A couple of strange things happened to me just before we moved to Benbow Road which I forgot to tell you about. Anyone out there thinking this book has all been a bit Mary Poppins so far, well, this is where the David Lynch hits the fan.
Alongside the more celebrated landmarks of the Hammersmith area – the Odeon, the Palais, the flyover, the bridge, the Broadway – the local paedophile was another neighbourhood fixture. Every area has one (or usually a lot more than one, more’s the pity). I guess they have a range that they cover, the same way urban foxes do, and this one’s territory stretched all the way over to Shepherd’s Bush, which would become significant a few years later … so just file that away for the moment in the part of your memory marked ‘ominous facts’.
Once, and it was when I was still living in Riverside Gardens so I know I wasn’t more than six years old, this guy tried to lure me down into the underpass beneath the Hammersmith flyover. He didn’t do it with sweets or chocolates like it said he should in the ‘stranger danger’ adverts, but by tearing out pages from a lingerie catalogue and dropping them in front of me to leave a trail – like the fucking breadcrumbs in ‘Hansel and Gretel’.
The question I’ve asked myself a lot is: ‘How did he know this would work?’ You’ve got to bear in mind that I was living happily at my nan’s. Nothing bad had happened to me yet, and I had only just started school. Technically, I was still a pure and innocent kid. And yet somehow he knew that, if he did this, I would follow him. I think maybe some kids just give off more of a sexual energy than others, and they’re the ones who are vulnerable to predators. It’s like you’re marked in a way that only they can see.
For whatever reason, I was one of those kids. I should’ve been thinking, ‘Why’s that creepy guy tearing pages out of that magazine and laying them on the stairs?’ But instead of that, because I’m this prematurely sexual being, I’m interested. I can see exactly where this happened very clearly in my mind’s eye: it was the steps down under the Chiswick side of the flyover, the way you’d go if you were heading for the river. He was trying to draw me off my usual turf and away from safety.
I didn’t want to go with him, but I did want to get my hands on those pictures of birds which were getting me excited for reasons I didn’t understand. I followed him down the stairs and into the darkness to a point where – and I remember this very clearly – I could see the light behind him from the exit at the far end. It wasn’t a long tunnel, just under the road, but I could see him making his way up the stairs and I just thought, ‘Fuck this, I’m going home.’ For the time being at least I was going to stay on my own territory, which, I hardly need to add, was very much the right decision.
Another weird thing happened around then. Again we were still living with my nan, so things hadn’t really started to get dark yet. But one day I was playing around the squares with some other kids when this girl – not much older than me and I didn’t really know her – pulled her knickers down. Maybe things weren’t right in her own home or maybe this kind of exhibitionism is quite normal for some kids of six years old. I don’t know. One thing I’ll tell you for sure is that my reaction wasn’t the same as the other kids’. She pulled her knickers down and there was her little shitty arse. All the other kids kind of ran off laughing, but I just stood there staring at her. I was totally transfixed – it was just so fucking sexual. She never moved either. We didn’t touch each other, but I was standing there in a trance for so long that by the time I’d snapped out of if some cheeky little cunt had had the time to nick my bike.
Later on, when I was reflecting on my life and trying to work how the fuck I came to connect stealing with sexual feelings, this incident was obviously hard to get past. But that kind of stuff is really deep and once you get down there trying to figure things out you’ve got to be careful not to leap to the obvious conclusions. Therapists love to jump on something like this and say it’s the reason for everything, but life just isn’t that simple. One fucking chancer even suggested that maybe I nicked so much stuff over the years that followed because I was trying to make up for the loss of my bicycle!
There’s no shortage of evidence to go through for anyone trying to work out why I ended up the way I did. Another time I was on the swings in the playground at school in Flora Gardens and there were girls standing around laughing at me. Girls tended to like me because I was cute, even though I was quite shy around them until I discovered alcohol. But I was still definitely one of the cooler kids, so I wasn’t used to people taking the piss. I didn’t know why they were all laughing at me until I realised my cock was hanging out of my shorts. I got so ashamed and embarrassed because I didn’t know how to make them stop. Of course I’d find out in the end, but that wouldn’t be for a few years yet.
There’s one other incident of this kind I probably can’t get away without mentioning, even though I’d like to. But if I’m trying to be honest about my past, it’s got to be all or nothing. My mum was walking with me along the main street in Hammersmith. It felt late at night but maybe it was just early evening in the winter, as I was probably only seven or eight at the time. Either way, the shops were closed. But somewhere along King Street, my mum stopped by this lingerie store to look at the stuff in the window. Not really thinking about what she was doing, she gave the front door a push and found that they’d left it open when they went home. No one was in there and so all this stuff she couldn’t normally have afforded was free to a good home. She was really surprised and excited – I remember her saying, ‘Fuck me!’ – not your usual window shopping.
You don’t need to be that psychiatrist bird in The Sopranos to see that the combination of having my mum’s attention, her swearing, the lingerie in the window and the excitement of getting away with something might have had some kind of impact on my sexual development. But when it comes to those murky waters there’s a big pike in the fishpond that I’ve not got to yet.
Never mind the paedophile in the underpass, more often than not it’s the one who lives in the same house as you that you really need to worry about. At least, that was how it worked out in my case. We’d been in Benbow Road a few years by the time my stepdad fiddled with me. I must’ve been ten or eleven, because by then we’d moved upstairs to a slightly bigger flat in the same house that had an actual toilet and a bathroom. Technically we were going up in the world, but it didn’t feel that way.
My mum was in hospital when it happened. The way I remember it, she had a miscarriage and had to stay in hospital for a while afterwards. I’m not 100 per cent sure that’s what happened but that’s what I remember. I don’t know how long I was in the house on my own with him. Frances said she thought this was a time I was sent to a children’s home for a while, but if that did happen, it didn’t happen quick enough to save me from getting fucked with.
One night, Ron’s in bed in Benbow Road when he calls me in to see him. He doesn’t generally acknowledge my existence unless he absolutely has to, but when he does address me directly, there’s usually a bit of intimidation going on. So I wasn’t going to say no, even though I’d have had no reason to think anything good was going to come of it (and it fucking didn’t). Anyway, I’ve not been in the bedroom long before he starts bullying me into jerking him off. I’m only a kid. What do I fucking know? I haven’t got a clue what’s going on, but I’m there on my own with him and there doesn’t seem to be any other option other than to go along with what he wants. So that’s exactly what I do – fiddle with his cock until he cums, with him looming over me all the while telling me what I’ve got to do.
All I remember feeling immediately afterwards was a bit bewildered – just thinking, ‘That was … odd.’ But the consequences of what happened are still with me half a fucking century later. I never told anyone about it for years afterwards, and it feels quite strange putting this in a book even now. But knowing the damage all the confusion I felt did to me over the intervening years makes me want to do all I can to let anyone who’s been in a similar situation know they’re not alone.
Obviously Ron would have to be a bit of a sicko to do what he did to a ten-year-old kid. I certainly never got the impression that he felt any conscience about it afterwards. I used to wonder if he’d done it to other children, but my instinct said probably not. It felt more like part of the power play around my mum – one of those alpha male things, like something that would happen in prison, where he had his chance to put his mark on me and so he did. He never tried it again, but if his objective was just to fuck me up he’d already achieved that goal, so why would he bother?
He’d always wanted to get rid of me so he could have my mum to himself, and now he’d pretty much got his way. From that point on, I never wanted to be at home. I didn’t feel safe there. I wasn’t actively in danger – I just felt threatened by his presence, and he seemed to revel in that. I guess when an adult who’s meant to be looking after you does something like that, it changes the way you feel about people in general.
An abused kid with no one to talk to will often think what’s happened is their fault, even though at some level they know it isn’t. That was certainly true of me. Another common response is to get angry and act out, and I did that too, if not necessarily in the way you’d expect.
Remember that local nonce I mentioned at the start of the chapter? Well, four or five years on he was still hanging around the area like a bad smell, and my confusion was his opportunity. I ran into him in the street not long after the thing with my stepdad happened, he started spinning me a line, and I went for it and let him suck my cock for some money. Isn’t that weird? I’m living in a different postcode to where he tried it on before, but this same fucking paedophile still manages to find me. This cunt must’ve had some kind of nonce super-sense which told him I was confused and vulnerable enough for him to blag me into getting what he wanted.
It’s not like I was wearing a badge that said, ‘I have just been molested by my stepdad,’ but something like that fucks with your idea of normality. Once it’s happened the first time I guess it’s more likely to happen again, because from then on there’s a little voice in your head that thinks this is what normal is.
I was no more than eleven years old by that time, maybe only ten, but either way, I was definitely still at primary school in Flora Gardens. It happened in a stairwell by a petrol station off Goldhawk Road in Shepherd’s Bush. The paedophile was trying to suck me off and having a pedal (and crank) while he was at it. Obviously it was a sexual transaction from his point of view, but not from mine. I was definitely not old enough to ejaculate even if I had felt the inclination.
I don’t know what happened to the guy afterwards – whether or not he ever got put away for doing shit like this – but everyone in the area knew who he was. Later on, when I became friends with Paul Cook, he knew about him too, though I never told him what had happened. In fact, I’ve never mentioned it in public before – and barely ever in private. It’s what you’d classify as breaking news.
This was quite a lot of secrets to be carrying around in my head at only eleven years old. Factor in not really being able to read or write properly and it was no wonder my secondary school career did not get off to the best of starts. I arrived at Sir Christopher Wren boys comprehensive school on Bloemfontein Avenue in White City and was put straight into the nutters’ class.
My biggest worry at this point in my life was in my pants. For some reason I became overwhelmed with humiliation at the idea that I had a little cock with no hairs around it. It was the time when everyone’s bodies developed at their own pace. I wasn’t the first one out of the blocks when it came to puberty, that’s for sure, and the fact that I knew I was a year older probably put a bit of extra pressure on – I’d see these kids with big cocks and hair everywhere and it just turned me into a basket case. This became such a fucking issue for me that I used to spend all my time torturing myself about the fact that I was going to have to get in the showers with everyone after playing sports. I was obsessed with not wanting anyone to see my cock, to the extent that I would keep my underwear on in the shower and tell everyone I had some weird thing wrong with me rather than face the imaginary music.
Of course it was all in my head. If I’d just got in the shower with my inadequately garnished meat and two veg on display like everyone else, no one would’ve said, ‘Ha ha, look at you.’ But I guess it was a sign of how much I was struggling that I fixated on these details in such a self-destructive way. It’s not like I was one of the nerdy kids. My fellow swimmers in the bottom stream would’ve probably thought I was hip, and if you were here with me now, I’d happily show you my cock to reassure you that it is at the very least of normal size, if not quite magnificent.
I can see now that at least some of the sense of shame I had about my body probably came from what had happened with my stepdad and then the nonce. But that didn’t occur to me then. Either way, it ruined my schooling. I’d go in there on a Monday thinking, ‘Oh fuck, I’m going to have to get in that shower in five days from now,’ and any slim chance of concentrating on what was meant to be happening in class would go straight out the window.
What it all came down to was me not feeling comfortable with myself. These experiences of molestation had knocked me out of alignment with the world. There didn’t seem to be any escape from feeling like this, not at school and certainly not at home, and all the shit I started getting into from then onwards – thieving, drinking, drugs, with birds – was basically about trying to leave that sense of discomfort behind. I was just looking for a way to feel all right, and I wasn’t too bothered about who got hurt in the process.
Would I have been a real goody two-shoes without my stepdad’s helping hand? (Well, technically it was my hand doing the helping, but you know what I mean.) Probably not. I don’t think I was that bad a kid prior to that, though. If I’d ever tea-leafed before it would just have been the occasional one-off – far from the one-teenager West London crime wave that I was about to become.
I’ve often wondered if things would’ve worked out differently if I’d been able to tell anyone what had happened at the time. My mum had no way of knowing – Ron certainly wasn’t going to tell her, and it’s not like I tried to talk to her about it and she shut me down. She probably would’ve done, but I can’t really hold that against her when I didn’t give her the chance to prove me wrong. I know she noticed a change in my behaviour from then on, because she mentioned it in an interview she did for a Sex Pistols book a few years later, but all she said was I ‘seemed to be very upset’ about her having a miscarriage. She didn’t know the half of it!
I can’t deny I’ve carried a lot of anger towards both of them over the years, but I don’t feel so much towards my mum now. If it hadn’t been for me getting in the way, she’d probably have been able to get someone better than Ron anyway. When you’re single with a kid you’re not going to get the pick of the litter as far as geezers are concerned, are you? So this cunt came along and she made do with him – I can’t really blame her for that. And if I’d had a safe place to retreat to and lick my wounds, I wouldn’t have had the motivation to go off in search of the kind of adventures that would help me forget them.
When it comes to what defines me as a person, a lot of the best things in my life have come about because of the worst things, which is a weird one when you try and think about divine intervention and all that bollocks. It would be a pretty twisted kind of God who would say, ‘Let’s abuse that child so he can go off the rails and form a band.’ But looking back, I do feel like someone or something – God, destiny, whatever you want to call it – definitely threw me a lifeline in giving me music to hang on to. Without that I was in serious danger of getting swept away by a tide of fucked-up shit.
Right in the middle of my darkest time in Benbow Road I heard a noise I liked coming from our neighbours’ window. The bloke next door had one of those little Dansette record players and he was playing the ’45 of Jimi Hendrix’ ‘Purple Haze’ on it. As tinny as it must have sounded, it really spoke to me. Not so much the words of the song – I’ve never been too bothered about lyrics, even to this day – just the feel of the whole thing and the way it fitted together.
There was a catchiness about it as well as the power, and I loved the syncopation, the way Hendrix’ guitar would kind of go ‘Clunk’ and then ‘Weeeoh!’ I loved it so much that I wouldn’t let them stop playing it. I stood in the street outside their window shouting up ‘Play it again! Play it again!’ till I drove them half crazy. At this point I wouldn’t have dreamed of ever trying to become a guitar hero myself, but one thing was for sure: I needed a fucking outlet, and music would give me one.