ON 24 SEPTEMBER 1966 my sister Linda married Mike Whitaker in Watford. They had already taken out a mortgage on a house in St James Road, a few doors down from Linda’s in-laws.
I attended the wedding wearing a cotton Madras jacket, my long, wavy hair flowing free (or ‘in a mess’, as Linda tartly observed). Guests included some of the Coxes, the family of my boyhood friend Tony, whose mother Pat had been close to Lily, Andrew Wiltshire and a sprinkling of relatives from Liverpool, among them my cousin Pam, whom Andrew spent the entire evening trying to chat up.
We drank and talked and danced, to the Stones, to Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich; to the Easybeats, an Australian band whose single ‘Friday on My Mind’ had just been released, to great acclaim from me and my sister. When there was a good-natured protest by the older guests, who demanded something more agreeable to them, Ken Dodd and Jim Reeves forced their way on to the turntable, to the groans of the youngsters.
I was a complete poseur, trying to combine the serious demeanour of Scott Walker with the panache of Stevie Marriott, the Mod style icon and leader of my latest favourite band, the Small Faces.
For my sister and me, the wedding marked the end of the life we’d shared since my birth. Mr Pepper, the social worker responsible for keeping us together and out of ‘care’ after the death of our mother, had obviously decided that I was safe in Linda’s hands. At any rate, his visits had reduced considerably during our two years in Battersea, and we saw nothing of him after Linda married.
She tried to convince me to move with her to Watford, where there were three bedrooms in the ‘semi’ she was so proud of. But to me Watford represented the far north and I was resistant to all attempts to prise me out of London.
Linda and I have never ceased to worship Mr Pepper and to hold his profession in the utmost respect. He was the only person ‘in authority’ we encountered throughout our eventful childhood. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he was the only one I encountered, as Linda must have dealt with many more than I knew about. It was solely because he listened to Linda and acted on his instincts rather than rigidly following the rulebook that we were able to stay together. We still speak fondly to this day of Mr Pepper, and how it was he who ensured our future happiness. Linda even invited him to her wedding, but he wouldn’t come.
I’m not sure how Mr Pepper would have felt about my escapades in Soho with Andrew. The wedding marked the end of a wonderful, hot summer in which the two of us headed most weekends into the West End, often with no bigger plans than to walk the streets absorbing the atmosphere. Given the risk he’d taken by not placing me with foster parents, Mr Pepper would probably have lost his job if things had gone wrong.
He needn’t have worried. We weren’t the slightest bit interested in drugs, and drugs didn’t seem to be the slightest bit interested in us. Apart from somebody once offering us purple hearts at the Hammersmith Palais when we were schoolboys, we never came across a drug-pusher and no drugs were ever pushed our way.
I suspect that, for all the talk of a generation turning on, tuning in and dropping out in the sixties, tripping on LSD was a middle-class preoccupation and there was more chance of being pressurised into taking drugs on a university campus than on the Wilberforce estate. In any case, you needed money to buy drugs, and we were constantly broke.
I’d left Remington’s for Tesco in January, upping my income with a job as assistant warehouse manager at the supermarket in King Street in Hammersmith. They paid me £8 a week rather than the £10 a fortnight I’d been paid at Remington. But still, after helping Linda with the rent and saving up to buy the Ben Sherman and Fred Perry shirts I favoured, I was left with very little disposable income (or spare cash, as we called it then).
Fortunately, the man who delivered Nevill’s bread to Tesco every morning carried a stash of contraband EMI LPs. His name was Fred and he had a dark, immaculately shaped moustache which sat above his upper lip like a blackbird in flight. My first task of the day was to give him a hand in with the trays of sliced loaves. Fred was a fellow QPR fan and we’d chew the cud for a while about football before Fred dropped his voice to a murmur and listed the albums he had on board for half the shop price.
It was from Fred that I acquired Revolver, the musical highlight of that or, come to think of it, any other summer. Still my favourite Beatles album, Revolver achieved what I hadn’t believed attainable: it was better than its predecessor, Rubber Soul.
The title was a clever pun on the way we listened to music at the time: putting a slab of vinyl the size of a large pizza on to a turntable, applying a needle and listening as it moved through the five or six tracks on that side. And what wonderful sounds emitted from Revolver. Familiarity has made it impossible to recapture the initial impact of songs such as ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’, ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. The ability of the Beatles to continue to break new ground musically, and for it all to work so brilliantly, was breathtaking.
I took Revolver home and listened to it alone in the flat. There were times when, in an effort to imagine myself as Paul McCartney, I’d mime to his songs in front of the huge mirror over the mantelpiece, with Linda’s old school hockey stick standing in for Paul’s Höfner violin bass. I even held it left-handed for accuracy.
The hockey stick doubled as a weapon for protecting ourselves against burglars. There was no security on outer entrances to blocks of flats in those days. Anyone could mount the stairs to our landing. And there was some hostility to Linda and me among several of our neighbours, who felt it was wrong for two teenagers to be allocated a council flat when whole families remained on the waiting list. We suspected that the three break-ins we suffered during our tenancy were orchestrated by the big lump of a lad who lived next door with his parents. We were always away when these burglaries took place, which heightened our suspicions.
The hockey stick was never stolen but they took my Vox solid electric guitar and, on their second visit, our old Dansette record-player, which upset me more than losing the Vox because of its sentimental value. For some reason they never took our records, which made us feel almost offended, as it seemed to be a slur on our musical tastes. Neither did they remove our rented telly, which was strange, given that they nicked all the other electrical goods we possessed.
The Wilberforce estate wasn’t what we would have classified as ‘rough’. There wasn’t the constant domestic violence of our childhood in Southam Street – or, if there was, it was better hidden. And I didn’t feel threatened by the local kids who played football in the space between the blocks of flats and ignored my comings and goings.
You did have to adopt the demeanour of the streets: a kind of swagger in the walk, a narrowing of the eyes, a forceful way of dragging on a cigarette or aggressively chewing a piece of gum. This posturing and the requisite accessories had been an essential precaution for a boy growing up in North Kensington and they continued to serve me well now. Up to a point.
That point was reached not on the mean streets where I’d grown up, or even on the Wilberforce estate, but on the Churchill estate in Pimlico. Yes, in Westminster, London SW1. Bloody Pimlico!
One Sunday in 1966 I’d gone there to see my old schoolfriend Philip Yerby. I also had a love interest on the Churchill estate, a girl named Janice McDonald, whom I’d met through Philip. He and I were walking across the estate on this quiet Sunday lunchtime, heading for Janice’s flat. We never made it.
It was pouring with rain and we were hunched beneath an umbrella Philip had borrowed from his mum when we passed two older boys coming in the other direction. It must have been the umbrella that interfered with our defence mechanisms. It’s difficult to look hard while holding a brolly, and the very fact that we were using one at all must have marked us out as legitimate targets.
We took no notice of these boys as we walked by them, no words were said, no glances exchanged. But about a hundred yards further on we heard running feet behind us and as I turned to check what was happening a fist hit me full in the mouth.
Staggering around spitting out blood and teeth, I saw that Philip was on the pavement being mercilessly kicked by a second attacker as my assailant weighed up whether to come at me again. He’d probably hurt his hand on my mouth and decided he’d done me enough damage. The two of them ran off, whereupon, to my amazement, Philip leaped to his feet unharmed. By adopting the foetal position, with his arms covering his head, he’d managed to protect himself.
I had not been so lucky. Philip had the good sense to take me straight to Westminster Hospital in Horseferry Road. A dentist saw me immediately and asked Philip to return to the scene of the crime, find my three missing teeth and run back with them. He then proceeded to replant them into my gums, securing them in place with a scaffolding of wires which I had to endure for many months.
Forty-three years later, when I became home secretary, my press secretary informed me one day that a photo-op had been arranged for me, walking the streets with a neighbourhood police team accompanied by the deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
When I asked her where we were going for this media jamboree, she replied distractedly, ‘Oh, not far. It’s on the Churchill estate in Pimlico.’
As the assembled hordes of cameramen snapped away at the deputy commissioner and me surrounded by coppers, I resisted the temptation to ask the obvious question: ‘Where were you lot when I needed you?’
I grafted my way through 1966 in the Tesco warehouse, sweeping, tidying, unloading vans and storing the produce in its allocated place on the warehouse floor. It was there that I learned the art of wielding my broom to vanquish the constantly accumulating dust and dirt. I also learned the skill of flattening cardboard boxes and feeding them into a mechanical press with a huge iron weight that was ratcheted down like some instrument of medieval torture until the cardboard was reduced to a tight parcel which could be bound with twine ready for disposal.
When there was nothing to do in the warehouse I’d have to stack shelves, and on the occasional Saturday morning, when it was all hands to the pump, I’d work on the tills. Being on the supermarket checkout back then was very different from the slick operation it is today.
There was no barcode technology. Every item had to be priced by hand; every tube of toothpaste or tin of peaches had its little stick-on price tag. The shelf-stackers used a special hand-held device to label everything they put on the shelves – and to label it all again as rampant inflation led to price increases on what seemed like a monthly basis.
Long queues would form at the checkouts, particularly during the peak shopping period of Saturday mornings, when I’d be drafted in as an extra pair of hands. I wasn’t as quick as the regular checkout staff, taking more time to find the price and punch it on to the round buttons on the till. Decimalisation was still several years away, so all the prices were in pounds, shillings and pence, with the odd halfpenny thrown in. Nobody seemed to mind queuing. I suppose it was the norm then, and in any case, waiting at a busy grocer’s shop where there was no self-service would have taken much longer.
With no credit or debit cards, every customer paid in cash and most of them spent ages fumbling in purses or pockets for the right change. Then there were Green Shield stamps to be handed out, according to how much had been spent. These were an early version of today’s reward schemes, but a lot more fiddly. Customers had to stick them into stamp books acquired for the purpose, which could be saved up and exchanged for a range of goods from a catalogue. It was stressful, but sitting at the checkouts was a welcome relief from the warehouse and it gave me the opportunity to take the weight off my feet.
I worked at Tesco through a blistering summer full of fabulous music, none of which wafted out of the speakers dotted around the store. From these came the mushy sound of something that was supposed to be music but never quite fitted the description, like margarine passing itself off as butter. Sold specifically to be played in shops, its brand name eventually became a generic term we all recognise: muzak. The only relief came when one of the staff broke into the transmission to proclaim a special offer: ‘In aisle number four, cans of Batchelors marrowfat peas are half-price for one week only. Thank you for shopping at Tesco.’
In the warehouse my manager, Ronnie Handley, had his own radio tuned to the pirate stations that continued to feed our appetite for pop by blasting out records from early in the morning until late at night while the BBC Light Programme remained frustrated by the restrictions of the ‘needle time’ agreement with the Musicians’ Union. The pirates were going from strength to strength. By now they had built up a listenership of between 10 and 15 million. It was thanks to these broadcasters lying just beyond the reach of the law, and the two flagship television shows, ITV’s Ready, Steady, Go! and the BBC’s Top of the Pops, that young people were able to follow the transformation of popular music.
America had absorbed the influences of the British musical invasion they had seen a few years before and US bands were now setting new standards. So much new and exciting music reverberated through 1966. Earlier in the year I’d acquired Pet Sounds from Fred the bread man. Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ reclusive leader, apparently produced this sophisticated album in response to the Beatles’ Rubber Soul. Interestingly, at first it was better received in the UK, where it was an instant critical and commercial success, than it was in the US. I loved ‘Wouldn’t it Be Nice’, the first track on Pet Sounds, and the aforementioned ‘Friday on My Mind’ by the Easybeats, but my song of ’66 was one by a US band called the Lovin’ Spoonful.
While the Beach Boys were all about sun-kissed days on a Californian coast that existed for me only in my imagination, ‘Summer in the City’ was gloriously urban, tapping into my own experience of Andrew and me traipsing around Soho ‘hotter than a match head’, the backs of our necks getting dirty and gritty, wishing that there was a rooftop at our disposal where, like John Sebastian, the Lovin’ Spoonful’s songwriter, we could find the cooler evening air.
Andrew had joined me at Tesco, in the butchery department, where he plied his trade in a section of the warehouse. It would be many years before butchers went front of house in British supermarkets. As for delicatessens, international cuisine remained so alien to our palates that olive oil, traditionally used in Britain as a remedy for earache, was still available from chemists on prescription.
Unfortunately for Andrew, he worked a full six-day week whereas I had Saturday afternoons off, in lieu of the extra hours I worked on Monday and Tuesday evenings when most of the produce arrived for warehousing. So it was that on Saturday, 30 July, I returned alone to Pitt House to watch England beat West Germany in the World Cup final at Wembley, picking stale custard creams out of a biscuit tin as the match went into extra time.
Andrew would not usually have cared about missing a match. He had no interest in football. But this was more than a football game: it was a national event that everybody wanted to be part of. Not only was a World Cup final being played on our home turf, but we were in it. And, of course, we won.
That night the two of us went up west and jostled among the crowds cramming Trafalgar Square. The surrounding roads and pavements were gridlocked. A concert of car horns filled the warm summer air of the country that was now champion of the world. Honk, honk, honk honk honk, honk honk honk honk, ‘ENGLAND!’
We stood with hundreds of others on the plinth of Nelson’s Column, shouting our refrain, shaking hands with strangers and trying to chat up unaccompanied girls. Afterwards we walked all the way back to Pitt House, as we’d done so often. This time we felt we’d had a small taste of what our parents must have experienced on VE Day. Our boys had beaten the Germans 4–2 to take the Jules Rimet trophy for the first (and, so far, only) time.
We both had girlfriends that summer, although they weren’t with us that night for some reason. Conveniently for us, and perhaps for them, we were going out with two sisters, Stephanie and Deborah Blake. ‘Steph’ and ‘Debs’ lived with their parents in a prefab on the White City estate off South Africa Road. These pre-constructed houses were erected all over the country after the war as a temporary measure to address the housing shortage caused by Hitler’s bombs. They were only designed to last for about ten years, but many of them survived a lot longer. Some are still housing families today.
Mrs Blake was always ill. Looking back, I think she may have been an alcoholic, though I had no concept then of what an alcoholic was. Mr Blake, to me, represented the best of adult masculinity. He had a tough, stern demeanour but was so gentle in the way he treated his fragile wife and so considerate to his daughters and their friends. He talked to us as if we were the grown-ups we thought we were and I valued his approval.
The sisters followed an etiquette handed down to working-class girls through the generations. They would never enter a pub unaccompanied or smoke or whistle or chew gum in the street. When walking with a boy, they always had to be on the inside (apparently, so that if a car accidentally mounted the pavement, the boy would manfully shield them from the impact). To transgress these rules was to be considered ‘common’. There was a long list of dos and don’ts to be followed in public, but in the privacy of 11 Pitt House there were few inhibitions.
I fell madly in love with Stephanie Blake, only to be spurned for an older rival. When she packed me in she at least had the good grace to do it to my face, gazing at me sympathetically with her lovely dark eyes as she broke the news that she wanted somebody more mature. Which was fine, except that the guy she dumped me for was her cousin.
I wrote a melancholy song, ‘Stephanie’s Blues’, to express my heartache.
But when you love you soon forget
The pain your love may cause, and yet,
You bear; a lover is a fool.
As if this wasn’t pathetic enough, I imagined myself busking in rags, singing Bob Dylan songs on Shepherd’s Bush Green, where Stephanie was bound to see me. I pictured her bursting into tears at the pain she’d inflicted and the love she’d discarded.
In an act of solidarity, Andrew finished with Deborah. But a change in our lives was imminent that would be even more important to us than loves won and lost. At the end of 1966 a tiny asteroid entered the musical universe: our first proper band, the Area, was formed.