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CHAPTER 3

PORTWAY SCHOOL

Our house was a happy house, and it was also a loud house – in good times and in bad. Sometimes there’d be rows, and sometimes there’d be parties, but Sunday mornings were always the same. Dad would go out and get the bagels, and then Laura and I would get into his and mum’s bed while she did the breakfast. We had a little pink-and-white Pye record player, and we’d listen to some Frank Sinatra, Jack Jones or Judy Garland on it while Dad read the papers. Then after breakfast we’d get smartened up in our best clothes and head over to Hackney to see the grandparents.

At other times, the family would come to us. When we were in Plaistow, we always used to have a big party on Bonfire Night. My dad’s brothers and sister would come round with their kids and we’d make a load of noise in the garden. All the fireworks would be kept in the outside toilet to keep them dry and warm. One time, Uncle Charlie went in there for a more traditional purpose and a Jumping Jack went under the door. We heard a kerfuffle inside and everyone was laughing, then out came Uncle Charlie swearing and running round the garden. The Jumping Jack was in his trousers. He was lucky he’d come out the door because you wouldn’t want that blowing up in a confined space.

Another evening – I want to think of it as the same night but it would almost certainly have been a different one – the party was in full flow when a policeman turned up, on a motorbike, wearing one of the old strap helmets like in The Blue Lamp. He knocked on the door and asked for Sugar – all the local coppers knew my dad’s nickname, not least because about nine out of ten Old Bill in those days came from the area they policed – then told him there’d been a complaint about the noise. This was unusual so it must’ve been loud. My dad was very polite about it, and invited the copper in and gave him a drink, and by the end of the night he was giving all the girls rides up and down the street on his motorbike.

They were good times, but it was one law for the law and another for me, as my dad would never let me ride a pushbike, let alone a motorbike. I’ve been a bit the same with my girls – I’ll let them ride a bicycle in the garden, but not outside. (Obviously Lois and Jaime are all grown up now, so I can’t stop them going out into the world without stabilisers, but Ellie-Rae is only twelve, so she still has to do things my way.) It wasn’t an irrational fear on my dad’s part – he’d seen a guy on a bike get his wheel stuck in a tram line on Stratford Broadway once, and the tram had done him.

I remember one tricky moment when my dad came out of the house and saw me riding a mate’s bike round the corner. I jumped off it and came charging back up the road, vaulting over everyone’s fences to come out behind him on our front path, but I still got a clip round the ear to send me back inside. Those little patches out the front of the houses in Caistor Park Road are nearly all gravelled over now, but in the early sixties there were a lot more postage stamp-sized patches of grass.

Once The Beatles had come along, you’d find us standing between the hedges with our plastic guitars and Beatle wigs on, singing ‘She Loves You’ and making out we were John, Paul, George or Ringo. Another one of my favourite activities was watching the mods and rockers go roaring down the road like the Lancaster Bombers I used to make Airfix kits of.

All the mods seemed to live on our street, and all the rockers came from the next one down (close enough for me to know how wide of the mark my wardrobe of leathers and Liberace haircut was in Quadrophenia fifteen years or so later). They were all mates and they’d all been in the same class at school, but they’d get together to go to Margate or Southend and have a fight on a bank holiday, then for the rest of the year it would all be forgotten.

In terms of historic events which made an impact on people, the one that springs to mind for me is the one that springs to mind for most people, but maybe not for the same reason. Even though I was only six years old at the time, I can clearly remember what I was doing when the news of John F. Kennedy’s death broke in November 1963 – I was wondering what all the fuss was about.

Obviously it was sad for him and his family, but I couldn’t understand why grown adults were breaking down in tears in the street over something that didn’t really have too much to do with them, because he was a Yank. For some reason, everyone seemed to see it as being their business. I suppose because he was young and well liked, and people thought of him as more of a celebrity than a politician.

By then I’d left the afternoon kips and free orange juice of nursery behind for the relatively grown-up world of Portway Primary School. As a kid I never thought of it being ‘Portway’ as in ‘you’re on the way to the port’ – that’s the kind of connection which is lodged so deep in your mind it doesn’t really occur to you. And by the time I would’ve been old enough to get them, those jobs in the docks that might once have been waiting for me had all gone.

You can’t be hanging around the gates of your old primary school for too long at my age or people will think you’re a nonce. But it made me laugh to retrace the footsteps of my walk to school again all these years later – at the time it felt like miles and miles, but in fact it was only a couple of hundred yards. A little group of us used to assemble on the way down there in the morning, and we’d usually meet up with a mate who had a glass eye. His mum used to let us watch her put it in – you can’t believe how much space there is in the socket at the back of the eye – and it used to roll around all over the place until it settled in position.

He’d got his real eye poked out by the spoke of an old bicycle wheel on a bombsite on the main road. With the city to the west and the docks to the south, East London had taken a belting during the Blitz – anything the German bombers had left, they unloaded on us on their way home.

Of course we always won in the endless re-run of the Battle of Britain that was being staged by the Airfix kits hanging from my ceiling, but the fabric of the place I grew up in was definitely holed. If the spaces in the city that the bombsites opened up were the war’s legacy to young Londoners, it was our duty to make the most of them. Everyone knew they could be dangerous places which we weren’t really meant to hang around in, and that was half the appeal.

A copper caught me messing about in one when I was five or six, and took me straight back to ‘Sugar’s house’, where the punishment for my crime was to be kicked straight upstairs to bed and grounded for a week. It’s not just your family, friends and neighbours keeping an eye on you which helps set you on the right road as a kid. If policemen, teachers and doctors know where everyone lives too, that helps you grow up with a sense of being part of a community, rather than just a mass of disconnected individuals. Not that this would stop me getting into a fair amount of mischief, obviously.

Another time when I was messing around on a bombsite I found this big kind of metal torch. I think I’d just watched Spartacus, so I knew what to do – I got hold of a box of matches and tried to set fire to some straw in it. Nothing’s more interesting to you as a kid than fire, because there’s such a big warning sign over it as far as adults are concerned. Unfortunately on this occasion things got a bit more interesting than I’d intended, as some of the flaming straw fell down and set fire to a chair. I was shitting myself after that – every time we walked passed that bombsite I thought the police were after me. And the next few times I went shopping with my mum I’d duck down in the seat of the car if a police car came past, which I suppose was good training for later life.

All the bombsites are gone from Plaistow now, but you can still see where they once were from where the houses stop. A little block of flats in the middle of a terrace is always a tell-tale sign, and where the gaps have been filled in it’s like the street has got false teeth.

Not all the memories prompted by seeing my old primary school again are happy ones. Quite early on in my time there I got six of the best across the arse for throwing stones up in the air. OK, one came down and hit another kid on the head, but he wasn’t badly hurt, and it was obviously an accident. The headmaster wasn’t having any of it though, and he gave me a caning I can still remember to this day. I was absolutely terrified to tell my mum and dad, and the fact that the weals only came to light because my mum was bathing me shows you how young I was.

She asked what had happened so I had to tell her. When my dad found out he went round to the school to hear the headmaster’s side of the story. He sat down calmly and listened to his explanation, then when the teacher had finished talking he said, ‘So let me get this straight. My boy is five years old, and you’ve given him six hard wallops across the arse for something he didn’t even mean to do?’

I’m not exactly sure what happened next but the impression I got was it was something along the lines of my dad forcing the teacher’s head down onto the desk and trying to shove his cane down his throat. Either way, the headmaster never looked at me again, which was a result as far as I was concerned. I did get caned a few times over the years, and sometimes I deserved it, but that one was a fucking liberty.

When you’re five or six years old, the boundaries of your world are very clearly defined. Going somewhere in the car was fine, but if I ever walked further than the school, it was like you were Christopher Columbus and didn’t know if you were going to fall off the edge of the world.

Apart from Sunday trips over to Hackney to see Maud and Toffy, the main excursion we used to go on would be out of London to see Nanny Rich, Reg Hallett, Auntie Olive and Uncle Len in Shoeburyness. Those drives along the old Southend road seemed to go on forever, and there were three trips which particularly stuck in my mind.

My dad had an old Austin van. If we were all going to squeeze into it, I usually ended up sitting over the engine, between the passenger seat and the driver, which was not so great in the summer. But in the winter I’d be the only one who was warm, especially while the van was lacking a back window, as happened for a while after it got smashed. One time we were driving east in thick snow when the car broke down near the Halfway House pub. Obviously you couldn’t just call the AA on your mobile in those days and there wasn’t a heater you could put on in the car, so we were absolutely freezing.

I can’t actually remember who rescued us on that occasion, but another time we didn’t make it all the way to Nanny Rich’s house was when we hit a Labrador which ran out in front of us. The dog flew up in the air and came down in the road with a horrible smack, then just got up, shook itself and ran away, apparently none the worse for the impact. We were alright too – just a bit shocked – but my dad’s van was not so lucky. The front of it was severely smashed to pieces and there was steam coming out of the radiator, so we had to wait till someone we didn’t know stopped to help us. When this guy found out what had happened, he ended up giving me, Mum and Laura a lift all the way back to Plaistow.

That wouldn’t happen now – apart from anything else, a woman would be frightened of taking their kids in a car with a stranger – but the geezer genuinely wanted to help and there was a different mentality in those days. I’m not saying there weren’t evil fuckers about, because there were, but everyone wasn’t so primed by the media always to be thinking about the worst thing that could possibly happen. We didn’t have that same fear factor we do now everyone’s got Sky News.

In my memory, that change in people’s thinking wasn’t something that happened gradually. It happened more or less overnight when everyone found out about the Moors Murders. I’m not saying children hadn’t been taken away and killed before, but it wasn’t something people ever really thought about until Brady and Hindley put it in their heads. In a way, taking away that freedom for parents and children to live without fear was another crime that they committed. Even though it happened all the way up north in the hills outside Manchester, it was such a horrific case and it scared everyone so much that it might as well have happened just up the road. When we got up the next morning after it had been on the news, the streets of East London were empty. A lot of the old freedoms that we used to enjoy had gone out of the window overnight. I must have been eight at the time.

It was a dangerous old road, that one out to Southend. The third – and most dramatic – of the incidents I remember from those drives was the time we drove past a big car crash. There were police everywhere, and as we approached what appeared to be a fair amount of carnage, my mum said, ‘Don’t look.’ Obviously that’s the worst thing you can say to a kid – it’s right up there with ‘Never play with matches’. So by the time we drew level with the scene of the accident, Laura and I both had our faces glued to the window.

I’ve never forgotten what happened next. Things kind of went into slow motion, as they always seem to at moments of crisis. I suppose it’s your body’s way of protecting you – the adrenaline speeds up your brain, so whatever else is happening seems to slow down in comparison, which (in theory at least) gives you more time to respond. That’s why when we’ve seen something really horrible, we usually remember every unfolding detail, because it’s like we’ve recorded it so fast that when we try to play it back at normal speed it comes to us in slow motion. Anyway, as we drove past the wrecked car, the back door swung open and a body fell out. I hoped she wasn’t dead, but the absent look in that woman’s eyes has stayed with me ever since, and there was someone else in the car who looked in a bad way too.

As I’m describing this, I’m realising that it sounds quite like the car-crash sequence in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, and probably loads of other films as well. When something shocking’s happened to someone and they say it was ‘like being in a film’, they usually mean it was out of the ordinary. But the reason things happen the way they do on the screen is because a lot of people have got together and done their best to create the illusion of what it actually would be like. So it’s no wonder we use those kinds of scenes as a way of understanding reality and distancing ourselves from it at the same time.

I’ve had similar experiences several times since, of being a witness to really bad things happening. I’m not saying I see dead people like the little boy in The Sixth Sense (although I did look a bit like him as a kid), but knowing what death is does change you as a person. And I can understand what they say about people who see a lot of it – whether they be soldiers or doctors, policemen or undertakers – finding that their emotional responses start to close down. We use the word ‘deadened’ for a reason.

It’s the same with me and violence, which I’ve seen a fair amount of over the years. I’ve never liked it – and I’ve liked it less and less as I’ve grown older – but it doesn’t shock me either. I don’t see it happen and think, ‘Oh, what was that?’ I know exactly what it is, and, to a certain extent, I understand it.