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3 YOU DIDN’T SEE IT

The memory of Mr Bowman came back to me when Mum told me about him years later. Rosie Bradley had kept Mum informed about Denny’s worsening state of mind, and in the end Mum asked Dad to go down there with her. Shocked at Denny’s erratic behaviour, Dad announced: ‘This is ridiculous – he can’t stay with her there – she’s completely round the twist.’ They decided instead that Denny had to come and live with us, until she got better. I sometimes think that if it weren’t for Denny’s obvious madness I might never have returned home from Westgate.

In July 1952 Mum came to collect me from Westgate on the train – not with Dad, but with Dennis Bowman and Jimpy, whom I was delighted to see. On the way back on the train, though, it was clear my mother hadn’t prepared herself for having me back. My fidgeting irritated her, and so did my runny nose. Nothing I did seemed right. Dennis Bowman said quietly to her, ‘That’s a really dear little boy you’ve got there. Why don’t you leave him alone?’

While I’d been away the kids my age in Acton had fallen into two gangs. Jimpy was leader of the larger group, his authority renewed by a weekly running race he always won. On the day I returned, by some miracle I nearly beat him, and was instantly promoted to Jimpy’s second-in-command. After the race I went over to the playground climbing frame, which was occupied by a menacing-looking boy who sneered at me. ‘You’re not getting on here, mate.’

Normally I would have turned tail, but a new courage compelled me to challenge him. I climbed up, and when the boy pushed me I pushed back so hard that he fell. As he dusted off his trousers I could see he was considering teaching me a lesson, but someone whispered in his ear. He skulked away, almost certainly having been told I was a friend of Jimpy. Even then I felt happy and safe in a gang of boys, protected by a dominant male.

Just as my childhood status was improving, the ground under me shifted again. It seemed I was going to lose one of my beloved parents. I didn’t get the details until years later.

‘Dad had agreed to let me go, and to let me take you with me. Then Dennis got a new job in the Middle East,’ Mum explained. ‘Dennis was an ex-RAF officer with qualifications abroad, very presentable, and because of the mess he got me into here he put his name down for a job outside the country. He finally got a position in Aden. Big money.’

But then Dad had a change of heart.

‘As soon as Cliff knew it was Aden I was taking you to, he came back and said, “Sit down, I want to tell you something.” I had our tickets, yours and mine. Cliff said, “I’ve changed my mind; you’re not taking Peter. It’s too far away. Think about it, do you still want to go?” So I thought about it, and in the end I decided to give things one more try with your father.’

I wondered what Mum meant by ‘the mess’ Dennis Bowman had got her into? Had she become pregnant? ‘Yes. I was in very bad shape in that respect.’ She hesitated. ‘I’d had some miscarriages.’ She paused for a long moment. ‘Self-inflicted miscarriages.’ After having one back-street abortion Mum had decided that from then on she would end her pregnancies herself. ‘I did it five times.’

I was seven, and happy to be home again, back in the noisy flat with a toilet in the back yard and the delicious aroma of Jewish cooking from upstairs. It was all very reassuring. Jerry Cass still played his radio – the BBC Third Programme, classical music, mainly orchestral – incredibly loudly for fifteen minutes every morning as he shaved. (I still like to wake up to Radio 3, as it’s now called.) As I settled back into my old routine, life seemed full of promise. Dad was still often away on tour or at one-night-performances, but Mum was always around, sometimes distracted, but no longer willing to rely on Denny to look after me.

In 1952 the Squadronaires began a regular summer engagement at the Palace Ballroom in Douglas, on the Isle of Man, that would continue for ten years. That first season we rented a flat for the entire holiday, and Mum, still extricating herself from her love affair, got a secret box number at the post office where she would collect Dennis Bowman’s daily letter.

The one-bedroom holiday flat we stayed in was on the lower-ground floor of a large block. My bed was in the living room, an upgrade from the dining room. I would wake occasionally to Dad creeping about in bare feet, coming in late from a night in the bar, or trying to slip out.

I loved Jimpy like a brother. He and I played fantastical and elaborate games. We were also great explorers. In Douglas, the capital of the Isle of Man, where Jimpy was staying with us, we discovered a crumbling old mansion surrounded by high walls that we climbed to steal apples. The house seemed abandoned. We managed to get into an outside room and, peering through a keyhole, could see an old vintage car. Through another keyhole we saw a table covered in what appeared to be treasure – old watches, tools, chains. We tried to force the doors, but they were absolutely secure.

Being explorers was fun, but the biggest treat of all was watching the Squadronaires. This meant dressing up smartly and getting a few shillings from Mum for crisps and milk-shakes. Before the dances began we’d stand in the middle of the huge empty floor and bounce gently up and down – the entire floor was on springs. Then we were free to wander, listen to the music and watch the bouncing hemlines of the teenage girls dancing. Sometimes we’d practise dance steps of our own at the edge of the oak dance floor.

On Sundays there were concerts at the Palace Theatre next to the ballroom, where the Squadronaires would accompany visiting artists, some quite special: Shirley Bassey, Lita Roza, Eartha Kitt, Frankie Vaughan, the Morton Fraser Harmonica Gang, and a string of comedians – even, I think, George Formby plunking away at his silly little banjo. I remember a novelty guitar player who strummed an electric guitar while playing a tiny harmonica in his mouth. He looked ridiculous, and the harmonica was so high-pitched it sounded like a squeaking mouse trapped between his teeth. However, he became a regular at these concerts, so it obviously went down well with the crowd.

Seeing this, I became keen on learning the harmonica, and began playing Dad’s quite seriously.

There were wonderful times on the Isle of Man that year. I fell in love with the younger blonde girl who lived next door. One day, while playing at ‘Mums and Dads’, I had her wrapped in my arms in a play-tent and felt for a moment like a real adult. I remember her mother telling me later that the little girl would be a ‘heartbreaker’ when she grew up. I had no idea what she meant, despite my own rapidly beating heart.

Near the end of this first Isle of Man holiday, Mum brought Denny over and left me in her care while she returned to London to end her affair with Dennis Bowman. Mum and Dad began to put their love life back together that autumn. They tried hard to have a second child to stabilise the family and provide me with a sibling. I know now that the reason it took so long – my brother Paul wasn’t born until five years later – was Mum’s battered reproductive system. She might not have put herself through all that abuse had she been clearer about which man she was going to settle on.

It must have been difficult for my proud father to take Mum back after Dennis Bowman. I don’t believe he knew about her abortions, but if he had, or even suspected anything, it might help explain his drinking and his absences. It could also explain why, after they reconciled, he seemed most at ease with his wife and family when he was tipsy; only then could he express words of love.

In September 1952 I started at Berrymede Junior School. I remember coming home to Denny’s face peeping out through the french windows like a strange, trapped animal. Mum and Dad had given her their bedroom, which she’d filled with the sad booty of her years as Mr Buss’s mistress – sterling silver hairbrushes, manicure sets and Ronson table-lighters. I wish I could say I felt sorry for her, but I don’t believe I did.

Around this time I became a fire-starter. I went door-to-door borrowing matches from neighbours, claiming Mum’s oven had gone out. I didn’t set light to any houses, just to piles of rubble on bomb sites, or old cars. One day I misjudged things: I created a city with building blocks underneath a refrigerated van I took to be abandoned, then stuffed the city with paper and set it alight. The van’s occupant came out screaming: ‘Petrol! Petrol! You’ll kill us all!’

On another destruction-minded day Jimpy and I laid a huge piece of steel across the railway tracks under the bridge and stood back. As the train approached we ran away, waiting to hear the sound of a terrible train crash. This could have not only injured or killed a lot of people, but led us into a very different life, in the penal system. Thank God the train passed without derailing.

At home our chief entertainment was radio. Television had arrived on the scene in 1952, but our family, like millions of others, waited until 1953 and the Queen’s Coronation before buying a TV set. I also read a lot of comics and enjoyed Enid Blyton’s Noddy books, which first appeared in 1949 and were still pretty new. Dad made a model sailing boat that we sometimes took to the Round Pond in Hyde Park on Sunday. He also took me greyhound racing, which I found magical, especially at White City Stadium. And he always gave me far too much pocket money.

Berrymede was in a poor neighbourhood of South Acton, and one day in my first term at school I told a boy in the playground that Dad earned £30 per week. He called me a liar – the average wage was less than a third of that – but I stuck to my guns because I knew it was true. We nearly came to blows over it before a teacher intervened, warning me to stop telling lies: ‘No one earns that much money. Don’t be stupid!’

Dad may have been well paid, but there was little sign of it in our lifestyle (beyond Mum’s clothes). I wore grubby grey shorts and a Fair Isle pullover, with long grey woollen socks drooping around my ankles, muddy shoes and a white shirt that was never quite white. We had no car, lived in a rented flat and rarely went on holiday or travelled unless it was part of Dad’s work; we had a gramophone but listened to the same twenty records throughout my entire childhood, until I started buying new ones myself.

One of the only children’s records available was ‘The Teddy Bear’s Picnic’, backed with ‘Hush, Hush, Hush! Here Comes the Bogeyman’ by Henry Hall with the BBC Dance Orchestra. I played it a lot, but even then I preferred the sound of the modern big bands, including the orchestras of Ted Heath, Joe Loss and Sidney Torch, with whom Mum was guest vocalist for a time before her marriage. My life with Denny in Westgate had left me disliking Broadway musical tunes: every day I was there the eerie strains of ‘Bali Hai’ from South Pacific had crackled from Denny’s big radiogram, a gift from Mr Buss. There was only one South Pacific song I liked at the time – ‘I’m Gonna Wash that Man Right out of My Hair’ – but thanks to Denny’s bathroom brutality, even that had sinister overtones.

1953 was turning out to be one of the happiest years of my life – but then Jimpy moved away. Until then, even though we were no longer going to school together, he had still been the centre of my existence. Now he was gone. My parents decided to replace him with a Springer Spaniel puppy. I remember waking up sleepily on my birthday and being introduced to this adorable, snoozing puppy curled up in an armchair. We called him Bruce.

Bruce became my great joy, although he was shamelessly disloyal. If someone in my gang of friends or a neighbour down the street called Bruce, the disgraceful creature would immediately run to him; no matter what I did he would refuse to return to me. It never occurred to anyone in my family to attempt to train the dog, and as a result Bruce spent a lot of time running around the neighbourhood, barking.

One summer day a local photographer took a photo, reproduced in the Acton Gazette, of my Jimpy substitute and me in the afternoon sunshine, leaning against a wall, almost dozing. In those days the pavement was a long, limitless bench to sit on. Like apprentice winos, wherever we sat in our neighbourhood, we appeared to preside over and size up all who passed.

We were getting more adventurous as a gang and as we got older we used to sit under West Acton bridge on the GWR fast main line to the West. The Twyford Avenue gate there was left open, and under the bridge, out of the rain, we could wait for the West Country and Welsh expresses from Paddington to thunder by as they approached at full speed. As one train approached, I absent-mindedly threw a stick across the tracks. Bruce – ever the instinctive retriever – leapt after it, the thundering locomotive ran over him, and I felt sure he must be dead. Suddenly, with the stick in his teeth, he appeared between the large driving wheels, his head going up and down with the driving shaft, and somehow managed to jump through without getting hurt, dropping the stick at the feet of Peter S, a favourite neighbour of his, while I looked on amazed at both his impregnability and his disloyalty.

One day I came home to find Bruce was gone. He’d been returned to his kennel of origin – or so Mum said. I knew deep down he’d been destroyed, but I went along with the pretence so that Mum wouldn’t be upset that I was upset. I tried consoling myself with the thought that if Mum hadn’t had him destroyed he would probably have died in any case.

Bruce was more than a companion. When he was suddenly gone I was heartbroken – not just over the dog, but for what he was supposed to have replaced. When Jimpy had been around we’d felt like a proper family.

In June 1953 we watched the Coronation at Westminster Abbey live on our brand-new, nine-inch television set, the images barely visible unless all the lights were out and our curtains drawn. Until then my parents had to take me with them if they wanted to go to the pub, or hire a babysitter. Now, with TV to entertain me, they could let me stay home alone.

On my own, terrified, I watched the scary science-fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment. Returning to Earth, the sole survivor of a space mission, ‘infected’ by aliens, gradually and horrifyingly turned into a monstrous vegetable. Although the ‘special effects’ were primitive, their psychological impact was genuinely disturbing and realistic and I began having terrible nightmares. Perhaps in a subconscious effort to make my parents come home, I’d fiddle with the electric fire, folding up slivers of newspaper and lighting them on the red-hot bars. Luckily I never set the house alight.

My parents were still trying to rebuild their marriage, I expect, and the pub and the circle of friends they shared there were vital in this process. It was more normal in those days to leave children alone, but I won’t pretend that I liked it, or that it felt normal. The truth is, though, that my experience of feeling alone, different, alien, was much more ‘normal’ than I realised.

I have always been a dreamer. My new teacher, Miss Caitling, noticed this and helped me. She caught me out once or twice telling lies and let me know she knew, but never made a great deal out of it. The way this clever woman handled me denied me the option of blaming someone in authority for my sense of shame over making things up; I had no choice but to see it as self-inflicted.

Miss Caitling wasn’t conventionally beautiful or pretty. She was stocky with short, dark hair, a little mannish, and wore sensible shoes. But her dark eyes were full of warmth and understanding. She was a champion of the underdog, a perfect teacher for the run-down neighbourhood South Acton had become by then. She was neither an unreliable vamp (like Mum) nor a wicked witch (like Denny); she was an altogether new kind of woman.

As far as girls my own age went, I relied entirely on my peers for guidance. They knew less than I did. Even Dad wasn’t much help. Drunk one night, Dad told me the facts of life. ‘The man does a kind of pee into the woman,’ he said. The rest of the details were explicit, so I don’t know why he fudged the critical bit. I remember passing the facts, as I understood them, to a young friend of mine, and his astonishment that we should all have been synthesised from urine.

On 8 May 1955 Dad was playing at Green’s Playhouse in Glasgow when he was sent a telegram from Norrie Paramor of Parlophone Records, part of EMI, offering him a solo record deal. Dad’s record, ‘Unchained Melody’, was released on 31 July 1956. His handsome face was plastered all over the local record shops. Although it was never a hit, ‘Unchained Melody’ was covered by at least five other artists, three of whom I think charted simultaneously. My father, the pop star! I wanted to be like him.

That summer we all went as usual to the Isle of Man. On one occasion while the band played at the Palace Ballroom, two teenage girls sat either side of me and began to tease me. They were dressed in the full skirts and petticoats of the day, with pretty shoes and low-cut bodices. I felt very much the little boy, my eyes darting back and forth between their heaving cleavages as they discussed which member of the Squadronaires they fancied. One girl immediately claimed the drummer. The other took her time and eventually selected the sax player.

‘That’s my dad!’ I shouted. Her disappointment at this confused me.

The incident served to do two things: it set my heart on becoming a performing musician, and prejudiced me for ever against drummers with their fast-pedalling sex appeal.

In 1956 popular music did not yet mean rock ’n’ roll. But The Goon Show, which Dad and I listened to, featuring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe, did include some early BBC broadcasts of rock performances. One of the show’s resident musicians was Ray Ellington, a young English drummer–vocalist and cabaret artist. With his quartet he sang songs like ‘Rockin’ and Rollin’ Man’, which he composed specially, and rather hastily I think, for the show. I thought it some kind of hybrid jazz: swing music with stupid lyrics. But it felt youthful and rebellious, like The Goon Show itself.

I was regarded by my parents as having little musical talent other than a thin, nasal, soprano voice. I was forbidden to touch Dad’s clarinets or saxophones, only my harmonica.

On my first Isle of Man fishing trip, I had a fiasco with a huge trout and was consoling myself by playing harmonica in the rain. I got lost in the sound of the mouth organ, and then had the most extraordinary, life-changing experience. Suddenly I was hearing music within the music – rich, complex harmonic beauty that had been locked in the sounds I’d been making. The next day I went fly fishing, and this time the murmuring sound of the river opened up a wellspring of music so enormous that I fell in and out of a trance. It was the beginning of my lifelong connection to rivers and the sea – and to what might be described as the music of the spheres.

I was always drawn to the water. A friend at school was a Sea Scout, and at the age of eleven I was impressed by his smart uniform and badges. He took me to meet the troop leader, and I was immediately signed up for a ‘bunkhouse weekend’ in order to acquaint myself with the camp. Dad interviewed one of the leader’s assistants and was very suspicious. He told me the fellow didn’t know which way to fly the Union Flag, and doubted he could ever have been any part of the Navy. When I pressed Dad he said he thought the man was ‘bent’, an expression I didn’t understand.

Dad eventually agreed to let me go for the weekend. The troop’s headquarters were on the River Thames, where a large shed was laid out as a dormitory, and a large rowing boat was moored – an old ship’s lifeboat in which the boys were taken for trips. We arrived on Saturday and spent the afternoon trying to tie nautical knots from a chart, which the two adults present couldn’t manage. After a fry-up lunch the light began to fade and we were hurried to the boat for a short trip on the river.

The tide was high and it wasn’t safe to row, so the men fitted an ancient outboard motor to the stern and fired it up. As we swept past the Old Boathouse at Isleworth once again I began to hear the most extraordinary music, sparked by the whine of the outboard motor and the burbling sound of water against the hull. I heard violins, cellos, horns, harps and voices, which increased in number until I could hear countless threads of an angelic choir; it was a sublime experience. I have never heard such music since, and my personal musical ambition has always been to rediscover that sound and relive its effect on me.

At the very height of my euphoric trance the boat ran up against the muddy shore at the troop’s hut. As it stopped, so did the music. Bereft, I quietly began to weep. One of the men put his coat around me and led me up to the camp, where I was settled by the stove to warm up. I kept asking the other boys if they had heard the angels singing, but none of them even responded.

A few moments later I was standing naked in a cold shower set up behind the bunkhouse. It was almost dark; there was a stark light bulb behind the two men who stood watching me shiver as the freezing water sprayed over me. ‘Now you’re a real Sea Scout,’ they said. ‘This is our initiation ceremony.’ The only thing ceremonial about it was the wanking these two chaps were doing through their trouser pockets. I was freezing, but they wouldn’t let me leave the shower until they had each achieved their surreptitious climax. I felt disgusted, but also annoyed because I knew I could never go back: I would never get my sailor’s uniform.

I remember only one truly terrible row between my parents, and sat terrified in the dining room as cups were smashed in the kitchen; I believe Mum flourished a knife. I intervened, weeping like a child actor, only to be told off by Dad who hated the melodrama to which I was contributing. There were also parties, and Dad invited musicians sometimes; their playing kept me awake and I annoyed and embarrassed Dad by bursting in on them and crying, telling him off in front of his friends for the disturbance; Dad told me off in return, but it was terribly exciting. The smell of cigarettes, beer and scotch floated down the hall.

Maybe to compensate for being kept awake at night by wild parties, I was given a small black bike which I hired every day to my friend David for his paper round. He paid me sixpence a week, but I caught him one day bumping it against a curb violently and ended the arrangement.

Once I had a bike I gave full vent to my local wanderlust; there was hardly a street or alley I didn’t explore in an area over two or three square miles. But I was one of the few boys in the gang with a bike, and my solo excursions deepened my solitary feelings. I often went into a trance-like state when cycling. I was nearly killed by a dustmen’s lorry at the top of my street as I swerved in its path, my head full of angelic voices.

I laboriously learned the tricky harmonica theme of Dixon of Dock Green, played by Tommy Reilly, on my own first chromatic instrument. No one was even slightly impressed by my achievement and I realised I was playing the wrong instrument if I wanted superstardom.

Like many of my peers I spent long, boring hours outside various pubs, a packet of crisps and fizzy drink in my hand, wondering why I was permitted such luxuries only when my parents were getting drunk. I was caught shoplifting once. I had gone into a bookshop for some Observer books I was then collecting. I paid for two, and tried to walk out with six. What’s strange is that I knew I’d be caught. The police were called, and I was questioned before being released.

Dad said nothing about the incident. It was the not unkind warning of the police officer I remember: ‘This is the first time, son. Make it the last – it’s a terrible road you’ve set out on.’ A terrible road? He was a good copper, but I thought it was obvious that I was simply filling the time, bored, up to no good. I began to collect things to settle myself down: model trains, Dinky cars, comics, postage stamps.

I was determinedly non-academic, although I wrote stories constantly and drew hundreds of pictures, mainly of military battles. I became obsessed with drawing plans for a fantasy fleet of huge, double-decked touring buses. My fleet of buses contained schoolrooms, playrooms with electric train sets, swimming pools, cinemas, music rooms, and – as I approached puberty – I added a large vehicle that contained a nudist colony with a cuddling room.

For a few years I attended Sunday school, regularly singing in a church choir. As I fell asleep at night I sang my prayers into the mouth of my hot-water bottle, which I held like a microphone. My parents still resisted the idea that I had any musical talent. No matter, I was already a visionary. A mobile nudist colony with a cuddling room? I’ll bet even Arthur C. Clarke hadn’t come up with that at my age!

Whenever we made a family visit to Horry and Dot’s, I got to see not only my beloved grandparents, but also Aunt Trilby, Dot’s sister. Trilby was single when I met her, and kept a piano in her flat. It was the only one I had a chance to play. Tril read music, and played light classics and popular songs, but never tried to teach me much. Instead she entertained me with palm-readings and interpretations of the tarot, all of which indicated I would be a great success in every way – or at least enjoy a ‘large’ life.

Aunt Trilby provided me with drawing paper and complimented my rapid sketches. After a while I would drift to the piano and, after checking to see that she was engrossed in her knitting or a book, begin to play. The instrument was never quite in tune, but I explored the keyboard until I found whatever combination I was after.

One day I found some chords that made me lightheaded. As I played them my body buzzed all over, and my head filled with the most complex, disturbing orchestral music. The music soared higher and higher until I finally stopped playing, and came back to the everyday world.

‘That was beautiful,’ said Tril, looking up from whatever she was doing. ‘You are a real musician.’

Because of Tril’s faith in me, I became a bit of a mystic like her. I prayed to God, and at Sunday school I came to genuinely love and admire Jesus. In heaven, where he lived, the strange music I sometimes heard was completely normal.

Miss Caitling continued to encourage me to link my fantasies with the real world through creative writing and art. She began inviting me to tell serial stories to the class, which I made up as I went along. Looking back, I understand that my classmates were as gripped by the thrill of seeing how I would escape my tangled plots as they were by the stories themselves. Sometimes, if I got in too deep, I simply dropped a nuclear bomb on my characters and started all over.

I felt natural standing in front of an audience. I also discovered that I could think quickly on my feet. If I didn’t know something, I could often bluff my way around it. In my last year at Berrymede I told anyone who asked about my ambitions to be a journalist.

In summer 1957 on the Isle of Man, Jimpy came for another visit. We had a great time together, and Dad took us to the cinema to see a musical film. I asked Dad what he thought of the music. He said he thought it had some swing, and anything that had swing was OK.

For me it was more than just OK. After seeing Rock Around the Clock with Bill Haley, nothing would ever be quite the same.