When I was at the tender age of nine, I always had this fascination to take things apart, to see how they worked, and then put them back together. Sometimes these efforts worked, sometimes they screwed up.
My first downfall was at Uncle Simey’s house where I would go on a Saturday while Mum and Dad were at work, and I was left on my own to play. Simey and my mum’s sister Julie shared a house for a while, they were housemates and good friends, but there was never anything romantic between them.
They had bought a top-of-the range Hoover vacuum cleaner on HP, that’s hire purchase (known as the ‘never never’) from a big store. Posh sods, this was 1954! I was left to play, and found Simey’s toolkit in the cupboard. I took the Hoover apart, each and every nut and bolt, because fascination had got the better of me. I put it all back together again, there were no bits left over, or so I thought. My aunt came home and asked me to go and play outside. After a few minutes there were screams, like a person being murdered. I rushed into the house and saw Julie on the floor, writhing in pain.
‘What the fuck has happened?’ my uncle shouts, as Julie mumbles, ‘I turned on the Hoover, and the bastard threw me across the floor – I got a massive shock!’
Julie and Simey took me back to Harris’s, the store where Simey purchased the Hoover. We saw a salesman, who told us they would have to send it back to the factory for inspection.
‘What?’ says my uncle, ‘my missus got a bloody shock, what about her then?’
‘Sorry,’ says the salesman, ‘there’s nothing I can do until it’s sent back.’ And then he done a stupid thing: he turned his back on Simey and tried to walk away.
Simey is a big man, like my dad, so he proceeds to lift this wimp up by the neck, and says to him, ‘CHANGE this Hoover now, and gimme some more goods for my inconvenience, and a new Hoover.’
As the salesman is turning blue, with my uncle Simon’s hands around his neck, the store manager approaches and tries to calm things down. The salesman is put down, gasping for breath, and the store manager tells us to leave the store, or he will forcibly remove us.
Bad move mate.
All hell is let loose as Simey punches this dick full in the face and then starts to take the store apart, smashing and wrecking things. The police are called and Uncle Simon is carted away by four policemen.
At the police station we are told he will be in court tomorrow morning for assault. Now I realise at my young age that it’s my fault that I had not put the Hoover back right, and all this trouble has been caused by me. So, I did the sensible thing: kept quiet and went with the flow.
The outcome was a fine of five pounds (about three weeks’ wages in those days) or one week in prison: uncle Simon takes the one week in prison. Ooops, it was my screw-up, so I do the cowardly thing and keep schtum. The Hoover was found defective, a new one was handed over, Uncle Simey’s fine was paid by the store, and a new refrigerator given as compensation, so not too bad an outcome really. That was my first fuck-up, in a line of many…
When I was about eleven they found subsidence or something in the Samuel Lewis Trust flats we were living in and they moved everyone out. So we moved in with my mother’s parents in Stoke Newington for a few months before the council found us a house in Filey Avenue, N16.
The place was completely bare and needed decorating throughout, so my dad, uncle Simey and me spent weeks before we moved in, sprucing up the whole place.
And that’s how I learnt to become a handyman.
Woodwork, plastering, painting, we did it all. It even needed completely re-wiring and because I was so small they used to send me under the fucking floorboards to feed the wires through! It was our first proper house, and we loved it. We had a ‘posh’ lounge that you wouldn’t use every day, only for special occasions, a choice of indoor and outdoor toilets and an Anderson Shelter (an underground metal box used as a protective bunker during World War Two air raids) at the bottom of our own garden.
We even had a proper bathroom – I thought I was in heaven! Living in the flat we’d not had a proper bathroom, just a galvanised bath hanging on the back of the scullery door and twice a week we’d fill it with a kettle and all of us would take turns to bathe. Mum would always go first, then dad, then I’d get the leftovers.
Before we had our own tin bath we’d go over to Hackney Baths once a week. You’d pay a penny and they’d give you a towel and a bar of soap, no sponge or anything, and you got your own bathroom for thirty minutes. But only thirty minutes, mind. Outside the door they had a lever, and when your thirty minutes were up they’d pull it and if you’d fallen asleep you’d suddenly wake up and all the fucking water would run away. You had no control over anything. Once the bath had drained it would automatically fill up again, and all you had was a cold tap to cool the water down if it was too hot, but there was no hot tap if it wasn’t warm enough, that was tough luck. Having our own bathroom meant we could have a bath each with fresh water, and it felt like being a millionaire.
Our other great pleasure in Hackney was going to the Town Hall on a Saturday night to watch the wrestling. My dad, being a bit of a name in those parts, knew quite a few of the wrestlers and so we always used to get front-row seats. That was entertainment, I tell you!
Some of the famous names included Steve Logan, Johnny Kwango, Dr Death, Shirley Crabtree (aka Big Daddy), Jackie Pallo, what days! My favourite back then was Mick McManus. He was always the bad boy, doing naughty moves, winding up the crowd, who would boo him and he’d get the crap kicked out of him for fifteen minutes and then come back and win! Even as a kid, though, I’d look at his hair and think, ‘That’s not right.’ It was gloss black, dyed to within an inch of its life.
Then there was Ricky Starr who was a ballerina, he was like no one else. He was much slimmer than the other wrestlers but really muscly, and he would dance around the ring doing all this ballet stuff – we thought he was a joke when he first came on. Then when Johnny Kwango came for him he stood on one foot and kicked him in the head with the other! The posts in the corners of the ring must’ve been four foot high and I remember once when Ricky, from a standing position, jumped straight onto the top of the post right in front of me, it was incredible! Then he lost balance and fell off. Johnny Kwango dived on top of him – one, two, three and he was out!
Once the wrestling was over for the evening we’d head to the bar where my dad would catch up with his wrestling pals. Being seven or eight years old and stood next to these giants like Big Daddy, I suddenly felt very small indeed.
I was reminded of those days last year when I went down to Ramsgate to the house of the late Jackie Pallo. He was a decent mechanic in his day and he loved cars, almost too much because he couldn’t bear to part with them. In his back garden he had a collection of rusting old Saabs and other things that he’d hoarded away. It was both amazing and sad to see.
From getting stuck into my early handiwork I got quite good at fixing things, so once I grew out of my wooden toys, as I said, I used to take things apart and put them back together. I’d go down the scrappy’s (scrap merchants) looking for old things to repair and also go door-to-door asking if people had anything that needed fixing, and they’d give me sixpence for doing it. Electric fan heaters, mangles, anything that had broken, I would take away, get out my little toolbox of nuts and bolts, and spend hours figuring out how to fix these things, and earn a few quid doing it. That was my greatest pleasure, until I hit thirteen.
Then it was all about trying to get into eighteen-rated movies, then called X-films. Me and my mates used to go to the Kenning Hall Cinema in Lower Clapton to see movies like The Blob. We’d hunt around the pavement looking for fag ends, then roll them up in toilet paper to make several of them assembled together look like one fag. We stuck our collars up, put the swagger on and walked past the doorman smoking, trying to make out we were eighteen.
Then of course once we were in, The Blob frightened the fucking life out of me! After I got home I was checking under the beds, and kept the light on, it was scary shit. I’ve seen it since and I laughed my head off. It’s got Steve McQueen in it, good actors. It’s totally naff when you see it now, but God it frightened the fuck out of me when I was a kid.
Around the same time I started going to the movies I started noticing girls too. There was one girl in particular, and I’ll never forget her – Pat. I was thirteen and she was eighteen. She lived in Upper Clapton and I lived in the scrag end of Lower Clapton, but she liked me ’cos I was a cheeky little fucker and I liked her because she had big boobies! We used to have a little play around, you know: ‘You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.’
Then for my fourteenth birthday we were going to walk hand-in-hand up to Stamford Hill to go and play on the fruit machines at the ‘Shtip’. Right next to that was a salt beef bar, so if you won any money on the fruit machines you’d go next door and have a salt beef sandwich. Anyway, I turn up at Pat’s house, and ask her, ‘You all right? Ready to go?’
‘Why don’t you come in a minute?’ she calls out.
‘Where’s Mum and Dad?’ I ask her.
‘They’re out. I’ve got a birthday present for you.’
I’m straight up stairs! We’re in her bedroom under the sheets, getting on with a bit of rumpy pumpy when suddenly SLAM, the front door shuts. Before we know what’s going on her dad bursts in. He was a cab driver and I’ve just been playing ‘now you see me now you don’t’ with his daughter, and he gives me a fucking hiding. So I scarper like a rat out of a drainpipe and as I’m leaving I can hear her mum calling her a fucking slag and all sorts. I get home and I’ve got a black eye, but I don’t tell my dad what it’s for of course, how can I?
Still, all these years later, I can still remember that it was the best birthday present ever!