3

A-Wop Bop A-Loo Bop

Courtesy of the author

My mother’s homesickness finally started to wear off after a few years at No. 1 Beech Drive. Or maybe it was just that she’d found an outlet for it – an Italian food-importing company up in Glasgow, run by a guy named Pietro Fazzi, who’d been thrown in prison with his brothers by the British during the war, then released after VE Day.

The company had started out as a family ice-cream shop and café in the 1920s, but one of Mr. Fazzi’s sons realized they could make more money selling raw ingredients directly to restaurants and homesick Italians all over Scotland and the North East. (Quite a few Italian prisoners of war had married in Britain and never returned home.) We’re talking things like Mennucci pasta, Bertolli olive oil, proper salami, gallon-tins of tomatoes, Parmigiano Reggiano and doppio zero flour for pizza crusts.

Whatever you wanted – if it was Italian and made your mouth water – Mr. Fazzi could get it.

Once my ma found out this guy existed, she never looked back.

Every Friday afternoon, my ma would call in her order from a phone box up the street, and I’d listen to her babbling away to Mr. Fazzi in Italian for what felt like hours. Then a few days later, a guy would show up on our doorstep to deliver her supplies – and my ma would look as happy as a kid on Christmas morning.

Watching her prepare this food was just the best thing ever. My brother Maurice – a future chef – was especially transfixed by it. I mean, although the food in 1950s Britain had a dreadful reputation, the Geordies were rightfully proud of their soups, scones, lamb chops, English bangers, bacon sarnies and Sunday roasts – comfort food that I still cook at home today. But what my mother could do in the kitchen was something else. She used spices that we’d never ever tasted before. Made pastas from scratch that we’d never seen before. Cooking was an outpouring of emotion for her – a way to remind herself of the life that she’d left behind in Italy.

I’ll never forget the first time she made her Italian doughnuts – bomboloni they’re called because they look like little bombs – on a Sunday afternoon. The entire family sat and watched that dough rise in front of the fire, a damp towel placed carefully over it, like it was a Hollywood film. Then she kneaded it, cut it into little rounds, laid out the doughnuts carefully on parchment paper, then fried them gently in the very best oil that Mr. Fazzi could get. And then out they came, all warm and soft and insanely delicious-looking, and she cut out the centres as a special treat for the kids, rolled them in sugar, and ohhhhhhhhh, you just couldn’t believe how good they tasted! My brothers and I could have eaten a thousand of them.

And, of course, the neighbours ended up smelling the bomboloni from halfway up the street, and they’d never smelled anything like it before, so they all came running over. And by then my ma was onto her third or fourth batch, so she starts wrapping the doughnuts up in old newspaper and handing them out, and before I know it, I’m taking them into school for Mrs. Patterson and Mr. Graham the caretaker, and everyone has stopped making fun of us for being Italian behind our backs.

From then on, I didn’t really mind that we were different. In fact, I started to quite like it.

Every morning, my ma would make proper Italian coffee after my dad left for work. The beans would come from Mr. Fazzi, and she’d grind them herself in one of those wooden box things with a twisty handle on the top. The smell was so good you just wanted to bury your head in the stuff. Then she’d brew one of those Italian pots of coffee on the stove, pour us each a little bowl of it, add a splash of milk, and drop in some little squares of toast. That was our cereal. I mean, were there any other kids in the North East who got to start their school days like that?

She was a wonderful woman, my ma. Always surprising us and delighting us with her recipes – all of which she’d memorized. Always happy and smiling when us kids were around. Always wanting us to see and do the things that she never could.

Every so often, though, the old pain would come back. Like the time I was playing soldiers with the broom and I charged and smashed her pastel pink chandelier in the living room – one of the few things that she’d brought with her from Italy that hadn’t ended up being stolen or pawned. It was the first and last time that I was ever scared of my ma. She wasn’t just angry, she was absolutely livid.

But as soon as the anger passed, all the sadness came out, and she grabbed me in her arms and cried.

This would probably be a good moment to mention that my mother had another go at taking me back to Italy – only this time with some advance warning, during a school holiday.

I must have been seven or eight.

The only parts of the journey there that I remember are using a toilet on the train that emptied directly onto the tracks – ‘the loudest toilet in the world’, I named it – and being paralysed with fear when we had to carry our suitcases over these narrow, wobbly planks onto the cross-channel ferry at Dover. I felt absolutely sure that we were both going to die. How my mother finally coaxed me aboard, I’ve no idea.

But Italy was a revelation.

The station we arrived at – Roma Termini – was this brand-new modern masterpiece with a huge atrium and cantilevered roof, like nothing I’d ever seen before.

I was even more amazed by the Italian trains, which were diesel, not steam, and painted in the most beautiful reds, oranges and greens. And when we got off the train, the terminal smelled of coffee and fresh bread, and there wasn’t a single piece of litter blowing around. Nothing could blow around, in fact, because there was no gale blowing in from the North Sea. And it wasn’t pissing it down. And I could feel something unusual on my face, something that I’d never felt before . . .

Heat.

From the sun.

I felt like I’d arrived in paradise.

As soon as we got off the train – me dressed in my usual shorts with a pair of open-toed sandals – my ma’s sisters and her niece Julianna showed up, and everyone cried for about ten minutes. They were the loveliest, friendliest people I’d ever met, and so incredibly beautiful, I couldn’t stop looking at them. None of them wore nylons, because their legs were naturally tanned. Their teeth were straight and white. And their makeup was so subtle, you could barely even tell they were wearing lipstick. One of them even had a car and drove it herself, which I couldn’t believe. Cars were rare enough in Dunston. But women drivers? I was in shock. My Italian aunties and cousin Julianna just seemed so free, so stylish . . . so happy.

Then off we went to Frascati – which was about forty-five minutes away, up in the hills – and we passed all these burned-out German tanks and artillery pieces on the side of the road.

Next thing I knew, we were pulling up outside an incredibly posh-looking block of flats, where it turned out my Aunty Maria had the whole top floor to herself.

I was in shock at how she lived. I can still picture the silk curtains, which were pale light blue and gold, and the kitchen, which had a long table for cutting and preparing all this fresh and colourful-looking food. There were even vines of grapes just growing naturally in terracotta pots on the balcony, spilling over the side and creeping up the wooden latticework, creating a canopy of shade.

That night, we were treated to the most delicious meal of pasta, fish, meats and cheeses that I’d ever tasted, and I got to sit with Julianna and my other Italian cousins on a special children’s table. They gave me a little beaker of red wine. And for the first time, the full weight of what my ma had given up for my dad – for all of us – began to sink in.

If my mother was the soul of the family, my dad was its backbone. Getting so much as a hint of emotion out of him was like getting blood out of a stone. He grunted. He growled. Sometimes he bellowed. Mostly, he said very little at all. When he spoke to me, it was usually to say, ‘Oy, you! Stop that!’ or, ‘Oy, you! Gerrover here now!’

For years, I thought my name was ‘Hugh’.

It wasn’t that he was cruel. He just didn’t want to be seen as soft. And that wasn’t just a macho thing, either. When you’re a sergeant, discipline is everything. If you can’t keep your men in line, sooner or later someone is going to get killed.

The first hint I got of what my dad had been through during the war came one Saturday afternoon when I was about ten years old. One of my favourite things to do back then was build Airfix model aircraft and on that particular day, I was putting the finishing touches to an American P-38 Lightning twin-engined fighter bomber (as the Germans called them, ‘The Fork-Tailed Devil’). My dad had never taken much of an interest in my creations before, but when he came back from his club and saw the P-38, he stopped, smiled and said, ‘That’s the most beautiful plane in the world.’

Which kinda shook me because he never usually said anything at all.

‘Why’s that, Dad?’

He said: ‘It saved our lives, that did.’

And that was it. I was expecting a story but talking about the war just wasn’t cool. It took another twenty years before I finally got an explanation.

Years later, my brother Maurice and I were in Frascati staying with ma’s family, with her and Dad. One afternoon, Dad said, ‘I’d like to go to Nettuno’, which is not far from Anzio. This is where, on 22 January 1944, the Allies attacked the German-held beachheads. The Americans at Anzio, the British at Nettuno, which is where my dad landed.

So, Maurice and I drove him to Nettuno. The drive from Frascati took about an hour. It took the Allies about five months. When we arrived, we were met by some of my ma’s extended family, who had an apartment right on the beach. They welcomed us in, took us up to their balcony and brought out this glorious spread of food. There were salamis, cheese, bread and wine. Perfect. We looked out over the beach drinking wine and taking it all in when, out of the blue, my father said: ‘You see that rock?’

About half a mile away, just before the beach met the water, stood a huge rock.

We all looked and nodded.

‘We took cover behind that when we got out of our landing craft,’ he said. ‘There were bodies everywhere. Floating in the water. On the beach. Men were dropping like flies. I told my men to run for that rock and stop for nothing. I don’t know how we made it, but we did . . . well, some of us did, anyway.’

Maurice and I were stunned. This was the first time we’d ever heard our dad talk about the war.

‘Then, out of nowhere, these P-38 Lightnings came swooping down and strafed and bombed the Germans,’ my dad said. ‘They were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.’

I suddenly got it, all those years on from that Saturday afternoon.

We then went to the Allied War Cemetery. Thousands of crosses, with a Star of David here and there – it just took your breath away. I’d never seen anything so sad and beautiful at the same time. The flowers, the death all around – young fellas who gave everything they had and two generations later, nobody knew or cared where Nettuno or Anzio was.

I felt quite ashamed when I thought about what I’d wanted when I was their age. A new P.A. system. A motorbike. Those lads never got a chance.

My father’s shoulders straightened instinctively as he walked into the cemetery, then he marched determinedly to a row of graves that he must have remembered from when the bodies were buried way back. Maurice and I followed him as he pointed to various headstones. ‘Ah, Tommy, he was a good lad, and there’s Eric, a funny fella – I went to school with him, y’know – and that’s Mickey, he didn’t make it five yards.’

We could see none of them had even made it to their twenty-first birthday.

‘Give us a couple of minutes, lads,’ asked my dad – and we left him there with his fallen pals. We watched as he talked to them all without opening his mouth, smiling now and then, nodding occasionally – the boys back together after so many years of silence. I hope he’s with them now. There were tears in his eyes and lumps in our throats. Then he pulled himself up to his full height and gave a proper sergeant’s salute, rigid and intense. No trumpets. No last call.

Then he dropped the salute, did an immaculate right turn, and marched towards us.

‘I’m done,’ he said – and we followed him out.

We looked at our dad in a new light after that.*

For all my dad’s cantankerousness, there were only a couple of times when I saw him really lose it. And on the occasion that it was with me, in all honesty, I had it coming.

I’d come home from school one afternoon and noticed this huge cloud of black smoke billowing out over the top of the house and thought, what the hell is that? So, me and a few of the other Big ones ran to find the source and quickly found the railway line, which ran directly behind our street and was separated from our back garden by just a little fence. This gave us the idea to create an incredibly fun new game, which the Little ones also soon eagerly joined in with. The game was called . . . ‘steam train chicken’. Which, as you can probably work out for yourself, involved us standing on the line and waiting for a train – while listening to the driver blowing his whistle, and screaming every curse word that he could think of at us – and seeing who could hold their nerve the longest before jumping out of the way.

The closer you came to a horribly violent death, in other words, the better your chances of winning, which, in our kids’ minds, seemed like an entirely reasonable gamble to take.

Anyway, this game went on for weeks, providing us with endless hours of entertainment, until my dad looked out of his bedroom window one day and saw what was going on.

Let’s just say that his reaction wasn’t one of fatherly pride. He didn’t open the window and call out, ‘Brian, my son! What an exciting game you’ve invented there! Well done, little fella!’

Instead, as he stormed out of the house, he got the same look in his eye he must have had when he was killing Germans in Tunisia. He pointed at us in turn and roared, ‘You!! You!! You!! AGAINST THE FENCE. Now!’ Then he pulled down a tree branch and started whacking the shit out of us. ‘If I ever see you doing that again,’ – WHACK! – ‘I’ll call the police’ – WHACK! – ‘You’ll go to prison, d’you hear?!’ – WHACK!

‘Yes, Dad,’ we whimpered in turn, tears streaming down our faces, our arses on fire.

Later that night, one of my friend’s dads came to the house, all riled up, demanding to know why his son had been beaten with a stick. But when my dad explained that he’d been caught playing chicken with a steam train, the other dad went very quiet and said, ‘Well, I’m sorry for doubting you, Alan. If you ever catch him doing that again, please give him another good fucking hiding from me.’

Lettuce

In 1950s Dunston, the stubbornness of the average working-class dad was a constant hazard, and almost impossible to navigate – a prime example being the time my old man asked me to go over to his friend Billy’s allotment to pick up a lettuce for my ma.

In the late fifties, in all working-class areas in Britain, there were allotments. These were a throwback from the war. The idea was to grow your own food and usually have a cree for your homing pigeons.

Not far from Beech Drive, where we lived, there were literally hundreds of them. All about forty yards by twenty-five, give or take a turnip. These allotments were rented out by the local council, and all were surrounded by corrugated iron and secured and guarded jealously by the tenants. Especially when prize leeks were involved.

My father’s mate had one, and on a beautiful sunny spring day Dad said to me, ‘Go to Billy’s allotment and pick up a lettuce for your mother.’ It was spring and that’s when you ate salads because, unlike today, it was a seasonal thing.

He gave me a twopence and off I went. I knocked on the corrugated iron fence, but nothing, so I shouted, because the fence was too high to climb. Billy came and said, ‘C’mon son, I’ve got a nice head of lettuce for your Mam.’ It was wrapped in a newspaper and I said to him, ‘Here’s your twopence from Dad.’

‘What?’ he said. ‘There’s no need for that, I have plenty, off you go.’

I went home and proudly announced the lettuce was free, Billy didn’t want any money. My father said, ‘Take that money back and tell him, I always pay my way.’

A little confused, I ran back to Billy’s allotment and said to Billy, ‘Dad won’t take it for nothing and here’s the twopence.’

Billy laughed and said to tell Dad not to be so daft, ‘I don’t need the twopence, now go on and bugger off.’

Whilst buggering off, I realized this was a political game I was ill-equipped to deal with. What the hell was my father going to say?

I must point out at this juncture, that at the time in the North East fathers were strict and were not used to being disobeyed, and I was just a pawn in the game of pride.

I went back again to plead with Billy to take the bloody twopence. It was too late, he was gone, panic set in. I couldn’t keep the money or I’d be accused of stealing. I couldn’t take it back or I’d be doing the allotment shuffle for all eternity, and this was a Saturday and nearly time for the afternoon matinee at the pictures.

So, this was what it was like to have to make a decision. The closest I’d been to that was in a sweet shop, deciding between midget gems or pineapple chunks.

I didn’t like this decision-making at all – it was confusing and scary. So, I thought long and hard about what to do. About five minutes later, I had come to a conclusion and threw the money down the drain.

I spent the next few days in sheer terror that Billy would talk to my dad and they would find out the truth, but nothing happened. Both of them were probably too proud to talk about it. I started realizing then that being honest wasn’t that easy.

Contents of an English Salad circa 1950–1965

2 leaves of lettuce

½ boiled egg

2 pickled onions

½ tomato

1 slice of meat, ham, spam or tongue for a child

2 " " " for an adult

and lots of bread spread with margarine or dripping or the ubiquitous Heinz Salad Cream (the middle class used butter).

Then the lettuce would disappear for another year, but time moves on and hydroponics changed the lettuce world. We bred them like battery chickens, and both taste nothing like the originals. Just like water.

Nineteen fifty-eight was the year that everything changed for me, in ways both awful and amazing.

The awful part was that I had to take the ‘eleven-plus’ – a brain-meltingly hard IQ test that also included questions on everything you’d ever been taught in school.

In Britain in those days, it’s no exaggeration to say your performance in that one exam – at the grand old age of eleven – decided how the rest of your life would turn out. The high scorers went to grammar schools that prepared them for universities. The rest went to secondary moderns, where the focus was on practical skills like woodwork and metalwork – and you had more chance of walking on the moon than getting a university education. There were also a few ‘technical schools’ that taught trades, but most trades were learned through on-the-job apprenticeships.

The exam lasted forty-five to sixty minutes. You couldn’t retake it. So, the pressure was absolutely horrendous. It didn’t help that Britain hadn’t built enough grammar schools to handle all the kids born after the war, so every year they made the questions harder.

My dad being my dad, the only kind of encouragement he knew was fear. ‘Oy, you! You’d better pass that exam or you’ll end up sweeping the roads!’ he kept saying to me. Sweeping the roads was the worst job imaginable as far as my dad was concerned. For me, though, the fate that scared me the most was becoming a coal miner.

What my dad should have known, of course, is that you can’t scare someone into doing well at something that requires preparation and a cool head – on top of whatever natural intelligence you were born with. And I didn’t prepare at all for the eleven-plus. But the truth was, I was also just very underdeveloped at that age compared with my friends. I still hadn’t grown out of playing Cowboys and Indians. And I suffered from terrible performance anxiety – I still do.

The whole thing was just a total humiliation. I got the exam papers in front of me and froze. I was so nervous my brain wouldn’t work and I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. The questions might as well have been written in Swedish. It was one of the worst hours of my life. What made it even more painful was that I’d been such a good student at school, always getting gold stars and top marks.

We got the results about a week later. What a day that was. Suddenly everyone was separated into groups. In one group were the future pilots of the world, the doctors, the lawyers. Some of the high-scorers were friends of mine and had always come lower than me in class – but they’d obviously prepared for the exam and been able to hold their nerve when it counted. But when my name was called, I was told to go and stand with the kids who usually got ‘D’s and ‘E’s. My heart sank. I’d failed, obviously. I’d be going to a secondary modern. Not that it made any difference in the end. Even the hardest of blows you take in life can be overcome if you just play the hand you’re dealt, instead of moping around and feeling sorry for yourself. But I’m not gonna lie to you, when the grammar school kids went one way, and I went the other . . . I couldn’t have felt more empty.

A few weeks later, the amazing thing happened.

I was off school on the day in question – I must have been feeling poorly or had a dentist appointment or something – and was out of my mind with boredom, so I switched on the television and started watching this daytime BBC show with the very catchy name of Farming. That was it, just Farming. Later on, they’d spice it up – no doubt creating a whiff of scandal at Broadcasting House – by renaming it Farming Today. Either way, it was just a guy in a suit and tie talking straight to camera – in this particular episode, about the difference between mulch and manure.

Now, at this point you might be asking yourself, why didn’t the little lad just change the channel? But in the North East in those days, remember, the BBC was the only channel, with Tyne Tees Television not launching until a year or so later. So, it was either suffer through an episode of Farming – in black-and-white, just to add to the thrill – or stare at the wall. And I’d done as much staring at the wall as any eleven-year-old boy could take in one day.

So, there I was, sitting and watching this mind-numbing form of entertainment – eyes glassing over, drool coming out of my mouth – when all of a sudden the credits rolled and this plummy-voiced BBC announcer said, ‘and now, for the interlude . . .’

I almost certainly groaned. Because if you can believe it, the BBC’s ‘interludes’ were even worse than the awful programming itself. Things like, ‘Here’s a short film of fish swimming in a pond’, or ‘Here’s an elderly Scottish woman decorating a pot’, or ‘And now for a church choir singing a hymn . . . very slowly’.

But not on this day. Oh no. On this day, the Gods of rock’n’roll had decided that little Brian Johnson at No. 1 Beech Drive was going to get a bolt of lightning up his arse.

Instead of being treated to a short film of fish swimming, I suddenly found myself staring in awe at a black guy with a wafer-thin moustache and a crazy mop of hair. Oh, and he was wearing makeup and a sequinned shirt with a skinny tie, and everything about him was just so obviously, wildly, fabulously gay, but of course gay to me just meant happy, and it would for many more years to come.

‘This young American boy goes by the name of Little Richard,’ said the announcer, with a hint of mischief in his voice, like he knew this was far too racy for the BBC, ‘and here is his most popular song . . . which has been a terrific success across the Atlantic!’

With that, Little Richard opened his mouth and let out a noise at the very top of his lungs that was just pure joy, sex and liberation all rolled into one. ‘A-WOP BOP A-LOO BOP, A-WOP BAM BOOM!!’

Many have described that song, ‘Tutti Frutti’, as the sound of rock’n’roll being born – which is fitting, because my dream of becoming a singer was born in that moment too.

I felt like someone had just plugged me into the mains. Every part of me was suddenly standing on end, from my hair to my nipples to the bits down below that I didn’t even know how to use yet. It was like nothing I’d ever seen, heard or felt before . . . and it absolutely blew my mind.

Like all highs, though, ‘Tutti Frutti’ was very quickly followed by a crushing low. Because I wanted – no, needed – to hear those screamed lyrics and those unhinged ‘wooooos’ and that full-throttle rhythm section again. Immediately. But I was just an eleven-year-old kid in Dunston. I was too young to go to a record shop. I didn’t have any money. And even if the single had magically fallen from the sky, I wouldn’t have had anything to play it on. Our ancient wind-up gramophone only went at 78 rpm.

It was agony!

Then, a few days later, coming home from school, I heard that unmistakable shriek of rock’n’roll ecstasy carried down the street. I ran around, trying to find the source – and when I realized that it was coming out of a neighbour’s downstairs window, I jumped the fence and just stood in their front garden listening to it, mesmerized.

Then it stopped – and to this day, I can’t believe what I did next. I knocked on their front door.

A lady answered in her curlers. I remember thinking that she seemed far too old to be listening to ‘my’ kind of music – but she was probably only nineteen or twenty. ‘Sorry to bother you, Missus,’ I said, feeling my cheeks turn bright red, ‘but could you . . . play that again?’

The lady looked back at me for a moment, not quite believing what she was hearing.

‘Well . . . if you’d like,’ she said, with a little smile. Then she went back inside, I heard the crackle and hiss of a needle on vinyl, and then, oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, oh yes . . .

‘A-WOP BOP A-LOO BOP, A-WOP BAM BOOM!!’

Next thing I knew, the lady was back on the front step with me, doing the hand jive to the music. That just floored me. It was the best thing I’d ever seen. So, of course I joined in, and there we were, this kid who’d just failed his eleven-plus and this fully-grown young woman, on a council estate in Dunston, and we were grinning our faces off to this totally alien-sounding, but unbelievably exciting, new kind of music. It was hands-down the best Tuesday afternoon of my life.

‘What’s your name, sweetie?’ asked the girl, out of breath, when the song ended for the second time.

I told her.

‘Well, it was nice to meet you, Brian,’ she said. ‘I’m Annette.’

Annette, if you’re reading this, many thanks for pointing the way.