IT WAS TIME to begin decorating at 234 Long Furlong Drive. In preparation for the task at hand I had become a close observer of the décor in the the large houses of Dawes East Road, Pipers Close and Linkswood Road to which I now delivered on my regular mail round in the prosperous little town of Burnham, half a mile from the Britwell.
There were no council houses like ours on my route. Burnham was populated by professionals: accountants, solicitors and bank managers who’d be heading off to work as I was completing the early-morning delivery. By and large their wives stayed at home. I’d exchange pleasantries with them on the second, midday delivery, when those with small children, which was most of them, were around during the hours between taking their offspring to school and picking them up again. Some of the older women had other jobs. I remember one who taught languages at evening classes and another who ran a boutique called Brandy’s in Burnham High Street.
On our little patch of the Britwell estate, daily life wasn’t dissimilar: the men went off to work while the women stayed at home. There weren’t many part-time jobs around that women could combine with child-rearing and my union at the Post Office wasn’t alone in trying to keep things that way. The received wisdom was that women only worked ‘for pin money’ and, as far as organised labour was concerned, full-time jobs were the only ones that mattered. Working-class women took in home work, such as sewing, to earn some extra cash. Judy was soon running a playgroup from which she earned little, if anything. It was handy, though, as she could take our two small children with her.
Meanwhile, I worked every Saturday and most Sundays (which was double time and pensionable – not that I gave even a fleeting thought to retirement in those days). On average I worked about seventy hours a week – more even than Sham, my bass-playing friend, could have envisaged when he convinced me to become a postman.
It left me little time to wield a paintbrush, impatient though we were to decorate our first nesting place and to paint over the lurid orange patterned wallpaper we’d inherited, an acquired taste even for the 1960s.
We decided that I would dedicate my week’s winter leave to this purpose. So, in February 1970, Judy and the kids went to stay with Linda and Mike, who were now living in Tring in Hertfordshire, leaving me the space and necessary tranquillity to exercise the talent I was convinced was part of my genetic heritage.
Since my father had been a painter and decorator, I imagined that the required skills would be embedded somewhere in my DNA. It was true that I’d never actually observed my father painting or decorating anything. To be fair, the places where we’d lived all had damp walls and peeling paper on which any attempts to brandish a paintbrush would probably have been futile. In adulthood, I’d only ever lived in other people’s houses and so, at nineteen years old, I had yet to prise the lid off a tin of paint, let alone apply the contents smoothly to an appropriate surface.
Our house may have been owned by the council but we thought of it as ours, and indeed our name would be on the rent book for as long as we wanted it to be. This was the foundation of our settled serenity.
I was determined that my first experience of decorating should be a success. The market research I’d conducted on the houses on my delivery revealed that most had plain white walls. This seemed to me to have two advantages. The first was that it gave a bright, fresh feel to the room and the second was that, with enough coats of paint, I could obliterate the awful orange paper without having to replace it. The process of wallpapering frightened the life out of me. The chorus of one of the old cockney songs in my father’s wedding reception repertoire, ‘When Father Papered the Parlour’, echoed in my head.
When Father papered the parlour
You couldn’t see him for paste,
Dabbing it here, dabbing it there,
Paste and paper everywhere.
Mother was stuck to the ceiling,
The kids were stuck to the floor,
You never saw such a blooming family so stuck up before.
At least there would be no danger of my little family ending up like that. They would be safely exiled. Besides, there would be no need for paste and paper as Judy agreed with my suggestion that our ‘parlour’ be painted white.
There was something else I’d noticed as I peered into the living rooms of my customers. They invariably had their books on display. Mine had been accumulating in an egg box for years. By egg box, I don’t mean the cartons containing six or a dozen eggs found on supermarket shelves, I mean the substantial ones, big as coffins, in which the cartons arrived at the supermarket warehouse.
I must have picked mine up from Tesco to transport my books from Battersea to North Kensington when I moved in with the Coxes. By then I’d amassed a substantial number of mostly second-hand volumes from haunts like the Popular Book Shop in the Hammersmith Road, where I’d swapped my collection of Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly magazines for a stack of murder mysteries by writers such as Agatha Christie, Marjorie Allingham, John Dickson Carr and Leslie Charteris. There were also some Sherlock Holmes paperbacks I’d bought new and, as I moved on from murder mysteries, books by Orwell, Dickens, Trollope, Arnold Bennett, O. Henry and Somerset Maugham, plus some more recent hardbacks Judy had bought me as presents. Even the most battered specimens were precious to me and I would never have contemplated throwing them away, but neither had I thought about putting them on display. Until now.
Before embarking on my week of decorating I asked one of my neighbours, Mick at number 228, if he’d put up some bookshelves for me. Like all our neighbours, he was ingrained with a genuine sense of community. What was more, he possessed an electric drill and was pleased to have the opportunity to use it. Mick produced a simple construction: four or five metal rods attached to the wall, upon which were affixed supports for the white, laminated shelves to be laid across. He refused to accept any remuneration, so I bought him my favourite Simon and Garfunkel LP, Bookends, which seemed appropriate.
I can’t say that my painting was as proficient as Mick’s carpentry, but it was adequate. Our main living area consisted of a single room that ran from the front window to the back and served as a lounge at one end and a dining room at the other. The orange paper covered the whole lot. It took four coats of white emulsion to eradicate it completely. I also used emulsion on the ceiling and architrave and applied white gloss to all the woodwork.
For entertainment during this lonely week of hard labour I listened to music in the morning, either on Radio 1 or on Judy’s English Electric record-player. In the afternoons I’d treat myself to a play on Radio 4. I’d loved radio plays since I was a child.
Our limited collection of LPs had a couple of recent additions. Judy had given me an album by the Incredible String Band for Christmas. I tried so hard to like The 5000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion. I’d always been a bit of a folkie and wanted to understand why this band received such glowing reviews in the music press. On the principle that familiarity would breed content, I must have played that LP more times that week than I ever have in the ensuing forty-nine years. While I could appreciate tracks such as ‘Paint Box’ and ‘The Hedgehog Song’, there was a pervasive tweeness that grated on me. I eventually concluded that any album that has to be forced on to the turntable is better left in its sleeve.
I was much happier with our other new acquisition, Abbey Road, the final album recorded by the Beatles, although not the last to be released. By the dawn of the 1970s, the end was in sight for them. Their very last album, the substandard Let It Be, would be launched in April, but as I listened to Abbey Road during my week as a painter and decorator, I knew, as everybody did, that the internal divisions within the group, and between John and Paul in particular, were leading inexorably to the break-up of the band that had changed the world.
I loved Abbey Road, especially the sixteen-minute medley on what I still think of as Side 2. I wasn’t pleased that they too had caught the ‘silly lyrics’ virus. I didn’t really believe that, in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make, but hey, the overall effect of the farrago preceding the articulation of that sentiment was sublime, and those three words ‘in the end’ still bring tears to my eyes when I listen to the album, because it was indeed the end.
The parting of the ways was probably for the best, sad though it was. They went out in style after seven incredible years. If they’d carried on it would have been impossible to maintain the same high standards and their music would no longer have been exclusively framed by the iconoclastic sixties.
The first year of the new decade saw the release of solo albums by Paul, John and George. So, in a way, the Beatles’ output trebled, although they could never be as good apart as they had been together. To a great extent due to their influence, the music scene in general had risen to new heights and there were many brilliant musicians seeking to fill the void they had left. I was largely unmoved by Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, preferring the more experimental music coming from across the Atlantic from the likes of the Mothers of Invention, the Doors, Richie Havens and the Velvet Underground, which I’d first discovered on John Peel’s Perfumed Garden show on pirate radio and continued to access on Radio 1 after he moved to the BBC.
In Britain, Badfinger seemed worthy of the patronage Paul McCartney gave them in producing their early records. And Cat Stevens had morphed into an inspired balladeer.
Later in the year, after a particularly lucrative week of overtime, I managed to set aside enough cash to buy After the Gold Rush, the third solo album from Neil Young that everybody in the music press was raving about. It wasn’t easy to justify such luxuries when the money could have been saved for the appliances we needed, especially when Judy was still washing all our clothes by hand for want of a washing machine and, during warm weather, our milk had to stand in a bowl of cold water in the larder for want of a fridge.
But After the Gold Rush was a luscious treat, and its title song was one of the first to highlight the environmental damage being done to our planet. The young Canadian singing about it would become a permanent feature of my record-buying through the years to come.
When Judy and the girls returned from their week away at my sister’s the living–dining room had been transformed from orange to white and accessorised by my little library of books, which filled the four long shelves Mick had drilled into place.
I’d pondered various ways of breaking up the long stretch of white wall beyond the bookshelves. We had no paintings to hang from the picture rails. In one final burst of creativity, I decided to display my Spanish guitar instead.
Two electric guitars had come and gone, along with the bands I’d played in, but the battered old acoustic my mother had bought me, on which I’d practised day after day, bent over my copy of Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day, had survived the calamities that had befallen all the rest of my instruments and equipment.
Now it had pride of place on the wall, hanging by its mock leather strap from a silver metal picture hook, where it was easily accessible whenever I wanted to play. And when I wasn’t playing, there it was on full view, a constant reminder of the past and what might have been the future.