I’VE LEARNED THAT the world came close to nuclear annihilation in 1962 but I don’t remember anything about the Cuban missile crisis. I was blissfully unaware of any sense of impending doom, which I suppose is the best state to be in when doom decides to impend.
A little over a week before the crisis began, on 5 October 1962, the Beatles released their first single. I was largely unaware of that as well, which marks out 1962 as the last year in which the Beatles weren’t an integral part of my life.
I do recall seeing a photo of this obscure Liverpudlian group, at the time ‘Love Me Do’ was released, in a weekly pop magazine to which Linda subscribed. Even our mother, as a born-and-bred Scouser, took a mild interest. Ringo was still sporting an Elvis Presley quiff and a streak of grey hair that seems subsequently to have been dyed out of existence.
The relationship between Linda and me was undergoing an evolutionary change. She was becoming less like a sister and more like a mother as Lily spent more and more time in hospital, leaving her daughter to take command of grappling with the debts created by our mother’s incapacity and our father’s indolence. The age difference between us – two years and eight months – was also suddenly opening a wider social chasm. She was fifteen and would be leaving school the following spring, while I was still in my first full year at Sloane. Her friends seemed more like adults; mine were still children. She was acquiring boyfriends; my voice had yet to break.
I was very unhappy at my new school. The contrast with Bevington was stark and isolating – only two other boys had transferred to Sloane from my primary school, and one of them was in a different class. The journey there and back was daunting enough: a quarter of a mile’s walk to Latimer Road tube station, my books stuffed into a duffel bag slung across my shoulder, four stops on the Metropolitan Line to Hammersmith, through the arcade and across to the bus stop opposite the Hammersmith Palais to catch the number 11, which took half an hour to snake through Hammersmith, Fulham and Chelsea to the bus stop near Lots Road power station.
When I finally reached school, there was a further challenge to be overcome. At each gate stood a sixth-form prefect waiting to report any boy who arrived a second later than nine o’clock. Persistent lateness could (and did in my case) lead to a caning, delivered with relish by our headmaster, the stick-thin, sharp-featured Dr Henry.
I hated most of my lessons. Particularly Latin, in which I barely got past amo, amas, amat, and French with Mr Harris (nicknamed ‘Dolly’ for reasons I never discovered), who was possibly the most boring teacher in the world – though I can’t in all fairness blame dear old Dolly for my complete lack of competence in the subject.
I even dreaded games and PE because of having to get undressed in front of the other boys. Every one of them seemed to be wearing brilliant white vests and pants, so immaculate they appeared to have been newly purchased for each PE period, and their socks had holes only where their feet went in. I’d never worn a vest in my life and it’s best not to dwell on the state of my underpants. As for my socks, let’s just say they were well ventilated. Lily received financial help to buy my uniform (complete with a superfluous cap and a dark blue raincoat belted at the waist), but she had to find the money for everything worn underneath and that meant a certain amount of make do and mend.
And there was the dreaded dinner-money ritual, presided over by my form teacher, Mr Woosnam, every Monday morning. He would call out our names in alphabetical order, whereupon the bidden child had to approach his desk at the front of the class and hand over his dinner money for the week ahead. When my name was called I was forced to shout out, ‘Free, sir.’ Mr Woosnam meant no harm and was, I’m sure, completely unaware of the anguish this caused the only ‘free’ kid in the class. Even if there had been more of us the effect would have been equally humiliating.
The saving grace was a music teacher at Sloane who was a worthy successor to Miss Woofenden. Mr Dearlove was an urbane character in his late thirties, with thick, wavy, elaborately styled hair, a strand of which always fell across his forehead, like a stray leaf hanging down from a flower display. giving him an absentminded air. He had a cheery disposition and a fondness for three-piece suits.
Mr Dearlove auditioned all the new boys for the school choir during our first few weeks at Sloane. His principal aim seemed to be to identify some sopranos who could compensate musically for the absence of any female voices. No doubt our counterparts in their first year at Carlyle Grammar School for Girls, who congregated in the next building, along Hortensia Road, behind a high and forbidding brick wall, were being simultaneously auditioned for baritones.
Having impressed Mr Dearlove with my singing ability and the purity of my unbroken voice, I found myself committed to spending my lunch breaks practising for the 1961 Christmas concert. But Mr Dearlove’s lunchtime choir practice became the highlight of my school day. We had two pieces to master for the concert. One was a piece of sacred music by Claudio Monteverdi, which we had to sing in the original Italian. I can’t recall the name of the piece, which is a pity, since to this day it’s the only Italian I’ve ever spoken.
The other was ‘Habanera’ from Bizet’s Carmen, perhaps his most famous aria apart from the Toreador song. This one was to be sung in English:
Love will like a wild birdling fly, careering whither it may please,
Vainly to him for help we cry, but ’tis his fancy to displease.
Mr Dearlove rehearsed us well and gave me a glorious introduction to opera but, in the end, I let him down by failing to turn up for the concert.
At the beginning of December I made a meal of an eye injury sustained in the school gym to such an extent that I convinced both my mother and our GP to keep me off school until April the following year.
So I began 1962 educating myself at leisure at home. Throughout our childhood Lily had ensured that we had comics to read as well as library books to borrow. By now Linda’s Bunty and my Hotspur had given way to Billy Fury Magazine and Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly respectively. But I had kept all my back copies of Hotspur and during this glorious spell of educational inactivity I read them all again. It was around this time that my mother increased the paper bill at the newsagent’s opposite our house in Walmer Road by ordering a new magazine, the title of which demonstrated its worthy purpose.
Knowledge was a collection of thick, beautifully illustrated pages that could be bound between laminated covers by means of a set of thin metal rods. Lily shelled out an extra half-crown for the binding kit. She had never been able to acquire an encyclopaedia, so I suppose she saw this as the next best thing. I learned a lot about the Phoenicians, Roman Britain and Hereward the Wake from reading Knowledge and had even begun to bind the editions into Volume 1 before Linda was forced to cancel the order because we couldn’t afford it.
By now she had a steady boyfriend, a local jack-the-lad by the name of Jimmy Carter. My sister had matured early, already having gone on several one-off dates, including an outing with an Italian student who’d chatted her up on the tube between Hammersmith and Latimer Road. If they’d stayed together, he could have helped me with the Monteverdi.
With Jimmy it was serious. He was to be a fixture in our lives for at least a year, even becoming engaged to be married to my industrious sister.
I liked Jimmy and, more importantly, so did Lily. However, I don’t think she ever saw him as son-in-law material and Linda may well have felt the same. Round our way, an engagement was rarely the precursor of a wedding. Couples got engaged without the slightest intention of getting married. Jimmy was a man of considerable charm and, in addition to an affection for Linda, the three of us – Lily, Jimmy and I – shared a penchant for cigarettes.
My sister never smoked. She was too sensible for that. But I took up the habit at the age of twelve. My strict(ish) mother was surprisingly indulgent, sometimes even slipping me a packet of ten Rothman’s King Size, a perk of one of her latest part-time jobs in a tobacconist’s kiosk next to Ladbroke Grove station. They were our little secret, passed to me surreptitiously to avoid my sister’s stern disapproval.
I would smoke on the way to school, permitted then on the top deck of the bus (as well as on the tube, and more or less everywhere else). Although Linda and I took the same route in the mornings, we never travelled together. She had to be in earlier than I did and liked to go with her older and more sophisticated friends. Even so, I never lit a fag until I had passed the bus stop where they all got off – Fulham Cross, a couple of miles before mine – in case one of her friends saw me.
Having finally returned to school that April, I didn’t have to endure it for too long before the summer holidays and the greatest adventure of my life to date: my first trip abroad. I had never been out of the country and it would be another twenty years before I left these shores again.
I was bound for Denmark with a large contingent of London’s waifs and strays, courtesy of the Children’s Country Holiday Fund (CCHF), a charity founded in Dickensian times to give slum children a chance to experience the fresh air of the countryside. If this sounds like a stroke of luck, that’s what it was: usually these holidays were in England but I had the good fortune to be selected in one of only a couple of years when they were offered further afield, thanks to the generosity of the London Evening Standard newspaper, which enabled CCHF to fund the use of a Danish horticultural college near Esbjerg while the local students were on their own summer break. Linda had been on one three years earlier – to Guildford. So whereas Linda got Surrey, I got Scandinavia.
I had a glorious fortnight in Denmark, much of it spent showing off to the girl who had become the focus of my youthful adoration. For among my new experiences in this exotic land of blue skies and wide, open spaces was a tender east-meets-west romance (Edna was from Whitechapel).
After the first week we were taking long walks together in the peaceful, verdant Danish countryside, during which poor Edna was subjected to my singing as I displayed my profound knowledge of contemporary song lyrics, gleaned from another purchase from the newsagent’s in Walmer Road. Record Song Book provided the words to chart records (‘B’ sides as well as ‘A’ sides), printed on paper so cheap you could still see the wood pulp. It was published every month for 3d.
Edna was thus treated to exclusive, word-perfect renditions of ‘Things’, ‘A Picture of You’ and ‘I Remember You’, Top 20 hits that August for Bobby Darin, Joe Brown and Frank Ifield respectively, as we wandered unaccompanied through country lanes. In a pre-pubescent golden haze of innocence we kissed – just the once – and Edna told me that she loved me.
We vowed to meet again but never did. After we returned home I wrote to her at the address she’d given me in Whitechapel Road, where she lived with her mother and four siblings. She made no mention of a father. There was no reply. She probably dreaded me singing to her again.
When I arrived back in London on the train from Harwich it was Linda who met me. Lily had gone into hospital for yet more tests and treatment. At home Linda produced two records she’d bought while I was away, ‘She’s Not You’ by Elvis and ‘Sealed with a Kiss’ by Brian Hyland, which I’d heard on the radio and hankered after before my trip to Denmark.
‘She’s Not You’ was a return to form by Presley following some dreary singles released on the back of his turgid films but Hyland’s plaintive ballad now held a new and special significance for me. Its haunting harmonica introduction and resonant lyrics about saying goodbye for the summer invoked in me a delicious sadness as I thought of Edna and the single kiss we’d shared.