always give him a big kiss and a hug when she came to collect him.’

Barry D’Arcy recalled one very unusual game that he played with Bindon at school. ‘We’d see who could piss the highest. John’s first claim to fame was that he could piss over the wall into a teacher called Mr Maloney’s tea when he was on a break. He was never caught. It was hilarious.’ However, when Bindon was nabbed in the loos with chewing gum, it nearly ended in agony. ‘Chewing gum was an offence back in those days, so he hid it up his trousers and ended up having his nuts stuck to his leg.’

While Bindon struggled in most classroom subjects, he is still remembered to this day as an exceptional artist. He was very proud that one of his paintings of a stag’s head was hung in the school hall. He also gave Barry D’Arcy his first taste of sex education, albeit slightly misguided. ‘John told us babies came out when doctors cut open the sides of the women and took them out. This information soon spread round the school as we used to talk about it in the playground. Eventually we got hauled in front of the headmistress Miss Watson because kids’ parents had started complaining. But Miss Watson was marvellous. She explained to us that pregnancy was one of God’s gifts. It was a sacred thing and she told us all about the Virgin Mary and our Lord. But she also said we mustn’t discuss it again in the playground.’

Pint-sized Barry D’Arcy had a lot of affinity with John Bindon because of the numerous playground scraps they both experienced. ‘I used to fight all the time and I would bash up the biggest kid in the playground and that bonded me with John because he could see I stood my ground.’ The ‘spitfire raids’ on other schools continued. ‘We’d all gather outside the playgrounds and then head off in a gang of twenty. Most of us walked home from school so when we went on a raid we knew we had a bit of time on our hands because most of us were latchkey kids. We’d fly up the road in a pack. The element of surprise was essential. As we ran along the streets, our coats would be streaming in the air and we’d be gulping down Tizer, the red stuff. We must have looked quite a fearsome sight.’

The father of one of Bindon’s best friends Buster Crouch owned a river pleasure boat and a lot of the boys sometimes went up the Thames to Hampton Court Palace at weekends. D’Arcy recalled, ‘One time John let a woman sit down on a seat out of politeness and she turned out to own a sweet factory. John was the hero of the day because she sent out huge boxes of sweets to us all at school. That was a real lesson in manners.’ On another visit to the world-famous maze at Hampton Court, Bindon and his friends feuded with a group of older school kids and slipped laxative tablets into their fizzy drinks before they went into the maze. ‘That was hilarious because all these snotty kids were running around trying to find their way out in a great hurry!’

Back on the mean streets of Fulham, John’s tough reputation was already growing. ‘I had a problem with some kid and it seemed inevitable it would end in violence, but it didn’t because John managed to calm everything down. In fact, he was very adept at avoiding violence back then,’ explained Barry. ‘He looked so fearsome that kids just knew to steer clear of him.’ Bindon was already learning valuable lessons in life. He had become a champion of the underdog by defending the victims of school bullies. It was something that would serve him well in later life.

As soon as Bindon was old enough to cycle, he stole himself a bike and his independence immediately grew. He was naturally attracted to the river and its towpaths because of their close proximity to his home in Hugon Road, and by the time he was ten he knew virtually all the nooks and crannies near the river edge between Wandsworth and Putney Bridges. With his friends he often crossed Wandsworth Bridge to the derelict land flattened a few years earlier by the bombs, where there were huge craters the size of large swimming pools, and any remaining trees were turned into tree houses, shared with kids from nearby housing estates. There were also more secretive places away from the popular areas where old burned-out cars were turned into dens, and areas under railway arches provided another escape from grown-ups. Sometimes the Bindon brothers and their pals were chased off the bombsites by the police or other grown-ups. Bindon got his first ‘pull’ by the long arm of the law after being chased from a dilapidated building where he had smashed a few windows. They hauled him down to the local nick and charged him with malicious damage. He was fined by a local juvenile court and so, at just eleven years old, John Bindon already had a criminal record.

Back north of the river in Fulham, smaller bombsites peppered the area between the Bindon home and the busy market on the North End Road. A massive bomb had demolished a huge area on the nearby Peterborough Road, and plans to build a completely new housing estate on the site had been announced in the local Fulham Chronicle newspaper. A favourite haunt for John and Mickey Bindon was Scala’s Ice-Cream Parlour at 387 North End Road, where they made the tastiest ice cream in west London. It was a state-of-the-art place with pale-blue, yellow and black Vitrolux tiles complete with neon lighting. Even the soda fountain and the coffee machines were chrome. Bindon would sometimes spend as long as half an hour queuing up at the kiosk for a cone. In front of Scala’s was the North End Road market in all its splendour. Most of the stallholders were costermonger families who had been associated with the North End Road since the early eighteenth century. The market came alive particularly on Saturdays. Regular traders would haul their stalls to their pitches, while lorries went to Covent Garden to collect the day’s fresh fruit and veg. More than 50,000 shoppers passed through the market every day, but by six o’clock in the evening the traders had packed up and gone, leaving market leftovers littering the empty street. That was when scavengers like John and Michael Bindon would appear to pick their way through the food that was lying around. Often they would manage to collect a wooden pram-load of slightly damaged fruit and veg to eat.

When Bindon’s first bike was stolen, he started spending more and more time on street corners where all life passed by. Soon he was hanging around with a much older crowd of boys. London was made up of so many areas that villains were able to call their own district their ‘manor’. Since the war, Fulham had earned a reputation for slippery burglars and streetwise hustlers, not to mention a family or two of very shrewd moneylenders. Characters with names like Tiger and Albert the Jar could be spotted in west London most days. Many of them also spent some of their time in Soho. Other characters worked on flower stalls and as market traders but still relished the chance to get involved in some ‘business’, the bigger earner the better. Fulham was ripe with opportunities for anyone with a dodgy outlook on life.

As a child, John Bindon often sat on the front doorstep of his home for hours in springtime, staring at the sky almost as if he was waiting for the clouds to disperse and the sun to come peeping through. That front step was north facing, so it was almost permanently in the shade, but occasionally a small sliver of sunlight would come shining on to his face. By 1954, people had stopped talking so much about the war and, although there were still food shortages and rationing, the streets were filled with big prams and new babies. Bindon was eleven years old, very grown up and already looking forward to leaving school and taking on the world.

His father Dennis was still in the merchant navy, and his visits home remained spasmodic, intense and filled with every range of human emotion. John Bindon’s world back then was dominated by scrap metal, powdered eggs, tinned Spam and the occasional gift from some far-flung place visited by his dad. When he was a young kid, it was the job of him and Michael to keep guard on the family home in Hugon Road. They were the men of the house while their father was away at sea. John would sit on that front doorstep for hours, closely scrutinising every vehicle and person who passed, including the rag-and-bone men who came trotting by on their horse and cart at least three times a day.

John was a self-contained child, happy just to sit and stare at the world going by. He wore shorts most of the time but soon grew too big for them, so in the end he made do with hand-me-down long trousers, some of which belonged to his father or uncles who lived next door in Hugon Road. His hair was cut in a pudding-bowl style, and he was tubby with a big, round face that seemed to be almost permanently smiling, especially when he was getting up to mischief. That usually occurred with the assistance of swarms of children who were drawn to the riverside area near the Bindon home. It was also when Bindon’s acting career probably first kicked off. He was good at playing the tough guy even to children two or three years older than him.

Bindon’s daydreams back then included a fantasy that he was in charge of a gang of criminals and they ran the area where he lived. Certainly, Bindon and his pals were in the know as far as the locality was concerned. He would often head to South Park where there were some enormous oak trees to climb. The post-war years made a strong impression on John Bindon because he had heard the tales about how there were hardly any coppers around when Hitler sent his bombers in and you could get away with all sorts of nonsense. That atmosphere still prevailed long after the war had ended. The games played by Bindon and his gang of tearaways were still based on war action featuring Brits versus the dreaded Hun. These games always started off deadly seriously but veered into farce when they got out of control. Sometimes John Bindon would overstep the mark, and a couple of his friends had to drag him off the ‘enemy’ on more than a few occasions.

A few yards from the Bindon home was a pub, which was the natural focal point for all the adults. Bindon’s dad Dennis went there every evening when he was home from the merchant navy. Everyone in the street nodded hello, but he never engaged in much conversation. He would pull out a newspaper, lick the end of his biro with his tongue and slowly sip a pint of best while he filled in the crossword. Dennis Bindon was certainly not one of those fathers who believed that one day he would make his fortune. He might have been extremely well read, but his expectations of life were not high. He just wanted to ensure his family was provided for. Dennis was over six feet tall, well built and extremely fit, but he had no reputation as a local hard man. He wasn’t interested in being a tough guy. He left that to others.

During the mid-fifties, Dennis decided he needed to acquire ‘the knowledge’ and start earning an income closer to home by going behind the wheel of a Hackney Carriage. It was a much more secure way to earn a living than in the merchant navy, and the tips were very good. He passed the test and his two sons were soon taking it in turns to accompany their father during long, cold days in the taxi’s open luggage area, strapped in with the suitcases and coats.

But there was a darker side to Dennis Bindon. Perhaps it was the result of years of frustration at not being able to cash in on his obvious intelligence. Whenever he was angry, his eyes would glaze over and Ciss would tell the children to go to their room before something bad happened. However, Ciss was more than capable of standing up to Dennis. Some of the shouting matches heard by the Bindon children shook their home to the core, but they rarely exploded into actual violence. Sometimes pieces of crockery would go flying across the kitchen and the yelling between them was filled with personal insults, but they both had strong personalities and seemed deeply in love. In those days, fighting seemed almost natural if you were born to working-class parents. It was the only way to air your grievances in front of everyone; nobody cared what the neighbours thought as they all did the same. Fisticuffs in pubs and clubs were also part of that same culture. It was usually just a punch-up followed by a handshake the next day. Fights in pubs mostly happened over a woman. Dennis Bindon never got involved as he remained the quiet drinker in the corner, but he did tend to explode in public when he felt he was being patronised by someone of a higher class than him. It was the only time he ever showed his true colours in public, and usually he would be back buried in his crossword before anyone could even offer an opinion on what he had just said.

Gradually Bindon’s misdemeanours became more serious. He started thieving lead off the roofs of nearby buildings and selling it to the scrap yards, which had sprung up close to the river during the early post-war years. But beneath it all he was still a child, and he played classic street games with other children: hopscotch, skipping, Tin Tan Tommy – a glorified version of hide and seek – plus the obligatory war games, chase games and the all-time favourite: Knock Down Ginger. This required the cover of darkness, and there were only two rules: be as daring as possible and don’t get caught. The rest was easy. ‘You’d go down the street banging on all the doors and run away before the occupants realised it was a bunch of kids larking around,’ explained Bindon’s old friend Barry D’Arcy. Bindon devised a special version of the game where he would loop all the doorknockers together with string and knock an entire row at once. ‘Watching all them people coming out their front doors at the same time was fucking hilarious,’ Bindon said many years later.

When they weren’t causing chaos out on the streets, John and Michael Bindon were both assigned specific tasks to help clean the family home. Ciss Bindon always wore an apron over her dress inside the house, together with thick, flesh-coloured stockings and beautifully polished shoes, even if she wasn’t going out that day. The radio played a constant stream of the big-band tunes that were so popular just after the war. Ciss loved singing along to them at the top of her voice. That radio was one of the most important items in the Bindon household. Other friends and relatives would travel miles to spend an evening in front of the wireless. At Christmas time, dozens crowded round it listening to plays, sitcoms and royal messages wearing paper hats from the crackers pulled after a festive lunch. Throughout all this gaiety and laughter, however, Dennis Bindon would keep a low profile, occasionally joining in but usually more concerned with reading a book than playing charades.

It was Ciss who undoubtedly had the talent to lighten up the room. Even after three children, Ciss remained slender and attractive with well-defined cheekbones and an infectious smile. She was always immaculately dressed, even though she rarely bought any new clothes. Some members of the Bindon family said many years later that Ciss would have adored a chance to go out ballroom dancing, but Dennis Bindon was not keen on the idea so she spent most evenings in. Her and her sister’s sing-songs, however, were as much a part of Bindon’s life back then as cobblestones and black taxis. Sometimes one of the men would play an accordion, and there was even an upright piano that occasionally got opened up. It was here that John Bindon the performer premiered his show-business talents. He had picked up endless verses of cockney rhyming slang, together with stories and ballads passed down to him by his mother and other relatives. This was one of his favourite rhymes:

She was walkin’ down a street

On ’er fancy plates of meat

Wiv a summer sunshine smilin’

Through ’er golden barnet fair.

Bright as angels from the skies

Wiv ’er bright-blue mutton pies

In me east and west ol’ Cupid

Shot a shaft and left it there.

At the end of most summers, Ciss and her sisters clubbed together, hired a coach and took a few bottles of beer to the seaside: fish ’n’ chips and a blustery seafront at Southend, Margate or sometimes Brighton. The idea was to enjoy a day out on the merry-go-rounds and the big dipper and get a good whiff of sea air. But, even more importantly, these trips brought the families of Monaghan Terrace even closer together.

This was John Bindon’s early life: an endless drama involving sing-songs, fights, pie and mash, bombsite playgrounds and a lot of general ducking and diving. He and his family might not have been born within the sound of Bow Bells, but they had a cockney streak nonetheless. It was a different sort of charm from today’s London, but in many ways it was much more real. Back then there was still a knife-grinder on his bicycle, a chestnut-seller with his brazier of glowing coals, the Pearly King and Queen hosting a night of singing at the local, an organ-grinder with his little monkey and tin cup, old soldiers selling matches – all these characters added to the tapestry of life in the London of John Bindon’s childhood. Back in those post-war years, Fulham was like a village where everyone knew everyone and neighbours still believed in helping out if you had a problem. It was a warmth that went way beyond the occasional fist fight.