My secondary school was Thomas Tallis in Greenwich, one of those huge grey schools you see in cities across the country. It was huge, surrounded by muddy playing fields with tortured schoolchildren stuck in the mud in the pissing rain. It was towered over by the Ferrier estate, apparently where people even poorer than us lived, though I don’t think it has ever been proven that people from Lewisham are in any way richer than those in Greenwich. They used to urinate off their balconies and throw furniture at people walking under the tower blocks, or so my brothers told me. It was a terrifying place just by reputation. Apparently, the woman who designed it committed suicide. I’m surprised she wasn’t murdered.
I realised not long after my arrival at Tallis, that I was really just a small boy from a very small primary school and a comparatively tiny council estate. None of my old friends were there and I was cast alone and adrift, in a unique opportunity, I remember thinking to myself, to buckle down and try to get away from this life. Brother number two was talking about going to university, away from home, away from London. Brother number one had moved out of home with a girl he’d got pregnant and the other brother had turned into a military obsessive and seemed to spend his entire life wearing army uniforms and old army boots. I think he even went through a period of saluting his dinner.
In my tutor group alone there were four different languages spoken. We had Vietnamese and Chinese kids who we all assumed spoke the same language and could understand each other. There was a Turk in his late teens who spoke no English at all but had a penchant for slapping his knob out on the table in front of terrified schoolgirls. We had a Scouse girl who was really poor, even more so than the girl with no front teeth who never showered or bathed or, for that matter, seemed to actually be at school. There was a tall girl who already had a boyfriend with a car. The rumour was that she’d let the boys put their hands down her knickers for a quid. I didn’t take the bus for a whole week just so I could have a go one Friday lunchtime. She was off sick when my turn came around.
By 1985 I could actually feel myself losing control, despite the good intentions I’d had when arriving there not two years before. My mother’s reign at home was tight, but never tyrannical. She kept our house warm and safe from the outside world. Imperial Leather soap was our only luxury and she worked her fingers to the bone just to get that. It was the 1980s and politics were everywhere but not in our house. It seemed the poorer you were, the more right-wing and racist you were encouraged to be by some newspapers. You could do battle with teachers for an entire one-hour lesson if you knew the right buttons to press. The Sun was running a campaign against the ‘loony left’ and you knew the sort of people they were talking about. History, humanities and even mathematics lessons ground to a halt for a heated and out of control discussion if you could make the right obnoxious, smart arse remark. But I had to be careful; phone calls or letters home from school meant a deafening silence and a look of disappointment from my mother that was too much to bear.
Was I just intellectually curious, challenging authority, testing boundaries, or what? What was it I was doing? I never even contemplated it. ‘You’re the worst kind of bully; you create misery for everyone,’ I was told, as I sat cold in another office somewhere deep within the grey walls of Thomas Tallis. By the time I was thirteen, they were calling me a racist too. Was I a bully? Was I a racist bully? Fair or not, being constantly told off suited me because it suited me to feel victimised.
I knew what racism was and it was not as unattractive a proposition as the trendy posters on the school’s walls claimed it was. I’d already led a campaign against one teacher to remove an anti-racist poster because it had ‘no white faces on it’ and she had capitulated for a quieter life.
I went to the school library and stole Martin Walker’s book on the National Front. It was a curious book, well the NF was certainly curious. Later, I flicked through the phone book to see if any of the big names I’d read about were listed. I rang a few Tyndalls but couldn’t get the one mentioned in Walker’s book, the one that wore the Nazi uniforms: John Hutchins Tyndall. He probably didn’t even exist any more.
But I still didn’t think I was a racist. I just thought that no one gave a toss about me because of my colour or class, least of all some trendy overpaid bastard teachers with lefty stickers on their stupid satchels. I wondered whether if I was black they’d be giving me some award for being so cocky; or if I was Chinese or Asian they’d give me exemptions from certain classes on religious or ethnic grounds. I began asking that question aloud more and more often. No one challenged me and I felt no one was listening. I was certainly becoming the worst sort of bully.
My brother came home from university and played Billy Bragg and Smiths records continuously throughout the holidays. I had my own bedroom by now; indeed we even had a spare room. Mum started dating a man who had a car. She had started working; we had a colour television and even a video recorder. Things improved but it was still an uphill struggle just to keep your head above water, minding every penny that your mother could earn, while thinking that all of the injustices in your life were surely because you were white.
What was eating at me, why was I so angry? I’d got over the Irish thing, in fact I felt it made me a little cool, but still something was not right inside. Every now and then I’d get a twinge or a sneaking suspicion about something. Perhaps it was growing pains but I’d grown to resent everything, even friends and family, and the fact that nobody seemed to be listening. I resented my brother for going to university and coming back in his holidays like he knew everything. Working class people didn’t go to university and if they did they came back talking a load of bollocks down their noses at people. Did my brother’s growing vocabulary compensate for his small penis? And why did he have to play poxy records about queers on bicycles with nothing to wear? We didn’t talk for twenty years after his last visit home.
At fourteen I got a weekend and holiday job on Lewisham’s fruit and veg market. They worked me like a bastard no matter what the weather. But they were real men to me. Not teachers or student wankers. They had huge, handsome beer guts and pockets full of cash. They would talk to me and listen to me and they never disagreed with any of the angry observations I made about black shoppers, black youths, black women…
I worked for a couple of brothers who absolutely hated black people, strange considering Lewisham’s ethnic make-up. There was an ongoing campaign against South African fruit at the time, on account of the Apartheid regime. In front of the lefty paper sellers they made me stand shouting ‘Cape fruit! Cape fruit! Buy a banana picked by Mandela.’ Well, I made that bit up on my own but the lads on the market loved it. I was the angry clown, a £10-a-day barrow boy.
We sold cooking cherries marketed as edible and fiddled the scales to our benefit. The full-timer put cash straight into his pocket and not into the boss’s. I ate as much fruit as I could because it was good for my complexion. I’d recently started masturbating furiously and frequently, which had seemed to coincide with an outbreak of acne. The endless wanking became a bit of a distraction and sometimes I had to sneak off in the middle of the day for one. The blokes there didn’t seem to mind. ‘He’s going for a cotton wool’, they’d shout after me as I went for another toilet break.
But there was something in my head apart from all of the pornography. I was constantly asking myself what I believed in. How did I feel about myself, my home, my life? What would I do when the drudgery of school, a constant and seemingly pointless distraction from wanking, ended? I’d never gone hungry, had never been left cold at home alone, or beaten black and blue like so many other kids at school seemed to be. In the 1980s, everything was on HP and the never-never. We had a large black market economy, lightning strikes and schools with their windows locked open and the heating turned up. Mrs Thatcher seemed to be god-like if equality of opportunity managed to reach your front door but it was not knocking on ours.
Who was going to listen to my complaints? What actually were my complaints? I couldn’t articulate what I was feeling because I didn’t understand it. Something had to happen, anything. The absolute and endless periods of boredom, either locked in school or locked in my bedroom, seemed to drag by while I sat plotting all the things I was going to do when I had the chance. Never once did I list what these things were, never once did I convince myself of anything. Whatever it was I was planning would only ever turn out to be another interlude before I could start beating my meat once more. At some stage I should have called the Guinness Book of Records to watch me go at it, Roy Castle playing his trumpet and me on my pork flute.
In August 1987, Rudolf Hess died. I had not long turned fifteen. I watched mourning German skinheads and suited Nazis on television trying to have parades and being beaten back by German police officers. Hess had been Hitler’s deputy and possibly a little bit mad, but during the war he had flown to Britain in an attempt to broker peace with the British. They stuck him in the Tower of London and then after the war in Spandau Prison, where he lived a life of solitary confinement guarded by the former Allies. Was it right to keep a man who came in peace in prison? What did he do or say to deserve that punishment? How many wanks had Herr Hess knocked out between meals?
The gangs of German Nazis in their black jackets with their faces covered looked impressive to me, even brave. People my age, with courage and conviction, trying to commemorate one of their own, betrayed by liars in foreign governments. I was leaderless and I was bored. Where was my Rudolf Hess?
I pored over the books I’d stolen from the school library on British fascists and went through the phone book once more for numbers for the National Front. But still there was nothing, not even a clue to where those angry thousands of British patriots had vanished to not ten years before. In Lewisham, on our very doorstep, in 1977 the National Front had caused a ground-breaking riot. The police had used riot shields for the first time against the mighty National Front, resplendent behind large flags, like an army of avenging angels, trying to liberate white families from the torment of a multiracial Britain. But they were gone it seemed, no longer the salvation of the white race. If only I could have been ten years older, I would have joined the Front on that march. I would have stormed the barricades, I would have been our Rudolf Hess if necessary.
And then, at last, something happened. British Nationalist was posted through my door one Saturday afternoon. It was a grubby-looking newspaper with a red and blue masthead. It pronounced itself the monthly paper of the British National Party. It had a large ‘BNP’ encircled in the top right-hand corner and lots of stories and dire warnings about blacks and Asians. Oh joy! What common sense would now prevail! I breathlessly smuggled it upstairs, hid it under the bed with my most prized copies of Razzle (Readers’ Wives editions) and waited until I could give it my full attention.
That night, I pored over the pages in awe. I read and reread the same articles. It had a picture of one of their members, a man named Richard Edmonds, sporting a black eye he’d got from fighting for his beliefs and an obituary of Rudolf Hess, as if he was their old friend. This was bigger than me alone. This was about history and people with a will (but very little ability) to change it. In the paper was the great John Tyndall, he of the Nazi uniforms and jackboots who had been to prison for his beliefs. It was astonishing. My body trembled as I held it in my hands and read every inch of its pages. This spoke to me, this said so much without actually making any real sense to me. It made me feel small and, at the same time, the more I looked at it, the more obvious it was that this was my calling. I would just have to meet the people behind this newspaper and offer them my services.
After school on Monday, I fired Mr Tyndall off a letter from my mother’s typewriter and waited for his response. And waited, and waited. There was nothing.
By now, a few of the guys from school had found a pub that would serve us. We could even drink there in our school uniforms. On Friday and Saturday nights, a dozen off us would be in there propping up the bar and talking teenage bollocks like we knew everything. It worked out I could have three pints a night on my limited barrow-boy budget.
If we didn’t want to go to the pub, we’d go up to Blackheath and sit on the common by the ponds with plastic bags full of cans of beer and bottles of cider. Some of the pretty girls from school came along too and there was always kissing and bragging going on. They christened me ‘working class hero’ on account of the fact I was fifteen and had a job, but mainly because I was crude and a slob. It was a beautiful, warm summer and I was almost in danger of being distracted from everything but relentless masturbation, when the phone call came. It was a Wednesday evening and I was locked in my bedroom with my favourite magazines. I rarely got phone calls. ‘Some bloke, I dunno,’ I was told when I asked my brother who it was. He always answered the telephone with military precision but had been unable to glean exactly who was on the other end of the call to me, to his obvious chagrin.
‘Matthew?’ asked the voice, ‘Matthew, would you like to come to a meeting this Thursday in Bromley, a meeting of the British National Party?’ Too right I did. I put the phone down calmly and went back to my bedroom. This was where it was all going to start, I just didn’t know what it was yet. I was going to meet John Tyndall for sure. I went back to Walker’s book and read about Tyndall again. John Hutchins Tyndall. I wondered whether we’d be going for a curry afterwards like other blokes did.