So there I was, having a great old time in the shadow of the Hammersmith flyover, when all of a sudden this guy comes along and my life takes a turn to the dark side. Ron Dambagella his name was, and I think my mum met him at work. She’d had a few part-time jobs. I remember one as a ‘telephone girl’ – that meant cleaning other people’s spit off the telephones in offices, which can’t have been a barrel of laughs. But then she got something a bit more permanent at this factory making rubber components, I’m not sure if they were for shoes, or cookers, maybe both.
Anyway, after a while she got moved to a smaller workshop under the arches, right next to Flora Gardens, my first school. I think he was in charge of that place, and I always remember the two of them working there alone, because once they’d got together she used to tell me proudly, ‘Ron’s the boss,’ and I used to think, ‘You’re the only ones there!’ But when I asked my auntie Frances about this, which I had to do, because my mum and I haven’t spoken for a few years and I wanted to make sure I’ve got everything as accurate as possible, she told me there were other employees as well. Apparently old Ron (and he was old – a good ten years older than my mum, anyway) had a reputation of being ‘very flirtatious’ with the female workers.
I’ll have to go into a lot of detail about things that happened over the next few years, some of which will probably be quite difficult for anyone who was involved to read. But I want to say from the outset that I’m not doing this to make my mum look bad. I’ve absolutely no interest in coating her off (though my stepfather is a different matter). I understand that her life wasn’t easy. She had me too young – when she was about twenty – my dad had left her, and she maybe didn’t feel like she had too many options, so I can see why she might have lowered her standards a bit. She probably thought, ‘Well, I’ve got this kid, which is baggage to a lot of men, and I ain’t gonna get anyone better.’ My mum was not a square, in fact she was kind of hip – she bleach-blonded her hair and had massive knockers – so I bet Ron couldn’t believe his luck.
The first time I sensed something was going on was when my mum was walking me along King Street to school – she’d drop me off there on the way to work – and we stopped at a crossing. I can’t be sure if this actually happened or if I’ve elaborated on my mental picture over time, but I do have a memory of the wind catching my mum’s coat and blowing it open, and me thinking she didn’t have anything on underneath – well, maybe stockings, but not a skirt. That momentary flash kind of spun me a bit, and when I was older I’d wonder if they were maybe up to some kinky shit at work. For the moment, though, I was only six years old, and my whole world was about to go down the toilet.
The next thing I know, this Dambagalla guy’s in the picture. He never came up to visit at my nan’s, but I guess part of the deal for my mum in getting a new geezer in tow was so she could get her own place. So we waved goodbye to happy times with my nice, nurturing nan and grandad, and began our shit new life in a one-bedroom basement flat at 15 Benbow Road, Shepherd’s Bush. It wasn’t much more than a mile away from where we’d lived before – I even stayed at the same school – but it might as well have been on the other side of the world.
Fuck, that place was grim. It was dark and damp and horrible and I was sleeping on a fucking camp bed at the bottom of what was now my mum and Ron’s bed. The khazi was outside, and when the tin bath came out in the front room, I’d be the last one into the dirty water after he’d gone first and then my mum had followed.
When I’ve talked to Americans over the years about what being poor meant in Britain at that time, they’ve never quite seemed to get it. I don’t remember having a fridge or a TV, no one ever had showers, and for hot water there was the sink with the Ascot heater above it. You’d put money in the meter to get the radiator on and most people would knock the lock off and keep putting the same 10p in. I remember when I first went to America in the late Seventies, even poor people who were near the bottom of the ladder seemed to take things for granted that I’d always seen as luxuries.
Where I grew up, it was fairly normal to turn a blind eye to the odd bit of opportunist thievery. If people were struggling to get by and could get away with nicking something every now and again to make ends meet, that was maybe frowned on a little bit but no one was really going to hold it against them. We were all living at subsistence level – in short, none of us had a pot to piss in – so I can understand now why when families went to the Tesco supermarket on King Street together I’d sometimes see them putting stuff under their overcoats. Maybe there was nothing left in the house for dinner and it was their only way to put food on the table. At the time, though, I didn’t really get it. Maybe because it wasn’t really talked about afterwards, I’d be thinking, ‘What’s going on here?’
Another time they had some kind of competition in Tesco’s where they would read out a number over the PA and if it was your number you could win a prize. I don’t know how it happened, but my mum or Ron must have known someone on the inside, because their number came up and they won something, but for some reason it was obvious that the whole thing wasn’t legit and they got rumbled. It was all a bit of a farce and quite humiliating, but again because nothing was ever really explained to me, I found it all very confusing.
A similar thing happened at school at Flora Gardens when we had an assignment to draw a picture and bring it back to class the next day. One of my mum’s brothers – I think it was my uncle Barry – drew something and it looked good, so he said, ‘’Ere you are – try that,’ but when I took it into class the next day, the teacher caught on straight away. He just asked me to draw the same thing again, and of course I couldn’t do it. Barry was no master draughtsman, but I couldn’t match him. I suppose looking back the feeling that incident gave me was shame, but at the time it just felt like I was worth a bit less than everyone else.
It was the same at home, too. I was second fiddle, I was put in the back, while my mum did everything she could to keep Ron happy. It felt like I was in a competition – with my stepdad, for my mum’s attention – that I couldn’t possibly win. I’m not saying my mum got off on the power this gave her, but sometimes it felt like she did. When you’re a kid, you don’t think of your mum the same way you think of other people. You don’t think she’s entitled to have character defects or do shitty things or just generally fuck up like everyone else does. So when that does happen, it can be hard to deal with.
It’s only recently that I’ve started to look at her as a person like any other and not just my mum. I would love to know what her motivation was and what her life was like when she was growing up, but I don’t think she would know where to start when it came to that conversation. I tapped on the window of it a few times when we were still talking but the curtains got drawn very quickly. If I tried to ask her about what my nan and grandad were like as parents it just seemed to make her really uncomfortable, almost as if something bad went on there. You’d think if nothing did she’d gladly talk about it, wouldn’t you? But there’s no knowing with my mum.
She’d say, ‘Make sure you wipe your arse and put clean underwear on when you leave the house … in case you have an accident. I don’t want the doctors thinking your mum doesn’t look after you.’ It was like that was all she cared about – not whether you’ve had an accident and ‘Are you OK?’ but would your arse be clean enough to reflect a positive light on her?
A lot of it was that classic English thing of ‘What will the neighbours think?’ My response to that has always been, ‘Who gives a fuck what the neighbours think?!’ But it was part and parcel of a working-class upbringing in Britain in those days that you got brainwashed into apologising for living in shit. ‘Just shut up and get on with it, let the rich be rich and the poor be poor, Henry the Eighth is up there in his castle and everyone else is down below in their little mud huts.’
In a way, the Sex Pistols would be the end of that way of thinking, but even now I lapse into it every so often. Sometimes when I know I am selling myself short I feel that old lack of self-esteem reflex stirring within me – ‘Oh, that’s OK, I’ll make do with this thing I don’t really want because I haven’t got the right to ask for anything better.’ The programming is deeply rooted.
My mum didn’t tell me much more about Ron than she had about my real dad – and she never had any good words for him, only that he was a cunt who never made any paternity payments. I think Ron had lived in East London before they met, and I had a feeling that maybe he had a daughter, although I never met her. I found out later that he was still married when he and my mum got together, which might explain why the two of them never got hitched, although they stayed together till he died a few years back, so they must’ve loved each other in their own way.
From his dark skin, jet black hair and foreign-sounding name, I got the impression that maybe Ron had originally come from Italy, or maybe Turkey, or Greece – there could easily have been a bit of Bubble (bubble and squeak = Greek) in there – but this wasn’t talked about much either. In fact, nothing was. Without ever saying much, Ron made it pretty clear that he’d have preferred it if I wasn’t there so he could have my mum all to himself. I quickly learnt not to ask too many questions, because curiosity seemed to be frowned upon. It’s only over the past few years that I’ve started to find some of the answers that a person who’d grown up in a normal family would’ve known all along.
I’d often wondered what my nan and my uncles thought of Ron, because I got the vibe that maybe he wasn’t popular with the rest of the family. So I asked my auntie Frances if this was because the family disapproved of the way my mum and Ron got together, and she said it was more likely because the brothers and sisters weren’t close. She also said my grandad was a grumpy old sod who wouldn’t leave the house, but if a trip to 15 Benbow Road was all that was on offer, I don’t really blame him.
No one would’ve been going back to that dingy gaff voluntarily, that’s for sure. The whole time I lived with my mum and Ron as a kid – after a few years in the basement in Benbow Road we’d move to an upstairs flat in the same house, and then later my mum got a council flat in Battersea – I never remember them having friends or family over. I found that weird at the time and I still do now. I’m not saying my mum and stepdad were like the Moors Murderers, but Ian Brady and Myra Hindley probably had more visitors.
The workshop under the railway arches where Ron was supervisor was even worse. Obviously this wasn’t my mum and Ron’s fault – they weren’t hanging out there for fun – but I hated it when I had to go there. That whole place stank of rubber, the curved roof and bare brick walls made it really claustrophobic, and there was this one big fucking machine with steam coming out of it that stamped out rubber rings all day long. It made so much noise you couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. It was like something out of the movie Eraserhead.
The one glimmer of sunshine that came into my life during this dark and depressing time was when I got a dog. He was only a little mutt but his name was Brucie and I got very close to him very quickly. That dog was fucking great and he really loved me, but one day I came home from school and he wasn’t there any more. My mum just told me, ‘Oh, Brucie’s gone.’
She never explained what had happened to him, so I assumed they’d just got rid of him because he was too much work. It felt like the same thing might happen to me at any time when I was living in Benbow Road, and at a couple of points, it did.
This is where the gaps in my memory really start to widen – presumably because I was so upset by some of the things that were going on that my mind just tried to close them down. Auntie Frances can’t help either because, as I’ve already mentioned, she kind of lost touch with us once we moved to Shepherd’s Bush. Later on, as a teenager, I’d be sent to several different institutions for a variety of reasons (mostly connected with getting nicked), which I can generally recall quite well, but there’s one place I half remember getting carted off to soon after we got to Benbow Road and I’ve just got no fucking idea what – or where – it was, or why I had to go there.
All I’m sure of is that it was out in the country and I was only there for about a week. I don’t think it was a punishment, I think it was some kind of children’s home, so maybe my mum couldn’t look after me and no one else was willing to take me cos I was too much trouble. It’s not like I was a total hooligan by that stage, though – I was only a little kid when I got sent there.
The only clear memory I have is that when I arrived they had a litter of kittens in a basket in the hallway. All you cat-lovers out there should look away now – I don’t want to turn the cat people against me at this early stage, the pussy’s going to be in enough jeopardy later – but I was so fucking angry about having to be there that I started trying to strangle them. These poor little fuckers have only been born a few days and already they’ve got my traumatised child’s hands closing round their throats. I’m glad to say I didn’t go through with it, but I sure as fucking hell did miss Brucie.
Your brain’s still developing when you’re young, and when you’re quite isolated and you make a close attachment like that – even if it’s only to an animal – and that contact gets taken away, it can mark you. All of a sudden this thing that made you feel like you mattered has fucking disappeared, and you don’t get the hope of that back. When the scar heals over, it gets kind of hard. No wonder I can’t have a proper fucking relationship with a woman … but let’s not go down that road just yet.
For the moment, the main side effect of how fucking miserable I felt was that I started to fall even more behind at school. I couldn’t read or write that well from the beginning, anyway. When it came to all the kids’ comics with little stories in them like The Hurricane and The Topper, it was only really the pictures I was looking at. But the more unhappy I was, the more I fucked about, until eventually I got put back a year for not learning enough.
If I was a kid at school now, I’d probably get diagnosed pretty quickly as being dyslexic and/or having ADHD, but there was no ‘special needs’ teaching in those days. Or at least, none that applied to me in the schools I went to. I guess I seemed like a normal kid, just a bit more loony than the others. My problem was I just couldn’t keep words in my head as they came off the page. Even now in later life, when I’ve taken steps to sort myself out on the literacy front, I still struggle to focus – it’s like I’m not listening in my head to what I’m reading, because my mind is already away thinking about a pair of socks or something.
I’ve never been the sort of person who’d show off about not having once read a book all the way through. This was always a source of embarrassment to me, and another reason I never paid attention in school for one fucking second. It was the first of a series of situations where it became easier to find a way of blocking out the reality than to face up to it. No one was saying, ‘Maybe this kid could be dyslexic.’ Not at school, and certainly not at home, where no one had anything but the worst expectations of me, academically. Teachers assumed it was my destiny to fuck around and get in trouble, and so I did. It wasn’t like I felt they had it in for me, just that what they were teaching didn’t really have anything to do with me.