In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
IF IT WAS rather late for Philip Larkin it was a bit too early for me, but the chaste kiss that sealed my romance with Edna the previous year was by far the most thrilling thing I’d ever done with another human being.
As I carried that sweet memory into 1963, I was certainly more interested in girls than I had been previously but all the innuendoes and insinuations of the sex-saturated Profumo scandal still went completely over my head. I didn’t understand what was meant by ‘living off immoral earnings’ and couldn’t make sense of the complex chain of events linking Stephen Ward with Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, John Profumo, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. Perhaps I wasn’t alone in that respect.
My mother certainly wasn’t going to be the one to explain it all to me. While she devoured the latest news in the Daily Sketch during her brief morning break, sitting with her feet up, drinking tea and smoking one of her razor-halved cigarettes, she avoided any discussion with me that might remotely touch upon the birds and the bees.
It had been left to my sister to relate the basic facts of life, which she had done in a difficult conversation one evening when Lily was safely out of the way. Now Linda displayed the smug superiority that came naturally to a fifteen-year-old girl with a steady boyfriend in the presence of an immature younger brother. She pretended to understand every aspect of the scandal and told me patronisingly that I couldn’t because I was too young.
It was impossible for me to confide in her or my mother about the way I was feeling; about the maelstrom of emotions raging through me like an electric current. I think I fancied Mandy Rice-Davies, considering her the prettiest of the two girls at the centre of the Profumo storm, whose pictures were everywhere. If ‘fancying’ meant nothing more carnal than taking delight in gazing on a woman’s countenance, that’s about where I was with Mandy.
There were other women. While in hospital having my appendix removed at the beginning of 1963, as that historically terrible winter tightened its grip on the country, I fell in love with a French nurse who came to tuck me in every night. And Linda’s red-headed, freckled friend Kathleen Kelly made me feel as if my insides were dissolving whenever she deigned to acknowledge my existence upon her very occasional visits to our house.
Finding myself attracted to these older women may have had something to do with the fact that I hardly ever encountered any girls of my own age. Edna had been a rare exception in unusual circumstances. As a pupil at an all-boys school, I’d had to go to Denmark to meet a female contemporary from London.
While there was a distinct sense of community in Walmer Road, with the newsagent’s opposite and a corner shop at the end of the terrace, I had no close friendships there with any boys, let alone girls, the same age as me. Gerald Wright, who’d lived further down Walmer Road, close to the junction with Bramley Road, had been my only local mate before his family was allocated a council house in Basingstoke and moved out of London. Tony Cox, my bosom buddy at primary school, was not far away in Lancaster Road, but we had grown apart even before we both went to Sloane as two thirds of the trio from Bevington. While his wonderful mother Pat had become a firm friend of Lily’s as a result of our childhood alliance, Tony and I now had little to do with one another.
Dereck Tapper, the other Bevington boy who moved on to Sloane, lived on the other side of the Portobello Road, much too far away to be ‘local’. He was also immersed in a studious phase and wanted no distractions.
At school I had teamed up with two separate groups, one from Shepherd’s Bush and one from Fulham. Foremost among the Shepherd’s Bush set was my fellow aspiring musician Andrew Wiltshire, slightly built, dark and uproariously funny. Just as I was teaching myself to play the guitar, he was learning the drums.
Andrew lived close to Wormwood Scrubs, a fifteen-minute walk away from me down Latimer Road. He had been introduced to jazz, soul and R&B by his two older brothers, one of whom was a Mod, a style and culture we admired. Andrew had a liking for Georgie Fame, Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band, and American artists such as Marvin Gaye.
I was also friends with his mate John Williams, who lived on the Wormholt estate in Acton. The three of us loved the Goons, thought we were ‘cool’ and postured accordingly for the big Sloane school photo, the kind taken with a single camera rolling across a long line of schoolboys, arranged in several rows, which afforded a mischievous pupil the chance to get himself in twice if he was fast enough.
One of Andrew’s claims to fame was that he’d had a genuine brush with pop stardom. That winter, with snow lying thick everywhere, he had got involved in a play snowball fight with some children in the front garden of one of the exclusive houses in Roehampton we used to pass every week on our way to and from Sloane’s sports ground.
Andrew was alone when he responded to the snowball attack. He and the small children who’d ambushed him were having great fun when a parent came to the door of the grand house. He invited Andrew in for a hot drink and some cake. The father of these children turned out to be none other than Pat Boone, the American singer who’d been the second biggest-selling recording artist of the late 1950s behind Elvis Presley.
There followed several weekends of Andrew being picked up from home in a chauffeur-driven car and conveyed to Roehampton to play with the junior Boones. In fact, this went on right up to the time when the children’s father finished his UK tour, gave up the rented house and took the family back to the US.
The big music venue round our way was the Hammersmith Palais, which had begun to offer a reduced entry fee to teenagers on Monday evenings for what would in the future become known as a ‘disco’, although that term did not exist in London in 1963. Anyway, it was a dance where records were played, young people could show off their prowess at the latest dance crazes and partners were not necessarily required.
This was an innovation for the Palais, where Joe Loss was the resident bandleader and ballroom dancing the preferred pursuit of its regular clientele. It was probably something that was happening everywhere as the waltz gave way to the Twist, and sequinned gowns to mini-skirts. The two forms of dancing were at first the preserve of different generations – until older people started doing the Twist, forcing the young to abandon Chubby Checker for the next new dance craze unsullied by parental approval.
Linda and her fiancé, Jimmy Carter, were regulars at the Palais on Monday evenings and I longed to go as well, but it was for over-eighteens only. Strictly speaking Linda and Jimmy would have been equally disbarred by the age limit, but they were old enough to pass for eighteen. Not that there was any necessity to provide proof of identity: a bouncer on the door simply looked each entrant up and down as they wandered in. But I felt I was far too fresh-faced to pass even this cursory check.
Andrew’s Mod brother used to go to the Palais a lot and he assured us that if we arrived early enough, before the bouncer began his evening’s work in earnest, with somebody older (like him), we would be able to sidestep this crude appraisal. One Monday evening we tried our luck, succeeded and thereafter became regular attendees, much to Linda’s chagrin. This was her stamping ground, upon which I was not supposed to intrude. I was not keen, either, on being chaperoned, though I knew she would be watching out for me all the same. So inside the dance hall we kept our distance from each other, which wasn’t difficult in that vast hangar of a space.
For the older teens this was boy-meets-girl territory. There was a protocol to be followed. The evening would begin with the girls dancing round their handbags while the blokes congregated at the bars. As the night wore on some liaisons were formed without significantly depleting the handbag dancers until, near the end, the lights went down and the slow records came on. That was when the boys moved in for a smooch. The unapproached girls were left to guard the bags.
Steady couples such as Linda and Jimmy were in a different category. They generally mixed with other couples, sitting round tables in the bar area looking adult and taking to the floor only occasionally.
A third species, at the other end of the age scale from us, were the ‘Palais Prowlers’, sleazy older men who came alone and patrolled the dark edges of the auditorium looking for single women.
Andrew and I watched all this dispassionately. We knew the girls wouldn’t dance with us even if they were our age. There seemed to be some kind of rule that girls were only interested in older boys. In any case I was far too shy to ask for a dance.
Nor were we interested in alcohol. The real excitement for me was listening to my favourite records being played at an impressive volume for hours on end. It was at the Palais that I first heard the debut single by a new group called the Rolling Stones, became aware of Little Stevie Wonder, an American singer only my age, thrilled to the Searchers’ ‘Sweets for My Sweet’ and ‘Do You Love Me?’ by Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. On the dance floor the girls did the Locomotion, the Watusi and the Pony. If the ‘swinging sixties’ were happening anywhere, they were happening at the Hammersmith Palais on Monday evenings in 1963.
As the year progressed I began to spend more time with my Fulham friends. The clincher was this: while Andrew’s house was nearer (and his parents always welcoming), all we could really do there was mess around in the room he shared with his Mod brother. On the other hand, the central figure of the Fulham set, Colin James, had his own basement retreat, down a flight of stairs beyond the prying eyes of his parents and four younger siblings.
I was always closer to Andrew, geographically and emotionally, but I wanted to be mates with both groups. Although Andrew and Colin were in the same class at school, they were never friends with each other, which ruled out going around together. So I bounced back and forth between the two.
Colin was a scion of a prosperous, middle-class family who lived in a four-storey house near Parsons Green. He seemed to be in permanent rebellion against his background, to the despair of his lovely parents. He picked fights with his father and longed to be rated as the toughest kid in the school. He adored the Rolling Stones, whose demeanour of youthful revolt he copied, and the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming.
What was more, whereas the only girl at Andrew’s was his little sister, Colin had two female friends of our own age, Pauline Bright and Yvonne Stacey, pupils at Carlyle, who lived near him and often came round to hang out in his sanctuary. So it isn’t difficult to see the attractions Fulham had to offer.
The downside was that visiting Colin involved the same journey as I took to school and meant travelling back late at night. But there were no curbs on my freedom. I wasn’t subjected to the same parental control as my sister had been at the same age. Our mother seemed less fretful about my whereabouts. Perhaps she made the not unreasonable assumption that boys were in less danger out on the streets than girls. The streets of North Kensington, however, always seemed dangerous enough to me.
Walking home from Latimer Road station to Walmer Road in the dark, I carried a steel comb in my hand and would keep as far away from the houses as possible in case I was jumped. I’d been attacked a couple of years before by a gang in Oldham Street, which was on my way home from the tube station, only just managing to outrun my pursuers and their shouted warning never to set foot in their street again. The year before that a man had held me hostage in the middle of Ladbroke Grove, threatening to cut me with a piece of broken glass held close to my left eye. I forget what he was demanding, but what he needed was medical attention. And what I needed, I’d decided then, was to be more careful.
Violence was a part of growing up in North Kensington. Whether it was the domestic violence that had been inflicted on my mother and so many other women, the horrific killings at 10 Rillington Place a few streets away, for which John Christie had been hanged a decade earlier, the race riots, the terrible murder of Kelso Cochrane or, on a more mundane level, the daily beatings meted out by our teachers at Bevington Primary School (a cane across the hand for the boys and a ruler applied to the legs of the girls).
There were also the daily confrontations in the playground or on the streets that all boys had to endure. I could fight a bit and run pretty fast, but I agreed with Baden-Powell about the importance of being prepared. Hence the steel comb.
I was beginning to carry a bit of money, too, having acquired two jobs with Jimmy Carter’s older brother John, helping him on his milk round all day on a Saturday and on Sunday mornings and on his paraffin round two evenings a week. Unlike Linda, who’d had to use her earnings to pay off Lily’s debts, I was free to spend my money as I pleased. Apart from the odd request for a shilling for the gas meter, neither my sister nor my mother troubled me for a contribution.
As a result I was gradually building my own record collection, a separate entity from the one Linda and I had put together over the past three years; a collection that would be an uncompromising reflection of my taste.
With much of the early repertoire of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones consisting of the American R&B artists who had influenced them growing up, there was an upsurge of interest in the music of Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson et al. They recorded on the Chess label in the US, but their records were largely unavailable in the UK until the Pye record company responded to public demand and began to release them on a ‘Pye International’ label.
Even then, not all record shops stocked them, but in a little place near our sports ground in Roehampton I struck gold, finding Chuck’s School Days EP (extended play record), which also featured ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’. A significant Pye International collection was soon in place.
I had been a Beatles devotee since hearing their second single, ‘Please Please Me’, on the hospital radio after having my appendix removed the previous year. While Linda had taken an interest in ‘Love Me Do’, it had never ignited a real passion in her for the Fab Four and hadn’t been added to our joint treasure trove of singles. Lily took pride in the new status the band were bringing to her native city but that didn’t extend to a liking for their music, or indeed that of any of the other groups that emerged in their wake from Liverpool.
I hadn’t bought the early Beatles records because I wanted to save my precious earnings for music that few other people had. I could listen to Beatles records at Colin James’s house, because he had them all. Indeed, it was Colin’s collection that inspired my first bid for pop stardom. Along with Jimmy Robb, another schoolfriend, Colin and I formed our own band, the Vampires, with occasional input from a big blond boy originally from the Channel Islands called Lilliput. We would play in Colin’s Fulham basement, imagining ourselves in the Cavern Club in Liverpool.
So it wasn’t the Beatles first LP, immortalised in that Larkin poem, that sealed my bond with John, Paul, George and Ringo; it was the second, released at the end of 1963. With the Beatles was the first LP I ever bought and it cost half what I’d earned from a weekend on the milk float and two freezing evenings delivering paraffin.
I purchased it at the record shop in the Hammersmith station arcade and made a point of taking it out of the plastic bag in which it was handed to me so that the cover image of the Fab Four, dressed in black polo-neck jumpers and gazing out from half-shadow, was visible to my fellow travellers on the tube to Latimer Road. Those four young men had revolutionised British popular culture during 1963 and would go on to conquer the world.
That evening I sat alone in our ‘parlour’ to listen to my new record. Lily was lying in hospital and Linda was out somewhere. It was just a week or so after the awful night late in 1963 when my mother, who had resisted the operation she so desperately needed, became so ill that she had to be rushed to hospital in the small hours. It would, Linda told me, be an extended stay.
It was exceptionally cold so I turned on both bars of our electric heater, which presented the unconvincing façade of a real fire created by a red bulb at the back. Its scarlet light was the only illumination as I sat in the fake leather armchair, transfixed by the music, getting up only to turn the record over from side one to side two and back again, over and over again for hours. From ‘It Won’t Be Long’ to ‘Money’, all fourteen tracks seemed to me to be the greatest music ever made, with ‘All My Loving’ the highlight. Any other recording artist with a song like that would have released it as a single rather than ‘waste’ it on an LP. It was a harbinger of what was to come.
That year I entered my teens and on that night in November the Beatles entered my soul. I would be With the Beatles for the rest of my life.