REFLECTING ON MY childhood memoir This Boy, a radio interviewer described music as our escape from the slums. I never saw it that way. For a start, I wasn’t ever aware that I was living in a slum and had no conception of what life might be like elsewhere. Everyone around us lived in the same conditions. What was there to escape from, and where would we escape to?
If our mother’s cleaning jobs in the more prosperous households of Notting Hill and South Kensington gave us the odd glimpse of another kind of existence, we never saw it as part of our world. For all we had in common with these families, we might as well have arrived from another planet. We understood instinctively that the lives they led were completely different from ours and it never occurred to us to resent their obvious affluence. More often than not, when Lily was obliged to take us with her during the school holidays, we’d be dispatched to Kensington Gardens for the day, where Linda was deputed to watch over me while our mother completed her roster of dusting and polishing, sweeping and scrubbing. That was fine by us. We loved Kensington Gardens and we’d have been uncomfortable, not to say bored stiff, if forced to sit indoors in such alien territory.
I remember our mother telling us that the children in one of these families had been sent away to boarding school. Linda and I were horrified. We couldn’t imagine any greater deprivation. If those same ‘privileged’ children, living at the posh end of the Royal Borough of Kensington, were as beguiled by music as we were, it wouldn’t be seen as an ‘escape’ from their life, but as an integral part of it. And so it was for us.
There wasn’t much else to distract us. As far as we knew, nobody in Southam Street had a television set. Linda’s friend Marilyn Hughes, who lived a few streets away, was the only child we knew whose family possessed a television. By 1958, we had no TV and no father. If we we regretted one of these privations, it was the telly rather than the dad.
Our father eloped one Saturday morning with the barmaid from the Lads of the Village, leaving his wife distraught and his children happy. We couldn’t understand why our mother was so upset. Linda knew more than I did about our father’s antics. She knew that he contributed nothing to our upkeep apart from the coins Lily managed to filch from the bedside where he’d empty his pockets at night before falling into a drunken stupor. He rarely plied his trade as a painter and decorator, preferring his other, twilight occupation as musician, gambler and ‘ladies’ man’. The daily grind of earning a living was left to Lily. Worst of all, when he came home drunk he’d beat her. While she could give as good as she got in a verbal exchange, there was little she could do to counter his slaps and punches.
In the end he’d gone quietly, creeping away while the three of us were in the Portobello Road looking for second-hand clothes ‘off the barrow’. We’d returned home to find we’d become a single-parent family. What Linda and I failed to understand, as our mother sat quietly sobbing at the blue Formica kitchen table, twisting a tear-drenched handkerchief round and round her fingers, was that this wasn’t the end of the hard times. For Lily in particular, it was the beginning of a new and darker chapter.
For a start, she was lonely, and would now be even lonelier. She had become an abandoned woman and somehow, in our neighbourhood, abandonment was always the woman’s fault. But there would also be practical difficulties. Back then a married woman couldn’t sign a hire-purchase agreement or rent a telly without her husband being present to countersign the paperwork. Worst of all, she had no idea where Steve had gone, and to pursue a maintenance claim through the courts she would have to track him down. In the meantime we’d be poorer than ever because the family allowance to which we were entitled was paid to him, not to her. For women this was the post-emancipation, pre-equal-opportunities period of British social history.
And yes, undoubtedly those tears fell more heavily because, despite everything, Lily still loved Steve and had lost him to another woman.
The musical accompaniment to Lily’s consternation and our relief was provided by Lonnie Donegan and Cliff Richard. Linda had a pre-pubescent crush on Cliff. The dark, bequiffed lad from Cheshunt was basically an Elvis Presley tribute act, as were most British pop stars of that era.
The first homegrown answer to Elvis, an ex-Merchant Navy seaman called Tommy Steele, had been launched on to the music scene in 1956. He opened the door to a plethora of British rockers with edgy stage names like Power, Wilde and Fury.
I considered Lonnie, my favourite, to be more authentic than Cliff or Marty Wilde (born Reginald Smith in Blackheath) or Adam Faith, from just down the road in Acton. For a start he actually played the guitar the others would occasionally sling round their necks for adornment. His first hit, ‘Rock Island Line’, had been written by the great African-American folk singer Leadbelly, who served time in the Louisiana state penitentiary for attempted murder, and at the end of 1958, the year he permeated my eight-year-old consciousness, Lonnie was in the charts with a version of an old folk song of the American south that seemed to me to be more profound than the ‘moon in June’ ditties warbled by the others. As can be seen, I suffered from early onset pretentiousness.
That year poor, struggling, worn-out Lily somehow managed to ensure that both of her children got to see their musical heroes. She entered Linda for a competition in the London Evening News to try to win tickets for a Cliff Richard concert at the London Palladium. To the disbelief and delight of all three of us, Linda landed an allocated seat at this famous venue for a Sunday matinee performance.
Lily and I accompanied her as far as the theatre, just off Regent Street, where my sister joined hundreds of other girls and their parents milling about waiting for the doors to open. The excitement in the air was palpable. Then we had to wait until the show was over to see her safely home again, which meant hanging around an otherwise deserted Sunday afternoon West End for several hours, trudging past endless parades of closed shops. On the plus side, I saw the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus for the first time and, at Portland Place at the other end of Regent Street, Broadcasting House, the art-deco structure from which emanated that cornucopia of entertainment accessed through our three-channel Bakelite switch. From there we returned to the Palladium just as Linda emerged, breathless after screaming for two hours at the object of her adoration.
Towards the end of the year my mother took me to the Chiswick Empire, where Lonnie Donegan was appearing. Linda had seen her hero and now I must see mine. It was just the two of us, Lily and me. Lily applied her deep red lipstick, pinned her hair into its ‘going out’ mode, the style she wore when she went to the pictures, and we took the bus to Chiswick High Road. It was one of those wet winter evenings that pervade my childhood memories, the deep yellow street lights reflecting off the damp pavements like pools of melting lemons as men strode along, hat brims pulled down and the lapels of their gabardine macs turned up against the grey drizzle.
As it was close to Christmas, I’ve always had the event filed in my memory as a pantomime, but I think it must have been a variety show of the kind that still packed theatres across the country into the 1960s, which usually featured a magician, a comedian and a troupe of tumbling acrobats as well as the musical acts. I can’t remember any of those, or indeed anything else from the show apart from the man I’d come to see. I do recall that Lonnie and his six-piece band weren’t actually top of the bill: that distinction fell to Joan Regan, a blonde singer, one of a legion of British crooners – David Whitfield, Ruby Murray, Dickie Valentine, Lita Roza, Dennis Lotis, Alma Cogan – who were soon destined for extinction in the evolutionary process that was changing popular music.
I was lucky to have the chance to soak up the atmosphere of the Chiswick Empire when I did because the following summer it was abruptly closed after the building was sold and plans approved for a lucrative office block. It seems the news came as a bombshell to the staff: the theatre played to capacity audiences, and in what turned out to be its last show, the flamboyant pianist Liberace wowed a full house.
In fact, Lonnie Donegan had been in pantomime at the Chiswick Empire the previous year, in the first of many panto appearances (giving his Wishee-Washee in Aladdin), derided by purists as ‘selling out’. No doubt to an experienced artist like Lonnie, who had been performing since the 1940s, it was just another paying job. But it is perhaps ironic that he began to broaden into an old-fashioned, all-round entertainer just as the musical revolution he had helped to create was about to consign that particular breed to history.
Lonnie would very soon develop a repertoire that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Victorian music hall – songs like ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ and ‘Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour on the Bedpost Overnight’ – which would dent his credibility among his teenage audience. Yet he and the skiffle genre he popularised, a blend of jazz, blues and folk often played on improvised instruments, was probably responsible for more young boys picking up a guitar and learning how to play it (or even a washboard or comb and paper) than anyone other than Bert Weedon, of Play in a Day fame. It would not be a stretch to describe Lonnie as the architect of the 1960s pop explosion.
In the winter of 1958, I sat in the binding darkness of the stalls waiting patiently for the penultimate act. I was enthralled by the whole experience of seeing Lonnie live on stage, of sharing the air he breathed, marvelling that he was occupying the same moment in time and space as me – and my mum. I suspect that Lily was only pretending to enjoy Lonnie’s performance out of loyalty to her son. She’d have been looking forward to Joan Regan. There was nothing about skiffle or rock ’n’ roll that moved my mother one iota. The only ‘group’ that she ever liked was the Bachelors, and they were to rock ’n’ roll what Jerry Lee Lewis was to Beethoven’s sonatas.
That evening Lonnie was not singing about chewing gum or dustmen but about being one of them rambling men; about the big Columbia River and the big Grand Coulee Dam. There was pathos, history, drama; there were catchy choruses, and virtuoso instrumentals. And, of course, he sang about Tom Dooley, the poor boy who was bound to die – the hit that was Number 3 in the charts at the time and one of the Top 20 bestselling singles of the whole year, in spite of having to compete with a rival recording of the same song from across the Atlantic by the Kingston Trio.
He was, in short, singing in American. And everything to do with the best entertainment came from the States. As Cliff and his fellow Elvis impersonators were carving out their careers in British pop, their established equivalents, the home-grown crooners, were still imitating their US idols, Frank Sinatra, Mel Tormé and Rosemary Clooney. The best films came from Hollywood and the TV schedules were saturated with westerns – The Cisco Kid, Gun Law, The Lone Ranger, Cheyenne, Laramie.
Lonnie’s assimilation of the American experience was part of his appeal for me. My passion for music was fuelled by those TV cowboy heroes long before we acquired our first television. I sat spellbound as the radio played Frankie Laine singing ‘Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin’’, the haunting theme from the film High Noon. Its sombre minor key sent shivers down my spine and I thought it was the most exciting song I’d ever heard. It inspired me to write my own western ballad, ‘As the Wagons Keep on Rollin’’ (Through this dark and barren land/The Indians are waiting to get your cowhand/They’ll be burning every wagon and killin’ every man/I don’t think anyone can get through/I’d be surprised if anyone can’). I sang this potential classic to my mother, accompanying myself on my plastic ‘Tommy Steele’ guitar. Just the once. There were no demands for an encore.
I liked the drama of the cowboy songs, their dark themes and rousing choruses. I didn’t know the genre as country and western, but that’s what it was. And prominent in the musical accompaniment was my instrument of choice: the guitar.
At school my sister and I played the descant recorder, as every child was obliged to do at the time. Linda also had a Melodica, given to her as a Christmas present. These plastic wind instruments with two-octave piano keyboards were expected to catch on in a big way but never really did. We also now had access to our father’s honky-tonk piano, one of Linda’s first acts as we celebrated his departure having been to break the lock with a screwdriver and liberate the keys. But for me none of these instruments could match the guitar.
My mother had bought me that toy ‘Tommy Steele’ guitar as a birthday present one year. Small and brittle, it had four thick, plastic strings in primary colours – one red, one yellow, one blue and one green – and plonked rather than strummed. It was upgraded to a proper six-string Spanish guitar, thanks to her win on the football pools, in 1957. The windfall wasn’t a life-changing sum – about £90 – but one which in those days was enough to put down deposits on various household items she could previously only dream of owning. But the money didn’t last long, especially after Steve got his hands on some of it and proceeded to gamble it away, and most of her acquisitions were soon either returned or repossessed because she couldn’t afford the repayments.
In truth, the three-piece suite, sideboard and new kitchen table that came and went had looked a bit incongruous in our Southam Street rooms. The suite had to be stored in the bedroom as we didn’t have a front room to put it in.
The two purchases that survived were my Spanish guitar and the Dansette record-player that represented Linda’s share of our mother’s good fortune.
The guitar wasn’t an expensive one, but I was thrilled with it. Lily helped me to pick it out of a mail-order catalogue, placing a strict limit on the cost. It had the appropriate burnished-wood body, six metal strings and a plastic scratchboard located just under the sound hole. Its smell of wood and polish and varnish has stayed with me down the years, reminding me of one of the most joyful days of my life – the day that guitar first arrived. It was almost as long as me, a full-sized instrument. And it looked just like Lonnie’s.