Chapter 4

The 60s and adolescence

They say that if you can remember the 60s, you didn’t enjoy them. Admittedly, my memory of the decade is patchy, but I do recall them being a time of great liberation and excitement, of breathless expectation and elation, although also times which were massively tempered with a sort of foreboding which comes with the sudden and frequent realisation that the unthinkable is, in fact, part of your daily reality. The 60s were great if you didn’t think about politics or of the increasing likelihood of an intercontinental nuclear weapons exchange. One which would either fry you to death on the spot, asphyxiate you, leave you as an inconsequential smudge on the pavement or expose you to radiation which would kill you in days, weeks, months or years.

I would read the newspapers or watch the news and if Kruschev or Kennedy had made some mildly provocative statement, it would be enough to make the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. Then there was China, of course. What the hell was that country of a billion souls plotting? Who knew? No-one, really. But it was generally agreed that their secret weapon was to get every last one of their billion to simultaneously jump in the air which would cause the world to shift on its axis due to the weight transfer and take us all to hell. The 60s were rapidly turning from a time of free love and liberation into a period of unadulterated fear. It was a decade of total contrasts: barriers in technology, music, art and culture were being torn down while, at the same time, politics and international relationships were heading back to the dark ages.

Light and dark vied for supremacy. Good and evil were never before cast in so stark a contrast and never before was the battle so keenly marked. John F Kennedy, probably the most charismatic and empathetic of all world leaders at the time, was elected. At the same time, the Russians were dividing Berlin with a monstrous wall. The first man ever to escape earth’s gravitational pull orbited the earth in 1961 while people were being killed for the crime of wishing to travel from one part of Berlin to another. Silent Spring: Rachel Carson’s warning of the impact of pesticides in the future was published and the green movement put down its first recognisable roots.

I remember my mum waking me the morning after the US Presidential elections which brought Kennedy to power to tell me, to my utter relief, that Senator Barry Goldwater, a Republican presidential candidate who had made blood-chilling speeches about what he was going to do with respect to the Cold War between East and West if elected, had been defeated: it was that important.

The Cuban missile crisis in 1962 was an incident which brought the world within hours of a nuclear exchange: to say that the world held its breath on that morning is not an overstatement. As Soviet ships ploughed towards Cuba where they planned to install missiles pointed at the US, Kennedy deployed naval vessels with the intention of turning them back. In a test of mettle between Kruschev and Kennedy, played out from July to October 1962, the United States was put on ‘defence alert condition 2’ (DEFCON2) and was prepared to force the removal of missiles from Cuban territory. The Soviet ships were finally diverted by Kruschev after he had secured an agreement that the US would not invade Cuba, but only after various compromises had been explored and rejected, the most notable being that the US should remove its missiles from Turkey if the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba. The entire event summed up the 60s – knife-edge diplomacy, high drama, high adrenalin and momentous incidences which would shape the next 100 years.

The day after my seventeenth birthday on November the 22nd, 1963, the most shocking event of the 60s took place when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Those few frames of film which show the third bullet ripping off his scalp as his wife turns towards him are probably the most chilling and arresting anyone will ever witness. For impressionable kids of a certain tender age, it seemed that the world had gone mad. As the US attempted to ‘halt the spread of communism’ in Vietnam, the superpowers shaped up to one another on a regular basis and we lived on the precipice of the unknown.

It seems perverse to recall, after living through such nightmarish times, that the 60s were not all bad, but in truth, and possibly driven by the ‘what-the-hell’ attitude foisted upon us by the mad political leaders of the day, life beyond thoughts of the frying pan was, to most, pure joy. It was the time of Harold Wilson, the ‘you’ve-never-had-it-so-good’ days of MacMillan and the good times of the 60s – assuming you could ignore the Cuban missile crisis, the fact that a megalomaniac was running for Presidency in the US and that we were still testing nuclear weapons all over the world, some still being detonated, believe it or not, in the atmosphere.

Music was becoming more and more important to me and my peers. After the wild ‘rocking’ beginnings of new musical experiments, music became more considered, more cerebral and, underpinned by the growing use of drugs and a growing anti-war sentiment, deeper and more engaging. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were, perhaps, favourites with us teenagers and Simon and Garfunkel’s early albums encouraged me to write and made me feel that my increasing teenage angst was not evidence of the onset of madness. But while music moved me to emotional extremes, even in those early days of stirring awareness about the world, it was much later that music really gripped me to a point where I doubt if I could do without it today.

My GCE ‘O’ Level results were good. I attained six passes and failed one – geography. Billy Evans and I found the French exam so easy that we’d finished within half the allotted time and through sign language indicated that we’d go and share a fag in the bogs. We were not allowed to go together so Billy returned after his allotted five minutes and palmed the remains of a Player’s Weight on my desk as he passed. The stench of a half-smoked cigarette filled the examination room and wafted after me as I headed for the bogs with it tucked into my top pocket.

So here I was, 16 years old and determined to leave school. Brian had already left home, and I looked at life from the vantage point of a flat in a housing estate in Deptford. We had no money, I had few prospects and was determined that, given these circumstances and the fact that all my friends from the estate and the area in which I operated, bar two, were now in paid work, I would forego further education and A-levels and get myself out to work. Stuffed into my back pocket was the sum total of my careers advice session – a sheet of paper which contained the addresses of ten print firms in London, most of which had long ceased trading.

The transition from school to work is a massive leap for anyone: I saw my life as probably being truncated by an exchange of intercontinental ballistic missiles and presumed the steps I took between that point and the inevitability of mass incineration would be rather academic. I therefore adopted an entirely ambivalent attitude to work and where I might be taken by the world of semi-adulthood. If real adults could not do better than to threaten to mutually assure each other’s destruction, what I did with my life seemed to be of little consequence. Despite the upsides to all of these goings-on, I fell deeper and deeper into depression, finding solace in writing. I wrote some very depressing poems around this time, but then I assumed every other 16 year-old was doing the same.

I saw an advertisement for a salesperson at a department store –Chiesman’s in Lewisham. On the grounds that it was close by, I applied and got the job. I wandered through the job with as little application or enthusiasm as I could muster. I had no appetite at all for selling soft furnishings to couples who, I was convinced, would live to see them disappear in a flash of atom-splitting fire and doom within a year or two. I became obsessed with the political situation and resigned to my fate. I became even more introverted and reclusive, retiring to my room as soon as I could and remaining there, writing and generally emoting for hours on end.