Page 4.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *



Johnny is a joker (he’s a bird)
A very funny joker (he’s a bird)
But when he jokes my honey (he’s a dog)
His jokin’ ain’t so funny (what a dog)
Johnny is a joker that’s a’tryin’ to steal my baby (he’s a bird dog)

Hey, bird dog get away from my quail
Hey, bird dog you’re on the wrong trail
Bird dog you better leave my lovey-dove alone
Hey, bird dog get away from my chick
Hey, bird dog you better get away quick
Bird dog you better find a chicken little of your own

Johnny sings a love song (like a bird)
He sings the sweetest love song (ya ever heard)
But when he sings to my gal (what a howl)
To me he’s just a wolf dog (on the prowl)
Johnny wants to fly away and puppy-love my baby (he’s a bird dog)

Hey, bird dog get away from my quail
Hey, bird dog you’re on the wrong trail
Bird dog you better leave my lovey-dove alone
Hey, bird dog get away from my chick
Hey, bird dog you better get away quick
Bird dog you better find a chicken little of your own

Johnny kissed the teacher (he’s a bird)
He tiptoed up to reach her (he’s a bird)
Well he’s the teacher’s pet now (he’s a dog)
What he wants he can get now (what a dog)
He even made the teacher let him sit next to my baby (he’s a bird dog)

Hey, bird dog get away from my quail
Hey, bird dog you’re on the wrong trail
Bird dog you better leave my lovey-dove alone
Hey, bird dog get away from my chick
Hey, bird dog you better get away quick
Bird dog you better find a chicken little of your own

Chapter 35. TO THE MANOR BORN.


     There are those that suffered and were in some cases, irrevocably traumatised by their experiences of Dave Harris, but he was intelligent, bright, and in some ways quite creative. He just came from a background that had such an overwhelming influence, that his destiny was assured.

     His father worked as a black marketer and his brother, Nutty, Robbed banks. Well, he tried to rob banks. He walked into Martin’s Bank in Chislehurst High Street with a gun. The manager simply closed the door behind him and locked it.

     Whichever way, at the age of 11, there was already a prison cell somewhere with Dave Harris’s name on it.

     I really got the impression that Shamus tried to begin with. He seemed to work hard and was enthusiastic, always being the first to hoist his hand whenever the answer to a question was put on offer. Inevitably, outside influences began his slide into demise. He started being late for school almost every day and was warned by Bert that if it continued, he’d have to go before Benny Hill, the Headmaster.

     Inevitably, the interview and subsequent flogging came to pass. Harris came back into the classroom with his face wet from tears and holding his backside. He mumbled something about having rumatism and how unfair it was that he’d been punished in such a way. Bert took no notice and from then on the Great White Shark, started to flounder.

     He lost concentration, spent more time with kids from the Mottingham Estate where he lived - kids who were in no way his intellectual equal, but with whom he now felt more comfortable. Us A-streamers steered clear of these tough guys with their chequered cloth caps, motor bike boots, jeans, fierce, snarling faces, and swaggering tough-guy walk that loudly proclaimed that if you fucked with them, you were dead.

     Dave Harris was the only kid I knew to have a hoof in both camps. He belonged in the A stream by virtue of his natural ability but maintained a fierce loyalty to those from a similar background. I was once allowed onto enemy turf accompanied by Shamus himself.

     We visited the games cloakroom, a wire mesh enclosure, which stank of old, socks and damp clothing. Atmospherically, the place could’ve been the domain of the ‘Sharks’ or the ‘Jets’, except the ‘Sharks’ and the ‘Jets’ would’ve been considered wankers by comparison to those who actually resided there in the dark, shadowy corners of this hard man’s cave.

     DELIVERANCE

     Harris was a fairly natural musician and played a mean banjo. I played the guitar a bit, and, as this was right in the middle of the skiffle era, Harris wanted to put a group of some kind together. My hair stood on end as I followed him into the smelly inner sanctum of the rough kids and down between the lines of coat pegs and benches. Tobacco smoke wafted in and out of my nostrils even though there was not a fag in sight.

     There were two kids sitting on one bench in the corner. The biggest, in a black and white cloth cap over his not very clean blonde curly hair and wobbly sideburns, had a snare drum on his knee and was tapping at it with a single stick, and next to him a diminutive Elvis Presley look-alike, called Bernie O Connor, strummed a gut-strung guitar.

     The two of them were idling away at a passable interpretation of Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue and they seemed harmless enough. But O’Connor would lead an attack on the Staff and School prefects two years later on his last day before leaving school at the end of the Easter term.

     The riot took place in the playground behind the bike sheds. The prefects, pre-warned of the impending onslaught, tried to stick together in a tight circle, and it probably saved them from mass murder. (Obviously, one of the smarter bods had been studying Roman warfare) It took a gang of staff and groundsmen armed with cricket stumps to break up the melee, but not until a lot of noses had been broken and heads bashed.

     BAND ON THE RUN

     “I’m gonna put a group together.” said Shamas to Checked Cap, motioning over his shoulder to where I cowered behind him.”
     “What, with this fuckin’ stooge?” retorted Checked Cap with utter disdain and the twisted nose of someone who’d just smelled the dog shit they’ve stepped in.
     “Nah. This is Nilw. He’s all right. He’s a good guitar player.”

     I felt kind of proud when Harris said this, but I wasn’t all right. Not as far as these goons were concerned. Checked Cap wasn’t impressed and even if he had been there was no way he was going to entertain the presence of ‘some cunt in a school uniform’.

     These kids were bitter and resentful - of everything, probably. They saw people like me as overpriviledged pricks who habitually broke all the cardinal rules by adhering to school regulations and blatantly displaying a will to work and recognise authority.

     But I felt I was the same as they were - almost. I came from a working class family just like they did. I lived on a council estate just like they did. Strangely, I resented their rejection, but I never visited the inner sanctum of their lair again.

     TROTTER

     The next year, the same Bernie O’Connor type terrorism was attempted again but with less success due largely to the heroics of the School Captain at the time, Mike Trotter. Mike was a six foot six, rugby playing, javelin throwing, discus-hurling, shot-putting, would-be policeman.

     He was a gentle-giant of a man who’s demeanour quietly displayed a ‘don’t fuck with me unless you’re certifiable’ label. Unfortunately, Joe Hurlock, whose name fittingly described his thickset, hulking, but fairly squat figure, (if you could call it that) accentuated with the regulation thug’s black leather jacket must have also been dyslexic according to the move he made. His men behind him, (by a good few yards, I might add) Hurlock decided, in a sudden rush of suicidal psychosis, that Trotter ‘was going to get his’.

     One of my few really fond and lasting memories of my time at Edgebury was of a beautiful late afternoon in 1960, the sun hanging low in the sky and casting long shadows of two figures moving slowly across the playground. One of the figures, Joe Hurlock,was being pushed backwards, step by step, by the ironically long arm of the other, Mike Trotter. With every steady, stride, he planted the palm of his hand firmly against Hurlock’s chest with just enough force to unbalance him.

     Back and back they went. Hurlock beckoned over his shoulder to his ‘men’ but they’d already seen the error of their ways and exited stage left like so many shit-scared rabbits. No one else got involved. There was no need. Hurlock eventually and begrudgingly turned his back on the advancing mighty Trotter and skulked away, the ritual of prefect mashing laid to rest forever.

‘Just because the lady loves Milk Tray’

MVO: “5,4,3,2,1…CONTACT!”
SFX: Rocket blasting off
MVO:
“Journey Into Space – a Tale of the future. Starring Guy Kingsley-Pointer as Doc; Bill Kerr as Mitch, Alfie Bass and David Kossoff as Lemmie, though not both at the same time, and some bloke no one can remember as Jet Morgan, a pretty daft name even for the captain of a space ship crew. Episode 304: ‘The Forbidden Planet’.” SFX: Annoying intermitant background ‘buzz-buzz’, which runs throughout the entire show.
Jet: “Hello, Doc.What’ve you got for us this time? We’ve done the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and every other planet in the Solar System so it must be something pretty important to bring you rushing over from Space Control in such a sweaty state. Where’s it going to be, Alpha Centuri; Betelgese; some new black hole they’ve come up with?”
Doc: “Get your helmet on and fasten your seat belt, Jeff. This is the big one: Bournemouth.”
J: “Holy asteroids! You can’t be serious. Bournemouth! That’s totally unchartered territory for the likes of us. And it’s infested with Aliens of the most awesome kind: holidaymakers and OAPs. I don’t think the rest of the crew will take kindly to such a mission. There’s a chance that even if we make it there in one piece, we may never come back. I’m really not sure this is a good idea. Er, it’s JET, Doc, not Jeff.”
D: “It’s come right from the top this time, Jeff. It seems Billy Butlin is set to colonise the place and Control want us to make sure we get in first.”
J: “I can see their point. Look what happened to Skeggy. I can see we have no choice. I’d better breake it to the chaps. It’s JET, not Jeff.”
D: “Steady on, Jeff. There’s no need to rush things. Look, we need everybody 100% behind this mission. And if they find out where they’re going, well…”
J: “You’re right, as usual, Doc, we’ll tell’em we’re doing another Mars trip. Once they get there, they’ll never know the difference. By the way, the name’s JET.”
D: “Good thinking, Jeff. Oh, there’s one other thing.”
J: “Yes?”
D: “Whittaker’s coming with us.”
J: “You don’t mean, ‘orders will be obeyed without question at all times’, Whitttaker?”
D: “I’m afraid so.”
J: “But he’s barmy!”
D: “He was. But now he’s completely lost it. Gone right round the bend. Started some programme called, ‘Juke Box Jury’. Calls himself, David Jacobs.”
J: “Yes, I’ve seen it – in the cause of research, you understand.”
D: “Quite. But there’s a cunning plan. Control want us to leave him there.”
J: “Brilliant! No more ‘oil give it foive’.”
D: “Exactly.”
J: “When do we leave?”
D: “Last week in July, first week in August.”
J: “I’d better dig out my Ray Bans…I mean ray gun.”
D: “I knew we could count on you, Jeff.”
J: “They don’t call me JET Morgan for nothing, Doc.”
D: “I’m sure they don’t, Jeff.”



* * * * * * * * * * * *


You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain
Too much love drives a man insane
You broke my will, oh what a thrill
Goodness gracious great balls of fire

I learned to love all of Hollywood money
You came along and you moved me honey
I changed my mind, looking fine
Goodness gracious great balls of fire
You kissed me baba, woo.....it feels good
Hold me baba, learn to let me love you like a lover should
Your fine, so kind
I'm a tellin’the world world that your mine mine mine mine-ine

I chew my nails and I quiver my thumb
I'm really nervous but it sure is fun
Come on baba, you drive me crazy
Goodness gracious great balls of fire


Well kiss me baba, woo-oooooo....it feels good
Hold me baba
I want to love you like a lover should
Your fine, so kind
I’ma ‘tell this world that your mine mine mine mine-ine

I chew my nails and I quiver my thumb
I'm real nervous 'cause it sure is fun
Come on baba, you drive me crazy
Goodness gracious great balls of fire



Chapter 36. C,F, And G7.

     Shamus took his banjo into school once and Bert Bower lit up like a Christmas tree when he saw it. He actually asked Harris to play the thing, which he gladly did with the aid of a collar stiffener for a plectrum. Bert’s face was a picture as Harris alternated between probably the only 3 chords he knew, C, F, and G7. Perhaps it was these three chords that upset the Headmaster, Benny Hill, who happened to be passing. He came into the room and demanded to know why Harris had brought the instrument into school without permission.
     Bert didn’t defend him, even though he’d enjoyed listening to ‘The Midnight Rambler’, albeit without the vocal. Musical instruments were banned from the school from that moment on - one of the more shortsighted decisions Ben made when I come to think about it.
     In the 2nd year, Dave Harris was demoted down a form, back, unfortunately, towards the beckoning, bony fingers of his inherited kind. A year later, after a few fights that became more adult in their viciousness, he was caught selling the proceeds of a burglary in school, namely, 3,000 fags. Benny Hill made an announcement in assembly about the felony, and that the police were involved.
     No one was named but later, in the corner of the playground, Dave Harris confessed to the crime. He took a long drag of the roll-up he had tucked into the palm of his hand, in the pofessional way all furtive smokers do, and blew a couple of wistful smoke rings, following them with a vacant kind of gaze.
     “I’ve fuckin’ ‘ad it now, Nilw.”
     “What d’you mean?”
     His head characteristically shrunk down into his shoulders, he smiled sideways at me, “The fags, you cunt. It was me. I nicked ‘em. ‘An they fuckin’ know it was me. Ben’s called the fuckin’ cops. I’m just waitin’ to get arrested. They’ll put me away this time.”
     I only half-believed him. He was almost bragging about it. But what really saddened me was that he had an air of success about him. As if he’d cracked something big at last. As if in some bizarre way he was relieved. He got 3 years at an approved school probably amongst similar thugs and phsycopaths. After escaping several times, and hiding under the beds of several Motttingham kids, he was sent to Wormwood Scrubs Junior prison, the toughest juvenile institution in the country and from where there would be no such thing as rehabilitation. There, he would be able to complete his education and hone his talents in the field that had already been chosen for him on the day he was born.
     Shamus’s course was set fair from then on. He would possibly one day commit murder, as he was well equipped to do both physically and phsycologically. The most dangerous aspect of all this is that he was innately intelligent and would now have an opportunity to turn that intelligence into the kind of guile and craftiness that makes successful criminals. I’d like to think I was wrong, and that he’d see the error of his ways and reform. It’s more likely that the RAF will recruit prize porkers as pilots.
     I never saw Dave Harris again.


     THE ARMY

     “Upper School, ‘HUN!”
SFX: CER---RUNCH!

     250 left feet shift sideways to meet 250 right feet with parade ground precision.
“Lower School, ‘HUN!”

     SFX: Same as above but with less precision.

     Ernie K, on lunchtime playground duty, was in his element. Most teachers on the rosta simply blew a whistle once to bring everybody to a halt, then again to signal the slow trudge to afternoon lessons. Not Senior Metalwork teacher and part time fascist, Groupen Fuhrer K. He’d line us up class by class in twos and then go through his tiresome military charade, “School, ‘HUN.” he yelled with the lungs of a seasoned parade ground tyrant.

     The second command was to be at ease, which didn’t make sense as everyone already was. Then it was the ‘attention’ routine. And, if he wasn’t satisfied, we’d have to do the whole stupid thing all over again. THEN the Prat would actually inspect the ‘troops’. He’d make comments about dress, length of hair, position of tie or lack of tie, posture....

     “Stand up straight, lad!” he’d bark, “Where do think you are?

At fucking school, you wanker! Not in the fucking army! Why don’t you piss off and stop playing your pathetic, military games. What’s up? Didn’t you get enough of it in the war? Didn’t you kill enough Germans? I’ll bet you never saw action at all. I’ll bet you never actually made it above sergeant. Is that your problem? Is that why you’re such a bully? Never had the rank. Is that it? Do you feel inadequate? Never given the level of command you deserved? Passed over? Under-used? I’ll bet you were just an ordinary NCO, a bullying sergeant. You were in the Royal Engineers, weren’t you? You were an instructor in the workshops.

     That’s how you got into teaching, wasn’t it? You could really exercise your ‘authority’ there, couldn’t you? You could shout ridicule at those poor conscripted bastards with the full backing of the War Office. AND there was a war on. That gave you even more clout, didn’t it? I wonder how many of those poor sods you bullied never came back. How many got blown in half or had their balls shot off. You wouldn’t know, would you? You weren’t there.

     You were back in the workshop shouting at the next batch of confused and frightened sods. You were never a hero. You never commanded men in the field. You never had to worry about how you were going to get the job done and get them back safely. You never went through the blood and bullets and shit.

     You never had to decide who was going to die and who was going to survive. You never had to make life and death decisions, did you? You never had to measure your own emotions and decide how much of what you were feeling could be allowed to show and how much couldn’t.

     You never earned respect. You were never someone men looked to for leadership; for security; for encouragement; for hope; for sanity; for a moment’s peace.

     YOU WERE NEVER THERE! Is that it? Is that what made you such a fucking bully?

     You wanted to be there, but you never went. How could you have? I know men who were there and none of them are like you. I know men who were shot at Dunkirk - who would die of their wounds 25 years later and never complain. I know someone who found his best friend’s head without its body in a destroyer gun turret still with the headphones still on his ears.

     I know a man who was so traumatised by what he saw on the beaches of Normandy that it turned his mind until he was obliged to spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital, still acting out the part of a soldier running messages for the nurses as if they were his commanding officers, saluting them all the time and driving them mad for more messages to deliver, driving his fellow patients even crazier than they already were until they attacked him. But it never put him off.

     Those who WERE there and managed to stay sane don’t show anything outwardly. They don’t talk about what they experienced, what they saw, what they felt, unless really pushed. Only then does the pain show. And even then, it’s not that visible. You have to look into their eyes to see it - into their souls. And it is such pain. Pain, I don’t believe you ever suffered.

     Otherwise, you wouldn’t be the way you are. You would show the kind of humility that these heroes show. They don’t swagger about like you do. They don’t have to. They don’t force some kind of military crap down the throats of those who are simply struggling to learn, to make some sense out of life.

     They wouldn’t stop a lesson in a metalwork shop half an hour before time and force every body to count every tool fucking twice; force them to count the tri-squares, first counting the stocks and then the blades; force them to polish the jaws of the vices till they shone like chrome and the anvils so that they could see their reflections in the horns so that they were so slippery, they were dangerous to use and something you might be hammering could suddenly take off and fly across the room, and slice somebody’s eyeball in two.

     They wouldn’t have victimised a kid so acutely, and so relentlessly as you did, that he turned round from the brazing hearth with a the lazy yellow flame of a lighted brazing torch he held in his hand, pointed it at you, and stood on the bellows, turning the lazy yellow flame into a stabbing, 3 foot, searing hot one.

     You must have shat yourself before thrashing the poor bastard within an inch of his life. All you lost was the front of your white coat and a chunk of your measly pride. What did he lose? I’ll bet you never stopped to think about it. I’ll bet you never asked yourself what causes someone to do something like that, did you? Because you didn’t care, did you?

     And yet, when I was 5, you took time to pull me out of the mud and take me back home to my Mum. If I’m right about you, what caused you to do that? If I’m wrong then there’s no reason or excuse for you to be the way you are. You’re just a bully, a tyrant, a complete and utter bastard.
So just leave us alone.”

     ...I thought.


     It’s funny what can go through your mind when some bastard stomps on whatever dignity you have left after a couple of years in an institution like ‘The Edge’ and crushes it like a snail. After inspection, Ernie strode back to the front of the parade. Each class in turn, was ordered to...
     “RIGHT TURN!” then, “DISMISS!” then, “QUICK MARCH!
     LEFTRIGHTLEFTRIGHTLEFTRIGHT....”

     Areshole.


‘Omo adds brightness, brightness,
Brightness women want, Omo’

“Hello. Katy here.I’ve a real treat for Philip in the oven tonight. He’s been over doing it recently and working late with his secretary rather a lot so I thought he deserved a real surprise and that’s exactly what he’s going to get. It’s called ‘Dog Casserole’. It’s lovely chunks of meat in a super jelly enriched with Oxo gravy, just the way he likes all his fodder. I’ve got his trough ready in front of the TV next to his usual flagon of ale. The dog will just have to make do with steak tonight. I might take him for a walk later on. Philip, that is. Byee.”



* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes
Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes Woo!
Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes
Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes
Betty Lou wa-ooo-wa-ooo-wa-ooo
Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes

Well she walked in the shoe store
Picked out a shoe
She tried on a twelve but that wouldnt do

Betty Lou Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes
Betty Lou bought a new pair of shoes
Betty Lou wa-ooo-wa-ooo-wa-ooo
Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes

Well she cracked up over the solid fit
Walkin down the street with her brand new kids
Betty Lou Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes
Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes
Betty Lou wa-ooo-wa-ooo-wa-ooo
Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes

Well shes walkin down the street
She met an undertaker
He tried to bury her in her old shoe-da-bakers
Betty Lou Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes
Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes
Betty Lou wa-ooo-wa-ooo-wa-ooo
Betty Lou got a new pair-a Yeah!

Well she went to a rock n roll party the other night
Someone stepped on her sho-dabakers and she started a fight!
Betty Lou Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes
Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes
Betty Lou wa-ooo-wa-ooo-wa-ooo
Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes

Well she walked in the shoe store
Gave the man a tip
Told him to go buy his-self a rocket ship!
Betty Lou Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes
Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes
Betty Lou wa-ooo-wa-ooo-wa-ooo
Betty Lou got a new pair of shoes Yeah!

Betty Lous got a new pair of shoes Woo!
Look at that girl walkin down the street Yeah!
Woo shes steppin higher than a kite
Yeah with them shiny new sho-dabakers shes got on
Whoa I dig them kids yeah!
Betty Lous got a new pair of shoes..


Chapter 37. BASTARDS.

     Earnie Kingsbury wasn’t the only sadist in the institution. And there were some teachers in the place who were human, who did care, who showed some humility in the face of what must have been terribly difficult job: to try and balance the need for some kind of discipline against an innate feeling of duty and desire to teach. But the genuine pilgrims were all too rare.

     SAM

     ‘Killer’ Edwards’s name and reputation seeped down into the hearts and minds of many a primary schoolboy long before Edgebury became all too much of a reality for the 11-plus failures. Failure. That’s how it was described. You didn’t just ‘not pass’. You failed. It was as if it was branded on your forehead like the sign of some kind of plague.

     ‘FAILED’.
     ‘2ND RATE’.
     ‘FOUND WANTING’.
     ‘NOT QUITE THE TICKET’.
     ‘NEXT TO USELESS’.
     ‘DIMBO’.
     ‘INADEQUATE’.

     And worst of all,

     ‘WORKING CLASS’.


     There was some kind of encouragement, however. Nobody from a B class expected to pass, but then nobody from an A class was expected to fail. But they did, quite a few of them: Malcolm Carter, Malcolm Cooper, Roy Barker, David Heeney, Graham Dorgan were all from 4A. In a strange way, it was quite reassuring. You felt glad they’d failed as well. It took them down a peg or two; made them just like you - no longer a cut above: merely mortal.

     They were certainly as scared as the rest of us. Stories were handed down about this monster of a teacher, Edwards, like so much mythology.

     “He broke one kid’s neck. Said it was an accident. No one could prove it wasn’t. He got away with it.”
     “Pushed a kid down the stairs. Broke both his legs.”
     “Shoved one kid through a plate-glass window. A couple of kids saw him do it. They were so scared, they never said anything.”
     "One kid’s Dad went up the school to sort him out. He came away crying. Killer Edwards did him over.”

     On my first day at Edgebury, I saw Roger Cook in the playground,
“You seen Killer Edwards, yet?” he enquired through a huge grin. I shook my head. “You will,” he said, gleefully, “You will.”

     My mind’s eye had described this monster from Hades as a tall, thin bastard with a Hitler moustache for some reason, and I kept my eyes peeled. It turned out, he didn’t look like Hitler at all, and he didn’t really look that fierce. Yes, he was big - tall, but not the wiry, muscle-bound commando type I’d been led to believe. He was quite fat with a waiste a good 60 inches round, and he wore the biggest, flappiest corduroy trousers I’d ever seen complimented by enormous flappy sandals, a thick-knit pullover, a checked shirt and knitted tie.

     He came carrearing across the playground one foggy morning swaying from side to side like a steam locomotive at full tilt, hell-bent on mowing down anyone in its path.

     The Killer had a moustache, but not like Hitler’s. It was a grey handlebar job, later to become a full-face grizzly beard when he contracted an itchy skin complaint that most of us believed was some kind of totally justified devine retrebution.
The moustache was patched yellow in places from the fat-stemmed pipe he always had stuffed in his fat face beneath his great fat nose on which was perched a great fat pair of horn rimmed spectacles. All in all, he resembled a sea elephant with irritable bowel syndrome.

     “WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING, YOU STUPID IDIOT!” screamed the locomotive in a whiney, screechy voice from somewhere deep inside its boiler.

     The child, fortunate not to have been crushed, scuttled away and I watched the monster rush past, cutting a swathe through the crowd, the back of its thick, swollen neck tinged a mean shade of purple, the wisps of thin hair on the balding pate sucked backwards in the after draft. So this was the famous Killer Edwards. He wasn’t frightening. He was bloody terrifying.

     Killer, or Sam, or Bruce as he was also known, became Deputy Head Master, when the very Welsh Mr Allen, the existing deputy, died of a heart attack one weekend. This gave him authority to use the cane, which he did with considerable relish.

     Edwards was also the school medical officer and on foggy mornings could be seen, as often as not, on the pavement outside the science hut where he resided, clutching the punishment book in one paw and his long, curved Kent County Council issue cane in the other. The huts were terraced and the hut below always donated a keen audience for the execution. The poor victim was read his rights:

     “Is there any medical reason why you shouldn’t be punished?” came the locomotive’s voice, a draft of early morning steam issuing from its mouth and nose.

     “No. Sir.” was always the reply. It seemed no one ever invented a rare disease or pretended they were epileptic and I don’t think claiming a nervous disposition would have cut any ice or for someone to have had the guts to say:

     “You come near me with that bloody stick, Edwards, and I’ll punch your fucking lights out, you fat, overblown, four-eyed bastard!”

     It was nice to dream.
&
nbsp;    “Right. Touch your toes.”

     The cane would come slicing through the air with enough force to almost topple the victim forward on his face. On one occasion, a lad was wearing black jeans with brass zips on the back pockets. The cane hit these with a resounding ‘ker-ching’ and sprang back with an equal and opposite amount of force. The kid immediately scampered off but The Killer called him back and had another go, this time being more careful with his aim.

     It was with great relief that I learned that we wouldn’t have to face the Killer in the classroom until the 3rd year. He was SENIOR science master (didn’t he want everyone to know it) and it was probably felt that there’d be too much of a risk to allow him near any kid under 14 in case they had nightmares or more likely died of fright.

     Even the way Edwards drank beer was frightening. I’m glad to say I only saw it once. He lifted the full pint, tilted his head back, his bucket-sized mouth wide open, and just poured it in. He didn’t swallow. It just ran straight into his stomach with a resounding gurgle like the last remnants of bath water being sucked down the plughole.

     NELCON

     It was only a book, but its title struck terror into the heart of many an A stream pupil at the Edge. Nelcon was Killer Edwards bible. It was a book full of physics laws that might as well have been written in Bengali. Each law was accompanied by a series of equations that, unless you understood the laws, might as well have been written in Hindi.

     In the third year, our first with the Killer as Senior Science Master, I used to copy down everything from Pete Onley, the chap I sat next to, without understanding a jot of what I was writing down. Turns out, that when you add Bengali to Hindi you end up with an answer in Mandarin.

     Pete didn’t seem to mind and made no attempt to cover up his exercise book. Luckily, he was good at maths and seemed to understand what was going on. He never made mistakes, which was double lucky for me. If the Killer had ever asked me to explain a mistake or how I’d got there, I’d have been stuffed. I knew I was dicing with death, but I was too terrified of this great fat wild boar, who just flew into a rage if you asked him to explain some thing twice - not that I’d have understood the second time around either.

     Edwards was clearly un-balanced. A great, fat, whale with obvious psychopathic leanings who terrified generations of kids and whose reputation kept many a would-be Edgebury-rite awake at night before he ever went near the place.

     A mate of Ernie K, he’d obviously been taught by the same professor of pastoral care - Genghis Khan or Heindrick Himmler. Ernie and Bruce, as they were also known, didn’t have an ounce of compassion between them and seemed to get off on spreading their brand of fear and bullying around them like so much grass seed.

     When we reached the 3rd year, we had the great privilege of lining up outside Killer Edward’s Science hut for our first lesson. He came waddling along with a bundle of papers under his arm, clouds of pipe smoke billowing in his wake. He didn’t stop and rushed straight past and though the doorway.

     “Right. Follow me and find a seat.”

     We followed him into the classroom and scrambled for seats on the tall wooden science stools lined up behind 3 or 4 science benches adorned with gas taps and neat displays of various rubber tubes and glass beakers. I wanted to sit at the back - as far away from this monster as I could get, but by the time I got into the room, all the best seats were taken and the only ones remaining were in the front row two feet from his desk.

     “DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!” he suddenly screamed. Jesus! He was worse than anyone could have imagined. What, did he think we all had, beubonic plague? (Well, he ‘d know. He was the school first aid officer.) His face had gone red and his eyes were bulging as if he was in the throws of some kind of fit. Maybe he had beubonic plague. He was like a giant, overgrown child throwing a tantrum. We he finally shut up, the silence in the room ear-splitting, “SIT DOWN!”

     We sat down. He stood like a fat bull in the corridor between his desk and the front bench and was too close for my liking. His huge stomach heaved in and out above me as he tried to cram air into his one lung, blowing it out through flared nostrils with a resounding hiss like air escaping from a tractor tyre. The stink of his shag-sodden breath was overwhelming but I didn’t think it would be prudent to ask him to move away a couple of paces. Inside, I could feel my essential organs shaking with fear.

     Edwards told us that our baby science days were behind us, and that we were now going to embark into the world of physics: the real world, without which nothing would work. The rain wouldn’t fall from the sky, nothing would grow, the earth wouldn’t go round the Sun - in fact we wouldn’t be here at all, if it wasn’t for physics. Sounded interesting enough to me, so far.

     What he didn’t say at the start was that physics is really maths only more complicated. There were a series of what The Killer called laws, which we were going to learn to translate into equations and solve little problems. This is where I came unstuck. Figures were bad enough. I could live with the fact that I couldn’t count, but I found these laws totally beyond my comprehension.

     It soon became apparent The Killer’s reputation was justified. As we’d already witnessed, he was given to very sudden explosive rages. Anything could set him off; getting an equation wrong in your exercise book; talking in class; breathing out of turn. He’d glow red and purple like a pulsating Hippo.

     His neck, which was already abnormally fat, would pump up to twice its normal size, and he’d throw things: chalk; blackboard rubbers, which were about the size of a house brick and felt like one if they actually hit you; papers from his desk; pens; pencils; even his precious pipe on one occasion. He was obviously completely deranged - mentally unfit to be in charge of dumb animals let alone a bunch of pubescent schoolboys. To the sensitive flowers amongst us, he was absolutely terrifying.

     We suffered a Physics lesson with the demented Killer, aka, Sam, aka, Bruce, every Thursday. We had to deliver the week’s homework too, which was Chinese to me, so for a whole year, I gave guitar lessons at my house on a Wednesday evening, in return for some of my students doing my homework for me.

     There was no shortage of takers, with Jimmy Jupp, Chick Cheese, Ian MacDermid, Mike Rickards, and even my best mate, Roy Barker, an accomplished guitarist himself and my helper with the lessons, all taking part.

     Looking back, I was skating on very thin ice. Because I didn’t understand the questions so the answers made no sense whatsoever, and I was laying myself wide open to certain death if one of my eager guitar pupils made a mistake and got something wrong.

     They all seemed to be sympathetic, though, and no one ever took the piss out my inability to comprehend even the basic principles of Boyle’s Law. Maybe they just wanted to play the guitar.

     There were a few suicidal blockheads amongst us, however, who’d deliberately set out to wind The Killer up. On a side table, near his desk, he kept an enormous green glass bottle, which held about 10 gallons of distilled water.

     To the Killer, this was as precious as the Holy Grail. Perhaps it really was the Holy Grail. Michael Coward, a particularly un-hinged individual (in the nicest possible way) in the 6th form, thought it would be a fantastic wheeze to empty the contents of several sachets of soluble Disprin and a few other white powders he found lying around in th escience lab, into the bottle and wait enthusiastically for the time when Edwards tried to use the water.

     When at last, The Killer unscrewed the lid, the contents ejected from the bottle like a volcanic eruption. White foam cascaded everywhere, soaking Edwards and the surrounding area with a jet of white effervescent foam. Both the 5th and 6th forms were there to witness The Killer’s apoplexy. He was incandescent. We thought he’d explode like the contents of the bottle.

     “THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS! OUTRAGEOUS! HOW DARE THEY! HOW DARE ANYONE.... THIS IS A PATHETIC, DISGUSTING ATTEMPT TO....TO....UNDERMINE.....” In blind panic, The Killer rushed around with a box of Kleenex in a futile attempt to stem the seething flow of bubbling white stuff. Ironically, he turned to Coward for moral support.

     “This is outrageous. Don’t you think so, Coward?”
     “Yes, Sir. Outrageous, Sir. Terrible.”

     On School Sports day, The Killer elected himself referee and ponced about in a luridly striped blazer and cap from his university days. He made such a clear target in his ridiculous getup, it was a wonder no one pierced the fat bastard with a javelin and did us all a great big favour.

     A couple of years later, Pete Press, a classmate who’d left school and had been at work for some time, was in bar of the Station Hotel Pub in Sidcup one evening when Edwards came in, “Oh, good evening, Press.” said the Killer, with a friendly grin.

     “Good evening, Edwards.” said Pete, dismissing the Killer with total contempt and turning back to his pint.

‘Drink a pinta milka day’

Lee Chippalarter: “Hello, ladies and gen’lemen, welcome to the show. I look real pretty today, don’tcha think? Whoops! I really must be careful flicking my hand up from the keyboard like that while I’m playing my superb jazzed up interpretation of Beethoven’s 5th. I almost whacked myself in the eye, and what with all these diamond rings, I coulda done a lot of damage. My mother would’ve been real pissed.
“My brother, George, won’t be with us today on account of the fact that I fired him. He was starting to get too much fan mail. For some unaccountable reason, folks seem to like the fat, baldheaded sweetie and his silly little moustache. That violin of his looks like a giant moth on a skewer the way it sticks out from under his chubby little chin-e-chin-chin, don’tcha think? I jest feel like I wanna tread on it, you know what I mean?
“Hey, guess what! I jest bin cast in the noo Bat Man movie. I’m gonna play the Joker. The prodoocer told me my fixed smile was perfect but, hey, I noo that already. Don’t know if I’m gonna do it, though. I told them I wann-ed a piano spot in the film but they said no way. Not even if it would help solve the world food shortage. Maybe if I didn’t insist the piano was covered in mink ‘an only had 200 hundred candles on top they might reconsider, d’ya think?

‘I’LL BE SEEING YOU,
IN ALL THOSE OLD FAMILIAR PLACES…’”




* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Bluejean baby, with your big blue eyes
Don't want you looking at other guys
Got to make you give me, one more chance
I can't keep still, so baby let's dance

Well the bluejean bop is the bop for me
It's the bop that's done in a dungaree
You flip your hip, free your knee
Squeel on your heel baby, one to three
Well the bluejean bop, bluejean bop
Oh baby, bluejean bop, bluejean bop
Oh baby, bluejean bop, baby won't you bop with Gene. (bop blue caps, bop)

Well bluejean baby when i bop with you
Well my heart starts hoppin' like a kangaroo
My feet do things they never done before
Well bluejean baby, give me more more more
Well the bluejean bop, bluejean bop
Oh baby, bluejean bop, bluejean bop
Oh baby, bluejean bop, baby won't you bop with Gene. (rock again blue caps, go)

Well the bluejean bop, bluejean bop
Oh baby, bluejean bop, bluejean bop
Oh baby, bluejean bop, baby won't you bop with Gene.
(blue caps, bop with gene, let's go)

Well the bluejean bop, bluejean bop
Oh baby, bluejean bop, bluejean bop
Oh baby, bluejean bop, baby won't you bop with Gene.


Chapter 38.HUMAN BEINGS

     Dick Spittle was a very, very tall man, and a very, very gentle giant. From the Rhonda Valley, his accent was lyrical and soothing, his temperament soft and reassuring. Slightly reminiscent of James Coburn, he had a small grey moustache on a small, Mexican-looking face, which probably just seemed small because it was such a long way off up in the sky.

     The very emotional Welshman, who’s specialist subject was geography, was given to becoming delightfully sidetracked and shifting subtly away from the Rainforests of South America to the hardships suffered on the transatlantic troopships during the war or the futility of wanting to earn big money as a Rock star. (I never did figure out what he was doing aboard a transatlantic troopship - unless he was living in the States and got conscripted by the American forces in time for D Day.)

     “A thousand pound a week! A thousand pound a week! An’ for what? Just ‘cos you can sing ‘Beat Me Down Daddy With A Wet Dish Cloth.’ ( he actually said that ) Youer dreamin’, if you think that’s what life has in store for you. And where’s the value in that? (Oooh, about a thousand quid a week, I’d say...) You don’t uv to be a genius to stand up on a stage an’ sing that sort ‘o rubbish. (true - but who’d want to be a genius earning so much dough?)

     “It don’t actually take BRE-ERNS to whirl around like some kind ‘o demented chimpunzee. Drivin’ around in youer pink Cadilacs, with youer trousers splitting your difference till youer eyes water. What sort of life is that?” (pretty damn cool, if you ask me)

     His long legs would stride up an down the aisles between the rows of desks as if to wind himself up. He’d get quite cross, but not in any malevolent way. He’d be chewing a sweet, his huge ginger tweed trousers swaying about like a pair of hops sacks in a gale as he turned on his heel and strode back to the front of the class, “‘An’ another thing. It’s about time you lads realised that you gotta work for a livin’. No one’s gonna come an’ give you your life on a plate.

     “But you’ll ‘ave it easier than the men wot went before you. They made sacrifices for the likes of you. They fought a war so that you could ‘ave youer TV’s an’ youer record players an’ youer gittars an’ youer tapered trousers. You don’ know what havin’ ‘ard time is like. Oh, you might think youer hard done by, but let me tell you, you don’t know youer born, most on you.

     “How would you stand up to livin’ on a merchant troopship for de-ers on end. Feelin’ sicker that you could ever imagine you could feel? What with the boat rollin’ so much in a typhoon that the bows come right out of the bloomin’ water. All billeted down together on the top deck with your mates bein’ sick all over you ‘an down the barrel ‘o youer rifle, an’ you havin’ to put up with it.

     “You think the answer is singin’ ‘Beat Me Down Daddy With an Iron Bar’, (he was fond of repeating himself) but let me tell you, it’s not that simple. ‘An there’s somethin’ else you should think about. You can travel the world, from here to Timbuktu, but the one thing you can’t buy is the love of a good woman.......” At this, some smartarse put his hand up.

     “You can sir. What about prostitutes?”
     “I’m not talkin’ about that. What I’m talkin’ about is real love. Not some cheap thrill roun’ the back o’ the bike sheds. (Chance would’ve been a fine thing) I’m talkin’ ‘bout proper respect and carin’ between a man and a woman. I’m talkin’ about sharin’ your whole life with someone who cares about you more than anything except the children you’ve ‘ud between you.

     “‘An’ that’s another thing. ‘Avin’ kids is a yuge responsibility. You jus’ don’t realise. You jus’ think about all the sacrifices youer payrents ‘ave made for you. What they’ve given up on youer behalf. Do you ever once stop to think about that? Not very often, I’m quite shooer.

     “The next time you compleeurn that youyer tea’s not on the table when you want it, or moo-ern that your Mum hasn’t washed youer football kit - but I’ll bet that never uppens - you think on. Let me tell you...”

     He went on a bit but he was packed with raw Welsh emotion. The tears would come to his eyes, and eventually he’d turn his back and write something on the board, probably to stop him from bawling.

     “Right. (sniff) Who knows what Tundra is?”

     Dick Spittle was one of the few human beings I came across at Edgebury, but for every human being there seemed to be three absolute bastards.


LEATHER EGGS

     Dick showed us how to play rugby. Up until then, only the kids who played football stood any kind of chance in the games lesson. What was the point of trying to compete with someone who could run rings round your feeble attempts to get just one kick at the ball?

     Apart from half a dozen skilful dribblers, the rest of us clumsy oafs or skinny weaklings would stagger around looking like absolute prats in the pissing rain. It was just painful.

     One particularly freezing, wet November day, on the top field where the East Wind blew in from the Yurals, Dick, resplendant in his giant-sized, black tracksuit, produced a funny looking, giant leather egg. He held it out the long, cane-like fingers of his enormous hand stretched almost right round it, showing it to us with pride. He chucked it at someone but the kid was taken by surprise and promptly dropped it.
     “Cutch it, boy. Cutch it.”

     The kid picked it up and tossed it back. Like a flash, Dick pitched it at another kid who almost dropped but managed to scrabble it against his stomach, “Thut’s it. You gotta cutch it. You can kick it, if youer good enough. But it’s not so easy as kickin’ one ‘o them silly roun’ balls that you soccer funutics are so fond of. To kick this, takes RE-UL skill.”

     With that, he dropped the egg towards the ground and hefted it with all six-foot-seven of his might. In a split second it was a wild tumbling spot against the horizon.

     “Well, don’ just stund there. Gerrafter it.”

     As one, the whole group of us set off like a pack of hounds. Being tiny, I was fast and unfortunately got to the bloody thing first. I could hear the dozens of trampling feet sploshing in the mud at my heals but they weren’t going to catch me. Oh, no. Silly boy. I skidded to a halt and stooped to pick up the ball feeling in the depths of my ignorance that this rugby lark was a piece of piss. Suddenly, the lights went out as a congealed half-ton of classmates attempted to crush the life out of me.

     How I survived, I’ll never know. I fell awkwardly and somehow managed to drop the ball and roll clear, sustaining a couple of kicks in the ribs on the way. The rest of the melee fell on the spot where the ball had apparently landed and began to mud wrestle each other. Of course, the bigger, more lumbering lads came off best and it was rather satisfying to see the delicate footy fairies get smacked around to their total confusion and bemusement.

     Dick came trotting over with a big grin on his chops.
     “Well done. Thut’s the we-ar. Now lets do it again, but properly. ‘Ere, Bruds.”
     He offered me the ball. I didn’t want it. I could see what was coming.
     “Youer quick, Bruds. You can be a wing three-quarter. The rest ‘o you luds spread out in a line across there, ‘an when ‘e runs, you try ‘an bring ‘im down. Of you go, Bruds.”
     I didn’t want to be a wing-three-quarter, or a leg or a breast, or a bloody wishbone. I wanted my Mum.

     As I started to run, I could see the bastards in the line glaring at me. There was a strange look in their eyes. KILL, it said. I was just a target, as far as they were concerned. I was the fox and they, the hounds, were out for blood. My blood. They were out to tear me to pieces, limb from limb.

     I saw them from the corner of my eye as I ran. They were sweeping across the field in a great, muddy, hungry arc and cutting off my escape. The arms of Dave Groombridge were outstretched as he was the nearest and he was gaining fast. I thought fleetingly of the pain to come, the agony of crunching bone and bruised flesh. I could be killed, or worse, made to look a complete prat.

     That’s what happened. I wasn’t killed. Instead, I elected for the complete prat look. Just as Groombridge’s fingers felt the hem of my faded, green smelly old football shirt I’d got from a box of similar faded, geen smelly shirts in the locker room, I threw the leather egg up in the air, and changed direction.

     The effect was amazing. The great sweeping wing of straining adolescent muscle lurched away from me and after the ball. There was a huge collision and cloud of mud, as arms, legs and teeth went everywhere. Dick blew his whistle and ambled over.

     “Well done, Bruds.” He didn’t mean that of course. He was just naturally kind. “Right. Let’s go again.”

     My heart sank but he tossed the egg to Chris Stone, one of the biggest lads in the class of 12 year olds, and one of the quietest and nicest. He had come from Red Hill’s 4B heavenly haven, after all. The rest of the gang had pulled themselves from the mass of squirming flesh looking red-faced, red kneed, and looking extremely pleased with themselves.

THEY ACTUALLY ENJOYED THIS MADNESS.

     Being a Welshman, Dick Spittle was not unexpectedly a natural with a rugby ball. He could turn on a sixpence and change direction like he’d disappeared before youer eyes. He was uncatchable by the 2A mob and watching him towering lankily above us, darting this way and that, and laughing at our futile attempts to grab hold of him, was distinctly warming to the cockles of what little heart had by then survived our first year at the ‘Edge’.


‘Oxo gives a meal man appeal’

Narrator: The Story you about to see, is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
Joe Friday: “This is the city. Los Angeles, California. My name’s, Friday. I work here. I’m a cup.”
Music: DAN-DA-DAN-DAN
JF: “We were working homicide. A DAS had turned up unannounced at 2.15am behind a garbage bin near the Highway A14 slip road, JSO the Station turnoff, at the BOR. The deceased had been bludgeoned to death. A PM in a CADI with a CVC said he saw the victim being attacked by a little grey haired old lady wielding a hammer. The DAS looked like an OAP himself, so we figured it could have been a lovers tiff.
We put out an APB on an FOAP that fitted the description the PM in the CADI with the CVC had given us and headed back to town.
My partner, Frank, he’s the one with the bigger hat, got a call from a CBX. The caller was female, and said she recognised the description of the FAOP given out on TV. She said it was her.”
Music: DAN-DA-DAN-DAN
“Frank and I went to the caller’s apartment to ask her some questions about the INC involving the DAS near the A14.”
“Hello, Maam. I’m Sergeant Friday, LAPD, and this is my partner, Frank. We’d just like to ask you a few questions, if that’s OK.”
“Sure, son. That’s OK. C’mon in.”
We questioned the suspect at her APT about her whereabouts on the night of the INC at the A14. She seemed confused. She said she did recognise herself from the description of the FAOP on the TV, but that she couldn’t remember where she was at the time of the INC.
JF: “Just give us the facts, Maam. Just the facts.”
Frank showed her a picture of the DAS. She seemed to recognise the deceased.
FOAP: “That looks like George, my late husband. But I don’t recognise the dent in his head.”
Frank and I looked at each other, as we often do, then back at the suspect.
Frank: “You said, ‘late’ husband, Maam. How did you know he was dead?”
“Well, he looks pretty dead to me. But I said late because he always was. He was late getting up in the morning. He was late for breakfast. He was even late for our wedding 40 years ago. He was late coming home last night, but there was nothing unusual about that.”
Frank and I looked at each other, then back at the suspect.
JF: “Did he have any enemies that you know of, Maam?”
FOAP: “Oh, sure. Everybody hated him.”
F: “Why was that, Maam?”
FAOP: “Because he was a mean, nasty old sonofabitch.”
Frank and I looked at each other, then back at the suspect.
Music: DAN-DA-DAN-DAN
JF: “Did anyone hate him enough to kill him, Maam?”
FOAP: “I can’t count the number of folks who did.”
Frank and I looked at each other, then back at the suspect.

We questioned the old lady about all possible suspects. It was a long list. It looked like we were going to busy. But she was still the main suspect as she couldn’t remember where she was at the time of the INC and she did fit the description the PM in the CADI with the CVC had given us.
JF: “Are you sure you don’t remember where you were last night?”
FOAP: “I watched ‘I Married Joan’ on TV and then I must’ve fallen asleep. I woke up on the couch this morning.”
F: “Were you alone? Was there anyone here with you who could verify your story?”
FOAP: “Only my sister. We were playing poker till about 7.30. But then she left.”
JF: “How did she get on with your husband, Maam?”
FOAP: “Oh, she hated him even more than I did.”
F: “Why was that, Maam?”
FOAP: “Maggie never forgave him for getting me pregnant and marrying me. We were very close, you see. She always said he came between us. She said we had something very special between us, she and I, and that he came along and ruined it all.”
JF: “How’s that, Maam?”
FOAP: “The sort of bond we have is not that uncommon. Not between twins.”
F: “You mean, you and your sister are twins?”
FOAP: “Oh, yeah. We’re identical twins. Most folks can’t tell us apart.”
Frank and I looked at each other, then back at the suspect.
Music: DAN-DA-DAN-DA
“We arrested the FOAP’s twin sister, Maggie, and charged her with first-degree murder. She didn’t say much when we read her her rights.”
Maggie: “Prove it, cupper.”
VO: Both twins took the 5th amendment. The PM in the CADI with the CVC was taken to a line-up but he couldn’t decide which of the two sisters he’d seen at the INC. Due to lack of evidence, the case was dropped and the sisters were released. They’re now both living in Miami on the husband’s life insurance money. Neither of them turned up at the DAS’s funeral.
Music: DAN-DA-DAN-DAN, DAN-DA-DAN-DAN, DAN-DA-DAN-DAN DAAN.

DAS: Dead at the scene
JSO: Just South of
BOR: Bottom of ramp
PM: Passing motorist
CADI: Cadillac
CVC: California vehicle code
APB: All points bulletin
CBX: Call box
OAP: Old age pensioner
FOAP: Female old age pensioner
LAPD: Los Angeles Police Department
APT: Apartment
INC: Incident * * * *

Come over baby whole lot of shakin' goin' on
Yes I said come over baby baby you can't go wrong
We ain't fakin’ it Whole lot of shakin' goin' on
Well I said come over baby we got chicken in the boarder
oooh... huh.. Come over baby baby got move a little harder
We ain't fakin’ it Whole lot of shakin' goin' on


Well I said shake baby shake
I said shake baby shake
I said shake it baby shake it
I said shake baby shake
Come on over Whole lot of shakin goin' on

Ahhhhh Lets Go !!!


Well I said come over baby we got chicken in the
Barn whose barn what barn my barn
Come over baby better got to move along
We ain't fake it Whole lot of shakin' goin' on

Easy Now (lower) Shake it Ahhhh... Shake it babe
Yeah.... You can shake one time for me
Well I said come over baby Whole lot of shakin' goin' on
Now lets get real low one time now Shake baby shake
All you gotta honey is kinda stand in one spot
wiggle around just a little bit
thats what you gotta do yeah....

Oh babe whole lotta shakin' goin' on
Now let go one time ( Loud !!!!)

Well I said shake baby shake
I said shake baby shake
I said shake it baby shake it
I said shake baby shake
Come on over Whole lot of shakin goin' on


Chapter 39. THE REICH.

     ‘Stan’ Mathews, the remaining Welsh rugby teacher at Edgebury, was an ex-Welsh International. A diminutive but muscley man in also in his forties, moved like a cheetah on the field. When pursued by a bunch of frustrated class members, his technique was different than that of Dick Spittle’s.

     Rather than just holding the leather egg aloft and out of reach, he’d come charging right at you, actually offering it to you in a feint and then changing direction at right angles leaving you looking a complete dick with your hands held out. He was a nice little bloke and ran a boys club in Sidcup where he was affectionately known as ‘Mr M. and commanded absolute respect by example rather than threat.

     These three lyrical Welshmen all led by example and gained the same respect. Kids actually wanted to learn sports crafts properly and enjoyed the games lesson while they did it. That being the case, whoever decided to change all that and introduce a more military style discipline into the proceedings was either a sadist or just another bastard. So what was new?

     Enter Wardle and Bowen. I never bothered to find out their first names, and no one could have cared less. For the first time, Edgebury School decided to appoint a head of games and physical training, seemingly chosen from whatever remnants of the Third Reich was left in the Brazilian Jungle.

     They came up with an appropriately square-headed member of the SS who’d disguised his voice to sound like a Lancastrian. In retrospect, he was reminiscent of Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, though much uglier, which is possible, believe me, and not quite as jowley.

     His head was shaved to grey skin at the back and sides and on top, the black hair was slicked back with a dead straight white parting down the centre which seemed to have been chiselled into the bone of his skull, it was so prominent. His fat-lipped mouth was the gateway to a graveyard of jagged, lop-sided, tombstone-shaped, yellow teeth, which were constantly on display by way of a cynically vicious grin that made the hair on the back of everyone’s head stand up in a desperate attempt to run for cover.

     This bastard was evil personified. Everybody felt it. It wasn’t just my own paranoia. He introduced himself to our merry band on his first day as camp commandant by marching into the changing room and positioning himself at the far end, feet planted wide and inside a spotless pair of Green Flash, hands thrust into his tracksuit trouser pockets to adjust the fit round his thick waist - the crisp white T shirt setting off his big barrel chest a treat.

     The other bastard followed Wardle in and took up position behind his left shoulder. The almost albino Bowen, was slightly taller than Wardle with sharper features but no less menacing. His hair was white and he wore blue tinted rimless Nazi-type glasses with a magnification that made his eyes bulge a piercing, poisonous blue.

     In the film Jaws, the skipper of the Orca, Quint, describes the horror of The SS Indianapolis being torpedoed in shark infested seas during world war 2. 700 odd men ended up in the water clinging to life rafts and because the ship had just delivered the Atom Bomb to an air base in the Philippines and the mission was so secret, no one knew the ship had gone down, let alone where the survivors were.

     The men in the water were attacked by a shoal of Tiger Sharks and Quint described in lurid detail how the sharks killed and ate the crew three or four at a time. He tells about the look in a shark’s eyes as it rolls over for the kill. He described the eyes as having no emotion, no soul, no feeling. The description always reminded me of the same dead eyes Bowen had stuck in his skull.

     This one was the sycophant. If Wardle had ordered the removal of someone’s teeth or fingernails with a knife and fork, he’d have done the deed without blinking. Hitler himself, would have been proud of this perfect specimen of ‘the New Arian Male’, his body crying out to be adorned in the black jodhpurs, uniform, boots and high-peaked cap of his predecessors. Both men wore the insignia of their death camp training methods on their breasts: ‘AAA Hon Coach’. It might as well have been a swastika.

     “Rarht gentlemud.” the first words from the disturbed adenoids of W would become almost a catch-phrase overture of the torture that was certain to follow. “The foon and geems stops here. Boot, at tha seem tarm, now is where the foon really begins. Not yours - ours. You will simply perform. We are going to make you into men. Real men. Or....” the yellow graveyard widened, “you will die in the attempt.”

     A minion produced a huge cardboard box and dumped it unceremoniously on the concrete floor. It was full of un-washed, mud-stained, faded pink (they were red in a former life) and green football shirts, many full of holes or ripped right down the front.

     “Rarht, gentlemud. Each of you will wear one of these. MOVE!.”

     We moved. It was like the final charge at a church jumble sale, with everyone scrumming for the last of the mouldy second or third hand bargains. The main disadvantage of being smaller than average at the age of 12, was that, in such circumstances, you simply got shoved out of the way.

     By the time I made it to the box there was only one shirt left. It was stuck to the bottom like a pancake, which was, I realised, as I peeled it away from the cardboard, was because it was damp. It was also one of the split down the front jobs - like a jacket without any buttons, and a puke shade of green. It stuck to my skin as I put it on, or rather wrapped it around me, and it stank of stale sweat.

     I needn’t have worried too much about the dampness of the bit of old rag that I had draped over me, because this was the second week of January and the first week’s snow had been replaced by a heavy frost and, once outside, the ‘garment’ instantly froze and turn into iced, corrugated cardboard, making it impossible to bring the two sides of the front together.

     “Rarht, gentlemud.” (W didn’t possess much by way of vocabulary.) “If you think you’re going to kick a pretty little ball around or anything like that, think again. Thut is a privilege you uv to earn. And earn it you will. I uv to make sure you’re fit enoof first. And if you’re not, then I have to make sure you get fit enoof.”

     Bastard B produced a salivating grin from behind bastard W’s left shoulder. “And if you dorn’t get fit enoof, then you worn’t be kicking a pretty little ball anywhere. Oonderstood? OONDERSTOOD?”

     “Yes sir.” chorused 40 suspicious voices.

     “Rarht, gentlemud.” I was beginning to tire of being called a gentlemud, but maybe this was one of the fat, bulbous creep’s ways of wearing us down. “You are going on what is known in fitness circles as a cross coontry rood. You are going to rood for 7 miles. You are going to keep rooding for 7 miles. You are not going to stop rooding for 7 miles. You are not going to stop rooding until you reach the school gate, which is where you will start rooding from. Oonderstood?”

     “Yes sir.”
     “Excellent. Now we oonderstund wood anooder, rarht, gentelmud?’
     “Yes sir.”
     “Ut the gate, you will nortice soomwood with a green flug. He’s your starter and will tell you which way you will go. Further down the road, you will nortice anooder individual with anooder green flug, and further on, anooder. You will nortice many individuals around the course with green flugs. They are there to show you where to go and to report eddy walkers or strugglers, and to make sure you don’t get lost or take eddy short coots. Ooderstood?”
     “Yes sir.”
     “Rarht, gentlemud. Off you go. And remember, the fuster you rood, the quicker, you’ll get buck.”

     BRASS MONKEYS

     I forgot to mention that my latest fashion accessory didn’t have any sleeves. That is, it used to have but they’d been torn off just below the armpits, probably in some vicious rugby scrum, or something. The pack scrabbled and shoved its way through the double doors and into the freezing cold. The biggest and fittest were already half-way down the road by the time I and the other diminutives reached the gate.

     Malcolm Carter, a tall, extremely skinny and sport-mad boy was already striding off in the lead. This kid had incredible stamina and felt no pain. He actually kept rooding for the entire 7 miles and arrived back at the gate a good quarter of a mile in front of anyone else. I struggled along in the back half and by the time I reached the bottom of the road, my stick-like arms were blue.

     I have many pleasant memories of my 56 years of life and, like most, a few not so pleasant. That first cross-country run, stands out as one event that I’d rather had never happened at all, except that it served as a first inkling that there would be many people that you come across in life whom you'd would gladly shoot through the brain without a smidgen of remorse.

     As I stumbled along, my arms did start to change colour - from blue to purple, and I imagined, would soon be black as the frost-bite kicked in. Along the ash covered alleyway towards The Kemnal we went, the ground like granite, jagged ridges doing their best to pierce the flimsy tread of our plimsolls. Oh, I also forgot to mention Wardle had banned the wearing of socks for this particular expedition.

     Then across The Kemnal and up a dark narrow alleyway, carpeted in hard mud, chunks of rock-hard snow lighting the way. Every now and then, a foot would fall on a little icy lake that had formed across previous footprints, crunching through into the freezing water underneath. A hidden ghost slowly pushing an ice pick under my rib-cage and into my right lung took my mind off this sudden, sodden sting to the toes. Stitch, it’s called, and it did feel like the death of a thousand knitting needles, I have to admit.

     Up through the Bluebell wood and across the open fields towards Sydney Woods, then down a steep bank to the concrete pathway that ran alongside the A 20 Sidcup Bypass, and led towards the long Kemnal lane, and back towards the school. In the summertime, these places were a source of huge pleasure, resplendent with green fields, leafy lanes, secluded copses, thousands of massive, welcoming trees - all food for the fertile imagination. Now, the only thing that sprang to mind was the plight of the German Army as it froze to death outside Stalingrad in 1944.

     With a few other stragglers, I arrived back at the school in dire pain from now two ice picks piercing both lungs, blisters on the soles of my feet and frozen skin over my entire body. The cold breath burned through my parched throat, and frozen globules of snot blocked my nostrils forcing me to breath through my mouth. I wanted to die.

     GESTAPO

     The two Nazis waited in the comparative warmth of the changing room and hurled insults and abuse at anyone who was behind the first 20 home, or should I say back to the camp. Of course, there were those who’d enjoyed the experience and these were congratulated and patted on the back and pointed out as fine examples of the real manhood that most of us weeds could never aspire to.

     “What a state, Lowe. (David Lowe was one of the biggest in the class, an amicable and popular lad who despite his undisputed strength, wouldn’t have even breathed hard on a butterfly) You rood lark a great big stupid girl. And that’s all you’ll ever be. A great big stupid girl.”

     A sensitive lad, despite his size, the damage perpetrated by this un-called-for, careless and totally unfunny comment would remain with David until well into middle age. He was big enough to have swiped W’s head from his shoulders with the back of his hand and it must have been doubly distressing for him knowing this fact and having to put up with such well-aimed derision. The two bastards just laughed when they saw the state I was in.

     (David is now a successful writer and broadcaster and hosts his own weekly music programme on Radio Devon entitled ‘As time Goes By.’ It’s a programme full of wit and a definite appreciation of the finer things of life including the sensitively chosen music. Not such a great big girl now, methinks, you pair of Nazi bastards.)

     In a way, it was gratifying to watch the next batch of victims being sent off over the 7 mile torture trails from the warmth of our classroom, as W and B systematically bullied their way through the entire school. We did eventually get to chase a pretty little ball about now and again as the freezing runs didn’t produce much except for a the largest spate of absenteeism due to colds and flu since the school was built in 1938.

     Wardle left the school in a hurry in the middle of a term. Apparently, he’d been discovered with Miss I, (a tall slim, large breasted apparition of a teacher with the kind of body that boys approaching puberty were likely to choke over), in the confined space of the games teachers’ office adjacent to the main changing rooms. He’d been taking her through an extra curricular exercise regime, which required her to kneel on the floor in a position of prayer, according to the caretaker with a pass key who blundered in on them.

     Those who’d heard about the incident from the caretaker’s son were both shocked and dismayed, apart from being just a tad jealous. Miss I was a cool, sophisticated beauty, with dark red hair and high cheek bones and not in the least bit brassy, but the devastatingly ugly W possessed all the charm, finesse, and physical attributes of a rabid warthog. It began to dawn on some of us that there was, in all probability, not a lot of justice to be found in the world.

     In Ken Loach’s 1970’s film, ‘Kes’, Danny Glover’s behaviour as a bullying games master on a school football pitch, portrayed Wardle’s own with uncanny accuracy. He’d barge and shove his way past everybody in a demonstration of his fairly thuggish skills, stepping on toes, kicking shins, elbowing teeth, pulling hair, kneeing groins, at the time bearing his repulsive yellow gravestone teeth.

     “Coom on, what’s the mutter with you? You’re useless. Orpless. A lord of fairies. Pathetic. Get up, stupid. I ‘ardly tooched you. It’s ornly blood and you’ve got lords to spare. Oh, tuckle me, would you? There! How d’you like that? That’ll teach you. Ahh, what’s the mat-matts? Moommy’s little boy’s fallen in the mood, us ‘ee? Wha’ a sheem.”

     “It’s that areshole, W!” I yelled unwillingly from the 50 bob seats in the Odeon, Bromley, as Brian Glover came charging towards the camera. “It’s him! It’s really him!” My girlfriend thought I’d gone nuts.

     Reich Marshals Wardle and Bowen were eventually replaced by Field Marshal, Jenkins, who like Rommel, wasn’t a Nazi, but none-the-less adhered to similar torture strategies. In his case, I’d say his was more honourable in that he really did believe his fitness regime was of benefit to his charges.

     Nick named, ‘Horse’, because he looked like one, he also had a keen sense of smell. In the 4th year of our Edge incarceration, he kept the class waiting outside the changing room one afternoon while he moved slowly back and forth along the double line queue, his nose in the air. After 5 minutes he spoke, “Who bought it into the school?”

     There was no response so he repeated the question. After some uncomfortable foot shuffling, Doug Chessel, spoke up, “My Mother gave me some whiskey in some milk this morning, Sir as I have a bit of a cold.”

     Horse didn’t push the matter further. Satisfied that he’d made his point, whatever the point was, he just opened the changing room door and we all trouped inside. None of us could smell anything but later Doug confessed he was relieved that Horse did make him turn out his pockets as he had a half-drunk quarter bottle of Haig Scotch Whiskey about his person and was feeling a tad pissed.

     STALAG

     They were other sinister characters who belonged to ‘the hut brigade’ at Edgebury. These elite clan members stayed away from the main staff room and took their tea breaks together in the huts well away from the red brick part of the school.

     It was a good five-minute trot to the main building, but the ‘Hut Club’ eventual became a sort of mafia family parading the same kind of obsequiousness as the Sicilian Brotherhood but without the characteristic kissing and hugging.

     Basil Dick was a ‘made’ member of the inner circle. The senior maths master, he wore the kind of none-descript clothes that only a maths master who saw the whole world as a set of figures, would wear: brown sports Jacket with leather elbows over a blue zip up cardigan with a tiny tie knot pulling his white shirt collar tight round his scrawny neck accentuating his already sharply protruding Adam’s Apple a treat.

     Short back and sides, mop of thick black hair, no chin to speak of and a perpetual blue shadow and wire glasses, he was another one straight from Central Casting. His brand new, sage green upright Ford popular said it all really.

     NUMBERS

     In my arguably limited experience, those who teach English tend to be civilised. Maybe it has to do with the delicacy, art, precision and versatility of the subject they teach and their passionate love of it that produces these humane qualities they all seem to have.

     Those who teach maths, on the other hand always seem to me to be cold fish. I remember the results of our first end of term maths exam at Edgebury when Basil was in the process of marking while we slaved away in absolute silence on some more similar nonsense.

     “Which is Bradley?” Basil suddenly said, his narrow eyes peering out form either side of his sparrow beak.” That was WEAK, Bradley.”

     He seemed to stare at me for half an hour - my brain frying in panic. As far as he was concerned, I was crap and that was where it ended. There was no “Why don’t you come and see me after school and we’ll go over it and see if we can sort out some of the problems.” No. I was definitely just something objectionable on the soul of his shoe.

     Basil Dick was another one given to sudden tirades of temper. Generally quietly spoken so that you could hardly hear what he was saying, he suddenly lost it one day, rushed across the room and yanked Ray Medhurst out of his seat by the scruff of the neck.

     Ray had been chatting to the bloke next to him, probably about some mathematical problem as he was pretty good at maths. BUT he should have used sign language. Talking was verboten. This was in the days of short trousers, and Ray had quite a nasty dry skin problem that was fairly obvious to anyone with only one half-blind eye.

     The poor bugger’s face and legs were often sore and red. It could have had something to do with the fact that he lived in St Michael’s Children’s’ home on Chislehurst Common and was affected by stress, I don’t know.
     Anyway, nice kind Basil cared more about his precious sums and his own mathematical ego. He lifted poor old Ray off the floor and threw him face-down over his desk, raining a frenzied series of slaps to the back of the legs as he did so, and then cracking the back of his head with enough force to scalp him.

     I was never very numerate, but was willing to try. Basil Dick, in his wisdom, made sure that I pulled my tiny head back inside my shell into the safety of ignorance whenever the word maths was mentioned from that day forward. It’s probably why I still sometimes have to count on my fingers to this day, and why my wife won’t let me anywhere near her impeccable organisation of the family finances.


‘Rael Brook Toplin, the shirt you don’t iron’


Dan Mathews:

“So remember. Leave your blood at the Red Cross, not on the highway. 10 - 4.



* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Come on everybody, clap your hands
Ar ya lookin' good
I'm gonna sing my song
And it won't take long
We're gonna do the twist, and it goes like this
Come on, let's twist again, like we did last summer
Yeah, let's twist again, like we did last year
Do you remember when, things were really hummin'
Yeah, let's twist again, twistin' time is here
Ee a round and a round and a up and down we go again
Oh, baby make me know you love me so and then
Twist again, like we did last summer
Come on, let's twist again
Like we did last year, twist
Rap:
Who's that flyin' up there
Is it a bird, no
Is it a plane, no
Is it the twister, yeah
Yeah, twist again, like we did last summer
Come on, let'd twist again, like we twist last year
Do you remember when, things were really hummin'
Come on, let's twist again, twistin' time is here
Ee a round and a round and a up and down we go again
Oh, baby make me know you love me so and then
Come on, twist again, like we did last summer
Girl, let's twist again
Like we did last year
Come on, twist again
Twistin' time is here, Bop Bop

Chapter 40. PARTY PARTY.

     The Bradley’s became famous for their parties. The first one we gave was for my sister’s 14th birthday in 1958. She invited several girls from her school and some from the estate. So that I didn’t feel left out, and to address some kind of balance between girls and boys I was allowed to invite some of my own classmates from Edgebury.

     I chose a mixture of friends from different backgrounds, not for any reason other than they were all mates of mine. But the mates weren’t necessarily mates of each other. Along with Mike Rickards from the top end of Imperial Way, Chris Stone and Pete Press who’s family had known Connie’s family for generations, I also included Dave Harris, Chick Cheese, whom Alf insisted on calling ‘Chuck’, and Jimmy Jupp, a sweet-natured little bloke from Mottingham, Dave’s and Chick’s own neck of the woods. Mick was very suspicious of Dave Harris and Pete Press was very suspicious of everyone. Chris...well, Chris was just Chris.

     Chris Stone, at the time the ‘straightest’ friend I had, turned up in his school uniform with a navy blue gabardine mac draped over his arm. The rest wore what was considered to be quite ‘with-it’ stuff of the time, Dave Harris plumping for a black jacket with horizontal gold streaks woven into the fabric. I didn’t have any modern stuff, being only 12 at the time and lacking the funds to get the gear, and just wore grey trousers and a green jumper.

     I was quite taken aback at the Mottingham boys’ response to the invitation. Both Jim and Chick lit up with glee at the prospect.

     “Will there be any tarts, Nilw? Any crumpet? How old’s your sister?”
     “14.”
     “Coorrr! I can’t wait!”

     They didn’t seem concerned that the average 14 year old girl of that time wouldn’t be the slightest bit interested in any spotty 12 year old boys, but undaunted, they immediately lit their fags on arrival and got stuck in. They certainly had all the chat and I think Kathryn and her friends were quite impressed and flattered in an amused sort of way.

     Jimmy took me aside at one point and told me that the tall tart, Ann Clayton, was actually going out with his brother, a piece of information that was to run me into a little trouble later on.

     The party went quite well in a sober sort of way. There was no alcohol allowed except for the adults. Kathryn’s friends all brought along their own records so there was a lot of jiving going on, girls partnering girls. Of the boys, I was the only one able to dance and took to the floor with great panache, albeit dancing with Connie or her sister, Janet.

     About half way through the evening, as things were getting a little staid, and my Mottingham friends a little turgid at their lack of success with the girls, Jack Head turned up with his guitar, girlfriend Rosemary and Ray Harris, carrying Jack’s banjo. (Ray was no relation to Dave, but he had been at Edgebury with Dave’s brother, Nutty. It was Ray who told me the story about Nutty trying to rob Martins bank in Chislehurst High Street and failing abysmally when the manager simply closed the door behind him and locked it.)

     Ray was a 5ft 2 pin-sharp (white jacket, black shirt) good looker - well, according to the girls - I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been able to predict or understand what women find attractive in men. Ray was later to marry the tall tart, Ann Clayton, after ‘getting together’ with her at another Bradley party.

     The rest of the evening was taken care of by Jack entertaining us all in his inimitable fashion, and Dave Harris’s eyes nearly popping out of his head at the sight of the big Hofner Committee guitar and Jack’s dexterity.

     Another thing I learned about Dave Harris that evening was that apart from being a sectionable psycho, he was also a boy of immense charm with the manners of a saint. He arrived bearing gifts for Connie and Alf - half an ounce of Golden Virginia for him and a gold-coloured, plastic harp-shaped bottle, if you can imagine that, containing very cheap perfume, for her.

     Connie told me later that the perfume had ‘nicked from Woolworth’ written all over it, but she took it with good grace. She and Alf really liked Dave Harris. He seemed to have so much to offer. It a real pity that he threw it all away like he did.

     JUPP

     Jimmie Jupp was little, even for a 12 year old, and was a mate of Terry Oliver and Chick Cheese. They were all from Mottingham but unusually, not as aggressive as most of their compatriots and by half way through the 1st year at the Edge, they were really friendly towards a few of the Red Hill lot.

     Jim had a 15-year-old brother in the 4th year, Peter, who I knew by sight from a distance. Peter Jupp wasn’t diminutive like his brother, but a tall, swarthy man-boy.
     All pupils at The Edge were required to serve time dishing up dinners to the queues of ravenous carnivores in the canteen at lunchtime.

     For my stint, I had the pleasure of serving from a great cauldron of steaming mash like the one that the skinny-faced, salivating rat had served me from on the first day at the school. I found a full ladle of the muck really heavy and had to use two hands to lift it. There was no point in only half-filling it, because the clientele showed all the outward signs of having been starved for two years and got extremely agitated if anything less than an overflowing ladle was offered.

     As I was trying to scrape off some of the mash that had clung to the side of the cauldron, I noticed Peter Jupp about 4 blokes along in the queue. He seemed to be watching me a bit too intently which I found a bit un-nerving as he was a moody looking bugger with his oily, black slicked-back hair, mature blue chin and the mannered look of the voluntary psycho he had about him.

     His ‘image’ was an uncomfortable mixture of James Dean, Ricky Nelson and Elvis Presley’s younger brother - if he’d had one. Obviously a rebel, Jupp Senior slouched rather than stood, his head thrust forward and down into his shoulders. He wore jeans, a black-and-white checked shirt over a black T-shirt, a St Christopher’s medal swinging next to his Adam’s apple, and a thin maroon tie hanging loosely from the open-neck of his shirt. The tie didn’t make sense amongst all the other stuff.

     I don’t really know why he bothered. He was probably taking the piss out of the school rules, which was that every pupil was required to wear a tie. A school tie. Well, Jupp’s tie wasn’t a school tie in the regulation navy blue with the grey diagonal stripe, but it was a tie. Wernit?

     Still gazing into the cauldron and pretending to go about the business of mash mining, from the corner of my eye, I noticed the checked shirt stop in front of me and Peter Jupp’s shadow turned the white stuff in the cauldron a dirty grey.

     “You Nilw Bradley?” said James Dean’s voice in a Sarf London accent. I looked up into the twisted-lipped sneer of Jupp’s chiselled features. This was a well-practised Rock ‘n’ Roll sneer later worn by Cliff Richard, Marty Wilde and Billy Fury, our home grown Made in Britain Rock ‘n’ Roll talent. Jupp was ahead of his time in one area at least or perhaps his lip was deformed and he couldn’t help looking like he’d just smelled something a bit iffy.

     “Mmmmm.” I said, feeling highly suspicious and more than a tad worried.
     “You bin tellin’ people I’m goin’ out with Ann Clayton?”
     My mind cartwheeled, desperately trying to remember who I’d told this piece of vitally important information, feeling fairly sure it had only been Jupp’s brother, Jimmy, but then he’d originally told me so it couldn’t have been him.

     Ann Clayton was a friend of my sister and lived up the road from us in Imperial Way. I’d overheard Ann telling Kathryn that she was indeed going out with Jupp Senior amid a lot of giggling from the pair of them, but I couldn’t really see that I’d committed a crime. I decided to play the innocent.

     “Well, you are...aren’t you?”

     Jupp leaned forward till his nose almost touched mine and the sky went really dark. I didn’t feel that this was the right time to point out that his tie was dangling in the mash. In a low voice, full of menace, he said, in the best ‘I’m gonna unscrew your head voice that he could muster, so that only the two of us could hear, “Well, there’s no need to publicise it, is there?”

     I couldn’t think why not. I mean, what was he ashamed of? Ann looked OK to me. She wasn’t exactly Marilyn Munroe but she wasn’t The Hunchback of Notre Dame either.

     The fact that she was only 13 surely wouldn’t have been a problem like damaging his reputation as a foraging hunter on a quest for the ultimate carnal experience. Would it? I thought it better not to say anything at this juncture.

     His eyes stared straight into mine for a moment as if to make sure I understood the point he was making. I didn’t really, but I wasn’t about to ask him to expand on it any further.
     He made to move on but realising he hadn’t taken his quota of spuds, he stopped and shoved his plate almost up my nose.

     Shakily, I forced my aching arms to lift two huge mountains of the stuff onto his plate, noticing that some had indeed attached itself to his tie. But I really didn’t think he needed to know that - not right then.

     Jupp swaggered back to his seat scraping the heals of his shoes along the floor in the hip, cool, stupid way that youths of his ilk did back then, leaving me to contemplate whether I should’ve chanced a parting comment like: “Enjoy your meal, Sir.” or “I hope it chokes you, you prick!”

     As I said, Jimmy Jupp was as really nice kid, unlike his dick-brain of a brother.


‘My goodness! My Guiness!’

Arman Dennis: “Michaela and I have twavelled over twee tousand miles to get to zis most wemote and danergwous place in the bush of Centwal Afwica to study the Afwican lion in its most natwal habitat…”
Michaela: “Look at this cub, Arman. Isn’t he lovely?”
A: “Vewy nice, Michaela, but I’m not sure you should be playing with it. Put it down in case the mudder lion is awound. You wouldn’t like any old Tom Dick or Hawwy playing with one of your babies, would you?”
M: “I haven’t got any babies. I might have if we hadn’t been plunging in to anuuder bloody jungle evwy five minutes.”
A: “As I was saying, we twavelled here by vay of…”
M: “Oh, Arman, he’s such a sweet little ting, I want to take him home. Look at the vay he is licking my hand. He can be my baby. Look at the vay he is licking my hand.”
A: “Zat’s pwobabbly because he quite likes the taste. I veerly tink you should put ze animal down. Now, since ve awived here…”
M: “Ah, Bless him. He’s nibbling my ear.”
A: “Be careful he doesn’t inadvertently tear it of and swallow it, Michaela. Vhere vas I?”
SFX: Lion’s roar.
A: “Dwop the bloody ting and wun for your life, Michaela. Dat’s its mudder wot has come cwashing frew the bushes and she’s vewy pissed.”
M: “She just wants to play, don’t you, darlink?”
A: “Are you mad? Dwop it and wun, you stupid cow!”
SFX: Lion’s roar/tearing flesh.
A: “AAAAAAAAGH!”
M: “Oh, Arman. Do your shirt up. Your intestines look so untidy all poking out like zat.”
Director: “CUT! That’s good, luvs. Let’s go again. Everyone back to their first positions and a little more passion this time if you wouldn’t mind, Arman.”



* * * * * * * * * * * * *


Oh Mary this London’s a wonderful sight,
With people here workin' by day and by night
They don't sow potatoes, nor barley, nor wheat
But there's gangs of them diggin' for gold in the street
At least when I asked them that's what I was told
So I just took a hand at this diggin' for gold
But for all that I found there I might as well be
Where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea.

I believe that when writin' a wish you expressed
As to how the fine ladies in London were dressed
Well if you'll believe me, when asked to a ball
They don't wear no tops to their dresses at all
Oh I've seen them meself and you could not in truth
Say that if they were bound for a ball or a bath
Don't be startin' them fashions, now Mary McCree
Where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea.

There's beautiful girls here, oh never you mind
With beautiful shapes nature never designed
And lovely complexions all roses and cream
But let me remark with regard to the same
That if that those roses you venture to sip
The colours might all come away on your lip
So I'll wait for the wild rose that's waitin' for me
In the place where the dark Mourne sweeps down to the sea.

You remember young Denny McLaren of course
Well he’s over here with the rest of the force
I saw him one day as he stood on the Strand
Stopped all the traffic with a wave of his hand
And as we were talkin’ of days that are gone
The whole town of London stood there to look on
Burt for all his great powers he’s wishfull like me
To be back where the dark Mourne sweeps down to the sea


Chapter 41. "HONEST TO GOD, TIS YOURSELF"

     While working for the Water Board, Alf made a couple of friends with whom he’d keep in touch for years after. The first was Ashley, an ebullient man in his late 30’s who, convinced he should have been Bing Crosby, recorded his own version of ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’ in some make-your-own-record shop or other. Either he was drunk at the time or he just got the timing wrong, but the end of the recording faded out with the sound of water draining down a plughole.

     For years, I thought the song was meant to end:

     ‘Bewitched, Bothered and bewildered am I ammmmmmmoooooooooooooorrrrrrrggggghhhh.........’

     Ashley, married to the voluptuous and barren Doris who wore the brightest red lipstick I’d ever seen, was responsible for wrecking my Hornby Dublo locomotive, Sir Nigel Greseley, locomotive, causing it to crash catastrophically off our dining room table at 120 Imperial Way, and onto the floor. Ashley, pissed as usual, tried to take a curve far too quickly at a scale speed of about 200mph.

     My beautiful Elizabethan Class L N E R locomotive never ran again despite several attempts by Alf and the Hornby Dublo Model Railway Hospital to repair the damage. Ashley just grinned after the accident and said:

     “Oppsh. Bollocksh! Shtill. Never mind, eh?”

     Basically, Ashley was a wanker.

     GEORGE

     Water Board pal No 2 was George Batey. I never met him until we’d lived at 120, Imperial Way for a number of years and he turned up on a very old and decrepit 125cc BSA motorbike with wheels not much thicker than pushbike wheels.

     Nothing so unusual about that except that George weighed 18 stone. He was big and very fat like a wine barrel with braces and a 3-inch wide leather belt to keep his massive gut from spilling onto the little bike’s petrol tank. From a distance, he looked like a hippo on a fairy cycle.

     He’d teeter up the road, the throttle wide open, re-creating the London Smog of the early 50’s, the bike’s little engine in meltdown, struggling to get above 3 mph. George was 70 by this time, retired and making extra beer money by collecting insurance payments for a mate.

     He took over a good two thirds of our front room, his huge frame blocking out all the heat from the gas fire and the sunlight through the window as he warmed his enormous arse.

     He had hands were like bunches of badly bruised over-ripe bananas with the index banana on his right hand missing. When he offered his hand for me to shake it was all I could do to keep from throwing up. How he could see to ride the poor little motorbike was a miracle. The thick horn-rimmed spectacles perched on his huge, purple nose held together with Elastoplast and boasting lenses like the bottoms of pint glasses, he looked like Mr McGoo.

     “You seen Ash?’ Alf asked.
     “Yeah. Nah ‘an agin. ‘Es a lazy bastard.”
     “What’s he doing these days?”
     “Not a lot since Doris got ill.”
     “Yeah? I didn’t know she was ill.”
     “Bloody cancer. ‘Ad ‘er breast orf.” He made a circular motion with his left hand over his chest as if he was the surgeon. “Ash can’t ‘andle it. Well ‘e couldn’t, could ‘e? It ain’t bleedin’ there, is it? Know wha’ I mean?”

     I thought this was quite a funny if tragic joke but neither men laughed, merely staring gravely at the floor. It was just George’s graphic way of describing the events.

     BOGEY

     Alf met Bogey Knight when he started work as a resistor maker at the Kolster Bran Factory. Bogey was the man who could get anything. If he couldn’t lay his own hands on something, he was sure to know a man who could.

     One of Bogey’s specialities was fresh horse manure. He’d procured some for himself and had a sack of the stuff over the handlebars of his bike late one night and was pushing it up the very steep Sidcup Hill. A policeman strolling his beat stepped out of the shadows and halted Bogey’s progress in the way suspicious policeman do.

     “And where are we going at this time of night then, son?”
     “Dunno ‘bout you, CUNTstable, but I’m going ‘ome.” Bogey wasn’t too fond of the law or its official guardians.
     “Oh, yes? You are, are you? And what, if I may make so bold, have you got in there, then?”
     “In where?”
     “Don’t be funny. The sack. What’ve you got in the sack, eh?”
     “Shit.” said Bogey truthfully.
     “I said, don’t be funny.”
     “I’m not. I told you, it’s shit.”
     “Very Funny. Right. Let’s have a look then, shall we?” said the particularly stupid copper whose nasal passages must have been well and truly blocked. He opened the top of the sack and thrust his arm in up to the elbow.
     “I told you,” said Bogey, “its shit.”

     Apart from his water board buddies, Alf was really a bit of loner and didn’t let what mates he did have get too close. There was one notable exception: Paddy. Alf started to talk about him in about 1955, with uncharacteristic fondness. His real name was Brendan McMahon, (pronounced, Macmarn) and he was a migrant worker from County Clare in the West of Ireland.

     Alf was obviously enthusiastic about this newfound comrade. Apparently, Paddy was an amateur boxer, a musician, rode a motorbike, and a was real laugh. We finally met him when we all went to the wedding of a couple who’d met at KB’s, (Kolster Bran’s) Ursula and Bill, she a pretty 25 year old with tightly permed hair and he a spiv-moustached, tank-topped beanpole.

     Even to a 10 year-old boy, Paddy was a strikingly good looking man - tall dark and handsome in every sense, with his chiselled features, dark skin, permanent 4 ‘o clock shadow, deeply cleft chin and shock of black hair. He was always laughing, exposing his gleaming white teeth like a toothpaste ad, but what drove the youth club girls wild when they first met him a few years later.

     6ft 4 muscley frame, were the scars. He had one above his right eye sustained from an amateur boxing bout and two on the left side of his chin from when he crashed his motorbike. They looked like tribal markings and to most females who met him, Paddy might have just as well have swung into the room on a vine. His voice was velvet soft and lyrical and packed full of the same hypnotic Irish charm that sparkled in his eyes.

     Despite his regulation double-breasted charcoal grey immigrant style suit with its 22 inch bottoms, (not exactly all the rage in Rock ‘n’ Roll Britain), Paddy undoubtedly could’ve have charmed the knickers off any of his young female admirers without trying, if he hadn’t been such a devout Catholic and firmly betrothed to a girl from his home town of Ennis, County Clare.

     When the news broke that there was someone in the wings, the expressions on the girls’ faces were wide mouthed and could easily have been interpreted as suicidal were it not for the fact that every one of them was obsessively curious to find out what the lucky lady had that they didn’t. They didn’t have to wait long. Paddy took a trip back to Ireland to bring his fiancée back to Britain to for a visit before they married and came to live here permanently.

     THE MOUNTAINS OF MOURNE

     Berrie was a pretty, feisty lady with rimless glasses and tightly permed hair and the same West Coast, lyrical Irish brogue possessed by her betrothed. She wore the neat, wasted black business suit and crisp white blouse that she wore as a senior buyer for Marks and Spencer when Paddy introduced her to the curious Bradleys and the rest.

     From the moment she stepped into our front room, she carried an aura of absolute self- confidence and had the sense of determination about her that she was going to wring life by the scruff of the neck until it gave her exactly what she wanted.

     She didn’t call her fiancé Paddy but addressed him by his proper name, Brendan, which was alien to us and planted in my brain a ridiculous notion that she was an outsider who had no real business messing around with our tame Irishman of whom we’d all grown so fond.

     After they married, the couple lived in a scruffy 2 up, 2 down terraced house in Bromley but Berrie had their lives planned in detail.
     “We’re going to have a televeesion. I’ve always wanted a televeesion. I’d love a televeesion. Then we’re going to have children and settle in England for good in a nice house somewhere.”

     For some reason, Paddy didn’t seem all that comfortable with the idea and the notion in my brain grew from the ridiculous to the absurd and I believed that one day Berrie would simply disappear. Instead, she got pregnant and gave birth to a son, James who immediately became Jim. Berrie also got her television but as yet there was no sign of the nice house. They stayed in the 2 up, 2 down, and swopped their antique 250 Norton and sidecar for a 1927 Morris 8, which Paddy bought for £5.

     During their first year in England as man and wife, they made the trip back to Ennis for a week, removing the sidecar and travelling the entire distance on the bike with a small amount of luggage tied to the carrier behind the pillion seat.

     In 2000, I made the same journey in our Mercedes 190E, with my Wife, 9 year-old son and enough stuff for a fortnight’s holiday. The journey took us two days. The second leg was from County Wexford, through Waterford and Limerick to County Clare on the West Coast.

     Even in the Merc, it was a very arduous journey across some of the most dramatic and rugged country and testing, twisty roads that Ireland could chuck at a motrtist. At the end of the journey, I was exhausted, but the idea of anyone attempting the trip 2 up on a clapped out, single cylinder Norton thumping away underneath them seemed nothing short of an act of lunacy, but then the Irish have always enjoyed the gentle art of being mad.

     The Morris was little better appointed than the old Norton with the passenger door handle tied on with string and more than enough exhaust fumes inside the car to terminate would-be passengers after half a mile were in not for the fact that the rear window was broken and the drivers window jammed open.

     When we visited Brendan and Berrie, we travelled to Bromley by 227 bus but the lyrical Irishman always insisted on giving us a ride home. Despite having only a motorbike licence, no road tax or insurance, Paddy always seemed to find the excursion a huge joke, Alf sitting in the front seat in a giggly, pissed state, next to the driver, and Connie and us two kids huddled together in the back on the smelly, old, freezing cold leather upholstery.
The two men would laugh and joke all the way back to the estate.

     “Got your bomb, Pad?” Alf would shout above the scratchy rattle of the tired old engine and grinding gears, a reference he later explained as having to do with some crazy organisation called the IRA. (10 years later, when the first person was shot dead in Belfast in May 1966, it didn’t seem so funny.)

     Heading down Summer Hill and trying to get up enough momentum to make it up the other side, Paddy would warn us that the brakes probably weren’t altogether reliable, in fact, he wasn’t sure they worked at all.

     “Oh, ain’t it grand to be bloomin’ well dead …” he’d sing at the top of his voice. “Ain’t it grand to be bloomin’ well dead.”
     Those of us in the cheap seats at the back violently disagreed.

     Whenever they got pissed together which was a couple of times a week, Alf and Paddy would get giggly and emotional and break into their own solemn rendering of ‘The Mountains Of Mourne’. It was many years before I discovered what a beautifully plaintif song it is. At the time it sound like several Tom Cats being drowned all at once, and Alf and Paddy didn’t exactly pose an obvious threat to the Everly Brothers.

     Paddy was a superb natural musician who could get a tune out of almost anything including Kathryn’s recorder, which I’d only ever heard as part of the Red Hill recorder orchestra, when it squeezed out a sound absolutely complimented the sickly smell of disinfectant which always hung in the air whenever the bloody things were played.

     I always found the recorder difficult to play because you had to breath into it very gently to avoid getting a horrible screeching sound. Paddy, however ingnored Kathryn’s protestations, simply plugging the thing into his gob and blowing as hard as he could, altering the pitch up a whole octave.

     “No, no, Paddy. You have to breathe gently, not like…” Kathryn stopped in mid sentence, open-mouthed.

     The sounds the young Irishman dragged from the infernal instrument were beautiful. He played a series of Irish jigs and folk tunes, multi-noted in texture giving the recorder a completely new, vibrant and unforseen character. He actually made the thing produce real music.

     He played non-stop for 20 minutes or more, cascading from one tune to the next with a vibrant energy that I’d never come across in any other form of music. When he finally stopped, he seemed unaware that the room had fallen into a stunned silence and simply examined the recorder before handing it nochalently back to its owner.
     “Tis a foine floot, so it is. Could I be botherin’ ye for another half ‘o Guiness, Elf?” (Alf)

     When Jim was about 5 (“:Oim toired ‘o warkin’, Daddy. Will ye be after pickin’ me up for a carry?”) and with a sister, Clare toddling about, the MacMahon’s decided to move back home to Ireland, or at least, Brendan decided that County Clare was where his heart truly belonged, and persuaded the disappointed Berrie that as a family, they needed to be closer to the place where the dark Mourne sweeps down to the sea.

     Before they left for the Emarald Isle, we visited them one more time and I took my guitar. I was 12 and already a fairly good player. Berrie’s brother, PJ was over from Ireland and was a dab-hand on the spoons so he, Paddy and I had quite a session. Alf and Connie also threw a party for the departing Irish whom everyone was sad to see go.

     Alf and Connie invited a few neighbours and friends from the youth club and Brendan and Berrie introduced the gathering to Irish Jigs, turning the Bradley living room into the best Kayley this side of the Dingle Peninsular.

     About 15 years later there was a programme on BBC 2 about a flute and harp maker from County Clare and I was astonished to see the serious, yet unmistakable face of Brendan McMahon instructing one of his daughters on how to play one of the instruments. According to the documentary, he’d become quite a celebrated producer of fine Irish folk instruments and was famous throughout Europe.

     In 1999, we first visited Ireland for a holiday for the first time, and stayed in County Waterford in the South East, as we had a friend who owned a house there. As it happened, the Ireland was enjoying its fiercest heart wave since 1965, theusual ‘Irish Mist’ having disappeared for a while.

     We stayed in a beautiful farm cottage with a swimming pool and I happened to mention one day to the young female attendant that I knew some people in County Clare, one of whom was a famous instrument maker. She asked me his name and when I told her, she became quite excited.

     “Jaysus! Holy Mary, Mother of God. Not Brendan McMahon? Do I know him? He only made my focken’ flewt!”

     I finally got to meet Brendan and Berrie again in 2000 when we took Connie and her sister to see them in their neat bungalow in Ennis. Brendan coyley showed me his workshop where he produced flutes for orchestras throughout the world including the USA and Japan.

     Brendan had turned into a rather reserved, shy character, almost dismissive about his reputation but before we left, Berrie persuded Brendan to play the flute for us and in return demanded that I drag my guitar from the boot of the car. I only played two things. One was my own arrangement of ‘Love Me Tender’, followed quite deliberately by ‘The Mountains of Mourne’.

     It was like the song struck something deep in the lovely man’s heart. He lifted his flute to his lips and played a haunting harmony to my instrumental rendering and then, as if he could resist no longer, he placed the flute on his knee and sang the song all the way through. There were tears in his eyes as he sang, and as I stroked the last chord, it was as much as I could do to stop myself from bawling out loud.


‘Settlers bring express relief’

Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, singing in close harmony:

“Happy Trails to you,
Until we meed aggen,

Happy Trails to you,
Keep smiling until then…”

Kid: “Just a minute!”
Roy: “Whoar, there, Dale. Here’s a fan.”
Dale: “Hi, there honey. D’you wanna join in the song?”
Kid: “No thanks. Are you really Roy Rogers?”
Roy: “Sure am, pardner.”

Kid: “ ‘King Of The Cowboys?’”
Roy: “That’s what folks call me.”
Kid: “I thought Buffalo Bill was ‘King Of The Cowboys’. It says so in my Buffalo Bill Annual.”
Roy: “Who in tarnation is Buffalo Billy?”
Kid: “He was a famous frontiersman and Indian fighter in the 1870s. He killed Chief Yellow Hand of the Cheyenne in a hand to hand knife fight and was scout for the 7th Cavalry, AND he wore a proper buckskin shirt, not a poncey tablecloth with fringes like the one you’re wearing.”
Roy: “Gee! But could he play the guitar and sing?”
Kid: “He didn’t have the time. He was too busy fighting Indians.”
Roy: “Hey, I fought a load of Indians only last week. The varmints overcharged us for a coupla vindaloui’s.”
Kid: “How come there are cars in your films? They weren’t invented when the great Sioux Nation roamed the Plains. What’ve Cadillac’s got to do with the Wild West?”
Roy: “You gotta move with the times these days, son. Besides, old Trigger ‘ain’t getting’ any younger and he gets plumb tuckered out treckin’ around t’ all the locations. Hey, Dale. Are you sure I’m showin’ my best side to the camera here?”
Dale: “You look mighty fine, Roy.”
Kid: “Are you any good with a lasso?”
Roy: “Am I any good with a lasso? Tell eem, Dale.”

Dale: “Let’s put it this way, angel face: without his lasso, he’d never catch me when he chases me round the corral every night.”
Roy: “’An she just loves bein’ hog tied, dontcha, Dale?
Dale: “Roy, you’re embarrasin’ me. I’m blushin’ like a Texas Rose.”
Roy: “OK, son, that’s all we got time for. We gotta finish the song. You want my autograph?”
Kid: “I think I can live without it.”
Roy: “Right, a-one, two, three, four…”

Roy and Dale: “Happy Trails to you,
Til we meed aa-gee-ern.”

Roy: “Who was that young whipper-snapper, Dale?”
Dale: “Says he was Billy The Kid.”
Roy: “If he was, then my name’s Gene Autry.”
Dale: “Roy! You shouldn’t blaspheme so. The Good Lord might be a-listenin’.”

* * * * * * * * * *

Honey, I love you too much
Need your lovin' too much
Want the thrill of your touch
Gee, I can't hold you too much
You do all the livin'
While I do all the givin'
Cause I love you too much

You spend all my money too much
Have to share you honey, too much
When I want some lovin', you're gone
Don't you know you're treatin' me wrong
Now you got me started
Don't you leave me broken hearted
Cause I love you too much

Ev'ry time I kiss your sweet lips
I can feel my heart go flip flip
I'm such a fool for your charms
Like to hear you sighin'
Even though I know you're lyin'
Cause I love you too much

Need your lovin' all the time
Need you huggin', please be mine
Need you near me, stay real close
Please, please, hear me, you're the most
Now you got me started
Don't you leave me broken hearted
Cause I love you too much




Chapter 42. AL CAPONE

     Alf really liked the way the party for Brendan and Berrie went and decided to throw another just for the hell of it, this time including the members of the youth club who, taken with the Bradley hospitality, had kept coming to the house once a week long after Alf disassociated himself with the club proper because of the Church’s interference, and also stopped running it from 120 ImperialWay.

     There were about a dozen members who stayed around, including Jack on occasions, though he saw himself as a bit old for that kind of thing being 21 and all. Alf decided that everybody should contribute to the booze kitty and charged 10s per head. To a man they coughed up, the gentlemen amongst them contributing for their girlfriends a swell. Those that weren’t, didn’t.

     Alf reconstructed the bar he’d used for the youth club in the corner of the living room, and we were all set. Connie was still involved in running the club in the church hall and had been joined by the Scout Master of the St Aiden’s Troup, Charlie Thomas. Charlie, a sandy haired, freckly diabetic in his 30s was a scoutmaster in his spare time and a probation officer at work. He was stereotypically dressed for the job: tweed jacket, cavalry twill trousers, a thick cardigan with leather football buttons and open-toed sandals over socks. He had a funny little badge on his lapel and I once asked him what it was for.

     “Ban the Bomb,” he said with a grin. “We’re going to march to Aldermaston this Easter.”
     “What for?”
     “To ban the Bomb.”
     “Oh, right.”

     With his pipe permanently clenched between his teeth below his ginger moustache, and belching out huge plumes of choking blue smoke, Charlie was thought to be too much like a school teacher to be of any interest to the youth club members.

     But not only was he very experienced dealing with the rougher side of the day’s youth culture, he was also very quick-witted and a great teller of stories and anecdotes.
     “So this bloke sitting opposite me on the train leans over and touches me on the knee. I thought he was after a quick grope but he said, ‘“That’s really disgusting. You’re poisoning the atmosphere. I think you should put it out.

     “So I took the pipe out of me gob and looked at, you know to make sure it was actually mine, then stuck it back in again. I leaned over and looked down the gangway - it was one of those open carriages, you know. There weren’t many people about and it was a smoking compartment. Then I pretended to look startled like I’d just dicovered oil, you know. So I lean over to the bloke and I say:

     “‘I say. I’m really dreadfully sorry. I didn’t realise that this was YOUR carriage.”’
     “You should’ve seen his boat race. He just went Puce. Laugh? I nearly bought me own beer.”

     Charlie showed YC members that he could hold his own with any of them and was eventually accepted as part of the scene. Tony Ashby, an overweight, chain-smoking would-be thug was once sitting leaning backwards on a chair blocking the hatch where tea was served in the outer room of the church hall:

     Charlie: “Move out the way, old man. You’re blocking the passage.”
     Ashby, shuffling sideways: “Isn’t you got nuffink better to do than ponce abart ‘ere givin’ fuckin’ orders.”
     C: “Yes indeed. I can assure you I’ve got much more interesting things to do than hang around here.”
     A: “Then why don’t you piss off an’ do ‘em.”
     C: “Because I like the air and the company - some of it.”
     A: “You look a right git with that college scarf ‘anging round your neck. What’re you? Some kind of clever dick?”
     C: ( Examining the scarf), “I thought it rather fetching. I’ve got a couple of degrees, if that’s what you mean. I ‘spose it does make me a bit of a clever Dick.”
     A: “What d’you do, any’ow? You work in an office?”
     C: “Yes, I work in an office.”
     A: ( Imitating a typist,) “Wot, you sit be’ind a tipritter all day, d’ya?”
     C: “ No, I have someone to do that for me.”
     A: “So wha’d’you do, then? Wot sorta job you got?”
     C: “I sort people out.”
     A: “Was ‘sat?”
     C: “I sort people out.”
     A: “What sorta people?”
     C: “People with problems.”
     A: “What sorta problems?”
     C: “This and that.”
     A: “You takin’ the piss?”
     C: “No, I’m just explaining what I do.”
     A: “I ‘ain’t got no problems, anyway.”
     C: “Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?”
     A: “What?”
     C: “That you haven’t got any problems, I mean.”
     A: “ I said, you takin’ the piss?”
     C: ‘I thought you said you didn’t have any problems.”
     A: “I ain’t.”
     C: “I think your problem is you’re paranoid.”
     A: “What’s ‘at mean?”
     C: “It means, old son, that you think everyone’s getting at you all the time.”
     A: “You talk crap, you do.” He dogged one Marlborough and lit another.
     C: “Do I? I wouldn’t be so sure if I were you.”
     A: “You talk crap, like I said.”

     Charlie re-lit his pipe and just grinned at Ashby through the thick blue haze of their combined pollution.
     A: “You are takin’ the piss. I’ve a good mind to take you outside and give you what for.”
     C: “Oh. Now I recognise you. You’re Al Capone’s tea boy.”
     A: “I’m tellin’ you, you’re really asking for it.”
     C: “It’d take a man, not his dinner, old son.”
     Charlie thrust his hands into his pockets and puffed up a few more clouds of Erinmore Tobacco, grinning through the fog at the big youth on the chair. Ashby got up off the chair, straightened himself, then turned away and shambled into the main hall.
     A: “Wankar!”
     C: “You know what they say. It takes one...and all that.”
     Connie: “You shouldn’t push your luck with some of these blokes, Charlie.”
     Charlie: “He just needed taking down a peg or two. He’s all right. Quite a nice bloke, actually.”
     After that, Charlie and Tony Ashby would often laugh and joke together. They generally took the piss out of one another but it was very good-natured.
     A: “Look. ‘Ere ‘e comes. Fuckin’ brains spillin’ art all over the place.”
     C: “Allo, Tone, me old mate. Like the wastecoat. Who’s your tailor?”
     A: (Proudly tucking his fat little fingers into the pockets of the lurid paisley waistcoat,) “Burton’s, innit.”
     C: “Really? I always thought they had a great sense of humour.”
     A. (Leering at his two sycophant henchmen,) “E’s a cunt, in ‘e? At least I can afford proper shoes instead ‘o them fuckin’ Jesus creepers ‘e wears. An’ look at them fuckin’ socks. They look like some kind ‘o fuckin’ vegi-able soup.”
     C: (Grinning through a fog bank of Erinmore smoke.) “You’re a real wag, you are, Tone.”
     A: “A what?”
     C: “ I’ll tell you when you grow up.”
     A: “See? I told you ‘es a cunt, din’ I?”
     Charlie put up his fists as if sparring, ducking his head sideways.
     A: (Laughing,) “Wankar.”
     C: (Imitating Tone,) “Wankar.”


     CRAPPER

     The next party also went well. It was oversubscribed with booze, which helped. The assorted guests were about a dozen youth clubbers, a few neighbours, and some interlopers who’d been invited (with permission from Alf) by Brian Thomson, a senior youth club member who at 25 was considered an elder statesman.

     He lived opposite my Nan in slades drive and he brought along his best friend, Vincent Saunders, a very straight Irish Catholic young man who wore very conventional clothes for the time: always a conservative Burtons suit with non tapered trousers, a white shirt and tie.

     We’d always thought Vincent wouldn’t say boo to the proverbial goose, his Mother being a fairly strict God fearing woman who went to church twice every Sunday and ran a tightly organised, God fearing household.

     I used to play with Vincent’s younger brothers, Edward and John, when I was younger and stayed at Nan’s house during the school holidays when Connie went to work. Their Belfast accent was very strong, and I was always a bit put out that neither they nor their Mother could ever pronounce my name properly. “Neeel.” was how it sounded and John, who was about 3 years younger than me and the proud and knowledgeable owner of what looked like Patton’s whole 6th Armoured Division army as lead soldiers, called Germans, Jairmins.

     Vincent must have often tried to suck the chalice dry at Holy Communion. The very whiff of alcohol attracted him like a bluebottle to a dead cat. In the space of 5 minutes he’d refreshed the bits that the Holy Stuff couldn’t reach and become the life and soul.

     He brought two of his own friends with him, Mike and Sonia. They were a couple, but they must have had a fairly open relationship because Sonia seemed to snog every bloke in sight throughout the evening, including Vincent whenever he grabbed hold of her, which was frequently. Sonia never snogged me, of course.

     Pity, really. She was short, dark and pretty with a very prominent chest that stretched her crisp white blouse way beyond where it was supposed to be stretched to. (The sort of thing 12 year-old boys notice and that they never grow out of.)

     The sitting room and the dining room were divided by two double doors which Alf removed to give everyone more room, especially Vincent who needed it most, spending the evening staggering about banging into everything - people, walls, doors, the cats, Brian Thompson, who he also tried to snog a couple of times, and who spent a good deal of his evening trying to keep Vincent out of trouble.

     “Come on, Vince. Why don’t you sit down on this nice comfy chair and have a rest.”

     “Crapper, my old friend,” (Vincent always addressed his best friend as Crapper) “you’re sho wond’ful. “ Uv I ‘ver tole you ‘ow mush I loves you, Crapper me old mucker. Thtssh good, that, ennit. Crapper - Mucker. Sort of goes t’gevver. He, he, he ,he, eh, dinnit?”

     “Come on now, Vince. What would your Mother say if she could see you now?”
     “My Mother? Jeeshsush! Who invited her? Sheesh not really here, ish she? Bloody Chrisht! I gotta hide! Hide me shomeone. (with a leering grin) You’ll hide me, won’t you Shonia? Come here and hide me in your ample busshomsh. She’s got ver ample busshomsh, hashn’t she, Crapper, my old mucker. Ooooooh! Yesh. Vey ample. Higgle-giggles.”

     Both Brian and Vince became quite close friends of the family, both vying for the attentions of my sister, Kathryn, or Keyhole Kate, as Jack Head used to call her.

     Neither was successful and I don’t think Vince over got over the pain of rejection and he later joined the army to forget, he said. (In truth he was one of the last conscripts before National Service was abolished and spent 2 years in the Pay Core in Devises.)

     Several times, when Vince was home on leave there’d be a knock at the door late in the evening and he’d be standing there tottering with a stupid grin on his face trying not to fall over.

     "Shorry to sturb y’all, but could I come in an’ shober up b’fore I go home? My mother will bloody kill me if she shees me in this shtate.”

     Brian was more philosophical and threw himself into his sport. Not that he ever needed an excuse to indulge himself. He was a keen cyclist, football player, runner, squash player, Tennis player, swimmer - if you could play it, Brian Thompson did. But he was an accident-prone sportsman.

     I came home from school one Friday to find the luckless Mr T. sitting by the fire in the front room talking to Connie, or trying to. He seemed to be having difficulty getting the words out. Any words. He didn’t look at all well. The lower part of his face looked red and swollen and when he smiled, or tried to, a look of agony spread from ear to ear like a shadow.

     “Brian’s fallen off his bike.” said, Connie, concerned.

     Brian looked at me, then painfully, slowly, parted his lips and revealed....nothing. Where his front teeth should have been was space. The entire 2 rows of front choppers, top and bottom had mysteriously vanished.

     There’s a hill near Sevenoaks called Poll Hill. Notoriously steep and un-forgiving, it is a well-know challenge for sporting cyclists, to see how fast they travel down or if they can stay in the saddle climbing up it.

     Brian had been going up, and while bending down to adjust his toe clips had inadvertently taken his eyes off the road long enough to plough into the back of a broken down lorry. He left his teeth and quite a bit of his blood at the roadside, acquiring a few bits of gravel in his cheeks instead.






Don’t forget the Fruit Gums, Mum’

The Man In Black:

“I shall now endeavour to scare you witless before we proceed with tonight’s story."


* * * * * * * * * * *



Wyatt Earp, Wyatt Earp,
Brave, courageous and bold,
Long live his fame,
And long live his glory,
And long may his story be told.

Chapter 43. HOWDY DOODY.

     All bragging apart, the Bradley reputation for a damn good wingding spread far and wide – well, at least as far as Bromley. The first party took place in 1958, the last in about 1980. Various excuses were used. Summer, Christmas, spring, Wednesday, wedding anniversaries or just, “let’s have a party.”

     In 1960, some bright spark suggested having a themed Wild West party. That sounded like a good idea, at least to the youth club blokes.

     At the time, British Television was festooned with Westerns and ran one every night of the week, sometimes two a night to fit them all in. None were authentic in any way, but the appetite for them seemed unquenchable.

     There was ‘Wagon Train’; ‘Bronco Laine’; ‘Alias Smith and Jones’; ‘The Virginian’; ‘Cheyenne’; ‘Gun Smoke’; ‘Bonanza’; ‘Maverick’; ‘Rawhide’; ‘Last Of The Mohicans’; ‘The Lone Ranger’; ‘The Range Rider’; ‘Have Gun Will Travel’; ‘The Rifleman’; ‘Circus Boy’; ‘Rin-Tin-Tin’; ‘Steve Donavon - Western Marshal’; ‘Roy Rogers’; ‘Lawman’; ‘Fury’; ‘Champion The Wonder Horse’; ‘Flicka’; ‘The High Chaparral’; ‘Boots And Saddles’; ‘Buffalo Bill Junior’; ‘The Cisco Kid’; ‘Laramie’; ‘Annie Oakley’; ‘Bat Masterson’; ‘The Tenderfoot’; ‘Wyatt Earpe’ to name a few.

     Straight away all the menfolk started claiming TV heroes they were going to the party as.

     This didn’t leave much for the girls. There was only one woman of note on Cowboy TV: ‘Kitty’ from The Long Branch Saloon in ‘Gun Smoke’. The couldn’t all be Kitty, but I don’t suppose any of the Cowboys would have minded, Kitty being the owner of a house of ill repute. Roger Pierce, the Youth Club Leader opted for the mysterious ‘Paladin’, aka, Richard Boone from ‘Have Gun Will Travel’. Roger had plenty of black outfits and as Paladin wore black, was sorted apart from a Colt 45.

     Tony Brown, a massive bear of a bloke who went out with my sister for a short time, (He stepped in and offered his services as Brian Thompson, Vince and Nigel were beginning to show signs of jealousy towards each other) opted for Flint McCullough, from Wagon Train as did one or two others. McCullough was played by Robert Horton, who I don’t think ever played any other part in anything else on account of the fact that he thought he really was Flint McCullough. Old Flint was a real heartthrob but I don’t think any of the Chislehurst or Mottingham home - growns measured up as far as our local squaws were concerned.

     MEXICO

     Ray Perriman, who also went out with Kathryn for a while, decided to be a sleeping Mexican and planned to kip quietly in a corner under his sombrero and blanket. Stan Peck, who was actually going out with Kathryn at the time grew his sideburns and a thin moustache, which was easy in his case, being dark and swarthy, but he just looked like an unshaved Stan Peck.

     Ray’s best mate, Nigel, who always wanted to go out with my sister but didn’t got past first base, elected to be barman. Nigel commandeered a real flintlock derringer we had lying around and, filling the powder box with caps, used it to great effect, deafening anyone within a quarter of a mile radius of 120 Imperial way.

     Once again, Alf removed the double doors but this time replaced them with two-saloon type swinging ones made of plywood and sprung with elastic bands so that blokes could shove their way though during the gunfights, of which there were plenty. By the end of the evening, or more like early the next morning, the air was acrid with cap gun smoke and everybody had been shot at least10 times.

     I ended up wearing a tin helmet from the 2nd world war and an old grannies fake fur jacket, though quite why, I’m not very sure. Remembering Tom Ryalls fantastic gun belts and holsters from 1953, I’d cornered his brother Kevin on the way home from school one evening and asked if I could borrow them.

     “You’re joking,” he said, “They’re long gone, but I wouldn’t mind going out with your sister.” He looked at me kind of funny.

     I was determined to have a properly constructed holster and not one of the jokey Woolworth jobs, so I set about slashing up the very fine leather school satchel that my Granddad had bought me for Christmas several years before. It worked a treat and I completed the ensemble by buying a toy Buntline Special, a replica of the long-barrelled colt 45-hand gun used in the TV series by Hugh O’Brien ‘Wyatt Earp’.

     STAN THE MAN

     Stan was yet another pretty mean guitar player and the owner of a fabulous white Grimshaw guitar, rare in those days and even rarer now. While he was around, which wasn’t that long, Stan became another hero of mine and was gracious enough to show me a few handy Rock ‘n’ Roll licks including the opening riff to Elvis Presley’s,’ King Creole’.

     Stan opened a few more musical doors for me including the one that Jim Reeves was hiding behind. (On reflection, perhaps he should have stayed there.)

     In those days, Reeves was a genuine Country star but it wasn’t long before his romantic, syrupy ballads started to appeal to Grandmas and became extremely unpopular with the younger generations, not to mention County Music fanatics who ostracised him. It wasn’t until he helped create the joke about singing and crashing into mountains that he found fame amongst them again.

     Kathryn got fed up, amongst other things, (didn’t we all) with Stan going on and on about the ‘Smashin’ aases’ in the block where he and his family lived on the Cold Harbour Estate. It was after all, just another council estate, respectable by comparison to the Mottingham Estate and a lot less dangerous, but never-the-less, just another
council estate.


‘Tide clean. Tide clean. Tide clean’

Here is a police message: “A man was knocked down by a lorry at the junction of White Cross Lane and Wellington Street, High Wickham on Tuesday September 6th. The man received injuries which have improved his looks incredibly. Would anyone who caused the accident or who can give information, please contact the police at Scotland Yard, telephone number, Whitehall 1212 and ask for Janice.”


Here is a special announcement. Will Peter Brooke, last heard of 3 years ago living on the Isle of White, please contact the special sideburns unit at the Whipps Cross Animal Hospital, East London, where his cat, Spike, is about to have puppies.



* * * * * * * * * * * *

Well, if you hear somebody knockin' on your door
If you see something crawlin' across the floor
Baby, it'll be me, and I'll be lookin' for you

If you see a head a-peepin' from a crawdad hole
If you see somebody climbin' up a telephone pole
Baby, it'll be me, and I'll be lookin' for you

Gonna look on the mountain and in the deep blue sea
Gonna search all the forests and look and look in every tree

Well, if you feel somethin' heavy on your fishing hook
If you see a funny face in your comic book
Baby, it'll be me, and I'll be lookin' for you

If you hear a thought a-callin' out in the night
If you see somebody hangin' from a lamppost bright
Baby, it'll be me, and I'll be lookin' for you

If you see somebody lookin' in all the cars
If you see a rocketship on its way to Mars
Baby, it'll be me, and I'll be lookin' for you

Gonna look in the city where the lights are blue
Gonna search the countryside, all the haystacks, too

If you see a new face on a totem pole
If you find a lump in your sugar bowl
Baby, it'll be me, and I'll be lookin' for you


Chapter 44. GROUPS.

     Stan Peck and Mirabelle, who used to play lead Guitar in ‘The Moonrakers’, Ron Herring and a drummer called Vic Flatt, formed a band about the time when Cliff Richard and The Shadows were at their peek.

     They practised in a hall behind the Tiger’s Head in Crown Lane, Chislehurst, rehearsing every Wednesday night. (That’s Stan and the band – not Cliff.) I used to borrow Alf’s bike and go and listen to them though I doubt I would have been invited if Stan wasn’t still going out with Kathryn at the time and, I supposed, wanted to keep her sweet.

     I don’t remember the band having a name, but they played mainly cover versions of whatever was on the hit parade at the time, and to my young ears, they sounded very good. Mirabelle (Mick Moor) played bass on a converted version of the old Weapon, Stan, lead guitar and Roy Herring did the vocals and played rhythm guitar.

     They were auditioning Nigel for the job of rhythm guitarist at the time so that Roy would be free to leap about and wiggle a bit and practise his Cliff Richard / Billy Fury sneer. Nigel would sit just off the stage and strum along on his Hofner Senator acoustic.

     The trouble was, though Nigel was left handed, he played guitar as a right hander which did little for his rythmic prowess and I overheard a couple of the band saying they didn’t think he was really up to the job. I knew I could do the job really well and ached for the chance.

     They all knew I played, but I guess, at 13, they just considered me too young. Nevertheless, I did toy with the idea of turning up wearing a sandwich board with the inscription:

LOOK. I’M OVER HERE.
I CAN DO IT, REALLY.
I’LL WEAR A FALSE BEARD IF IT HELPS,
IF ONLY YOU’LL GIVE ME THE BLOODY CHANCE.
I WON’T LET YOU DOWN.
I’M GOOD.
REALLY GOOD.
YOU WON’T REGRET IT…

…or something. But I didn’t.

     HANK B

     Another near band experience I had was a couple of year later when I was in the 5th Form at the Edge and about to take my O’levels. I noticed Stuart Grey had taken to wearing black, horn-rimmed glasses like the one’s Hank Marvin of the Shadows wore.

     I think they had plain glass, but whatever, I thought it was a bit extreme. I hadn’t really spoken to Stuart or his mate, Tony Ford, for longer than I could remember, having got fed up with them taking the piss all the time on account of me being small for my age. I decided they were all a bunch of wankers and losers anyway and going nowhere. (It was a different story a couple of years later when they thought I’d joined the Rolling Stones)

     Then, out of the blue, Stuart invited me down the road to his house one Sunday morning, saying he had something to show me. When I arrived, Tony Ford and his alter ego, Barry, were both there and I immediately felt suspicious. Proudly, Stuart produced a flash looking, bright red solid electric guitar from a case behind the sofa and handed it to me.

     “What d’you think? I’ve just bought it.”

     It was OK, and by the look of it, I knew what had been in his mind when he bought it. Now the black glasses made some kind of sense, depending how you looked at them, or in Stuart’s case, through them. Hank Marvin played a red guitar - well, it was red in the magazine pictures, but the reproduction was so poor in those days, the colour was very inaccurate, but as we all only had black and white telly, it was all we had to go on.

     Hank’s guitar was in fact, a salmon pink Fender Startocaster and, at that time, you couldn’t buy Fenders in this country, and even if you could, they were out of reach for all of us, pricewise. Anyway, Stuart’s Hofner had 3 pick-ups and a tremelo lever, and despite the red plastic covering, stuck on the body like so much Fablon, it wasn’t too bad an instrument.

     I plugged it into Stuart’s little practise amp, tuned up, and went straight into a few things that were in the charts, ending up with a Chet Atkins tune I’d just learned, ‘One Mint Julep’. I looked up when I’d finished to find them all open-mouthed.

     “We’re forming a band,” Stuart suddenly blurted out, “We’d like you to be lead guitar.”

     “I’ll bet you would.” I thought. I had no intention of doing any such thing, not with this bunch, anyway, and I made some excuses about being too busy with study and evening classes to have the time. They’d all had a lot of fun taking the piss for years and suddenly I was flavour of the month because not only did I have a guitar,but I could play it. Reluctantly, I agreed to help them get started and to give Stuart some lessons to begin with.

     For a couple of weeks, it went really well. Stuart was never going to be a natural player, but what he lacked in natural flare, he made up for in determination and struggled manfully through some excercises I gave him and actually managed to learn a couple of
things all the way through, despite his timing being all over the place.

     He told me that since he’d broken up with Elaine Lyn, a Welsh girl he’d been going out with for a couple of years and whom he referred to as his ‘Welsh Rare Bit’, he was going to make a new start and really get into music.

     Elaine was quite a feisty girl, fond of wearing fairly outrageous stuff for the day – like tight, red leopard skin jeans – obviously not afraid of parading her sexuality with great aplomb.

     What Stuart didn’t know at the time was that she was 3 months pregnant and that his dreams of becoming the next Hank Marvin or Buddy Holly, were about to disappear in a cloud of Johnsons Baby Powder and a high rise of terry-towelling nappies.

     Stuart said that he’d hired St Aiden’s Hall one Sunday afternoon and asked me if I’d go along with my guitar. Not thinking too much about it, I agreed. I got there first and was quietly playing away when in walked the other 3, or should I say, band.

     Stuart had his red guitar, Barry had a brand new Burns bass guitar and Tony was carrying a snare drum and two sticks under his arm. So this was it. They expected me to form them into a band, teach them all how to play their instruments, including drums, so that by tea time they could get themselves a record deal and make shit loads of money. The next 2 hours was very embarrassing and I’m glad they didn’t ask me back.




‘Graded grains make finer flower’




Annette Mills:

“ Here comes Muffin,
Muffin the Mule,
Dear Old Muffin,
Playing the fool,
Here comes Muffin,
Everybody sing,
Here come Muffin…whoops!”

SFX: Loud clatter.
“Oh, poor Muffin.
He’s gone arse over tip.
I knew we
shouldn’t have polished
that piano top this morning.”



* * * * * * * * *

HEY, IS HE REALLY GOIN' OUT WITH HER?
THERE HE IS, LET'S ASK HIM
HEY MAN, IS THAT YOUR RING SHE'S WEARIN'?
UH, HUH
MAN, IT MUST BE GREAT RIDIN' WITH HER
ARE YOU PICKIN' HER UP AFTER SCHOOL TODAY?
UH UH
BY THE WAY WHERE'D YOU MEET HER
I MET HER AT THE CANDY STORE
SHE TURNED AROUND AND SMILED AT ME
YOU GET THE PICTURE?
YEAH, WE SEE
THAT'S WHEN SHE FELL FOR
THE LEADER OF THE PACK
HER FOLKS WERE ALWAYS PUTTING ME DOWN
THEY SAID I CAME FROM THE WRONG SIDE OF TOWN
THEY TOLD HER THAT I WAS BAD
BUT SHE KNEW I WAS SAD
THAT'S WHY SHE FELL FOR
THE LEADER OF THE PACK
ONE DAY HER DAD SAID FIND SOMEONE NEW
SHE HAD TO TELL ME THAT WE WERE THROUGH
I STOOD THERE AND ASKED HER WHY
BUT ALL SHE COULD DO WAS CRY
"I'M SORRY I HURT YOU"
THE LEADER OF THE PACK
SHE WAS SO SMALL
AS SHE KISSED ME GOODBYE,
HER TEARS WERE BEGINNING TO SHOW
AND AS SHE DROVE AWAY ON THAT RAINY NIGHT
I BEGGED HER TO GO SLOW
IF SHE HEARD I'LL NEVER KNOW
NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO
I FELT SO HELPLESS WHAT COULD I DO?
REMEMBERING ALL THE THINGS WE'D BEEN THROUGH
THE GANG THEY ALL STOP AND STARE
I CAN'T HIDE MY TEARS BUT I DON'T CARE
I'LL NEVER FORGET HER
THE LEADER OF THE PACK

AND NOW SHE'S GONE
LEADER OF THE PACK

AND NOW SHE'S GONE
LEADER OF THE PACK

AND NOW SHE'S GONE
LEADER OF THE PACK


Chapter 45. HOGS.

     “First thing I’m goin’ to do when I leave school is to get a Norton Dominator,” Michael Pritchard leaned down over his desk arms wide as if hanging onto the handle bars, his right hand twisting the throttle wide open. “Eeeeeeeeeooooowwww!”
     “Shut up, Pritchard. You look like a moron.”

     Chris Chudley, Pritchard’s desk neighbour, his peculiar Bril-Creamed cake of hair sitting on top of his head like a cow plat, disliked his wing-eared, would-be biker companion intensly, despite the fact that the two were also practically next door neighbours near Chilsehurst’s exclusive Royal Parade. Chudley saw Pritchard as a common oik and wanted to have nothing to do with him. The fact that they sat next to one another had more to do with lack of alternative desk space than choice.

     “Come on, Chris. I bet you get a bike when you leave school.”
     “I wouldn’t be seen dead on one of those greasy, piles of crap. A Lambretta, maybe.”
     “Scoo’ ‘ers are for wankers! I’d blow you off the fuckin’ road on my Dominator.”
     “You’ll get blown off the road yourself with ears like those, Pritchard. You certainly wouldn’t need brakes.”
     “Don’t be such a cunt, Chris. I can’t help it. At least I don’t look like a fuckin’ poof with a haircut like that.” Pritchard said, pointing closely at Chudley’s scalp and making sure his finger didn’t make actual contact and disappear into the thick slime.

     The two thumped each other on the arm alternately, until Pritchard gave in.

     “Gerroff, you bastard.”

Pritchard’s ears did stick out like table tennis bats either side of the extreme short back and sides that his parents insisted on. He had a long, horse shaped face and teeth that looked too big for his mouth, making the whole ensemble of his face and head resemble a cruel cartoon. It seemed to me that Chudley was right and Pritchard’s side appendages would make pretty effective air breaks were he ever to get to ride his dream machine.

     While delivering papers on his push bike early one Autumn morning, a local bread delivery van skidded on some leaves, lost control, careered across the road, mounted the grass verge, and pinned the unfortunate Pritchard to the high, red brick wall of the house where he’d just dropped off The Times and a copy of Tit-Bits.

     Ironically, the top half of his right ear was severed in the accident, and though it was stitched back on again, the sad Pritchard never mentioned motorbikes or any other kind of bike again.

     This was 1960, and as 4A, our form room was in the huts, we moved to the Geography room on the 2nd floor of the main school building once a week for a lesson with Dick Spittle, the towering, Welsh, rugby playing giant.

     We actually sat in pairs at double tables rather than standard desks. (Maybe this was so that you had room to spread maps out or something) Pritchard and Chudley sat at the back of the room and Roy Barker and I sat in front of them and Dave Brotchie, a Buddly Holly fanatic, sat on his own in front of Roy and I.

     Brotchie lived in a new private house in Elmstead Lane, along with other members of the town’s ‘nouveau riche’, most of whom, like the young Scott’s successful businessman father, owned cars.

v     Chudley’s parents had a car, too, and so did Roy’s, but these were exceptions rather than the rule, cars being out of the reach of most of our parents, and of their offspring, according to the low wages we were to expect as apprentices when we left school. It would be £7 10s a week, if they were lucky.

     Motorbikes, however, were within reach. They weren’t that expensive, around about £200 for a 500 and even a lowly apprentice expected to be able to scrape together enough for a deposit within a couple of months in the outside world. To the average working class secondary modern school leaver, a motorbike was a sign that the rider had made it.

     It was a symbol of success. Of freedom; of virility; of having established himself as a creature reborn outside the confines and restrictions of the schoolboy role he’d been forced to adopt for the last 10 years.

     Motorbikes were a dream to focus on - a dream that could become a reality; a sign of rebellion, and of hot-blooded manhood.

     After all, if you couldn’t respect someone who was prepared to risk life and limb at 80mph (more often than not, claimed to be 110) aboard one of these flying missiles, his white silk scarf and hair trailing in the wind, (crash hats were strictly for cissies) and his sheepskin-topped, knee-length boots looking the dog’s bollocks along with his black, silver zipped, leather jacket that cost almost as much as the bike itself, just who could you respect? Even the names of the bikes were enough to get the Castrol flowing in the veins.

     ‘Triumph Thunderbird’; ‘Tiger 110’ and ‘Boneville Twin Carb’; ‘AJS Sports Twin’; ‘BSA (Biza) Road Rocket’ and ‘Gold Star’; ‘Royal Enfield Silver Bullet’ and ‘750 Super Constalation’; ‘Fish Tail Velocette Viper’; ‘Matchless G11’; the Triumph engined, Norton framed, ‘Triton’; and the ‘top of the tree’, 1000 cc ‘Vincent Black Knight’ and ‘Black Shadow’.

     The Vincents were the undisputed kings of the road despite their nasty, scruffy appearance. The engines were enormous and had bits that stuck out all over the place as if they were just too big to be accommodated in the frame. They didn’t sound too good at low revs, but once wound up, they were uncatchable, with a legendary, if improbable, top speed of 150mph. If you owned a Vinnie, your elevation to the realms of the immortal was assured, unless you hit something, that is.

     OUT OF ROAD

     On the road out from Blomley towards Biggin Hill, there were a series of bends that were a natural challenge to 50’s bikers. The most infamous of these was an uphill stretch that swept past a place known as the chicken farm, simply because that was what it was – a chicken farm.

     Dave Brotchie came into the geography lesson one day and gave out some news in his inimitable, casual fashion, “’Maybe Baby, I’ll have You-ou-ou, Maybe Baby, You’ll be true-ou-ou, Maybe Baby, I’ll have you-ou-ou for me…’ Della Toosh bought it last night out at the Chicken Farm. Leaned it over too far and lost it coming up the hill. Hit a lamppost chest first. Made a right fuckin’ mess of himself, I tell yer. ‘Well, that’ll be the day, When I say goodby-ee…’”

     I knew Della Toosh by sight, but I knew his bike even better. He used to sit side-saddle on the gleaming 250 Royal Enfield Silver Bullet parked outside The Gordon Arms opposite Belomont Parade, idly puffing away on a fag, his blonde hair spiked with sweat, being one of the few to actually wear a crash hat.

     The rest of his gear was also the standard stuff. Black leather Jacket, fur lined boots, white silk scarf. He’d dog his fag, start the neat little chrome beast up, and be off somewhere. It didn’t matter where, as long as it meant travelling a good road on the way. Della Toosh lived for his bike, and, at 18, he died because of it. His friend, John Emerson, lost his left leg below the knee a couple of years later riding an indentical machine. It almost seemed like he was paying Della a tribute.

     PILGRIMS

     I loved the bikes but never had any desire to own one myself. Mainly because I was a coward, and the idea of sitting astride one even at 30mph frightened me silly. I used to borrow Alf’s push bike on a Good Friday, cycle along the A20 towards Sidcup and sit on the grassy roadside banks and watch the steady stream of machinery charge up to Brands Hatch for the annual Easter race meeting.

     It was a must for every worthy biker – a place of worship where everything at the cutting edge of bike technology would be on display in the car parks. The continuous train of throbbing metal was awesome, and in the late afternoon, I’d go back and watch them make the return journey.

     I became a bit of an expert in a voyeuristic sort of way. I could tell the difference between a Triumph Bonneville, a Norton Dominator, and a BSA Road Rocket with my eyes closed. Today, I could expect a coment like: ‘And just how sad is that?’ But I didn’t feel particularly sad at the time.

     One memory that stands out was the sight of a Triumph Bonneville, with its distinctive pale blue tank and rubber-covered front springs, coming round the bend of the Road at the Eltham end, flat out and hotly persued by a turqoise and white Mark 2 Ford Zodiac with white wall tyres. The car was leaning over to the max on its thin tyres, the rubber squealing like a thousand rats in agony.

     There were 6 black suited blokes with the obligatory swept back hair and side-burns in the car and I wondered what was really going on in the mind of the Buddy Holly lookalike sitting in the centre of the front bench seat, nervously smiling and hanging onto the the roof for dear life and chewing frantically like gum was about to be made illegal.

     Maybe he was thinking: “Yeah, baby. Let’s go, go, go. Let’s get right up the fucker’s arse and plough him off the road.”

     Or was it really: “Oh, Jesus. Please, God, make him slow down. I don’t want to die. Let me live. Please let me live. I promise I won’t try and look down Veronica’s blouse again or put my hand up her skirt if only you’ll let me live.”

‘You’re never alone with a Strand’

Eamon Andrews: “And here we are back with Burry Mogford who, as you can see, hasn’t managed to answer a single question correctly on ‘Double Or Drop’ on this week’s Crockerjock…
Audience: “CRACKERJACK!”
EA: “…And consequently, he’s holdin’ a great armful o’ cabbages and not one of the really delicious prizes that he could’ve been holding if he’d been just a little better informed. Not a particularly great start, eh, Burry? It is Burry, isn’t it? I can’t really see your face behind all those veggies. Now, here’s your next question, Buzza, old chap. Whoi did the chicken cross the road?”
Barry: “Mmmbbblemphffff.”
Audience: “CRACKERJACK!”
EA: “Yes, that’s the correct answer. Well don, boot I’m sure he didn’t say Crockerjock, audience.”
Audience: “CRACKERJACK!”
EA: (under breath) “Boogor!”
Audience: “CRACKERJACK!”
EA: “Nigh. I didn’t say Cr… oim nart fallin’ fer dut won agin.”
Audience: “CRACKERJACK!”
EA: “Now, wot proize do we huv fer Burry here? A loovley trean set. Bit o a problem, dut. You dorn’t seem to be able to get hold of it, wot wit all dem cabbages yir holdin’ an’ yir not allowed to drop dem. Preps you cud balance it on yer hid, if Oi could foind yer hid, dut uz.”
B: “Mmmbbblemphffff.”
Audience: “CRACKERJACK!”
EA: “Thut’s an oidea. We cud try an’ stick it between yir knees. Here we gor, then. Yes, thut’s ut. Will dorn. Er, jurst worn ting. Bit o a problem here. My hund’s stook un ah can’t git op agin. Can you release yr grup on d’ train sit, Barry. Barry? Barry, cin yer her me? Burry…”

Audience: “CRACKERJACK!”
EA: “Oil give ye bloddy Crockerjock.”
Audience: “CRACKERJACK!”
EA: Cun sumboody gi me a hund, her? Burry! Yerv got to let go o’ t’ train set, nigh.”
Audience: “CRACKERJACK!”
EA: “BURRY, FR GOD”S SEAK, MUN!”
Audience: “CRACKERJACK!”
EA: “BURREEEEE!”
Audience: “CRACKERJACK!”



* * * * * * * * *


Don't want your lo-o-o-o-ove anymore.
Don't want your ki-i-i-i-isses, that's for sure.
I die each time
I hear this sound:
"Here he co-o-o-o-omes. That's Cathy's clown."

I've gotta stand tall.
You know a man can't crawl.
But when he knows you tell lies
And he hears 'em passin' by,
He's not a man at all.

Don't want your lo-o-o-o-ove anymore.
Don't want your ki-i-i-i-isses, that's for sure.
I die each time
I hear this sound:
"Here he co-o-o-o-omes. That's Cathy's clown."

When you see me shed a tear
And you know that it’s sincere,
Dontcha think it’s kinda sad
That you’re treatin’ me so bad,
Or don’t you even care?

Don't want your lo-o-o-o-ove anymore.
Don't want your ki-i-i-i-isses, that's for sure.
I die each time
I hear this sound:
"Here he co-o-o-o-omes. That's Cathy's clown.
That's Cathy's clown.
That's Cathy's clown."


Chapter 46. SMITHS.

     Next door to the Cooks, lived the Smiths. There were Mr and Mrs, Daughter Bella, and sons, Jack and Sonnny. Mr Smith, who’s name was also Jack, was a wiry little man with hornrimmed glasses and regulation army haircut. He was an ex-soldier and still kept his eye in by serving in the Territorials. He’d sometimes roll up in a beautiful, shiny Bedford army truck with the suspention jacked up so high, you could see between the chassis and the wheels. I don’t think the truck saw any action, it was always so immaculate, but it brought a great sense of British military pride and reverence to Imperial way.

     Mr Smith was also a member of St John’s Ambulance Brigade and at weekends would toddle off to Brands Hatch to attend the motorbike meetings on his little BSA 2 stroke, often having to try and resuscitate the odd bike racer who’d collided with something solid or who’s bike had come to rest on his head after man and machine had parted company.

     One Christmas, Santa gave Roger Cook and I identical repeating cap rifles. Eagerly, we knocked on Mr Smith’s back door to show the retired soldier our new weapons. He opened the door in his usual outfit of belt and braces and rolled up sleeves, forearms proudly displaying his war time tattoos, and immediately appeared to go beserk.

     “Don’t you ever point a gun at anyone!” he yelled.
     “But these are just toys…” one or both of us started to say.
     “That makes no difference. You might think that they’re not loaded but you can never be sure. Point them at the ground, NOW!”

     The tyrade went on for about 5 minutes while we stood incredulously to attention. All we’d wanted was to bag a few Cherokees we’d heard were lurking about on the estate, and this was Christmas Morning, the perfect time for it. Instead, all we got was General Patton on a bad hair day.

     Despite his occasional ravings, Poppa Smith was quite a nice bloke really, and generally friendly. He was not entirely a healthy man, however, and was given to peculiar fainting fits due to a heart problem. George Cook said he’d be standing talking to Jack Senior over the garden wall, when the blood would suddenly drain from the old soldier’s face and he’d grab hold George to steady himself,

     “Ooh, I’m goin’, George. I’m goin.” he’d wheeze, then slide down the wall and disappear from sight. Sometimes he’d recover after a few minutes, stand up again, and carry on the conversation, as if nothing had happened.

“Sorry about that, George. It catches me like that sometimes. What was I saying?”
     But mostly, he’d look like he’d died and someone would spring into action and call an ambulance.

     The two Smith Sons were heroes of Roger and I both. They were enigmatic, interesting, a lot older than either of us, and comfortably inhabited that twilight world between the freedom of leaving school and becoming just another boring adult.

     The eldest was Sonny, a merchant seaman, who would be away at sea for months on end but was the gossip of the neighbourhood when he came home. This was 1954, when men looked like men and women knew their place behind their men, and suddenly, there he’d be strolling up the road with his kit bag on his shoulder. His checked shirt would be unbuttoned down the front exposing a sun-parched chest, a huge brass buckled belt supporting faded jeans which tapered down to high heeled cowboy boots, or sometimes, if he was feeling particularly risqué, bare feet.

     He’d usually grown his hair down over his shoulders and pushed it back behind his ears Buffalo Bill style so that his 2 gold earing were properly exposed for the nosey neighbours to gawp at. Quite what General Smith-Patton made of all this was anybody’s guess though Sonny was big and muscely enough not to take much too much notice, if any.

     Jack had lank, blondish hair, forever falling down over his eyes and which he was perpetually scooping back over his scalp. It was probably why his head was always tilted up and his chin raised to give him more time between scoops. As a result he developed a distinct posture over time and, as he was a quiet man, a certain fascinating aloofness.

     Jack’s best friend, Laurie (I always thought his name was Lorry and that it was very brave of his parents to choose such a name) was never far away, and the two had been mates all through their school days. The prematurely balding Laurie, always the smiling, joking one of the two, was the perfect foil for jack and the pair would spend hours adjusting their drop handle bar push bikes when they were in their early teens simply because they had a fascination of mechanical things and loved messing around with spanners.

     If it turned, they’d turn it. If it undid, they’d undo it. If you could take it off, they’d take it off. If you couldn’t take it off, they’d find a way to make sure you could, and take it off anyway. As they got older, they were eager to capitalise on what they’d learned, and transfered their skill from pushbikes to motorbikes. Jack owned several over the years but Laurie never did. I don’t think he was all that keen on them but got involved because Jack wanted to.

     Jack and Laurie were as close as a couple of young men could be without actually being brothers, and had a bond between them that would be the envy of most natural brothers. And when Jack formed a combination racing outfit with neighbour, Tony Keable, Laurie was always around to lend a helping hand though he didn’t take part in the actual sport, except to help load the sidecar outfit they all built between them into the old Commer van they used as a transporter.

     RACING

     Tony Keeble lived next door to the Smiths. He was in his last year at Edgebury when I was still in the junior part of Red Hill. I met him once on the way from school. He was skating round in a circle on a wide part of the pavement just down the road from the school gates. He was wearing a badge in his lapel, which said: TRAVEL PREFECT, and I asked him what it meant. He said it was so he could ‘arrest’ any kid that he found up to no good away from the school premises. I thought it meant he could chase people on his skates.

     Apart from being a expert skater like Roger, Tony was a slightly ungainly, clumbsy sort of bloke, but what he lacked in charisma, he made up for in his keenness for motorbikes and started riding second hand machines as soon as he was old enough. He elected to be Jack’s passenger on the sidecar outfit, his slight recklessness and general belief in his own mortality, standing him in good stead and providing the necessary bottle neaded to hang his arse over the side of the thing around the demanding bends and corners of Brands Hatch.

     For the road, Tony eventually treated himself to a silver Triumph Tiger 100, while Jack made do with a very second hand 250 Norton for day-to-day riding, preferring to sink his money into the racing team. Tony must have stretched his own budget a bit to get the Tiger 100, because he had none of the posh biker outfits to go with it, making do with a waterproof overall and a pair of oversized Wellington boots that had a tendency to make him look like he’d crapped himself when he walked.

     During the late Fifties, apart from the 3 or 4 cars on the estate, there were a good half a dozen motorcycle combinations in varying degrees of roadworthyness. You only needed a motorbike liscence because the things had no reverse gear and were a darned sight cheaper than cars. You could get the whole chebang for less than a couple of hundred smackeroonies.

     If an owner of one of these contraptions became slightly more conservative in their ways or had a wage rise, they sometimes opted for a Bond Bug, a very noisy 2 stroke, 3 wheeled car, with a kickstart under the bonnet. The driver always looked to me like he was trying to put out a fire in the engine, standing there with one leg stuck inside, pumping it up and down for all he was worth.

     Eddie Ford, across the road in Gravelwood Close, had a combination before he graduated to his little black Standard that caused him so much heartache. Alf Crook had a smart Triumph 650 Thunderbird outfit with a bullet nosed sidecar in matching colour blue and finish; Mick Rickard’s folks had a delapitated 250 Norton job with what looked like the cockpit from a shot down, world war 2 Spitfire coupled to it.

     Mick’s Dad played Sunday Cricket in the summer and I’d sometimes go with him and his Mum and Dad as rear gunner in the sidecar when I was about 9. I used to pretend I was the Pilot of the Spitfire, my imagination enhanced by the thing shaking its way along like it was in the process of being shot down. It was smashing, to coin the risque phrase used by just about every Enid Blyton child character at the time.

     Alf’s step-neice Joan’s husband was traffic cop who Alf didn’t trust and said would run in his own Mother. (He threatened to do me for riding a bike on the pavement. Alf threatened to do him). A tall semi-albino, the cop had a state-of-the-art Winsonia Combination, which consisted of a Triumph Tiger 110 with full body fairing and what looked like a bubble car hung on the side. It was a fantastic looking bit of kit in black and white, but he was a complete nutter and rode the thing at full throttle everywhere, especially round the streets of the estate.

     He’d come steaming down Imperial Way at about 80mph, leaning outboard as if trying to tip the whole thing over on top of himself and hell-bent on going out in a misguided blaze of glory with his whole family for company. Little wonder Joan, in the bubble with her two terrified kids, always had her eyes tight shut.
“Wanker!” was Alf’s only observation.

     Jack and Tony crudely painted their team name on the side of the Commer van...

     SMITH-KEEBLE EQUIPE…

     …read the inscription, though quite what the ‘French’ emphasis signified, I’m not sure. I never saw them race so I’ve no idea how well they did. The venture only lasted a couple of seasons, because jack was killed in a freak accident on the little Norton 250 while coming home from work one day on the Rochester Way.

     It was a sad shock for the whole neighbourhood, not to mention the family. I saw Laurie coming back to the Smith household after the funeral, laughing and joking and trying to cheer everyone up because ‘that was they way Jack would have wanted it’, and supporting a very distraught Mrs Smith on his arm. Laurie was always there for Jack, right to the end.

     IN THE WARS

     In the 1950’s, the tabloid press saw it as just plain duty to outlaw ‘these damned ton-up machines’ as they labled the bikes. It some ways it was justified, I suppose. Accidents were frequent and the bikes were a lot less stable than they are today. Nor were crash helmets a legal requirement, which resulted in accidents probably being fatal more often than not.

     But disasters were also part of motorcycle folklore, handed on from one generation of ghouls to another, the unfortunate victims revered as posthumous heroes, gallant warriors of the road, lighting the way between The Dutch House on the A20 at Mottingham and Johnson’s Café, the infamous bikers’ gathering place at the top of Wrotham Hill and close to the bikers’ Mecca, Brands Hatch.

     The Dutch House sits behind a wide car park back from the road next to a bend on the A20 just before a railway bridge, the road sweeping beneath towards the South Circular Road to Lewishamd and Catford. One story was of a Triumph Tiger 100 bullet sidecar combination taking the bend a bit sharpish when the sideacar parted company with the bike and went stright on into the car park and a brick wall, killing the passenger. It was never clear whether the bike atually made it under the bridge or hit the railings, which protected the pavement under the arch.

     Another was of a girl pillion passenger on an AJS Sports Twin who was decapitated in a collision with a car as she and her boyfriend rocketed twowrds the Dutch House down the long sloping stretch of the A20, known as the ‘Mad Mile’, from the traffic lights at Mottingham Station.

     Whether these tales were true or not didn’t seem to matter. They were all part of the legend of the Fifties motorbike phenomenon and welcome conversation amongst schoolboy dreamers. At Edgebury, motorcycle garb, or something that approximated it, was school uniform to a lot of kids in the lower senior forms who would leave school as soon as they were able.

     Most of them felt at home in the metalwork shop in the huts. It was very much a ‘man’s’ domain with its smells of oil, sulphuric acid, iron filings and Brylcream. It was a bit like a garage in some ways, though in most garages you couldn’t have eaten your lunch off the floor.

     I hated the place. It just didn’t seem the right environment for the delicate fingers of a sensitive guitar player somehow. I mean, imagine how getting my digits caught in a vice or whacking one of them with a hammer could’ve damaged my technique. AbM7 on the 4th fret was difficult enough to hold down as it was.



‘Dreft keeps woollens softer,
Wash after wash after wash’



Mr Turnip: “Hello, HL. What are you doing?”

Humphrey Lestoc: “Oh, hello, Mr Turnip. I’m just having my lunch.”

Mr T: “Weally? What are you having, pwrey?”

HL: “Soup.”

Mr T: “It smells delicious. Do you have a stwaw?”

HL: “Here you are.”

SFX: Sluuuuuuuurp!”

Mr T: “Oh, it weally is vewy good. What is it?”

HL: “Vegetable.”

Mr T: “What sort of vegetable?”

HL: “Oh, just vegetable.”

Mr T: “That weminds me, HL. I can’t find my spare head. Have you seen it anywhere?”

HL: “Mmmmm?”


* * * * * * * * * * * * * *



Fe fe fi fi fo fo fum
I smell smoke in the auditorium
Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown
He's a clown, that Charlie Brown
He's gonna get caught, just you wait and see
Why's everybody always pickin' on me?

That's him on his knees, I know that's him
Yelling, "Seven come eleven down" in the boys' gym
Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown
He's a clown, that Charlie Brown
He's gonna get caught, just you wait and see
Why's everybody always pickin' on me?

Who's always writing on the wall?
Who's always goofin' in the hall?
Who's always throwin' spit balls?
Guess who?
Who, me?
Yeah, you

Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown
He's a clown, that Charlie Brown
He's gonna get caught, just you wait and see
Why's everybody always pickin' on me?


Who walks in the classroom, cool and slow?
Who called the English teacher 'daddy-o'?
Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown
He's a clown, that Charlie Brown
He's gonna get caught, just you wait and see
Why's everybody always pickin' on me?

Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown
He's a clown, that Charlie Brown
He's gonna get caught, just you wait and see
Why's everybody always pickin' on me?


Chapter 47. BENNY HILL.

     Gerald Hill, Edgebury’s Headmaster, was a small, hook-nosed man in his fifties, un-self-consciously balding. He made no attempt at the pathetic comb-over that so many middle-aged men of that time did. Who did they think they were fooling?

     With a small mole next to his nose which he occasionally rubbed with his forefinger on occasions as if for inspiration, he was known as ‘The Old Man’ by the staff members who naturally thought they could do the job better than he could. The boys called him Benny Hill and he managed to command respect even from the thugs in the school who made it public that they hated him.

     Dressed always in one of his two neat Burtons suits, one in green, one in blue, worn on alternate days, a rectangle of white handkerchief perched in the breast pocket, he struck a neat, tough little figure, feared and loathed as a disciplinarian, but an intelligent man of considerable integrity and teaching skill.

     Gerald Hill was short enough to be invisible above the heads of most of the boys and staff as he approached the stage in the main hall every morning for assembly. He’d walk to the far side of the stage to the lectern next to the organ piloted by the skinny Australian Music Master, Mr Macfarren, in the loud grey suit and colourful tie, usually ringing his hands and warming up his digits and preparing to attack the keys with his usual gusto. Stepping onto the lectern, Ben gained a foot of much needed extra height and stature as he turned to face his charges.

     “Good morning, boys.”
     “Good morning, sir.” replied the mixture of soprano and semi-broken male voices.
     “Good morning, Pointer. I said good morning, Pointer.”
     “Good morning, sir.” came the muffled voice of Pointer from the back of the hall.
     “We’ll begin by singing hymn number 375.” For such a small man he had a pretty powerful set of lungs.

     As in every assembly, the first hymn was always followed by the Lords Prayer and then the notices of the day. His mood was easy to read the second he stepped onto the stage: If his face showed a soft half-smile, what was to follow the service was bound to be boring with nothing much of interest for the mawkish appetites of the gathered company. But if his face was stiff and pale it usually promised the interest of some misdemeanour or other and the possibility of a victim to be named.

     Sometimes, he’d carry a cane curved like a scimitar, due, I always thought, to the many sudden visits it had made to various backsides. If he brought it with him it was always a signal of something really exciting to come.

     There were two female teachers employed at Edgebury during my time there. First to arrive was Mrs James, a woman of about 30, with light coloured wavy hair, gold-rimmed spectacles and a flat chest. She was tough, however, standing her ground against the burly school bully of the time, Tony Mullins, as he once tried to shove past her through a doorway.

     “Don’t shove me, Mullins. Stand aside and let me through. Sooner or later, you’re going to discover that you can’t just shove your way through life. You’ll come up against a lot of decent, hardworking, honest people out there when you leave school, who won’t be intimidated. Who won’t be steam- rollered and who’ll stand up to your bullying. You’ll find in this life, Mullins, you’ll have to earn respect. You can’t just beat it out of people. Now get out of my way.”

     Mullins stood aside and let her pass, probably wishing he had the nerve to punch her lights out or rape her right there in front of the traffic jam of scruffy youths that had quickly bunched into a traffic jam by the door. But he just stared, red-faced after her, inwardly seething, his guts, and what little brain he had, in meltdown, as she marched away down the corridor.

     Her admonishment had no effect. 5 years later, I was queuing outside the auditorium door of the Carlton Cinema in Orpington with my girlfriend, when the doors burst open and Mullins came out at the head of a stream of people. He rudely shoved his way through the waiting crowd still wearing his regulation brown leather gauntlets, black and white checked cap, dirty muffler and stupid grin. The word moron sprang easily to mind.

     COTTRELL-SMITH

     The second female teacher was Miss Ives. Tall, with deep red hair, a trim figure and large, pointed breasts, she was mentally lusted after by 110 percent of the school. She was put in charge of a junior class of 11 year-olds for a trial period, and half way through the first term, Ben stepped onto the stage carrying the scimitar and dressed in his dark blue suit. The look on his face would have been suitably topped off by a judges’ black cap.

     After the hymns, Ben stepped off the lectern and walked to the centre of the stage. He had a habit of twisting his right hand in mid air as if he was shaking a tambourine and delving around amongst his testicles with his left in the depths of his trouser pocket. After a few shakes he managed to find some words, his face a great black cloud of immanent thunder.

     “You may have noticed that we have a new lady member of staff, Miss Ives. You may also have noticed, that she is not present in assembly this morning. This is to save her from extreme embarrassment.”

     Ben’s hawk-like eyes scanned the sea of faces in front of him with a frightening, penetrating stare as if looking for someone. Searching for a clue. Searching for a victim. There was certainly going to be one. Every boy, no matter how innocent of whatever dreadful crime had clearly been perpetrated, felt a slight movement of his bowels. Shivers ran up and down 600 spines like a million spiders scrambling to find a way out. Ben took off his glasses and began using them to prod the air in front of him before he spoke, before he delivered the castigation.

     “MISS IVES HAS BEEN CRIMINALLY ASSAULTED BY A BOY IN THIS SCHOOL.”
He choked the words out, the right hand waving frantically by his right ear.“I don’t have to tell you that the boy in question has been dealt with most severely by me and furthermore, he has been expelled from this school.”

     I thought you could only get expelled from a public school like in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Apparently, not. We waited with baited breath to find out what on earth whoever it was had done. No such luck.

     “I’m not going to go into details for Miss Ives sake," he went on, "I will just say this: if any boy in this school EVER, EVER, behaves in such a way in future, though heaven forbid, or shows any kind of disrespect to a female member of staff, or a male member of staff, for that matter, then he will be dealt with just as severely. Do I make myself clear? DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?”

     “YES, SIR.” Chorused 600 gravelly voices.
The silence was deadly...until someone at the back of the hall farted. Ben ignored it. After all, it might have been a master, though probably some smart-arse made the noise with his gob rather than his smart arse. But how were we expected to avoid behaving in a particular way if we didn’t know what crime had been perpetrated in the first place? I had no idea but I wasn’t about to put up my hand and ask Ben the question.

     “Mr Edwards will finish the rest of the announcements.” Ben was obviously very upset, and picking up his scimitar and papers, he left the stage and the hall.
Turns out, Cottrell-Smith, a stuck-up little brat in 1A, had dropped a pencil on the floor by Mrs Ives’ desk as she was standing talking to another pupil, and by stooping down to pick it up and craning his neck, had tried to get a look up her skirt.

     Unfortunately for Cottrell-Smith, (or fortunately, depending on which way you look at it,) Miss Ives stepped back and Cottrell-Smith found himself beneath the billowing material of her skirt and amongst her stockings, suspenders, knickers and petticoat. All pink apparently. A pretty mind-blowing experience for an 11 year old I should think.

     At least, this is what the members of Cottrell-Smith’s class said had happened after they’d been threatened with a fate far worse than mere death by a couple of thugs from 3C, if they refused to cough up the info. My view at the time was that it was pretty stupid of someone to have allowed a lady teacher as ravishingly beautiful as Miss Ives within 1000 miles of a place like Edgebury. It was just asking for trouble. But I didn’t supposed for one moment that Benny Hill saw it that way.

     When I was in the 2nd year, we juniors missed what was probably a pretty spectacular execution. Terry O’Neil got 6 of the best in front of the senior school for inscribing pro-Nazi slogans on the wall of the senior canteen in soap from the washroom. We were party to the pre-chop lecture from Ben, however. It was really quite moving.

     He really lashed out at the mad corporal Hitler, describing him as one of the most evil men in human history, and considering the war in which 50 million people had died wasn’t all that far behind us in 1958, he had a point. He made mention of those of our parents and staff members who’d fought in the war and risked their necks to rid the world of the tyranny and of the millions who lost their lives on both sides as a result of Hitler’s madness.

     But according to the seniors who were allowed to witness O’Neil’s execution, after the last swipe of Ben’s cane hit the seat of his pants, O’Neil, a hefty curly-haired brute of Irish stock, just straightened up and grinned.

     TOILET TALK

     By far the most interesting incident concerning Ben and the assembled school was when poo was found on the walls, ceiling, floor and towels in the school toilets. I was a prefect in the 5th form and was shown the sight by the irate janitor, Mr Drage.

     It was a pretty disgusting sight and I’d just eaten a cheese sandwich, part of which suddenly found its way back into my throat. There were clumps of it everywhere. (The poo, not the cheese sandwich.) It was hard to imagine that someone had done this on purpose, and I preferred to think that some poor soul had had an accident of some kind.

     Mind, it would have had to have been a pretty spectacular incident to get the stuff on the ceiling. Surely no-one’s bowels could explode like that. Could they?

     When we were all summoned to the emergency assembly, we were intrigued to know how Ben was going to deal with this one. How was he going to describe the scene? More importantly, WHAT was he going to call the stuff that had the starring role?

     Appropriately, he was wearing his green suit this time. And brown shoes. He stepped onto the stage and walked slowly to the centre and stopped. He clearly didn’t want to speak about toilet matters from the lectern. He plunged his left hand into his pocket and raised the right till it was level with his ear.

     The virtual tambourine began to rattle and again he couldn’t seem to find the words. Then, finally, he began with part of one of Winstone Churchill’s speeches.

     “Never before, never before, lads, (‘lads’ meant he was feeling benevolent towards us - it was as if he wanted to share a confidence with us) in all my 30 years of teaching - in all my years as a headmaster, I have never come across an act so despicable. So sick. So perverted.”

     He paused and took a couple of steps across the stage. Then he came right to the edge. The virtual tambourine virtually rattled like the clappers. This was it. He was going to have to spell it out.
     “HUMAN MUCK! HUMAN MUCK, LADS. ON THE WALLS; ON THE CEILING; THE FLOOR; THE TOWELS. CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? WHAT FILTHY ANIMAL WOULD PERFORM SUCH AN ACT? IT DEFIES BELIEF.”

     It certainly did. Ben took his glasses off his nose and pointed at his audience with them.

     “HUMAN MUCK!” he shouted again as if he couldn’t believe the words he was using. “WHOEVER did this...” he voice grew quieter... “Did it in your name. (Yeah?) Do you realise that? That you have amongst you a creature who has carried out the most foul deed against decency...IN YOUR NAME? He is a fellow pupil. One of YOU. He tarnishes you all with his sickness, with his filthy act. He tarnishes your reputation as hard working, diligent, decent students. (blimey!) He smears your name with the same contempt he shows by smearing your walls, with his own muck. In your toilet. In your washroom. In the place where you go to clean and freshen yourselves as any civilised person would.” (If you could call the Edge civilised!)

     He’d done it. He’d found the words: Human Muck! Brilliant!

     “So, it’s up to you…to seek out this deranged animal, for that is what he is. Make no mistake. Find him before he does any more damage. Any more harm. If you know him already, it is your duty as civilised human beings, if that’s what you claim to be, to hand him over now. Hand him over so that he can be dealt with. So that he can be taken from your midst.

     If you don’t know him, it’s up to you as decent human beings to find him. To seek him out. This is your school; your place of work; your place of study. It should not be his. He is not deserving. Find him and we will rid you of him. Good afternoon. Gentlemen.”

     With that he left the stage. At least he didn’t say gentlemud.

     It was an amazing, impassioned performance. He left the hall and us in a state of stunned silence. The phantom poo hurler was never caught. Gladly, he never flung poo again.

     BROTCHIE

     Ben was fair. When we were in 4A, Dave Brotche who’d been promoted up a stream, was strolling casually homeward along Belmont Lane one evening and energetically sucking away on a Players Navy Cut, when he failed to recognise Ben’s green Austin A35 saloon that had slowed down beside him or the identity of the figure in the green suit inside frantically waving at him. Dave simply waved back.

     The incident earned Dave a thrashing with the traditional KCC cane from Ben and belting from Mr Brotchie, a dour, Glasswegan businessman, who, unfortunetly for Dave, didn’t wear braces. The next year, however Ben Showed that he bore no malice and promoted Dave, who’s conduct had always been good apart from the smoking misdemeanour, to prefect.

     Until Benny Hill arrived at Edgebury, the only chance you had at the end of your time there was to try and secure some kind of apprenticeship. Everyone left school at 15. There wasn’t a 5th year and GCEs were only for the privileged Grammar School pupils.

     Most became apprentice toolmakers or electricians and the less talented, carpenters or joiners. And these openings were strictly for ‘A’ stream boys. For those in the lower streams, any job was a job if you were lucky enough to find one at all.

     By the time I got to Edgebury, toolmaking apprenticeships etc. were opportunities for all including the lower streams, who had the opportunity to take exams and get some kind of qualification before leaving school.

     For the A streams, the way was open for O levels and the limit of the sky itself. I was relieved at this because I could never see that I’d be happy making hammers and chisels and stuff and couldn’t quite work out why the demand for producers of the things that Alf had in his tool box was so high.

     Of course, I later found out that the tools they were talking about were the specialist bits of kit that were fitted to lathes in order to produce anything to be manufactured. All of which sounded a mind-blowingly tedious way to spend one’s working life to me. I think in the main, most kids said they were going to be tool makers because they couldn’t think of anything else and this at least sounded respectable.

     “And what are you going to be when you leave school, Harry.”
     “A tool maker uncle Ted.”
     “Splendid. Splendid. (What the fuck’s that when it’s at home?)”

     So Benny Hill effectively upgraded everyone’s potential while he was Headmaster of Edgebury. And a damn fine thing it was for him to have done, I say.



‘Knights Castile. For that schoolgirl complection’






Fast paced Mexican style trumpet music.

Open on Duncan Renaldo dressed in poncey black and White Mexican outfit astride a colour co-ordinated Pinto pony as it rears up on a cliff top.

American MVO: “Here’s adventure…”

Cut to body double on horse skillfully plunging down hillside between rocks and boulders.

“Here’s Romance…”

Cut to our hero on horse belting along firing his shining sixgun at nothing in particular.

“Here’s O Henry’s famous Robin Hood of The West: ‘The Cisco Kid’.”

Cut to CU of our hero smiling at camera.

“Ze dog’s bollocks, no?”

Cut to wider shot of Cisco and his sidekick, Pancho, (Leo Carrillo) as their horses rear up.

Pancho: “Oh. Ceesco.”

Cisco: “Oh, Pancho.”

Pancho: “Lez went!”

The two disappear off screen on a cloud of dust.

Cut to commercials, which were even worse.





* * * * * * * * * * * * * *



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