WE ALL HAVE distinct scraps of memory, like video clips we replay in our minds; a record of a time and place, sometimes enhanced by sounds and smells, that remains indelible as other recollections fade. I have many in my mental library. One of the clearest dates from the summer of 1959.
The weather is hot and clammy. The big window in the bedroom I still share with my sister has been raised on its threadbare sash and is suspended like a guillotine above my head while I gaze out on the street below. Southam Street is teeming as the long summer evening unfurls, the heat compounding the effects of the poor sanitation to drive people out of doors.
Linda is out somewhere, probably at the Girl Guides, where she was an enthusiastic pack leader. She acquired many badges demonstrating her proficiency in a variety of essential skills such as chopping wood and making a fire, each sewn carefully on to the sleeve of her blue Guide’s blouse. And she learned lots of songs, which she insisted on singing to me. Most, like the archetypal ‘Ging Gang Goolie’, were innocent gibberish, but I recall another, which must have been sung when Brown Owl, or whatever the head Guide was called, wasn’t around. I can’t remember it all, but the first line was: ‘On top of Old Smokey where nobody goes, there stands Jayne Mansfield without any clothes.’
Anyway, my sister isn’t around and I’m leaning on a flaked and crumbling windowsill that forms the only barrier between me and the 30ft drop into the ‘area’ below (or the ‘airie’, as we kids called it). My mother joins me, bringing an old pillow to protect our bare arms from the rough edges as we lean out together to catch whatever breeze may be drifting past and to see what is happening down towards Golborne Road. It is not long after the Whitsun bank holiday Monday when, right there, at the corner of our street, Kelso Cochrane, a young Antiguan carpenter, was murdered by a gang of Teddy Boys.
Although all seems peaceful, and the few West Indian residents of Southam Street, who live at the other end, tend to keep themselves to themselves for fear of attracting any unwanted scrutiny, there is an undercurrent of tension in the oppressive heat. The senseless killing of Kelso Cochrane has brought a lot of attention to our previously largely ignored community: police conducting door-to-door inquiries, journalists seeking background, and camera crews from around Britain and abroad.
My mother had been wanting for years to move out of Southam Street, which had been declared unfit for human habitation in the 1930s, and this shocking event only sharpened her desire to escape. But the council house waiting list was long and our housing provider, the Rowe Housing Trust, was still trying to find us somewhere else to live; a place where Linda, who would be twelve in September, would no longer have to share a bedroom with her kid brother.
In the meantime, Lily had picked up an old folding screen from somewhere, the kind that doctors had in their surgeries, behind which patients would be invited to step to remove their clothing. This was strategically positioned in the space between our beds to provide some rudimentary privacy, particularly when we had to pee in a bucket during the night. It was that or go down three flights of stairs wearing makeshift nightclothes in the pitch dark to use the decrepit toilet in the back yard.
I was very prudish about being seen in a state of undress. It was certainly a more modest age. But, thinking back, I suspect I suffered from a mild form of what we now know as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), because I definitely had some peculiar bedtime rituals. The main one was centred on a girl named Jennifer Shepherd, who was in my class at Bevington Primary School and lived further down Southam Street. Every night as I undressed behind the screen, before I took my trousers off, I would check under the bed in case Jennifer was hiding there. I was not concerned that Josie Rose or Maureen Langton or Norma Dixon or any of the other girls in my class might have secreted themselves beneath the bed – no, this was a specific search for Jennifer Shepherd. Exactly what the poor girl had done to deserve this role as the object of my strange obsession I haven’t the faintest idea.
It was certainly not illogical to think that somebody could have sneaked into our room, even if it was highly unlikely to have been Jennifer Shepherd. None of the doors had locks, and while we had the upstairs floor to ourselves, with its two rooms and the cooker out on the landing, on the next floor down, where Linda and I slept, there was another family packed into the room opposite. Nothing other than an inbred sense of decorum among the occupants and boundaries that existed only in our imaginations prevented cross-pollination between the four or five different families who filled the house. Once through the front door on some pretence or other, a visitor or intruder could have entered any room at random.
As things turned out, this would be our last summer in Southam Street. And on this evening, as Lily and I take the air from our elevated vantage point, surveying the bustle on the pavement below, there is a song playing on a radio somewhere, the volume amplified through an open window. It is Buddy Holly singing ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’.
Buddy was everywhere that year. His death in a plane crash in February at the tender age of twenty-two had sealed his immortality, and that single carried a particular sorrowful piquancy, having been released posthumously.
As a nine-year-old obsessed with pop music, I followed the charts diligently and listened avidly to the few record shows offered by the BBC. There was Housewives Choice, more Perry Como and Lena Horne than rock ’n’ roll, Sam Costa, and Children’s Favourites, introduced by ‘Uncle Mac’ with the greeting ‘Hello, children everywhere!’. But I was outgrowing ‘Nellie the Elephant’, ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’ and Danny Kaye’s glorious rendition of ‘The Ugly Duckling’. I wanted to hear Neil Sedaka, Jerry Keller’s ‘Here Comes Summer’, Marty Robbins and, of course, Lonnie Donegan. So the highlights of my week were the BBC’s chart programme, Pick of the Pops, with David Jacobs, and Record Roundup, hosted by Jack Jackson, a former bandleader and trumpeter. He pioneered the use of comedy clips and pre-recorded tapes between records adopted by later disc jockeys like Kenny Everett and Noel Edmonds.
As a child, of course, I just accepted the scarcity of records on the BBC as a fact of life. The reason for it was a precedent set by an agreement with the Musicians’ Union dating back to 1934, which imposed ‘needle time’ restrictions on the corporation. In the 1950s, the playing of commercial gramophone records was limited to under thirty hours a week. All other music had to be ‘live’. This had never been much of an issue while listeners preferred live dance-band music to records, but now young people wanted to hear pop singles. It was a problem for the BBC that was exacerbated by the cost of using live music at a time when resources were increasingly being diverted from radio to television.
Whatever airwaves were available to original pop recordings that summer, Buddy Holly dominated them, as is so often the case when the life of an artist is cut tragically short. For years after his death, Buddy’s previously unreleased (and, in the later stages, ‘should never have been released’) material would sell much better in Britain than the records produced while he was alive ever had. And his premature demise would eventually be commemorated as ‘the day the music died’ in Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’.
I had never heard of Buddy Holly in his lifetime and quickly grew tired of ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’. But songs such as ‘Peggy Sue’ and ‘That’ll Be the Day’, coupled with the morbid fascination of the terrible plane crash that killed him, soon made me a Buddy fan.
Two other young stars, the Big Bopper (aged twenty-eight) and Ritchie Valens, of ‘La Bamba’ fame, who was just seventeen, perished along with Buddy and the pilot that February, minutes after taking off in snowy conditions. They had been leaving Clear Lake, Iowa, bound for Fargo, Minnesota (even the place names were redolent of the inhospitable, wide-open spaces depicted in westerns) and the next gig of a ‘Winter Dance Party’ tour.
It seemed to me that travelling by aeroplane in winter was suicidal. Matt Busby’s brilliant Manchester United football team had also been destroyed in a disaster at Munich airport only a year, almost to the day, before Buddy’s untimely death. I was crazy about football and fixated on United’s goalkeeper, Harry Gregg, who had not only survived but proved himself a hero by helping to rescue other passengers, including his teammate Bobby Charlton and manager Matt Busby, from the burning plane. Like all goalies at the time he used to play in a thick green woollen roll-neck jumper and a flat cap to keep the sun out of his eyes. I’d pretend to be Harry, throwing myself towards an imaginary shot, safe in the assurance of a soft landing on my bed.
Incredibly, Gregg returned for United’s first match after the disaster, and played in every game for the remainder of the season. I was a devoted Queens Park Rangers fan but, like most of the nation, I had willed United to win the 1958 FA Cup with the motley crew of players they’d assembled post-Munich. I listened to the final on the radio and was outraged when Gregg was barged over the line along with the ball by Nat Lofthouse for Bolton’s second goal.
For Linda and me the dangers of air travel were more or less on a par with the hazards of underwater exploration: we knew that there were people who experienced those risks but the chances of us being among them were so remote that the notion we might ever face such perils ourselves was hardly worth a passing thought. Our mother had never gone abroad in her life and the likelihood was that neither would we.
After an hour or so leaning on the windowsill with no sign of any tensions in the street boiling over in the heat, Lily suggests we walk round to one of the nearby corner shops that still proliferate for a packet of cigarettes. She buys them in fives, then cuts them in half with an old razor blade to give herself ten smokes, which will last her a couple of days. I am persuaded to accompany her by the promise of a Jubbly, an orange tetrahedron-shaped iced lolly – well, just a frozen drink, really – that has to be squeezed gradually out of one snipped end of its waxed cardboard cover.
As we stroll back through the syrupy air, the light is beginning to fade, and with it fades the film clip in my mind of the summer of ’59. This would have been one of the last times I walked the pavements of the familiar territory into which I had been born. These North Kensington streets would soon be gone, to be replaced in part by high-rise blocks like Trellick Tower, such a potent symbol of its era that it has often featured in films, TV ads and music videos, which still marks the spot where the eastern end of our road used to be. The innocent fifties were giving way to the swinging sixties.