Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (2 page)

So where did we actually live? Where was this notional house number eleven in Debnams Road?

Well, if you walked past St Gertrude’s RC, keeping the bombsite and railway arches on your right, shortly before you got to the council yard gates there was a small opening flanked by cobblestones. Turn in here and you would be in a concrete square from which rose two blocks of flats built in the mid-1950s. The larger of the blocks was Gillam House, the smaller, Debnams Road. Even as a young child I always thought the council had been a little unimaginative when naming our flats. I mean they were
off
Debnams Road, they were
near
Debnams Road, but a sane person might walk up and down Debnams Road itself and never find us. They could have called our little block Superman Villas or Elvis Presley Towers, but no. They couldn’t be bothered. Gillam House, on the other hand, was named after the infamous Judge Gillam who hanged more people than any magistrate in British history and was murdered by the outraged mother of his last victim in nearby Southwark Park. (Total poppycock, but that’s what we believed.)

And what was our life like in this noisy, dangerous and polluted industrial pock-mark wedged into one of the capital’s toughest neighbourhoods?

It was, of course, utterly magnificent and I’d give anything to climb inside it again for just one day.

I will never need regression or re-birthing to confirm I was a tremendously happy kid; confident, active and wildly popular. Perhaps that makes your lip curl, but honestly, the most traumatic thing that happened to me in my formative years was watching Millwall lose their fifty-nine-game unbeaten home record after being toppled by Plymouth Argyle. True, as your author and guide I appreciate there’s little communal pathos to be wrung there. P.G. Wodehouse noted in his own memoirs that being a contented and happy child is not what readers want from an autobiography. They look for darkness, regret and conflict, a glimpse of the wounded infant propping up the vindicated adult survivor. In short, a whiff of the workhouse.

Oh, I know the drill. The BBC recently broadcast a film adaptation of
Toast
, Nigel Slater’s lamentable, though successful, childhood memoirs: 100 minutes of pre-pubescent loneliness, desolation and misery complete with sad cello accompaniment. This heartache is essential to balance the orgy of fulfilment celebrity later brings. Alas, my tragedy is that I can offer no downbeat revelations, given that I literally beamed with joy throughout the entire sixties. No sad cello music would be required for my childhood; the most apt accompaniment would be a New Orleans jazz band tearing up ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’.

Why I was the kind of kid who leapt from his bed each day with a wild ‘Hurrah!’ is hard to say. Even as the youngest in our brood I don’t think I was particularly indulged. As you can imagine, we weren’t a wealthy household, though, as far as I could see, we wanted for nothing. Actually, in that very statement, there may be a clue to the apparent sunny atmosphere indoors.

My parents had, not too long before I arrived, been living a pretty rough existence. I mean real, austerity post-war Britain: rationing, no work, one rented room in the East End of London. Proper poor. Until he joined the docks in 1954, my old man had drifted through employment. Among many casual jobs, he had been a hopeless labourer, trainee rag-and-bone man (failed) and had spent time in prison too. My mum had become pregnant at seventeen and they had married soon after without, I suspect, knowing each other that well. My brother and sister were both born in East London, where the whole family lived in one room of an old house owned by a Mrs Shears (‘Poor old Jeanie Shears . . .’) whose alcoholic husband pissed away every penny he earned as a chimney sweep. After years of struggling to make any kind of progress with their lives, they crossed the Thames – a huge upheaval in itself – to take up residence in a poky flat on the third floor of a pre-war block in downbeat Deptford called Congers House. It was here, in number 51, at 9 a.m. on Saturday, 22 June 1957, that I was born. I was delivered by Nurse Walkerdene and my dad had to be summoned back from the pub as he was about to set off on a docker’s beano – a boozy coach-trip to Margate. It was an outing he had been looking forward to for ages, and over the next few decades he would mention this infuriating inconvenience to me on more than one occasion.

At this point they had three children crammed into one bedroom. Consequently, when I was still a baby – indeed, because I was a very small baby – they were allocated a brand-new three-bedroom council flat on the ground floor of the Silwood Estate
with a bathroom and a garden
. They simply couldn’t believe their luck. The railway and arches may as well have been rolling fields and double rainbows. Over the following decade, I harvested all the relief, freedom and optimism they suddenly felt. Things going right in their world had coincided with me coming along and, possibly misguidedly, I couldn’t help but feel partially responsible. Thus, by the age of three, my emerging ego was suitably robust.

Despite its unpromising location and meagre luxuries, Debnams Road was full of working-class families revelling in the sudden rise in their fortunes. All those who’d grabbed at the chance it offered – a bathroom being top of the boon-list – felt blessed indeed, and our block was a sturdy symbol of proletarian hopes and aspiration.

Here’s how the occupants on the ground floor ran. Looking at the odd-numbers-only front doors and reading from right to left, it went: the Bakers, the Painters, the Punts. The Micalefs, the Dulligans and the Dempsters. Yes, the Punts. Even as a toddler, I knew the Punts, at number 15, had absolutely no music in their name.

Punt, let us be clear, is a dreadful surname, particularly if you are a teenage girl and particularly if your first name happens to be Doreen – as was the case with our fourteen-year-old near neighbour. Doreen Punt. I’ll concede that, with some effort, it is just possible to get past the Doreen half of the arrangement, but then to immediately have to confront the Punt part of the deal is too much. One’s ear tends to bridle and shut up shop.

Doreen Punt sounds exactly the sort of oath W.C. Fields might have muttered shortly after stubbing his toe against the bedstead. The name took the gold medal over the bronze and silver of the other terrible names on our estate: Marion Mould and Lance Savage.

I often wondered what would happen if Doreen Punt were to marry Lance Savage. What a terribly cruel trick of fate that would have been. There’s Doreen, waiting her whole life to expunge the curse of Punt, and the one man to whom her heart calls out is called Savage. So she becomes Doreen Savage – which hardly seems to lighten the load, does it? Hyphenating makes it even worse. Doreen Savage-Punt. He’d be Lance Savage-Punt, which, frankly, is the kind of grim amalgamation that would see postmen leaving the mail at the end of their path before legging it.

By contrast, and here endeth my thoughts on names, in Congers House, we lived next door to a man called Jumbo Dray. Jumbo! Everyone called him ‘Jumb’.

The square occupied by the Debnams and Gillam blocks was completed by a snaking, six-foot-high brick wall that served to mark exactly where council property ended and St Gertrude’s Church property began. The clergy hated us council kids and would stick knives in our footballs rather than heave them back over the partition. So the only place we had to legally loiter was a kind of misshapen part-cobbled plot in front of the flats, which was far too small for another housing project and yet just big enough to be, well, something. And something is exactly what the council made of it.

They built us a boat. A boat!

Every community has a spot where the local youth hang out. Everyone from our flats congregated around the twelve-foot-long solid concrete ‘boat’. It was the focal point for all those between the ages of two and the mid-teens, a catchment area that in those baby-boom times made for a sizeable crowd.

Technically, I suppose it was more of a tug than a ship. It boasted a solid six-foot funnel at its centre and a crude but definite fo’c’sle. There were no ‘decks’ and it had no cover over it, but a well-sculpted solid-cement vessel it most certainly was and kids would slouch and slum all over it as they decided there were sufficient numbers for a two-a-side football tournament or whether they’d be better off opting for a game of ‘run-outs’ encompassing the entire sprawling estate of which our blocks were only a small part.

Run-outs really was the beautiful game. Have you played it? One person would be told to ‘hide their eyes’ – a phrase plainly handed down the centuries – while the rest of the crowd would scamper away to secrete themselves somewhere in the surrounding miles of flats, back alleys, bombsites and side turnings. Then they must all be found. Run-outs should not be confused with hide and seek. In run-outs, the search party swells as players get discovered and switch sides. There was an unspoken gentleman’s agreement that, once you had found your hiding place, you did not move from it. Not only would that have been cheating but it risked prolonging the game way beyond the two hours it usually took for all to be safely gathered in.

In my time I have hidden under parked cars, in rubbish chutes, on top of bus shelters and, on one occasion, inside one of the huge ‘wigwam’ bonfires pre-prepared for the upcoming November 5 celebrations. That was a terrific choice and much admired at the time. Strictly a seasonal retreat though.

Throughout the sixties the annual bonfire was one of the biggest deals in our calendar of events, and the gathering of wood to build these giant pyres in the months prior to Guy Fawkes’ Night was taken very seriously indeed. Our part of the estate was adjacent to a few streets of wonderful but doomed Victorian houses, left abandoned and thoroughly gutted over the years of all fixtures that might feed our bonfire flames.

The shocking amount of superb front doors, back doors, cupboards, panels and window frames that we torched for fun – or at a pinch, tradition – sickens me when I think of it now. Particularly the lovely interior doors that we thought extra groovy because you could see the flames dancing through their stained-glass panels before they literally melted in a psychedelic dissolve.

There would be two bonfires on the estate, one on each of the large bombsites to the north and south. Key to having the best blaze would be the mighty centre pole. This, as you can surmise, would be the totem around which all other lumber would be draped. I never went on the search for a centre pole – bigger boys’ work, that – and I have no idea where on earth they managed to find the perfect telegraph pole, plane tree or ship’s mast that would be hoisted on teenage shoulders and marched back to the dump to be gradually festooned with top-drawer Victorian carpentry and subsequently ignited.

One year, ancient Mrs Scott, one of the last residents of wood-denuded, earmarked-for-demolition Silverlock Street called out to us:

‘You boys want some old books for your bonfire?’

We did. We knew old books would make excellent kindling for the conflagration to come, and she had loads, so many that we had to fetch a builder’s wheelbarrow and transport them in two trips. Scattered around the base of our growing monster, their pages and colour plates yanked out to poke in key crevices, up in urgent flames these lovely old volumes went. More disturbing to me today than the creepy Nazi imagery of it all is the nagging thought that beautiful first editions of Dickens, Wilkie Collins,
Jorrocks’ Jaunts
and, gulp, Oscar Wilde would have been sacrificed simply so we could use the first wisps of that towering inferno to light our Jumping Jacks. Younger readers may marvel in wonder at the long-prohibited Jumping Jack – an unpredictable concertina’d fizzer designed to cause panic within a fifty-yard radius. If you weren’t quick to back away after lighting the touchpaper, it might land on you, popping and exploding in your turn-ups. Oh, a terrific firework, the Jumping Jack.

Ironically, and despite the casual vandalism of Mrs Scott’s library, I was completely besotted with Victorian authors at the time. No wait, that sounds hopelessly grand. What I mean is that from as early an age as I can recall, I adored Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, particularly ‘Jabberwocky’ and Lear’s short story about Violet, Guy Lionel and Slingsby who sailed around the world.

Just pondering the comic brilliance and sheer oddness in the name ‘Slingsby’ – and remember, I had been raised on Jumbo Dray – would make me stare off into the middle distance, mouth set in a frozen chuckle. Surely nobody had ever been called Slingsby, had they? It sounds like somewhere in North Yorkshire. Oh, hang on, it
is
somewhere in North Yorkshire. What genius! Like the nonsense words scattered throughout ‘Jabberwocky’, here was a writer who didn’t care for form and the norm. He called a character Slingsby and defied the world to make something of it. Nonsense, that was the way forward. Utter, baffling nonsense. Let the world walk this way and I will walk that way. All who choose a similar path will be friends for life. Prog rock here I come.

There was one particular book in our infant school library that mesmerized me like no other. It was called, rather generically,
The Book of Nonsense
and was a hefty compendium with Charles Folkard’s magnificent cover illustration featuring an assortment of the freakish characters featured within – Shockheaded Peter, Aged Uncle Arly, Jabberwocky, Baron Munchausen, ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ and countless others – gathered, for some reason, at the seaside. I had it out on virtual permanent loan. The volume encompassed not only Carroll and Lear but a whole storehouse of oddities such as:

Yesterday upon the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

And:

One fine day in the middle of the night

Two dead men got up to fight . . .

And my favourite: