Idiot Child.
Mad Family.
Growing up in Stevenage in the 60s and 70s
Growing up in Stevenage in the 60s and 70s
A New Town
Tell anyone you are from Stevenage, and you are likely to encounter one of two reactions.
One is a blank, uncomprehending stare. This is the response you get from foreigners. And from the middle-class Birkenstock
and Almond Milk brigade to whom a council estate is a mysterious place where foreign people, cheap cleaning staff, football
hooligans and moped riding robbery gangs live.
The likely response from those who have heard of the town would be a sharp backward step, and a discreet fumbling in their
pockets to make sure their wallet and car keys are still there.
The place of my birth has become a cliché of social toxicity. Teenage girls pushing double-buggies to the benefits office.
Gangs of feral youths wandering about in broad daylight stealing anything that isn’t nailed down. And padlocked. Whole
streets of the unemployed and the unemployable spending their days smoking booze-cruise fags and swilling cheap lager
while watching daytime TV on enormous tellies of dubious provenance.
I’ve heard them all.
Stevenage's most famous son, multiple Formula One World Champion Lewis Hamilton – for long a shining light and object
of pride for those of us raised in the town – has mentioned his upbringing there very little. And when he did it was
in an interview in the US during which he recalled how he had worked hard to “escape from the slums of Stevenage”.
There are no slums in Stevenage. There never has been. But it suited him to invent a kind of Dickensian nightmare estate in
order, one assumes, to accentuate his achievements. Achievements which are, it must be said, remarkable. He is a hugely
talented man. But by making this comment, he perpetuated a view of my home town as a kind of sepia-tinted hellhole of
barefoot children, poverty and desperation that was not, is not, deserved.
Stevenage was not created with cynicism or greed, but with optimism and positivity. It was conceived and designed to
provide an escape from precisely the kind of Victorian era deprivation that the term “slum” invokes. To give normal,
working people the chance of better life.
Society in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War was in a precarious position. Having fought a long war and made
sacrifices in both living conditions and, in far too many cases, actual lives, it was unlikely that the working class
would simply tug their forelocks and return to the factories and farms, gratefully and uncomplainingly accepting whatever
was offered by a privileged ruling class.
People – and the new breed of politician they supported - demanded change. Before the war was even over, in July 1945,
#they turned away from Winston Churchill, the victorious leader and icon, and instead, in a huge reversal, elected a
reformist socialist Labour government under Atlee.
This new government rapidly embarked on such an immense programme of modernisation and social re-ordering that, even now,
its scope is scarcely believable. Any present-day politician suggesting such breadth of change in such a short time now
would be laughed at in the street and side-lined as a lunatic.
But they not only attempted it, Atlee’s government largely achieved what they set out to do.
They implemented the first National Health Service, providing healthcare based on citizenship, not the ability to pay,
funded by a weekly contribution scheme from all working people. So welcome was this scheme, and so necessary, that in
its first year the NHS treated more than 8.5 million people for dental work alone, and supplied more than 5 million
pairs of spectacles.
The NHS quickly became something of which most people were immensely proud, as well as grateful.
Most people, that is, apart from the British Medical Association.
As a very vocal and influential body, the history of this august organisation’s actions regarding access to healthcare
free at the point of delivery may be worth a brief examination. Just so we know who we are dealing with.
A casual observer looking at the first half of the 20th century – the formative years for the NHS – could easily
conclude that the BMA’s sole function was the protection and enrichment of doctors.
The idea that they have always been a perennial protector of the weak and infirm is one which may lead to a lot of
tuneless whistling and the avoidance of eye-contact on the part of its management.
Let’s take a look at its reaction, in 1911, to the first proposal by the then government of a National Health Bill.
This was not a particularly ambitious proposal. It suggested that every employed person would pay 4 pennies a week
to insure themselves against the cost of treatment costs in the event they become ill.
The President of the BMA at that time, James Barr, reacted by telling his members that the bill was "the most gigantic
fraud which had ever been perpetrated on the public since the South Sea Bubble."
To give an idea of just how serious a threat the BMA considered a National Health Service, the “South Sea Bubble” was
the meltdown of the British economy in the 1700s, caused by reckless speculation in a company set up to exploit fishing,
which then expanded into slavery and finally into the managing of national debt. It collapsed in a puff of greed and
bullshit when it was realised the company had no trading potential, no prospect of any in the future, and was essentially
valueless. It was a Ponzi Scheme on an international scale.
And this is the hideously exploitative, cruel and dishonest fraud the President of the BMA felt justified in comparing
to the fledgling NHS, a wholly humanitarian and egalitarian wish to provide quality healthcare for the poor and the
working class.
Although, having said that, his views on the plight of the poor may be guessed at by looking at another of Mr. Barr’s
obsessions.
He was a fanatical adherent to the theory of Eugenics. You know, the thing the Nazis got really excited about.
He believed profoundly that saving the lives of the poor and the weak by providing basic healthcare was wrong. Not
just a waste of money, but actually damaging to the state of the nation.
In 1912, he addressed the BMA as its President, and said “No serious attempt has yet been made to prevent the race
from being carried on by its least worthy citizens…If such an attempt is to be successful, we must begin with the
unborn. The race must be renewed from the mentally and physically fit, and moral and physical degenerates should not
be allowed to take any part in adding to it".
As to who would determine the standards and parameters for moral, mental and physical acceptability, he did not say.
But I think we can assume it would be him and those like him.
You may think that such a mad view of the world, from someone charged with protecting the medical health of a nation
- a guardian of the Hippocratic Oath - would be something of a hindrance. That he may have suffered some kind of
sanction. At the very least, you may imagine one of his purple-nosed, port-swilling colleagues would put a gentle
arm around him and say "Listen William old chap, best we keep that kind of talk to ourselves when we're at the club, OK"?
But Barr was not embarrassed or repentant in the slightest. Even when given plenty of time.
In a 1918 speech, still as president of the BMA, he stated that “tuberculosis forms a rough, but on the whole very
serviceable check, on the survival and propagation of the unfit".
And added - in case we were not absolutely clear - ”If tomorrow, Tuberculosis were non-existent, it would be nothing
short of a national calamity. We are not yet ready for its disappearance."
Tuberculosis. TB. A disease responsible for the early and appalling deaths of millions of people, which still, even
today, kills hundreds of people every year. This is the disease the BMA considered “useful” because it killed off
whole swathes of people who were unlucky enough to be poor, and may therefore become a drain on resources which
could be targeted on more deserving cases – like rich people with TB.
It is worth taking a moment to remember that, when the BMA were approving TB as an effective means of killing off
the poor, the vulnerable and the weak, millions of young men – mostly working-class young men - were fighting and
losing their lives in the trenches of the Great War, fighting to protect the BMA’s freedom to publicly spout such
appallingly elitist bollocks.
Unsurprisingly, it is very difficult to find mention of James Barr on the BMA’s webpage or resources. Or his time
as their President. It’s almost as if they are embarrassed.
Just 26 years after Barr and his BMA were applauding the financial wisdom of not providing healthcare to those
most needing it, the new labour government came to power promising to introduce a National Health Service. It is
not a huge surprise that the BMA was one of the few voices to oppose it.
They were worried that their members may become mere employees of this new organisation, signalling an end to a
world where they tended to the rich, and were free to charge them whatever they judged they could afford.
Under a National Health Service, they may be forced to care for the great unwashed. To endure hoards of large men
and harried women with sickly children clogging up their pristine Harley Street practices and fragrant waiting rooms,
dirtying up the carpets with their hobnail boots and coughing all over the Canaletto.
They need not have worried unduly.
Because of their rabid opposition, and constant threats of industrial action, to get them on board the government were
forced into a corner, eventually allowing them to continue in their private practices at the same time as working within
the NHS, for which they were handsomely remunerated. So handsomely in fact, that Nye Bevan - the effective designer of
the NHS - described the deal as “stuffing their mouths with gold”.
That the government delivered an NHS, and we continue to benefit from it today, is something of a miracle. We should
remember, and be grateful, to all those politicians with integrity and humanity who forced the legislation through.
We should erect statues of them all outside the Houses of Parliament. And outside the headquarters of the BMA, we
should also erect another statue. A huge, working-class hand. Facing the building. With the middle finger sticking
proudly skyward. So, they can look out from their windows and see it. Every day.
But, for the government of the time, the gargantuan task of designing and implementing the world’s first national health
service - free at the point of delivery and a model for many around the world in the years since - was just one item on
#their to-do list.
They also introduced a comprehensive Welfare State, with automatic payment and financial support for sickness, maternity
and unemployment, and protection enshrined in law from the excesses and greed of unscrupulous employers.
They launched a State Pension Scheme, so all people over pensionable age received a weekly payment, allowing them to live
a decent life, to feed themselves, to keep warm in winter, to pay the rent – an automatic payment based on age, not social
position or influence or wealth.
No longer would the sick, the vulnerable, the abandoned, be left to starve or be forced to beg for support or funds for
healthcare from the worthies and well-to-do volunteers on the boards of local churches and philanthropic charities.
As if this convulsive change were not enough, they also instigated the nationalisation of many public utilities, from
coal and electricity, to steel, gas, water and the railways. The idea that the necessities of life would rest in private
hands where monopolies could hold the country to ransom for the benefit of rich shareholders was no longer blindly
accepted as the natural order.
Indeed, in the lifetime of the Atlee government, one fifth of the entire economy was bought effectively under state control.
At the same time as remodelling virtually every aspect of how Britain worked, the government also had to deal with the
nation’s new and hugely reduced position in the world order. Gone was the Empire, and the means to maintain it. One
quarter of the world’s surface no longer sat under the British flag. The Empire had been lost, sacrificed to fund the
fight against despotism on the battlefields of Europe, Africa and Asia, and on the oceans of the world. The country was
effectively broke.
The Empire was insupportable. The nation’s wealth, not to mention its vitality and its youth, had been spent on a more
altruistic exercise – contributing to free the world of Nazism. Britain was virtually bankrupt. It was simply no longer
possible to govern and manage an empire on which “the sun never sets”.
So, independence was granted – as a matter of necessity – to India and Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon and Jordan.
The USA – the great beneficiary of the war – was in an entirely different position. A huge population in a nation replete
with natural resources, it had rapidly become the armoury of the free world, with manufacturing facilities safely beyond
the range of the German and Japanese bombers. Factories were built or expanded or repurposed in order to turn out rifles,
guns, tanks, food parcels, uniforms, boots and aeroplanes in seemingly limitless quantities.
Shipyards were expanded and improved to manufacture vessels in quantities and at speeds never before imagined, let alone
seen.
By the last days of the war, US Shipyards could build a Liberty Ship – a 10,000-ton cargo vessel - in just 50 days. Think
of that. From a bare dry dock and a pile of sheet metal and rivets, to a fully built, fully fitted out, ready to sail 4
40-foot-long cargo ship. In 50 days.
The USA reached such a peak of manufacturing prowess and efficiency, it was both unprecedented in history, and utterly
breath-taking.
And when the war was over, US factories, and the country's infrastructure, were completely intact and undamaged. So,
they simply stopped making tanks and started making toasters and fridges and Chevrolets.
It was a nation running at breakneck speed in manufacturing terms, in an almost perfect storm of commercial growth.
There was a job for everyone. People in Chevrolet factories earned a good wage in stable employment, supplying markets
filled with pent-up demand.
With their wages, they could then buy the toasters and fridges that the workers in toaster and fridge factories made.
Who were also paid good wages, because their products were in demand, so in turn they could afford to buy Chevrolets.
John Maynard Keynes would have been jumping up and down, excitedly pointing at the factories and shouting at passers-by
“There…look…I told you so…”.
So, post-war, the US economy hit the ground not just running, but sprinting.
In Europe, it was a different story.
The primary battlefield of the war, it was smashed to pieces. The infrastructure was destroyed. There were no factories
left standing to make Chevrolets or toasters.
Austerity measures continued. Even at the height of the war, when the management of resources was a matter of survival,
not luxury, bread was never rationed. Presumably not just for nutritional reasons, but for the morale-sapping effect of
making people queue and provide tickets to qualify to buy this most fundamental and ancient of foodstuffs. Yet after
the war was won, in 1946, bread was rationed for the first time in Britain, and stayed that way for two years.
Times were tough. Really tough.
But the government was determined to create a better country for the working class.
So, not content with changing how the entire structure of society was organised, the new government also determined that
surviving in some unsanitary and cramped hovel at the mercy of an unscrupulous landlord, or living on your nerves in
accommodation tied to an insecure job, was no longer acceptable. There were instead to be homes for returning heroes.
New, clean, decent dwellings, built and owned by the state, and provided for the people at stable, reasonable and
subsidised rents.
But this would take money. Lots of it.
Fortunately, in an almost unbelievable act of charity that is unlikely ever to be repeated, the US launched The Marshall
Plan and gave billions of dollars to many European nations - including their erstwhile enemies - in both long-term soft
loans and straightforward gifts in order to rebuild their shattered countries.
Britain's final repayment on these loans made by the USA was not made until 2006.
Subsidised by a benign and generous ally, the British government unleashed a positive orgy of building, renovation and
development to create thousands and thousands of new homes to house the families who would take Britain forward into
the future. Local authorities were given new rights and responsibilities, and told to build houses. Lots of them. As
well as wholesale clearance and rebuilding in the cities, entire towns were conceived and built where none existed before.
“New Towns”.
The New Towns took the idea of the earlier, quaint and faintly Arts and Crafts "Garden City", and simply wrote it much
larger and more utilitarian. Out went the delicate Lutyens designs, the hipped roofs and clay tiles, the bay windows,
decorative woodwork and Georgian panes, the leaded glass windows and timber porches of Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City.
In came whole estates of cloned, robust, squat, solid houses in long terraces with concrete floors and metal framed windows.
During the term of Atlee’s government, four out of five of all houses constructed were council properties - conceived,
designed, built and provided for the working classes.
Between 1945 and 1951, over one million new homes were constructed. For people just like my mum and dad.
For my parents and their first baby, crammed into a privately rented bedsit in Muswell Hill in London with nothing but
a radio, a one bar electric fire and a Baby Belling cooker, the idea of having their own home was an unreachable dream.
Something for the rich.
And then they were told about Stevenage New Town.
Stevenage offered a new start for thousands of young families struggling to survive in post-war London. Set in the
verdant countryside of Hertfordshire, 40 miles to the north of the London, it was a planned community of new, modern,
clean, neat houses on carefully laid out estates - each one built, owned and maintained by the town council, and
offered at reasonable rents on secure terms.
It was a complete approach to town planning. Build the homes to house the workers, and at the same time build the
factories to attract large employers.
The many new factories, springing up on a monthly basis as companies flocked to the town to take advantage of beneficial
rents and rates, were located in a separate Industrial Area, keeping noise and activity away from the residential areas.
The two were connected by a network of cycle tracks allowing pedestrians and cyclists to leave their homes and get to
their place of work without ever having to stray onto a road if they chose not to.
The whole exercise was a stroke of genius. An all-inclusive exercise that could, perhaps, only have happened in the aftermath
of a war, when so much of society was ready for change.
Planning for the increasing leisure time of Stevenage residents as the world moved into the modern age was key to creating
the community too. Every neighbourhood got its own park and play areas, its own church, and its own shopping parade – the
trades of which were controlled to ensure the basic amenities, like a grocer, a newsagent, a chemist and a chip shop. Each
neighbourhood also had its own doctor’s surgery, and its own Community Centre where the WI could hold meetings and jumble
sales and the Philatelists Association could talk stamps.
There were Adventure Playgrounds, and huge wooded areas left undeveloped within the town boundaries, so kids could play for
hours in a natural healthy environment away from the roads and traffic.
At the heart of Stevenage was the Town Centre Shopping Precinct. In a hugely innovative measure, the enormous central
shopping area of the town was completely pedestrianised and surrounded by car parks. The nation’s biggest retailers
were all there, from Woolworths to Fine Fare and the Co-Op, and all set around paved piazzas with sculptures, artwork,
cutting-edge street furniture, benches and lighting. It must have been jaw-dropping for those seeing it for the first
time. Like those artist's impressions of the “The Town of the Future” in schoolbooks come to life.
The concept worked like a charm.
Huge technology companies, engineering works, packaging giants and global chemical businesses all flocked to the town.
Stevenage offered opportunity, privacy, space, security and leisure of a kind unimagined by working class people before
these wonderful places were conceived and built. A life-changing chance for anyone who wished to move out from the city
and set up home there.
My parents grabbed it with both hands.
My dad left his job at Cable and Wireless in London, where he worked as a telegraph key operator, exchanging the family
bedsit for a new three-bedroom council house and a job at the English Electric (eventually to be subsumed into British
Aerospace) factory in Stevenage.
To my mum and dad, our blocky, squat, utilitarian terraced house with its upstairs bathroom, separate toilet and small
garden must have seemed like the height of luxury. It certainly did to my Mum - she loved that house. She lived there
for pretty much the rest of her life, happy and contented, stable and secure, right up until the sad day when Dementia
began to exercise its evil grip on her and she started to keep her purse in the fridge, talk to the gas cooker, and
complain that the radiators were going to explode.
Built in several waves, the architectural style of Stevenage houses was refined and modernised as time went on, each
new phase reflecting advances in building techniques and the lower cost of things like central heating as economies of
scale could be exploited.
Our house, being one of the first built in the town, had no central heating. We had an open fire in the lounge, a coke
burner in the kitchen and an electric immersion heater for hot water.
The houses were brick built, with concrete floors. Ours had a pitched roof but, rather than being tiled, it was just
felted – presumably to reduce costs.
The windows were all Crittal Frames. To anybody unfamiliar with this term – one which will create feelings of both
nostalgia and dread among an entire generation – they were single glazed units with heavy steel frames. They were
very airtight, so the issue of draughts was not a problem. But a consequence of this, combined with open fires, was
an unbelievable level of condensation. There would be a permanent puddle of water beneath every window in the winter.
Until it was below freezing, when you would wake up to an entire window covered in a 3mm layer of ice, normally
encasing your mum’s net curtains.
And these houses were cold. Really cold. These were the days before insulation. To complement the steel framed single
glazed windows, the walls were brick on the outside and concrete block on the inside with an unfilled, uninsulated
cavity between. It was not until around 1970 that we got loft insulation. Two council workers turned up one day and
told us they were installing it and putting the cost onto the monthly rent.
Around the same time, two more council workers turned up one day unannounced, with a van and a huge hosepipe. They
drilled the outside brickwork, poked the hosepipe through the outer brick skin into the cavity, and pumped in millions
of tiny little polystyrene balls. This cutting-edge innovation of the insulator’s art affected the internal temperature
of the house not one jot. What it did do was ensure that any tiny imperfection in the mortar or brickwork of every house
down our road would for years be the source of an apparently unending trickle of tiny little polystyrene balls that
would clump in corners of the garden and stick to your clothes.
Still, despite its failings, our house was a thing of wonder in the sixties.
A clean, modern home. Well built. Solid. With a bathroom, a toilet, a dining room, a private garden. Owned and rented
by a council we voted for, and theoretically controlled, on subsidised rents and soft rates. It was an opportunity to
put down secure roots, free of the constant stress of living at the whim of a private landlord. And the town itself was
an Urban Planner’s dream – an opportunity for them to put all their theories and research and modern thinking into a real
live project.
Early footage from the sixties exists on YouTube, and it is poignant to watch. Clipped verges, clean, efficient public
transport, playgrounds, neat lawns, most of the men in suits, all the ladies smiling and fit, pushing prams on pristine
pavements, signalling a future in which we would all live in neat and tidy comfort and security. It looks so optimistic.
So assured.
The original neighbourhoods like Bedwell, where we lived, were added to over the years, and the town increased in size
substantially during my childhood. Each neighbourhood was colour coded - blue for Bedwell, red for Shephall, brown for
Broadwater, green for Pin Green, yellow for Chells.
I assume this was to generate some sense of identity and community for all those displaced families arriving on vast,
immature estates, trying to make some sense of the town and put down roots.
By and large, this worked. We certainly had an affinity for our neighbourhoods. We were Bedwell kids – distinct from
Chells kids or Shephall kids. This sense of loyalty was reinforced by the primary schools. Being filled with a growing
stream of young families and little kids, the town had at least one primary school in every neighbourhood. This meant
the kids you played with at school lived near you, and were the same kids you played with after school. We hung out and
played around our local shopping parades, shopped at our local sweetshops and played football in our neighbourhood parks.
Until the age of around ten you stuck very much to your neighbourhood. Travelling to another neighbourhood was like
travelling to another town – it was unfamiliar and unsettling. You knew nobody. Everything was different. We were like
territorial cats.
One shared area for all of us, however, was the Town Centre.
It was an incredible feat of urban design for its time.
Paved avenues of shops radiated from a central square, each one wide, airy and dotted with benches, space-age street
lighting, trees and planters softening the feel of the place. The buildings had mosaic frescos decorating their flanks.
Above the shops were flats and maisonettes – making sure the town centre was inhabited - a living space, not just a
dead retail centre. The focal point of the town centre was the Town Square. Here a tall, modernist clock tower, one
face of its rectangular form artfully decorated with a stylised map of the town in ceramic tiles, another commemorating
its dedication by the Queen, emerged from a huge, shallow pool surrounded with a low, fat wall created to provide seating.
At the opposite end of the pool to the clock tower was a tall fountain, which could be refreshing if you sat in the right
place to get the fine spray dissipated by the breeze on a hot summer’s day. A few steps away was a large, raised seating
area decorated with a bronze statue called Joyride by Czech sculptor Franta Belsky, affording an elevated view of the
town square on one side, and on the other giving access to the state-of-the-art central bus station.
The Town Centre was a hugely desirable place to be for the retailers of the day, one of whom was an example of the latest
in retail innovation - a Supermarket. A huge, glass fronted, open, airy, bright and spotlessly clean retail space,
employing the revolutionary idea of “self-service”, where the customer chose what they wanted, put it in a basket and
everything was added up at a checkout at the end and put in carrier bags.
This is such a fixture of modern life, it is easy to forget how recent an innovation it is. Prior to the late fifties,
anyone doing their weekly shop would have to visit half a dozen different shops. They’d have to explain to the shop staff
what they wanted, who would then toddle off – often behind the counter out of sight – and retrieve the goods. Whether that
was soap or mincemeat or washing up liquid.
The idea that a customer could pick the goods up, handle them, decide which apple or cauliflower they wanted and discard
the others was an utterly alien concept.
Called Fine Fare, our supermarket looked pretty much like supermarkets do today. Maybe a few more cardboard boxes and a
little less in the way of display finesse, but otherwise instantly recognisable. Wide aisles, piped easy-listening music,
wire trollies, everything brightly lit and fresh looking, with vegetables and fruit in big gondolas by the entrance,
shelves of everything from soap powder to matches, crisps to baked beans, and a long line of checkout tills at the exit.
It would not raise even the most curious of eyebrows today, such is the ubiquity of the concept. You could parachute a tribe
of Amazonian Indians into a Supermarket today, and they would just say “Oh yeah – supermarket” before running off in search
of New York Yankees baseball caps and Manchester United Football Shirts like all the other tribes seem to have. But in 1960,
a Supermarket was a really, really big deal.
Woolworths moved from their shop with its wooden floorboards and long, uninterrupted counters in old Stevenage, the quaint
and tiny original town onto which the huge, brash new town was grafted, to a brand-new store opposite the clock tower in the
town centre. W. H. Smiths was there too – I bought pretty much every Enid Blyton Famous Five or Secret Seven book they ever
had, at 2/6 a pop (that is 12.5 pence in new money - my weekly pocket money).
A huge three storey Co-Op sat on the corner of the town square opposite Fine Fare. We rarely went in there. My Mum said it
was owned by communists.
For a penniless working-class girl from Nottingham, married to a Turkish immigrant and living in a council house on a massive
estate, my Mum was inexplicably snobbish when it came to shops. The Co-op were communists. Tesco was for common people
(I could not imagine – even then – who was more common than us, but there we go). Macfisheries was for posh people.
Sainsburys was just right – not too common but not too showy either. A solid middle ground choice.
She relented at Christmas, however. The only place in Stevenage to visit Santa was at the Co-op, where he took over part of
the second floor and created a grotto. As he was the only Santa in town, my mum overcame her dislike of the store’s politics
for the sake of her kids.
We’d line up politely waiting for our interview with the great man, then leap up onto his knee, where we would quickly
discover that, rather than a jolly fellow with a jelly belly and the faint aroma of candy canes and marshmallows, Santa
was in reality short-tempered, middle aged, stank of stale cigarettes and tea and, cloaked in red and white nylon,
sparked like a Catherine Wheel every time he moved with anything but glacial speed. He would listen intently as you
reeled off your list of wishes, then direct you to his sack, where one of his sullen and bored looking elves, tattooed
and unshaven, would let you dip your hand in for a surprise gift. These fell into two categories. It was either some
piece of plastic crap that fell to pieces within minutes – a model boat, or a submarine with a plastic tube attached
so you could make it sink or float in the bath. Or it was something so puzzling that nobody – not even your parents -
could work out what it was. Two inexplicable and unexplained metal rings, or a piece of thin red plastic film with a button.
Apart from these large retailers, the town comprised long parades of identically sized retail units which the trader could not
buy, but could only rent from the New Towns Commission, the government body set up to manage the town. And each unit was carefully
controlled. If you wanted to sell clothes, you had to rent a clothes retail unit. The same for electrical goods, jewellery,
holidays or flowers. The Commission managed what was sold to ensure that it did not become an entire town filled with coffee shops
and banks. There are towns I know that could do with a dose of this management today. Towns where you can walk for several hundred
yards, passing banks, insurance companies, estate agents, building societies – not a single shop that provides a product worth
engaging in a walk for. It staggers me that entire towns can be so stuffed with these bland, paper-pushing palaces whose business
can be transacted just as effectively – more so – online than in a retail unit. Yet the ones which need a shop – which sell actual
products – are forced to the most remote of positions – or, sadly more commonly, out of business entirely.
But in the sixties, Stevenage Town Centre catered for every need. There were toyshops, craft shops, bakers, greengrocers, butchers,
sport shops, furniture stores, electronics stores, camera shops, record shops, wool shops, pet shops and gardening shops. Banks,
travel agents, clothes stores - whatever you needed, you never had to venture beyond the Town Centre to find it.
More than this, in these days before online payment and credit cards, there was the central post office, and shops operated by
the Electricity Company, the Gas Company and the Coal Suppliers, where you could go and place your orders and pay your quarterly
bills. The council’s Rent Office was there also, where my mum would go each month, her little accounting book in her handbag,
and pay her dues.
Shopping Centres in those days were not just retail areas. They were the place where you spent time doing all the stuff we now
do in isolation sitting in front of a computer or phone screen. Shopping Centres were places for social interaction and cohesion.
To make and nurture friendships and acquaintances. Every time we went shopping, my mum would spend an inordinate amount of time
chatting with people she knew only from her weekly visits to the town centre. I’m not suggesting that, as kids, we had any
insight into this wider benefit of shopping as a physical experience. We spent most of our time rolling our eyes, pulling
mum's arm and whining as she was updated about Mrs. Pertwee’s veins, or Mrs. Gee’s Yorkshire Terrier and his dodgy bowels.
Being the centre of the town, not only geographically but commercially, it was neutral ground for the kids living in the
many neighbourhoods of Stevenage. And because we spent all our time – at school and after – in our own neighbourhoods, a
visit to the town centre at the weekend was unusual in that we saw people we did not recognise.
At the weekend, with your mum doing the shopping, this was OK. But in most other circumstances, if you were out of your own
neighbourhood, you were in alien territory. Some groups took the whole loyalty to one's area a little too literally.
The Bedwell Boot Boys, for example, were a gang of skinheads who hung around our local shops and tended to kick the crap
out of anyone not from our neighbourhood. In terms of expressing civic pride, this was perhaps a touch excessive, and
although many of the stories that circulated about their feral activities were exaggerated, they did exist, I knew some of
them, their graffiti was all over every underpass, and they were a bit scary.
But shaven headed young men indulging in a bit of unprovoked violence apart, growing up in the early 60s in Stevenage was wonderful.
Being a New Town, and therefore a town filled with vast tracts of state owned, rent-subsidised houses, it was filled to the brim
with young families all seeking a better start, and all on the same socio-economic level.
Which meant load and loads and loads of kids.
Walk out your front door, bounce a ball three times, and in seconds you’d be surrounded by twenty kids all demanding to
play football and then arguing about whether to play in the neighbourhood park, on the school field or on the strip of
grass next to the main road.
It was most often the latter.
I’m not sure why we always seemed to plump for this, the most inconvenient of all the choices. Perhaps it was because it
was within sight of our houses and therefore more obviously our territory. But it had downsides.
The football would regularly get kicked into the road – a very busy main route into the centre of town - and often hit a car.
Then we had to run the gauntlet of legging it into the road to grab the ball before running like crazy to escape the angry car
driver chasing us.
Often the police would stop, tell us off, and order us not to play football where we were. We would dutifully pick our ball
up and walk the twenty yards back to our houses. Then as soon as they drove off, we’d be back again. Not worrying about
authority started young in Stevenage.
Actually, we did not really worry about anything too much. We would climb trees to ridiculous heights. We’d pick berries
from hedgerows and eat them. We’d throw ourselves about in the woods, in filthy water. We’d paddle in streams that contained
leaches. And I cannot recall ever being concerned.
Stevenage was a marvellous place to grow up. I’m not suggesting for a moment that it would fulfil the modern upwardly mobile
dreams of a thrusting young executive. But at the time, bearing in mind where most of its inhabitants had come from,
it was a miracle.
A town designed with people in mind. Where you could live in your own home, with privacy and security, and raise your family.
Where you could sit in the sun on your own patch of private garden, grow a bit of veg, and not worry about losing your home
if there is a hiccup in your employment. And what employment there was. Whether you were skilled or unskilled, an engineer
or a chemist, a bricklayer or a factory line worker, there was always work available.
It was a social experiment that, at the time, was a screaming success. But I suppose, over time, it became a victim of that
success. As people became more confident, more stable, more secure, they expected more. Quite rightly. It was when I got into
#my teens that the threads started showing. Society was moving on, and the working classes wanted more than just an indoor
toilet and a kitchen. They wanted cars. And holidays abroad. Colour televisions and hi fi systems. A Georgian front door.
More of everything.
My generation was changing the town. Or maybe, more accurately, the town was changing us. It gave us working class kids all
the basics - education, security, space to run, a safe environment to develop. It did the job it was created to do. Did it
so well, in fact, that we could take these fundamentals for granted, and instead focus on wanting more out of our lives than
a council house and a stable job.
Whatever was cause and whatever was effect, the world was undeniably on the move, and the working class were driving it.
Stevenage would never be as positive again. Never again be held with such pride by its inhabitants. It had started out by
offering a lifestyle to the working class that they could not hope to achieve anywhere else. We reacted with gratitude.
With thanks. With appreciation. We knew we were the lucky ones. The chosen.
But now we were outgrowing these modest promises.
As is the way with progress in any society - from post-war Britain, to India, to Japan and now China, after a few years
of stability and security to bolster our self-respect, what we thought of as good fortune instead became the status quo.
We stopped saying "We are so lucky", and started saying "Is that it?” and “What next”?
But for me, up until the age of 10, this meant nothing. I had no ambition. No wish to stride off into a glorious new future.
Stevenage was just where I lived. My town. It was everything I knew, and held everyone I knew. Or wanted to know. It was Nirvana.
I would not want to be anywhere else.
How our shameful garden upset our neighbours and disgusted their cat
The houses along our street were built in a long terrace, each one with a small patch of garden between their front door and the pavement.
But at the rear of each house, accessed via a brick-built storeroom between each house – a space for bicycles and bins – was a larger, enclosed garden.
Around fifty feet deep by the width of the house, these were much appreciated private spaces. The terrace of houses behind ours had the same garden arrangement, so the gardens of all our
houses formed a huge patchwork of little private spaces – each one different, each one reflecting the pride and the taste of the
owner.
Mr. and Mrs. Hales next door were an elderly couple who, by the diligent application of time, effort, love and chemicals, had created a lawn like a bowling green. Each year they would plant
their borders with annuals and tend them with devotion and not a little skill. Mrs. Hales would cut the edges of her lawn, where it met the flower beds, with scissors.
Their shrubs positively hummed with robust health and vigour, and every year were filled to bursting with
flowers of such diverse size, shape and colour it took your breath away.
The Briggs family on the other side of us had a similarly perfect, ironing-board flat and surgically trimmed lawn, also surrounded with healthy looking, weed-free beds. Mr. and Mrs.
Briggs’ annual display of roses would have graced any show garden. Huge, healthy, fat blooms in pink and red and yellow and white, all in the peak of health like something from a flower show.
Most council tenants in those early days were filled with a sense of their own good fortune in having a space to call their own that did not also have to accommodate a tin bath and an outside
toilet, and the gardens and houses were built to complement each other. All the houses had french windows from the lounge into the garden,
and the first home improvement most tenants made was to lay a small patio to make full use of it.
The Briggs' patio was a simple and neat patch of beautifully finished concrete with tiny stones embedded in it. A space decorated with gaily striped deck chairs and a little table, protected
by a small sun shade, it provided an ideal spot for a glass of fruit squash in the evening, and the perfect vantage point to observe and admire their garden. It really was quite gorgeous.
The Hales' patio was furnished with two wooden upright chairs, surrounded by a dense forest of potted plants and flowers blending beautifully into the copiously verdant herbaceous borders.
Their patio was a haven for bumble bees and butterflies.
The passion with which tenants in our subsidised housing treated their gardens stemmed from the fact that most came from the city, where they were starved of any outside space, so these little
patches
of garden were pounced on and lovingly exploited to create an oasis - a space to sit, to relax, and to breathe a little fresh suburban air. A place to plant a fruit
tree, grow some
vegetables, a few flowers to make the house look pretty, an area for the kids to play safely, to build a shed, a greenhouse, a space for a rabbit, or maybe a dog.
Our garden was not one of these.
Our garden was a scruffy and neglected piece of scrub, where the accidental seeding of thistles and dandelions and rye grass had somehow contributed to form a little green patch even my mum
could
not bring herself to call a “lawn”. It always simply called “the grass”. It looked like a malnourished desert. With alopicia. A repository for nettles, discarded toy soldiers, broken bits
of toy and dried dog shit.
It was also a place for my father to urinate. Don’t get me wrong, we had a perfectly serviceable toilet in the house. And he did not do this all the time. But on a summer night, often and
for no apparent reason, he would rise from his armchair clad only, as usual, in his pants and vest,
stretch extravagantly, open the French windows then go stand in the middle of the garden and have a wee while looking around with obvious pride at his personal domain.
Around the boundary of the garden, framing the grass, was a 4 foot wide ring of organically dead, bright orange clay soil. These my mum called her flower beds. They contained a few odd weeds,
interspersed with my mum’s rose bushes. These she devoted much care to, in return for which they delivered two or three limp flowers and a pound of greenfly every year.
A path ran from the house to the bottom of the garden, along which ran a washing line. Blocking the path, more often than not, were the oily remains of a motorcycle in pieces.
In the centre of the grass was an apple tree. At least my mum told us it was an apple tree. But not once did it produce a single, solitary piece of fruit. This may be because it spent
most of its bleak and blighted existence fighting off the effects of dog urine. It being the only suitable tree in the garden, our dogs made full use of it.
More serious than this, it also had to battle the deleterious effects of my Mum's "pruning".
My mum did pruning like Oliver Reed did booze. She was utterly relentless.
We would come home from school to find her a little breathless, her hair wild and dotted with bits of twig and leaves, her arms covered in countless tiny cuts and grazes.
"I've pruned the garden today" she'd say with pride and satisfaction.
Outside would be a scene of dystopian devastation.
She never worried or asked about the right time in a growing cycle for pruning. Her opinion seemed to be that, as the householder and therefore the boss in this particular relationship,
the tree should move to suit her agenda, not the other way round.
She really didn't know what she was doing, but what she did, she did with enormous enthusiasm.
After a pruning session, the apple tree would look like some hardy survivor of Hiroshima - bereft of branches, virtually just a long, scarred trunk, thinning to a fragile point at the top.
In the rock hard, bright orange flower beds, the few lonely rose bushes looked look like a line of dead sticks randomly poked into the ground. It is a miracle of nature, and a demonstration
of the hardiness of native species, that these plants continued to survive - not exactly thrive, but survive - for as long as we lived there.
Directly by the wall against the house was another bed. This was the crowning glory of the garden. About ten feet wide and three feet deep, it was my dad's vegetable bed where he grew
his tomatoes and cucumbers. Being Turkish, he ate these in prodigious quantities, hating the watery, bland taste of those we would buy in the supermarket. And he was right. The smell
and taste of a tomato, pulled off the vine and sliced immediately into a salad, drizzled in olive oil and lemon and sprinkled with salt was a real taste of my childhood. My mum would
give us half a cucumber, straight from the garden, it's skin thick and tough and spiky, and a teaspoon of salt on a saucer, and we'd happily eat it as a snack, dipping the cool flesh
into the salt and chewing it like a lollipop. We would eat fresh tomatoes like apples, straight from the vine. My mates thought we were very odd.
To make sure we could grow these essentials, dad actually fed the earth in this bed with some horse manure he bought from someone he knew. It stank the place out for weeks
but it produced soil which could actually grow something.
Sadly, this glorious productivity did not extend to the rest of the garden. And I really did try to grow stuff. I would buy packets of seeds from Cramphorns, a little pet and garden
supply shop in the town centre, and make huge efforts to grow something we could actually eat.
I would try to sieve the earth to provide the kind of powdery beds I saw in the books I got from the library. But if our earth was damp, it would collect in sticky orange lumps of clay,
and if it was dry, it would form rock hard nodules you'd have to hit with a hammer to break. But I tried nonetheless. I would push the claggy lumps through the sieve, or if it was dry, I'd
scrape them against the sieve like a cheese grater, until I had a light covering of earth on top of the concrete-like bed. And in this I would carefully plant my seeds. Usually, after
weeks of watering, tending, inspecting, waiting and seeing nothing, I would shrug and put another variety of fruit or vegetable down as unable to germinate in the hostile environment
of our garden
There were, however, things I found would grow every time, regardless of the appalling conditions.
Green beans, which I'd put on a frame of bamboo poles. Radishes which the slugs and ants hated - crisp, peppery and fresh I loved them. And lettuces, which I grew every year but
were a relentless and continual battle between me and the insect popuation to see who could actually get an edible amount of lettuce from each plant. What I hadn't worked out - and
nobody told me - was to programme my planting. I'd just fill the entire place with radish seeds, lettuce seeds or beans and wait for them to mature.
Which they did all at once. So we'd suddenly have kilos of radishes, or so many green beans we'd get sick of the sight of them. With the lettuces, it was something of a necessity. I'd
need whole rows to mature at the same time so I'd have an outside chance of getting two or three salads from the bits the slugs left for me.
The garden was a space for us kids, primarily. It meant my mum could work in the house and leave us to our own devices in the garden, relatively safe in the knowledge that there was
only so much
stupidity and mischief we could get up to in a 50 by 30 foot enclosed space.
You would imagine, therefore, that when my dad announced he was going to build a patio just like the neighbours had – a place to sit, for us kids to play when the mud got too much – we
would be happy.
For us, it was a reason to worry.
Our concern when my dad announced his intention was not without foundation. He was a man blessed with unlimited confidence in his own ability, and very little in actual talent to back it up.
Combine a shocking level of arrogance with a groundless faith in his own genius, a congenital refusal to ask advice and a temper bordering on psychotic, and you have some idea of the
trepidation
we would feel whenever he considered doing anything remotely connected to practical home improvement.
And our concerns were not just about ability. Temperamentally this was not a man suited to tasks equiring patience and application.
My dad spent virtually every waking hour at home struggling to contain his rage. At us, at my mum, at his life in general - pretty much everything.
This was a very angry man.
His needle permanently waving about in the red zone, he was ready to pop at the slightest event – his shoes not being clean, his dinner not the correct temperature, running out of lemons,
one of us kids talking audibly – anything was material for a complete, loss-of-all-control tantrum.
These could take many forms - from beating seven bells out of my mum in front of us kids, to throwing his dinner up the wall, to throwing things against the doors (a huge 1950s Olympic
typewriter was the most impressive – that one left a hole in the door that stayed there my entire childhood). But regardless of tantrum type, they would always end with the most
impressive feat of door slamming imaginable. This man slammed doors so hard it would make your eyes spin. He slammed doors like he was born to it – and my goodness
he liked to practice and keep his skills honed. My mum used to have a collection of Horse Brasses which were hung on small nails tapped into the 3mm of plaster which covered the
impenetrable concrete around the chimney breast. You could judge the depth of my dad's anger by how many ended up on the floor after a really good door slam.
Luckily, this being an older, utilitarian house, our doors were pretty robust. But we had a problem with the front door. And this was to prove his nemesis.
Heavy and solid, for as long as I could remember it would stick. It would open about 8 inches, then suddenly jam. But it would not do it every time, so you could go several days rushing out
the door without a problem, then, when lulled into a false sense of security, you'd grab the door, pull it open as you move forward, and the door would suddenly jam fast, trapping and
twisting your hand in the Yale latch, while your body, already moving forward, would collide with the doors leading edge which had stopped dead. If you were in a rush, it could be quite painful.
This went on for years. We just kind of put up with it, mainly because any injury sustained was going to be infinitely less painful - and dangerous - than my father attempting any kind of repair.
Then came the fateful day when he blew a gasket. He'd had a really good wig-out, a real eye-swiveller. He'd enjoyed a very energetic and comprehensive throw around of anything he could get his hands on,
slapped my mum a few times, then stormed out the house in a fug of bad language and old spice. But as he was sweeping majestically through the door, ready to give it a really, really good slam, it jammed.
He collided with the edge of the door, ramming his shoulder against it, banging his head into the solid wood with a satisfying and surprisingly loud thok. And that was it - he lost the plot. Completely.
"Get me the saw and the screwdriver" he shouted at me, his eyes wide and wild.
Like most people at the time, we did not have the kind of tool array most people have now. What we had was "the saw", "the hammer" and "the screwdriver". The saw was an old rip saw with a broken wooden handle,
a blade so rusted it was permanently dark brown, and teeth that could not remember what sharp meant let alone when they last were. We used to keep a tin of Three-in-One oil next to it, and you'd get
through half a can continually dribbling it on to the blade while sawing to prevent it from sticking.
I gave him the tools and beat a hasty retreat to be with my sister in the kitchen, closing the door and leaving him alone with his anger.
Denise and I stood behind the door listening to the frantic activity going on in the hall. He was mumbling loudly to himself as we heard him remove the door from its frame. Then we heard him start to saw.
There were four or five "zzzzrrr" noises, then a "twaangg" as the saw blade stuck and his continued sawing motion caused the blade to bend almost double before springing back violently with a loud "twang".
There was a loud "You bastard". Then four more "zzzzrrrr" cuts, then a "twaanng" and a louder "You BASTARD". Then five or six more cuts, then a "twaaanngg", and a shrill "FUCK YOU". This went on for a
few more minutes, during which the old fool became increasingly hysterical by degrees. After another four or five repeats and more foul and shrieking swearing he was, literally, screaming at the door,
hurling a stream of unintelligible but violent and high-pitched insults at it, the saw continuing to stick every four or five cuts. He was speaking in tongues he was so angry "Zzzrr, zrrrrr, zrrrr, TWAANG".
"YOUFUCKIINGCUNARSRBASTARSHITTFUCKERFUCKFUCKING".
After a while, we heard the front door slam, then slam again, and again, then a very loud "YOU FUCKER", followed by a slam so loud the plastic framed picture of horses riding through the surf fell
from the wall in the hall on to the floor. Then all was silent.
We went into the hall. There were bits of wood all over the floor. The front door was now back in its frame, but with a radically reshaped bottom edge. He had started off at the edge near the hinge,
but his cut had started to go up at a quite severe angle very quickly. This departure from the level was remedied with a vertical cut, before starting another horizontal one. Unfortunately, this also
went up at a loping angle before being stopped and another remedial vertical cut made. The final horizontal cut was still not level, and ended at the opening edge of the door about an inch above the floor.
We tried the door. It required a very hefty tug to open it, but it swung back on its hinges without the jamming we had become used to. But then it didn't shut. He had put the thing back in the frame slightly
off from its original position, so now the door caught on the frame as you closed it, and you needed to give it a heavy barge with your shoulder to push it home. My mum had to roll up an old off-cut of carpet
and bind it with insulating tape into a cylinder shape. This was placed at the bottom of the door to limit the mistral level draught which whistled through the gap left by the old man's handiwork. This stayed
there for another ten years until the council replaced all the front doors on our street with plastic ones.
So, with this level of expertise at hand, you may understand our natural concern when he decided he was going to lay a crazy paving patio.
At the time, you could buy broken paving slabs from the council. These were the off cuts and smashed up bits of slab returned by the crews installing pavements all round Stevenage, and were battleship grey
with a kind of pimply, non-slip surface. They were every bit as attractive as that description suggests. But they were cheap, and my god my dad was mean when it involved something not directly for his own
pleasure. Which is why, one day, the council came and tipped a huge pile of grey rubble on the road outside the house.
My dad, armed only with a hammer and his encyclopaedic knowledge of construction, simply laid them out on top of the grass. No hard core, no base, no drainage, nothing. Just plopped them onto the grass.
Then he mixed up some mortar and filled in the joints and gaps between the randomly shaped shards of council paving. He spent just a little bit more than no time at all trying to match them into a pleasing
crazy paving pattern. He pretty much just put them where they fell, and filled in the resulting spaces with a greyish mortar.
Where the paving met the lawn, he stood and scratched his head for a moment. Then simply spread a wedge of mortar from the top of the paving slabs into the grass.
The whole job took him an afternoon.
The following day, we stepped tentatively onto the surface. Each slab we trod on moved slightly, crunched a bit, and detached itself from the sea of concrete separating it from the other pieces of paving.
Nobody mentioned it to my dad, and it was never spoken of in his company, but from that day on, we had a crazy paving patio that could snap the ankle of an uninitiated guest in the blink of an eye.
The wedge of mortar providing a pleasing and gentle transition from the paving to the grass simply came away in foot long wedges of powdery concrete, which we hastily threw in the long grass at the bottom of the garden.
Despite such exercises in landscaping lunacy, I was quite happy in the garden. I tried to grow my vegetables, I kicked a ball against the house, or I used to throw a tennis ball onto the roof and try to guess where it
would come back down. But one order I dreaded was "Mark, you can cut the grass".
We had a very old metal lawn mower. But its blades were so blunt, and its mechanism so rusty, that to get the blades moving at any speed likely to damage grass, you needed a run up. If you pushed the handles way down,
lifting the cutting cylinder high above the grass, you could get some forward momentum and get the blades spinning, but as soon as you dropped them down to a cutting height, the mower would lurch to a stop after 18
inches, the dull, rusty blades wrapped in a cocoon of long, tough grass still attached to the lawn. You'd have to jerk the thing back and forth until free, tearing the grass out by the roots. It did not so much cut
the grass as bruise it.
You could, of course, discard the mower and use “the shears”.
These were dark brown with rust and had smooth, worn wooden handles. The blades were slightly bent, so when closed, the tips would meet but there would be a quarter of an inch of light between them for most of
their length. Needless to say, cutting the grass with these was a challenge.
If the grass was particularly long, and my Mum was out, I would raid the kitchen drawer and use the bread knife, grabbing bunches of grass and sawing through them. It did not give the nicely striped finish she
secretly hankered for.
My mum, faced with this problem, had what I can only imagine was a mental aberration of some sort. I don't know what she was thinking, but she went out and bought a Flymo. She'd seen the Hales, our next door
neighbours, gently guiding this bright orange machine around their perfect lawn, its electric motor buzzing like a hair dryer while it accurately trimmed a millimetre off the very tips of the bowling green
flat grass, and she concluded that this must be what we needed for our grass. A goat would have been more appropriate.
The Flymo was the very latest in lawn mowing technology – a device with a pathetic little plastic blade, on which were fins that produced a downdraught and allowed it to "hover on a cushion of air" as the
adverts would have us believe. And it did. If you had a level, flat lawn with closely clipped, quality grass. We had the Somme, covered in grass so thick and tough and long we could have sold it for rush matting.
Still, she gave it to me and said "You can cut the grass".
I tried. I really did.
I started the thing and it began with a satisfying and purposeful whizz.
I slid it onto the grass. It made a kind of grunting noise, squeaked a bit, stopped dead and blew the fuse in the house.
After replacing the fuse wire in the bakelite box in the hall, I tried the Flymo again, but more slowly. Same result.
I then tried starting it with the base at an angle, then lowering it down slowly into a patch of grass. It simply grabbed a handful of long grass, wrapped it around the spindle on which the blade was mounted, then
stopped and began smelling like rotten fish. Then it blew the fuse in the house again.
After much experimentation, and replacing the fuse wire in the hall cupboard several more times, I worked out a method.
My technique was to hold the Flymo up in the air above shoulder height then turn it on. When it reached maximum speed, I would bring it down vertically onto a patch of unsuspecting grass. The motor note would go
from a pleasing hair-dryer whine to a kind of stuttering grunt, eventually stopping and releasing a tiny but pungent whiff of blue grey smoke. I'd then raise the thing back up above my head, exposing a circle of s
horter grass - not so much cut as torn - the remaining stalks now flattened into an attractive spiral pattern about eighteen inches in diameter. I'd take half a step forward and repeat the process, until the entire
garden not only had shorter grass, but a pleasing alien-crop circle type design.
Each Flymo we had lasted for about four weeks during which it did sterling service in overheating and turning dried dog crap into a mist of foul smelling dust and, almost as a by-product, cutting a few patches of
rye grass, before expiring in a dramatic finale of smoke and sparks. My mum would take it back to the shop where they would scratch their heads, and eventually replace it. My Mum couldn't understand it - these
were supposed to be a quality product - a good brand - yet we had three on the trot which went wrong before the shop ran out of patience and suggested that perhaps a hi-tech product like a Flymo was not for us.
Another victim of our inability to provide a decent garden space was our neighbour's cat. The Hales' next door had a big ginger tom cat. He would spend hours lazing in the sun in their garden, surrounded by butterflies
and bees and blooms, spread out on a carpet of finely trimmed and springy grass.
His charmed life, indulged by loving owners, was perfect apart from one thing. He lived next door to us.
He would, on occasion, become bored with his life of bucolic splendour and, seeing our other next door neighbours, the Briggs', perfectly manicured and maintained garden, decide to wander over and lie on their
gorgeous lawn for a while. Unfortunately, in order to do so, he had to cross our disgusting property.
Which meant he had to escape the murderously anti-social attentions of my dad.
My dad had, for some inexplicable reason, developed an intense hatred of this gentle, innocent animal. And his ambition - his obsession, really - was to hit it with a gob of his spit from the French windows. Really. I don't know why.
We would be sitting in the lounge watching telly, dad lying back in his armchair in his standard comfort kit of baggy underpants and string vest, when he would suddenly tense up. He would slowly, silently,
turn his head to look out into the garden, every sense awakened and set to maximum.
The Hales' cat would be half way across our garden, disgustedly picking his way across the uneven hard ground, through the discarded toys, balls, lolly sticks and bits of litter, one eye guardedly watching the house,
his little cat face a picture of revulsion as he picked his paws high in the air to avoid the dog shit and other detritus, like someone walking across a minefield.
Dad would ease himself very slowly and fluidly out of the chair into a standing position, glide noiselessly to the French door and silently turn the key in the lock.
In the garden, the cat would start to move slower, more cautiously, sensing a minute change in atmosphere - a crackle of tension.
Then, the tiniest metallic click of the key in the lock.
The cat's head would jerk instantly in the direction of the French windows.
At the same moment, the old man would throw open the door, whilst hawking up a ball of phlegm and spittle into his mouth.
The cat would leap in the air, panic turning his little legs into a blur of movement, all thought of keeping himself clean now forgotten in a headlong chase for survival
The old man would arch his back, judge distance, trajectory and intersection points, and let forth with a slobbering "fffffffttt" whilst jerking his head forward like a striking cobra
The cat would be at maximum speed, launching itself at the fence and the sanctuary of the Briggs' garden.
The spittle would miss. It always did. Not once did the old man hit that cat, yet I saw him try countless times.
Within seconds, the cat would be safely sitting in the Briggs garden, staring disgustedly at our French doors and cleaning himself.
My dad's vendetta against this cat took an inevitable turn when the Briggs next door decided enough was enough.
Presumably tired of enduring the unavoidable vision of a hairy Turk either urinating in full view, or if not, spitting at domestic pets, they erected a six foot high panelled fence on the boundary between their garden and ours.
It says much that our reaction was to put on squeaky, sarcastic voices and say "oooooooohh… look at them. We can't see your horrible garden any more. We've got a fence" My god but we were awful. They were a decent family,
house proud and considerate of others. Why on earth would they wish to see a gang of feral oiks shouting and spitting in their garden? But we didn't see it that way at the time.
Mind you, we were no better with the other neighbours really.
The houses in our street were built before plasterboard and lightweight building materials existed. Made with solid concrete blocks and brick, their sound insulation was pretty good, so in any normal circumstance, the
fact that the lounges of two terraced houses backed on to each other with a shared solid wall between them would not be a problem.
Mr. and Mrs. Hales were an elderly couple. They kept themselves very much to themselves, maintaining their gorgeously pristine garden and, apart from getting the hump when one of our balls went into their garden,
they were no bother at all.
But the Hales' were deaf. Deaf as posts.
We would sit in our lounge, and when the Hales watched telly, we would hear a constant bass note coming through the wall and floor – enough to make cups rattle on saucers. It wasn't too bad if you were
watching the same channel – indeed, it was a sensation I recognized immediately the first time, as an adult, I encountered a sub-woofer.
Us kids and my mum just put up with it. We would watch our programmes happily ignoring the "Mmm Hmmm Fmmm Mmmm" coming through the walls.
My dad was less forgiving. One fateful Sunday evening he was deep in a particularly engrossing episode of The World About Us, probably enlightening viewers about the life cycle of the Crested Grebe,
when he flipped. He launched a five minute tirade about how it was ruining the only bloody programme he watched, then he went menacingly quiet.
The following evening when he arrived home, he unloaded a record deck, an amplifier, and two of the biggest speakers I have ever seen from his van and put them in our lounge.
We settled down for the evening – nobody mentioning the fact that there appeared to be the material for a pop concert in our lounge. The old man said not a word about it.
Sure enough, a little later on, the inevitable "Hmmm Frmmm Bmmm Thmmm" bass notes began drifting in from next door's telly.
The old man stood up, pulled his Y Front pants up to full working height, and told us to get out of the lounge.
He turned the speaker cabinets around, and positioned them so the speakers themselves were touching the wall between our lounge and the Hales’. Then he put a James Last LP on the turntable, then turned it up to full blast.
I have never – and I truly mean never – heard anything so loud. It was beyond the pain threshold. We were in the kitchen and could not hear each other's voices.
After ten minutes of this, James Last put his baton down and the old man turned the hi-fi off.
You could have heard a pin drop.
It was unnatural. Not a single decibel from anywhere. Nothing. No birdsong. No happy sound of kids playing drifting in from outside. Even the dog seemed to be holding its breath hiding under the kitchen table. All was weirdly silent.
And not a sound emanated from the Hales' house. I wondered for a while if perhaps they had died of shock.
The old man cocked his head to one side, listening carefully, then sat in his chair, turned the telly on and started picking his feet.
I have seldom seen him so happy.
The Ony Exciting Sunday of my Childhood
"I think there's someone in the garden" I said.
We lived in Walden End, a street on a large estate of council houses whose gardens backed on to each other, separated mostly by low picket fences,
and I'd heard some movement in the little patch of clay and scrub grass that was our little piece of England.
My dad, slouching in an armchair clad only in his underpants and a string vest, ignored my comment.
Which was not particularly surprising. It was Sunday night.
Sunday nights were purgatory. It was the one evening when my dad was home before about 10pm. And when he was home, he was a dictator. He wanted
his dinner within ten minutes of arriving in the house – regardless of what time that was. And it better be hot too. In addition, he wanted his
children to be, if not actually absent, then certainly as quiet as if they were. He wanted no disturbance from us, the dog, or my mum. Failure
to meet any of these conditions would result, almost inevitably, with him throwing his dinner up the wall, leaving it there for us to clean
later, and more often than not, him giving my mum a beating.
We were not allowed to eat in the same room as him was that he could not stand the noise we made. If you wished to eat an apple, you had to
leave the room.
He did not encourage strangers in the house. To say he was anti-social is like suggesting Stalin did not make friends easily. Although there was
no explicit ban on visitors, he made it very clear that such wildly hedonistic behaviour as asking a friend into our home was simply beyond the
pale. His appalling behaviour and weird habits ensured that if we did stumble across someone willing to spend time in our house, we would
probably have considered them mentally unstable and avoided them in any case.
As soon as my dad came into the house, he would take his trousers off and sit in his baggy underpants and undershirt – or in the summer, a
string vest. He would eat his dinner on a small table in front of the TV in the lounge away from the rest of us. Afterwards, he would sit
back while we cleared his tray and dinner things away, and pick his teeth with small, menthol impregnated toothpicks he bought from his
dentist in Harley Street. As a special treat, he would often whip off his socks, which he would tuck down the side of his armchair for
us to find days or weeks later, and paint livid purple iodine on his feet to treat the rampant athlete's foot infection he suffered from
throughout my childhood.
He was a class act.
The winters at Walden End were especially challenging. I’m not exaggerating. After 2 weeks of life in Walden End, with a full film crew and
a support truck, Bear Grylls would be crying for his mum and begging to be sent to the relative luxury of the Arctic Circle. Really.
Stevenage kids may not be as delighted as Bear is to drink his own piss, but we’d outlast any posh Sandhurst graduates in council house
survival without breaking a sweat.
The only heating in our uninsulated, single-glazed house was downstairs - a coal fire in the lounge, and a coke boiler in the kitchen.
In the early 70s, these were removed by the council, who installed a chrome and teak gas fire in front of the fireplace instead.
Presumably to justify a rent increase. The gas fire, while convenient, was a heat source barely deserving of the name.
We no longer had to have coal delivered from the back of a flatbed lorry. I no longer had to sweep out the coal bunker for my mum, and enjoy
the subsequent sensation of blowing out black snot for three days afterwards. The gas fire was cleaner, and it started with the turn of a knob.
Well, kind of. It was supposed to ignite with a high tech, cutting edge piezo crystal, but this never worked from day one. So we had to roll
up a piece of, light this on the gas stove in the kitchen, then walk carefully to the lounge without it going out or dropping flaming paper
on the carpet, stick it through the gaps in the front of the fire, turning the gas on and waiting for the enormous "whump" as it ignited
Cleaner. More convenient. More sixties. Less Edwardian. But it sadly did not remove much in the way of cold. We got more heat in the room
turning the valve telly on. You had to close every door from the lounge to retain any warmth.
What it did remove, in copious quantities according to my dad, was humidity.
He would arrive home, stride into the lounge without acknowledging anyone, turn the TV over, whatever you were watching, then turn the gas fire
off, regardless of how cold it was outside.
This was because, he would complain, it "dries out the air".
And you didn't want him drying out on a Sunday night. That was his preferred night for losing his temper, and if he was going to throw his
dinner up the wall, which he did some apparent glee, then Sunday night was odds-on favourite. This was a man with a lot of pent-up anger
he just couldn't wait to share.
If the gas fire had been used for a few minutes too long, he would start coughing and rubbing his temples, whining about fumes and the lack
of humidity giving him a migraine. He really was the most appalling drama queen, and it seemed not to concern him that we had been sitting
there quite happily in that atmosphere for hours before he came home without apparently falling into an oxygen derived coma.
His remedy for the dangerous dehydrating quality of the gas fire was to insist that we keep a cereal dish filled with water in front of it
at all times. He believed that the evaporation of this water would replenish the vital humidity that made the atmosphere less harsh on his
throat.
Being a curious child, I monitored the water in the dish, and found it took several days for the water to evaporate. I could not grasp, at
that tender age, what effect adding one cereal dish of water to the atmosphere of the room over three days would have. To be fair, I still
don’t. But this fact I kept to myself. Which was what you did with any thoughts which ran counter to any of my father's opinions – it was
healthier that way.
What the dish of water did do – rather successfully - was trap a lot of ants.
Now ants we had no shortage of. Indeed, we had huge colonies of these creatures living under the concrete floors of our house. We would
regularly find little pyramids of sand at the base of the door frames where they exited their subterranean world and entered ours. The
ants became part of our lives, and we learned to defend ourselves from their regular invasions. Any spilled drinks had to be cleaned
immediately. Drips and rings left by mugs of tea or coffee had to be wiped straight away. If the sweet residue from any drink was left
on any surface, within an hour there would be a healthy and growing crowd of ants enjoying the sugary treat.
The worst thing, though, was when the ants exited en-masse. Several times every summer we would arrive home and find the door frame between
the dining room and the lounge a seething black mass of insects. Every square inch of paintwork would be obscured by a moving, pulsating
carpet of the things, most of which were flying ants.
We tried everything to control them.
My Mum a bottle of white powder which you puffed around the exit holes of their nests, the theory being that they would take this poison
back to their nests, where it would turn their little bit of earth under our floor into a kind of ant ghost town and lay waste to a generation
of creepy black insects.
Problem was, they didn't seem to mind getting covered in the stuff. Dusted liberally, they just carried on going about their business –
unaware and unconcerned.
She then bought a very serious bottle of poison with Japanese style writing, called Nippon. A few drops by the exit hole would be enough to
bring death and destruction to the entire colony. According to the bottle. The ants didn’t mind it in the least. I thought I saw some
doing breast stroke in it.
Faced with a poison which the ants simply ignored, my mum would instead try to boil them to death by pouring kettles of scalding water
over them and their nests. It really was most ineffective. Sure, there would be a few ants transformed into tiny black balls of scalded
ant flesh, but for the most part, they seemed to take it as an inconvenience and that is about all.
So I would be told to vacuum them up. I’d suck them all into the cleaner bag, which I’d then empty in the dustbin. It was not until years
later I started to suspect that this was not exactly pest control. It didn’t kill the ants. Far from it. They would have a fun trip,
weightless and no doubt whooping with joy, up the vacuum cleaner tube, then I’d empty them in the dustbin, where they would enjoy a
brief ant snack, before escaping and returning to their nest beneath our floor. I had, for years, been providing a Disneyworld ride
for the ants, which they no doubt enjoyed hugely. Their kids probably even looked forward to it.
We never reduced the ant numbers, let alone got rid of them, so out of necessity we just learned to accept the occasional inconvenience
of their presence. Which was, coincidentally, pretty much how I think my dad felt about us. We were the ants on his skirting board.
The main problem with Sunday evenings though was not the oppressive presence of a psychopathic nut job who felt that grubby pants and a vest
were suitable attire for lying around at home. Nor was it the creeping realisation that in mere hours we'd have to go back to school. It was
the fact that our final hours of freedom were to be suffered in intense, inescapable, unutterable boredom.
The depression would start at about 6pm, after the religious service transmission "Songs of Praise" had finished. This was followed by a
programme called "News Review" - a summary and repeat of the entire week’s news, regurgitated for the deaf. It was every bit as exciting
as listening to week-old news whilst watching a bloke in a kipper tie and tank top in the corner of the screen doing sign language and
making exaggerated facial movements sounds. That is what passed for Sunday evening entertainment in the late sixties.
The programme after this, however, was the highlight of my dad's week - "The World About Us". Never, in the history of artistic endeavour,
has a series of programmes been so utterly boring, so bereft of entertainment, so staggeringly, head-slappingly, spirit-suckingly dull to
kids. The subject matter and its presentation, with the endlessly monotone, Oxbridge accented narrators, was the antithesis of what a
youngster would crave. There would be droning documentaries about wildlife on the Savannah, or river communities in the Amazon basin,
or life under the sea with Jacques Cousteau. For a 10 year old boy from Stevenage, you may as well have given me a lecture on Applied
Mathematics. What we craved was a bit of liveliness, some laughs, some colour and action. The Goodies, F-Troop, Hogan's Heroes or
Hawaii Five-O - anything with a bit of humour or glamour. What we got instead was slow motion footage of a lion ripping an Antelope's
organs out through its arse, or close-ups of a Turtle laying eggs (disgusting) or, the supreme irony, entire programmes about the
life cycle of ants - which in our house was one of the few things we certainly didn’t need the TV for.
It was a programme guaranteed to suck any colour, shine or glitter from the world and replace it with dull brown and beige.
If you want to apportion blame for Strictly Come Dancing, Big Brother, Simon Cowell and his vacuous and manipulative X Factor or any of the
countless, derivative, moronic but halogen-lit, energetic, primary coloured reality TV programmes, loud game shows, or the endless procession
of documentaries about men with testicles the size of footballs or hoarders living in flats filled with old pizza boxes and newspapers that my
generation have foisted on the viewing public, don't blame us. Blame The fucking World About Us.
But it got worse. If you could make it to the end of The World About Us without trying to chew your own face off, you'd be treated to the
double-whammy of Horizon. Sometimes you'd get a good one about Space Rockets. But as likely as not, you'd get an hour on exciting advances
in polymers and their impact on the Plastics Industry of the Future.
And we'd have to watch them all in complete silence. It must have looked like Village of the Damned – four kids staring wordlessly, blankly,
unblinking and unmoving at the glowing tube, uneaten apples in hand.
Sundays were a drudge. Until the night I saw the trespasser.
I was sitting in the chair by the French doors to the garden. My dad was in the chair next to me, entranced by the latest advances in
container ship design or the impact of the latex extraction industry on indigenous tribes or whatever titillating treat The World About
Us was serving up that week – I really wasn't paying much attention.
The rest of the family were on the sofa and the floor, imagining what was happening on The Goodies whilst watching in excruciating boredom
as some dull bloke with terminal dandruff droned away on the TV.
I moved the heavy curtains to one side and stared into the darkness.
"There IS someone in the garden" I said – more stridently now.
I saw, through the gloom, a figure casually wandering about in the garden.
This seemed to break through the shell of detached disdain my dad surrounded himself with while at home, and the Turkish part of his
character burst to the surface, utterly overwhelming the British reserve and logic he strove to cultivate. Someone was encroaching on
his turf, his domain.
He leaned over me, pulling the curtains to one side and peering out, then he jumped up and rushed to the kitchen. We all rushed after
him excitedly. It was Sunday night, but something was finally happening!
He ran to the drawer by the sink which contained "The Sharp Knife". Most families these days have a range of knives, each suitable for
a highly defined and specialised purpose. Carving knives, paring knives, grapefruit, steak, fish, filleting, boning knives – the list
goes on. In those days, we had two: "The Bread Knife" and "The Sharp Knife". It was a simple system. One was serrated and would cut
crusty loaves. The other was the one knife we possessed that, if not actually finely honed, was sufficiently keen that it could,
eventually, cut through rather than simply squash a Tomato. Eager to engage meaningfully with our trespasser, dad whipped open the
cutlery drawer with some force.
Being as sensitive and deft of touch as one would imagine an angry Turkish man desperate to stab someone to be, he only succeeded in
pulling the drawer completely out of the cabinet. The entire drawer emptied its contents on to the lino floor with the kind of crescendo
normally reserved for the last night of the proms cymbal player.
He stood, the broken drawer hanging from his hand, and looked blankly for a second at the floor, as if trying to work out who to blame.
Then he bent down and picked up "The Sharp Knife".
The kitchen had a window into the garden which was directly over the sink. I assume it was designed in this way so that when one was washing
the dishes, one could gaze with pride at one's herbaceous borders. Or, in my mum's case, cast a rueful eye over one's rye grass and dog shit
strewn garden as a distraction from the task of laundering one's husband's disgusting Y Fronts.
The kitchen also had a side door, which opened into a side passage and then to the rear garden where our trespasser was apparently enjoying a
private, fact-finding tour of our property.
I would guess that almost anyone with the most basic grasp of logic or reasoning would, through experience, determine that a door from the
kitchen to the garden would serve as the ideal portal for an over-excited Turk with a knife and murderous intent seeking to engage with an
intruder for the purpose of stabbing him.
Sadly, my father inexplicably chose to try to get into the garden through the kitchen window.
I have no idea why, I truly don’t. And my father was not the kind of person one could interrogate as to the reasons behind his decisions.
He expected you to accept that he was correct in everything he did, or he would lose his temper in the most spectacular – and generally
violent – manner.
The window he chose to use to try to gain fast access to the garden was small, metal framed and above a sink, and had a low lintel. It was,
on the outside, immediately above a muddy bed of earth used by my dad to grow cucumbers and tomatoes, within which was the drain from the
kitchen sink surrounded by a six inch high concrete upstand around its perimeter. In short, it offered more as an assault course than as a
means of access.
But this was the route he chose to enter the garden.
String vest rippling majestically, he leapt athletically up onto the draining board section of the stainless steel sink unit, which
immediately bent under his weight, deforming it in such a way that never again would water flow into the sink from the draining board
without being assisted by some concerted and vigorous hand sweeping.
He swept aside the cheese plant my mum had in a pot on the window ledge. Everybody had cheese plants in the late 60s. I think there was a
law about it.
He threw open the window and launched himself powerfully up and out into the cold night air.
Or he would have done, had he not misjudged the lintel height completely.
There was the most profound, sickening, hollow thud as his head whacked straight into the concrete lintel - I swear the concrete actually
rang for a second or two - then he kind of rebounded backwards, tumbled back on to the sink, before flopping back to the linoleum floor
with something of a muffled slap.
This seemed to really get the adrenaline coursing through his veins.
He jumped back to his feet like a coiled spring, shaking his head, an impressive and livid red line already appearing across his forehead,
and gripped the knife with renewed determination.
Swaying slightly, clearly dizzied by his head injury, he steadied himself for a second by holding on to the work surface, gathered his
wits, and seemed to decide to take another run at the window.
However, rather than achieve the desired forward momentum, quite surprisingly both to us and, it seemed, to him, and despite having his
eyes locked firmly on the kitchen window directly in front of him, he took off sideways at quite a lick, lurched six feet to the left
and careered clumsily and rather wobbly-kneed into the gas stove, knocking the grill pan to the floor with a crash and adding a cocktail
of old bacon fat and breadcrumbs to the collection of cutlery already there.
With almost superhuman effort, feet now coated liberally with bacon grease and puncture wounds from the cutlery on the floor, he waited
for a few seconds and collected his wits again. This time he made it up onto the sink once more, and finally, with a good deal of relief
on our part, successfully launched himself through the window.
Almost immediately, we heard a loud muffled squeal, followed by some loud and highly inventive swearing, as he landed awkwardly on the
concrete surround of the drain under the window, badly twisting his ankle – an injury that was to last for several weeks.
By now, unsurprisingly given the distinct lack of stealth used in my dad's approach, the peeping tom, or whatever he was, had long gone.
Dad spent five minutes exploring every inch of the back garden, looking behind bushes and under flower pots, staring for long moments
into the gloom of our neighbours’ gardens and calling out a few choice threats, warning any intruder still within earshot what would
happen were he to return. Then he came back to the kitchen, this time via the more sensible half-glazed kitchen door, his chest puffed
out with pride at protecting his castle.
Unfortunately, the back door was still locked. He stood looking through the window of the half-glazed door, pointing down at the lock
and miming unlocking motions.
But the key wasn't in the door.
We started scrabbling around looking for it below the door and among the assorted cutlery and kitchen utensils still spread about the floor.
Tiring of this, his adrenaline still clearly not back to normal levels, he then disappeared from the door, and we heard him outside the
kitchen window again. There was a fair bit of grunting, and we watched as his hands appeared from outside the window and gripped the frame.
His fingers clenched, and we heard another grunt. His hands went a little whiter, shook a little, then they disappeared suddenly and there
was a dull thud.
A minute later he reappeared at the kitchen door, this time with some muddy stains on his chest and hands. He seemed a little calmer now as
he waited for us to find the key and unlock the door.
We opened the door, and he strode back through the kitchen, limping quite badly, but head held high, not making any comment, or indeed any
eye contact, leaving a trail of muddy footprints in his wake as he took his seat by the TV once again. Just in time to watch Horizon.
Stories of life in my first school
The school I attended until the age of eleven was situated just across a busy road from our house. Called Broom Barns School, it was a bright, modern building, low rise with large window areas, well equipped and clean. Comprising an Infant School and a Junior School, providing education for kids from age five until they moved on to secondary school at eleven, it was a fine example of state investment in education, and a demonstration of the renewal and social change prevalent in the country in the optimistic and forward-thinking days of the 1960s. No more soot stained and intimidating, red brick and dour education establishments – this was the concrete constructed, expansive, open plan, primary coloured future. The Headmaster of the junior school was Mr. Glaze, a genial, warm and kindly man with a prematurely receding hairline. The infant school was run by a calm, soft voiced woman, Helen, who would later become Mr. Glaze's wife. It was a protective, encouraging and comfortable place in which to begin an education, and central to its atmosphere were the teaching staff, who were young, positive and seemed to really care for us kids and our development. There was Miss Simons - a petite lady with short dark hair who was gentle, calm, warm and kindly. A wonderfully protective and comforting figure to have as a teacher. And there was Mr. Simpson, another of my class teachers, a charming and funny man who at the time felt like the caring father figure I was lacking, yet was probably only in his late twenties himself at the time. Far too young for the tweed jacket, leather elbow patches, and highly polished but well used brogues that were his uniform. They were very much teachers in the new, sixties mould it seems to me now – open to new ideas, ambitious for their kids, and seemingly keen to kick against the staid and restrictive, pre-destined and stifling systems of the past. In fact, the only teacher I recall who elicited any feelings of concern on the part of us kids was Mrs. Else. She was rumoured to be something of a disciplinarian, and not averse to pulling errant boys around by the short hair above their ears as a remedy to misbehaviour. But that was the worst fate that could befall you at Broom Barns. What a wonderful place. Each day started with an Assembly in the hall, which also doubled as our gymnasium. A tall, large room, flooded with light from the full height windows along one wall framed by garish 60s abstract print curtains, it was open and airy with a highly polished parquet floor. We would all enter to a record playing on a turntable built into a wooden cabinet on castors, sit on the floor, then Mr. Glaze would address us all, delivering a brief talk, after which we would say a prayer and then go off to our classrooms. In those days, all schools started with a Christian assembly. Which I didn't really hold with if I'm honest. Not that I was against religion as a concept. My mum was religious - or at least she admitted to believing in God, although she never went to church or gave any outward sign of being Christian. I don't recall my dad ever expressing a religious thought – Moslem or Christian – so I can only assume he was an Atheist. We never discussed religion as a family. Mind you, we never discussed anything really. We watched telly, argued, fought, shouted at each other and, when my dad was out, laughed. But nobody ever expressed any real opinions on anything of any great import. It was not the idea but the logic of religion that bothered me. I would sit in the Assembly Hall, surrounded by 300 kids, imagining all of them asking God for different things, and this scenario being replicated in thousands of schools all across the country, and it all became a little unrealistic. The idea that one being – even the all-powerful man in the clouds with the wispy beard we saw in our books – could keep track of all those individual pleas just seemed ludicrous. And, to compound the silliness, apparently He was not just listening, but watching all of us too. All the time. Millions and millions of us. In a world filled with atom bombs and bank robbers, and one where my dad would beat my mum up in front of his kids, apparently, God spent his valuable time keeping a beady eye on me and my mates just in case we said "Oh God" or swore or told a lie, in which case he would not only spot it, but also mete put some form of punishment too. I just didn't buy it. Not that I ever said this of course. I wasn't that stupid. I put my hands together, closed my eyes, and asked for Johnny Seven or a new bike or some marbles like every other kid. Just in case. Apart from introducing me to mercenary religious practices, Broom Barns also has the dubious honour of being the place where I learned how to be embarrassed. My dad was still living at home at the time of this cathartic experience. Although he was my dad, he was no provider. He gave my mum a set "wage" each week to feed and clothe herself and us four kids, from which she was also expected to cover every household expense, from rent to gas and electricity, to saving for Christmas gifts. The level of this wage was not based on how much all these things cost either, but on the minimum my old man thought he had to stump up to prevent actually being arrested for neglect. So my mum had to watch every penny. And she was permanently broke. She made her own clothes on a pedal operated Singer sewing machine. She made dresses for my sister that way too. She took menial jobs part time to supplement the meagre amount paid by my dad – who never once asked, or presumably thought about, why we were all wearing each other’s clothes and why we only had one bath a week on a Sunday. I was about eight years old when my Mum received a parcel from her family in Nottingham, who knew the desperate financial straits she was often in. In the parcel were some men's shirts. I remember them well - thick, heavy, hard-wearing cotton, a kind of raw, cream colour, they had collars which could be removed from the shirt and washed separately or replaced when worn out. My mum must have been going through a particularly tough time, because one morning when I did not have a shirt to wear to school, she dressed me in one of those sent from her family. As it was a man's shirt, and I was not a big boy, it was enormous on me. It had old fashioned tails at the front and back, which hung down far below my knees. The collar, which my mum buttoned up, dangled gapingly about three inches below my Adam's apple. Being something of a smiling idiot, I trudged off to school, happily oblivious to my sartorial shortcomings. Our school uniform required short grey trousers which finished half way down my thighs, and as I was walking through the underpass under the main road to school, I suddenly felt the tails of the shirt unravelling from the tight balls my mum had screwed them up into under my trousers. They unfurled rapidly and completely, the cream tails of the shirt hanging out the bottom of my trousers and flapping around below my knees. Not quite knowing what to do, I stuffed my hands deep into the pockets of my trousers and began pulling and bunching the shirt material, hoisting it all back up the legs of my short trousers and holding it tightly in balls t hrough the pocket lining. To maintain my grip on the folds of fabric, I had to walk with my legs dead straight, pivoting at the hips and marching stiffly with my arms clamped to my sides, hands thrust deep in my pockets. I knew this made me look bizarre - striding jerkily like Frankenstein's monster – but I had no choice. I could feel my face growing hotter and reddening as I approached the school gates where there was a teacher and a gaggle of other kids. I steeled myself and strode purposefully through them. Beetroot red to the tips of my ears now, and thoroughly shamed, I glanced back to see their faces, some puzzled, most smirking, and behind them, across the main road, I saw my dad pull on to the main road on his way to work, driving his e-type Jaguar. I remember thinking – even at that tender age – that something wasn't quite right with my dad. But this was just my introduction to what life had in store for me, embarrassment-wise. I would soon endure greater shame not only in front of my peers, and my teachers, but also in front of a large invited audience. There was a very popular sit-com on TV at the time called Please Sir, in which a bumbling but terribly well-meaning young teacher takes over a class of inner-city delinquents – all with hearts of gold, naturally. The cast was a fabulous collection of stereotypes, from the Headmaster, an absent minded, befuddled older gent, to the assistant head, a terrifying and domineering, no-nonsense middle aged woman who scared the hell out of everyone at the school – teachers included. This actress reappeared years later playing, as far as I could tell, the same person in an episode of Fawlty Towers where she appeared as a very demanding guest who refused to turn her hearing aid on because it flattened the batteries. And then there was the school janitor, a man with a military gait who adored the Deputy Head and spent most of his time telling the kids "I was in the desert rats you know". The pupils were just as cliched, and just as brilliant. On the girl’s side, there was the pretty, vain, slightly dim and perennially mini-skirted Sharon, and Maureen, the plain and serious girl, constantly quoting and misquoting the bible, who mooned over "Sir" and had ambitions to be a nun. The boys were led by Duffy, a wise-cracking hard nut, with Craven, an impeccably dressed mod, Dennis, a gentle and loving simpleton, and leather jacketed Frankie Abbot, who acted like a tough guy, referred to himself as "F.A.", but was in reality a remorselessly henpecked mummy's boy and coward. Each Christmas our school put on a play, which was performed in front of all the parents. And one year, the teachers decided to forego the usual Nativity story, and in a fit of right-on rule breaking instead present our version of Please Sir. I got the part of Mr. Price – a blunt, no-nonsense Welshman and maths teacher with a strong accent. My sports teacher at school was Mr. Griffiths. A supremely fit man with a ginger goatee, he was also Welsh, and one of my favourites. I think he liked me because I was a decent, natural sportsman. He decided that to add veracity to our performance, and help me, he would coach me in how to deliver my part with a real Welsh accent. We went through my lines for several weeks, repeating them over and over and perfecting my accent. I had the honour of speaking the last line of the play. For this, I had to step forward from among a group of my fellow performers and shout "Never mind the flippin' bell, grab your cup of tea!" at which point I was to kick a football over the heads of the watching parents and the play would be over. Footballs in the mid-sixties were not the glossy, feather light, scientifically designed things we see today. Back then, they were heavy, hard brown leather, had a thick, internal rubber bladder, and when wet felt like you were heading a bag of flour. For safety reasons, therefore, it was decided that I should not use a real football, but just the rubber bladder alone. This, although much lighter, still had impressive heft. There were to be two performances of the play on consecutive nights, and tickets sold out quickly. The first performance went perfectly – not a single hitch, and despite a few first night jitters, nobody forgot their lines. We delivered the play with gusto and energy, and the parents all laughed in the right places. When the time came for the last line, and my solo moment under the spotlight, I marched boldly forward, chest puffed out, and tried to project myself and speak clearly just as Mr. Griffiths had taught me. "Never mind the flippin' bell, grab your cup of tea", I said confidently, and not without some pride. I felt pretty chuffed with myself. I had given a good performance, remembered all my lines, and got a few laughs. I was good at this. I launched the ball in a high toss and took a great swing at it with my right foot, hitting it hard on the volley. The ball left my foot at huge speed, travelled all of ten feet perfectly horizontally and cannoned directly into the face of a large middle-aged lady sitting in her coat on the front row. As it happened, and with a quite unfortunate twist of irony she seemed neither to recognise nor appreciate, she was just taking a sip from a school supplied cup of tea when the ball arrived. It hit her fair and square, with considerable force. The saucer dropped to the floor, the teacup span in the air, spraying its contents on the unfortunate woman's face. She sat there in shock, glaring at me with a look of hurt disbelief as tea dripped off her nose and onto her coat which was, I noted, buttoned right up to the neck as if against an arctic wind. I stood, my mouth hanging open, thinking "I am in so much trouble…". Taking the initiative, Mr. Griffiths bounded over and thanked the audience, while other teachers fussed around this poor lady, her face turning redder and redder with hot tea, and I was bundled off to the changing rooms in a horrified trance. The following day, the teaching staff were very kind and comforting. They counselled me, reassured me, and gently rebuilt my confidence. It was an accident, and accidents happen. They worked hard to make sure this terrible event did not affect my performance for the second and final night and, their support ringing in my ears, I soon felt I was ready to try again. As a gesture of goodwill, the school persuaded the unfortunate lady to return on the second night to see the play again as a special guest of the staff, to make amends for this unfortunate accident. She was given a reserved seat next to the teachers at the back of the audience as a mark of respect. Or perhaps for her own protection given the previous night's action. The evening passed well. If anything, better than the first performance, as we all got more into our roles, knew where the audience reactions would be, and started trying to milk the laughs wherever we could. It was going down a storm. The teachers looked proud, and we were having huge fun showing off, the audience lapping us up. Come the final line, I pushed forward again, energised and refreshed with the confidence instilled in me by my teachers and the reaction of the audience that night, and again loudly and confidently said "Never mind the flippin' bell, grab your cup of tea". I tossed the ball lightly in the air. I recall deliberately concentrating on kicking the ball high, so as not to repeat the previous night's error. I connected perfectly, and the ball took off beautifully. Much to my relief, it sailed easily over the front rows of parents. I began to hear the beginnings of appreciative applause. I felt great. I worked out the ball's trajectory long before anyone else. As it dipped viciously, I had the perfect view. I watched, horrified but powerless, and stood dumbstruck as it sailed down in a perfect arc and smacked the same lady fair and square in the face again. She looked at me aghast with an expression I will never forget. It said "Again!" It said "What have I ever done to you". There was a second or two of absolute silence. Nobody moved as the horrified teachers realised I'd done the same woman again. Mr. Griffiths looked straight at me and I swear to this day he had the ghost of a suppressed laugh on his face. He jumped up, dashed over and bundled me off stage. For the second time in two nights. I was never invited to take part in a Christmas play again, although to be honest, I did not volunteer either. I felt that perhaps acting was not my forte. Despite these setbacks, my early school life was enjoyable. We were all council estate kids, we were all from the same kind of background, so I went to school with the same friends I would play with after school finished. I was a reasonably bright kid academically. I latched onto things quickly, and it used to drive my sister to distraction. Denise was always a grafter. She would revise and revise - study like a maniac for exams. I would go out and play football instead. Then I would breeze through them. Din would achieve good results too – she is as smart as hell - but she'd work so hard for the exams. She would get pretty angry with me sometimes - at the unfairness of it all. And I don't blame her. But my relative academic ease flattered to deceive. Despite appearing naturally quick-witted, most of the time I acted with breath-taking feeble mindedness. To get to school, I had to go through an underpass under the busy main road which passed between the school and our house. This was part of the cycle track network which criss-crossed Stevenage, and at its entrance was a large round metal sign, strapped to a pole about 8 feet high, indicating that the cycle track was for mopeds and bicycles only. I told my friend Glyn that if we hit the sign enough with stones, it would spin on the pole and end up facing the wrong way – with presumably hilarious results. I'm not sure what these would be, but in my defence I was about ten years old, and an idiot. We began with much enthusiasm. We launched wave upon wave of rocks at the sign with deadly accuracy. It did not move one millimetre. Just stayed there, silently mocking our efforts. Once we had exhausted all the stones in the immediate surroundings, we went further afield to find more ammo. We raided the front gardens of close-by houses for more stones, and subjected the sign to barrage after barrage. It did not budge. Frustrated by our inability to achieve my aim, and clearly experiencing my first vandal blood lust, I went angrily off in search of larger ammunition. Rummaging around at the edge of some woods about a hundred metres away, in the long grass I came across a lump of concrete, peppered with bits of flint. It had seemingly been the concrete base into which a fence or sign had been set at some point as it still had the broken stump of a small wooden post sticking out of its centre. It was sharp, uneven, rough and of sufficient weight that I struggled to carry it back. Standing beneath the sign, I took a moment to catch my breath and give my arms a rest. I adopted as wide a stance as I could, picked the concrete lump up by the bit of post conveniently sticking out from its centre, and began swinging it back and forth between my legs to get some momentum going. I arched my body back and forth to increase the swing, and when I felt like I could hold it no longer, I gave one final huge lunge and launched it skyward. It left my hands and sailed up, straight and true, right at the sign. It hit it dead on, with some force. And moved it not the tiniest little bit. Instead, it bounced smartly off the metal sign with a bell-like clang, and plummeted back to earth, landing on my head as I stared stupidly upwards. I do actually have a hazy recollection of seeing the lump of concrete heading back down towards me at speed, and thinking "Duh?", before everything went black. I came round about ten seconds later, laying on my back with a lump the size and shape of a ping-pong ball on my forehead and Glyn staring down at me, his face a blend of fear, shock and panicky giggling. Not only did I not succeed in getting the sign to spin round, I didn't even get any time off for my injury. When I came too, I simply stood up and we carried on walking to school. Nobody took any notice – or even mentioned - the angry purple lump on my forehead. And it had reduced a lot by the time I went home, so my Mum simply thought it was yet another of the many cuts, lumps and bruises that boys collected in the normal course of life in Stevenage. Sadly, as you may judge from my mum's reaction – or lack of reaction – such idiocy on my part was not unusual. Indeed, it was just another in a series of head injuries which I incurred so often it was almost as if I were pursuing them as a hobby. Once a school light fell on my head. For those reading quickly, may I repeat that just for purposes of clarity. A school light fell on my head. A whacking great, two foot diameter, heavy glass lamp fitting. I was just sitting at my desk, happily doing my work, when it just fell from the ceiling, hitting my head a glancing blow and smashing on my desk. I think most people will accept there is little I could have done to cause, or indeed prevent, this event. I was, I am sure any right-minded person would agree, a completely innocent party in the whole affair. One minute I was reading the exciting tale of Janet and John going to the seaside, the next minute, a huge lump of white glass smashes on my head and my desk. The school, recognising their duty of care, assumed my mum would wish to be bought into the matter, so they sent someone running to bring her to school urgently. It says much about my mum – and probably a lot about the times – that when she arrived, her reaction was to grab my head quite roughly and have a close look at the cut and the lump. Then to accusingly demand to know what I had been up to. Ignoring my protestations of innocence, she tutted loudly and told me to run my head under the tap and hold a hanky on it until it stopped bleeding. Then she told me to be more careful in the future and not mess about in class. And that was it. Nothing more was said. She went back home, my head stopped bleeding after a while and things just went on as if nothing had happened. I still have a scar on my eyebrow. I was cut badly on the other side of my forehead a few months later when I was hit with a bottle – an event in which I was, once more, entirely innocent. We were playing football on the strip of grass in front of our house, when an argument broke out between some of the boys who were a little older than me. One of them picked up a bottle which was lying on the grass, and launched it at the rest of us. It hit me just above my eye and smashed. I put my hand up, immediately felt a lump and saw blood on my hand. I can remember with perfect clarity noticing a kind of shadow in my vision out of my left eye which was the rapidly expanding lump growing into my peripheral vision. I ran to my house, where my mum washed out the cut, put on a huge lump of sticking plaster and immediately sent me back out again. In the light of all this, I don’t wish to suggest that my mum didn’t care for us. She did. Unconditionally and deeply. It was just that she saw wounds like this simply as part of the process of growing up, and she had an inherent belief that everything would be fine, so there was no need for a fuss. We never had any worries about serious illness. Meningitis, septicaemia and the like didn't exist. Or rather they did, but they happened to someone else. Somewhere else. Anything that befell us could be dealt with by the application of soup and a Beecham's Powder. My mum took no prisoners when it came to being ill. My sister and I often joked that, were we to actually break a leg, we may get a morning off school to have the plaster put on, but we'd be expected to go in for the afternoon. And because we were never exposed to what might go wrong, we didn't think anything could. So we would take huge risks without fear of consequence. Hang out of trees fifty feet in the air. Walk and run over garages with fragile asbestos roofs. Make rope swings that suspended you in an arc tens of feet from the ground. Build karts with old pram wheels, sit in them and careen down the steepest of hills with no brakes or control, surrounded by cars, kerbs and trees all queuing up to bash your brains in. What this blend of ignorance and blind optimism meant was that most kids I knew were a positive riot of bruises and cuts, most of the time. I do, however, lay claim to one of the more unusual wounds among my peers. Indeed, so spectacular and unusual was it, that it remained a conversation piece for weeks. It was caused by our autumnal pursuit of the conker. Conkers were a very big deal when we were kids, and we would travel far and wide to collect them. The main problem was that so did every other child. As a consequence, trees were quickly denuded of conkers at anything like normal heights, so one had to find ever higher trees, and ever more inventive – sometimes violent - ways to knock the conkers down. This meant lobbing increasingly unwieldy and heavy stuff up into very high horse chestnut trees, and running like hell when it came clattering down, hopefully with a load of conkers. There was a particularly huge tree on our list – our mother lode. It stood in a mature, quiet and elevated copse by a large roundabout close to the railway tracks. I loved this little outcrop. It was little known and visited by other kids, yet was home to a huge horse chestnut tree. The copse was eventually cleared to make way for the eagle-shaped headquarters of the Confederation Life insurance company. It was deep into the conker season and, having visited our tree several times and stripped the lower branches of any fruits, I was becoming ever more desperate for fresh supplies. Facing something of a critical shortage, and finding a huge lump of broken tree branch on the ground, I decided to push the conker envelope by attempting to throw a branch I could hardly hold up. I took up position below a particularly tempting bunch of conkers maybe fifteen feet above my head. I always had pretty good hand/eye co-ordination, which was why I found sports quite easy, and having seen Hammer Throwing on TV, I thought I would try to copy the technique. I grasped the branch in both hands and began spinning my entire body round. I span round several times, faster and faster, feeling the pull of the branch on my arms as I built up speed until, with the vocal encouragement of my mates ringing in my ears, I released the log. It left my arms at an impressive velocity, flying upward into the canopy. Where it immediately hit one of the tree's more solid branches with a dull clonk, bounced straight back at incredible speed and landed on top of my head, knocking me down like I'd been shot. I lay there, conscious but stunned, feeling a slight dampness on my head, which I would soon discover was blood. As I lay looking into the clear blue sky through the branches of the tree, trying to collect myself, all was silence. Until I heard a clattering noise, like the sound of wooden balls on skittles. Staring harder, puzzled, I realised with some surprise and not a little concern that it was the noise of an impressively large shower of conkers in their spiky shells raining down through the branches. They landed on my prone form with some force, their spikes digging deep into my skin resulting in a liberal peppering of puncture wounds on my chest, arms, face and legs. For two weeks, I was covered in swathes of tiny, red pimple-like scabs. I looked like I was suffering from some hideous and exotic skin complaint. People would guide their kids surreptitiously away from my path, presumably fearing I was carrying Measles or Chicken Pox. The things which made life at Broom Barns so agreeable were also the things which made life in Stevenage as a kid in the sixties so good. The sheer number of young children was a factor. The town was full to the brim with t hem. Bounce a ball three times outside your house and within minutes there would be a gang of a dozen kids lining up to pick teams. And the fact that all families shared pretty much the same circumstances helped too. We all lived in rented council houses. Most of us had dads working in one of the many factories and engineering works in the town. Some of us had working mums too, doing part time hours in shops and factories while trying to raise us kids. Perhaps the most important factor was that, this being a new town, we were all new arrivals. None of us had roots here. We were all just trying to work out where we were, where we were going, and what this town was all about. How it all worked. To a large extent, we were all, parents and kids, the new kids at the big new school where we knew nobody and had to start from scratch. Broom Barns holds such happy memories for me. I had a huge circle of friends, all of whom went to the same school and lived near me. We were happy in our own environment. All the people I knew were like us, more or less. M y mum loved us, we were fed and clothed – even if it was sometimes in wholly inappropriate sizes - and once my dad went to work, our house was a fun and safe place to be. But at eleven years old, I had to leave the comforting confines of Broom Barns for Bedwell Secondary School, several miles away. Here the kids were big, often seemingly unhinged, regularly angry, and came from all over the town and from a variety of backgrounds. Was I in for a shock.
The Lunatics have taken over the Asylum
A spectacularly unsuccessful attempt at a dodgy insurance claim
My Dad's career in dodgy insurance claims was short, and rather unsuccessful.
He used to own a TV aerial installation business with half a dozen vans. The blokes who worked for him seemed to have been selected
for their idiosyncrasies. Tim was rail thin, from Tottenham, and always smoked his cigarette between thumb and forefinger. Mick the
Grit was a Stevenage boy, wiry and tough. Pete was a young lad from a very dodgy background, who used to go to Portsmouth at weekends
to fight “the seaweeds” as he called them. That was when he wasn't in Aldershot fighting “squaddies”. My that boy liked a scrap. He
also had a real thing about Traffic Wardens – absolutely despised them. I remember being in a van with him, driving through town in
torrential rain. We happened to pass a Traffic Warden, minding his own business, trudging along looking miserable and saturated. We
stopped at a junction, and as we did so, the warden reached the nearside of our van. Pete leaned over me, opened the window, leaned
out and shouted “Oi, warden...I hope you get fuckin' wet”. The warden stopped dead in his tracks and just stared back, open mouthed
at the venom directed at him for no reason, as we pulled gently away into traffic.
Jill was my dad's secretary, and the most stuck up woman I have met in my entire life. She treated us kids with undisguised disgust – particularly
my sister Denise – and any interaction with her was responded to as if we had just defecated in her handbag.
This was a surprise really, because far from being aristocracy, Jill's husband, Owen, was a labourer at our firm.
It is entirely possible, however, that her attitude toward me and my sister had less to do with us coming from what she considered
the wrong side of the tracks, and more to do with the fact that she had been shagging my dad for years. Just a guess.
Despite her animosity and self-regard, her husband Owen was an absolute diamond and was great to us kids. We all loved him. A charming man, he
was the king of paperwork. No government department ever got the better of him. He knew every benefit, every clause there was
to know, and he was organised. As only an obsessive compulsive could be. And this man used to iron his pants and socks. Really.
His favourite catchphrase when taking on the council – one that passed into our workplace language – was “OK, you get your papers,
I'll get mine, and we'll see where you’ve gone wrong”.
This all came in handy when he divorced Jill and set up home with a delightful lady called Allie, who was a serious epileptic. Owen
became her carer, and no government department or doctor ever got the better of them or refused her the latest and best medicine – Owen saw to that.
Del was our Welshman. A huge man with curly black hair, a blue/black chin and hands as big as shovels, he never used six words when
one would do. He was breathtakingly, eye-poppingly, blunt.
His crowning achievement was the handling of a new trainee. Young Jim had joined us to learn the aerial trade. It was not long,
however, before a more pungent issue came to the fore. Jim had a rather ripe aura. These were the days when wearing anti-perspirant
was highly suspect, and washing more than once a week using anything other than coal tar soap or Swarfega, was considered effeminate.
Moisturiser could have got you reported to the police. But in a group of blokes doing physical work, a smelly colleague was not welcome,
and eventually, the problem was reported to my old man.
My dad decided this would be a chance to develop Del's career as one of the senior riggers – to start to groom him for more
managerial duties - encouraging him, by experiencing a sensitive situation, to adopt a more politically adept and considered approach. He asked
Del up to the office for a chat one morning, and explained that Jim needed some gentle handling. Del should explain that part
of the lad's work was to deal with the customer, and that personal hygiene was consequently very important. He should sit the lad
down – maybe over lunch – and gently introduce the subject. He may want to mention that we all know it's a manual job, and climbing
ladders and roofs was hard physical work and that it was even more important therefore to make sure that we showered every morning
as we would be sweating during the day. Del sat and listened, nodding sagely at the right moments. It finished with my dad thanking
Del for doing this – he recognised it was a difficult issue and he welcomed Del's help in dealing with it so calmly and assuredly.
The old man shook his hand, and Del went downstairs from the office into the yard. The boys were loading up the vans for the days work,
and Del spied young Jim across the yard. “Oi, Jim” he yelled.
Jim looked up, “Yeah Del”?
“Ave a fucking bath son, you stink like a fuckin' pig isn't it” shouted Del.
My dad hated paying out for anything that was not for himself. Wages, Christmas Presents, Safety Gear, my mum's housekeeping money.
All of these were a real struggle for him to hand over. He clearly felt as if he were being robbed. Meanwhile, he drove an e-type Jag,
went to a Harley Street dentist and had a cupboard full – literally – of new boxed shirts and hand-made shoes. Saying he was selfish is
like saying Oliver Reed enjoyed a tipple.
His tight-fistedness knew no bounds. I have seen him walk across the yard in his hand-made shoes to where he had parked his jaguar,
then abruptly stop, bend down and pick up one piece of a coax aerial plug. These little aluminium plugs, comprising four pieces which
screwed together, fixed to the end of your aerial cable and plugged into your TV. They cost less than an old penny – we used them by
the hundreds in the business. Holding it above his head, he then proceeded to go completely ape-shit at the blokes loading the vans.
And I mean foamy-mouthed mental. Yelling about the waste and how they had no idea about money or how to save it. How they were all
just piss-takers. The blokes were in holed jeans, had no safety kit, and provided their own clothes, boots and gloves. And they were
all paid the absolute minimum possible.
They stared at him in his hundred pound shoes and tailor-made jacket, open-mouthed. How they didn't just lynch the fucker is beyond me.
I recall once broaching the idea of an incentive scheme so the lads would get a bonus if they bought in additional work. This made
sense to me – an aerial rigger would often get asked by a neighbour of the house where he was working to do some work on their aerial
“while they were up there”. I thought this was a good way of trying to keep hold of this extra work for the business and discourage
the lads from doing it for cash and pocketing the money - which, I hasten to add, I didn't blame them for doing, such was the
paltriness of the salaries they were paid. So, I worked it all out, how much it may cost and the benefits it would bring to the
business. The old man sat patiently as I explained it all to him, nodding at the proper times. Once I had finished, he said “Yes,
very interesting, but you do realise they already have an incentive scheme”? I didn't. Shocked, I said “I didn't know that” “Oh yes”,
he said “I've been running it for years. How it works is like this. If they do as they are told, and don't rip me off, they get to
keep their fucking jobs. That's the incentive”.
My idea went no further. But his arrogant meanness sometimes got repaid.
One day, Tim arrived back at the yard with a dent above the rear wheel arch of his van. The van Tim drove at the time was a huge old
Austin Cambridge – the oldest on the fleet. It had massive high sided tyres, and a rusty
body which had been hand-painted with silver so badly the brush strokes were visible from some distance. It looked like something out
of Dad's Army.
Tim knew what to expect. He went upstairs to the old man's office and told him he had been hit by a bloke who pulled out of a side road.
As we all knew he would, the old man went ballistic - yelping on about how nobody gave a shit about the business or costs except him.
Tim waited for him to calm a little, then handed him a piece of paper. He explained to his purple-faced boss that the other driver had
written his name and address on a sheet of paper and handed it to him. He had told Tim that, as it was a small dent, he would prefer to pay cash for
the repair rather than put it through the insurance. All Tim had to do was to get a quote, pop round to the blokes house and he would pay him cash.
The old man went quiet as an idea formulated in his mind. He asked Tim if the Police had attended, which they had not. And now the plan came together.
Here was a knackered old van, due for the scrapheap, and a man who had admitted liability for causing an accident in which it had sustained damage.
Most importantly, that damage had not been witnessed by anyone but the two drivers – one of whom was his employee.
He walked purposefully down to the yard and looked at the damage. It was a crease about six inches long high over the
wheel arch, but it was shallow and would easily push out. Not a serious thing.
The old man went rummaging in one of the store sheds, then came out with a sledge hammer.
He then proceeded to beat that poor van to shit. He smashed every panel all along one side. So extensive was his work, he actually
stopped, rested for a minute, then started again. By the time he had finished, the van was clearly a write-off. One entire side had
been destroyed. He even dented the steel wheels.
Once he had finished, he turned to Tim and said, panting, his face flushed, “Now I'm going to the police station to report the accident.
Where's that piece of paper?”
He grabbed the vital document from Tim without a word and, still panting from his exertions, got into the van and trundled off, the poor old Austin scraping, banging and squeaking its way
out of the yard.
He returned an hour later in the beaten up Austin, and went directly upstairs to his office without speaking to anybody. Tim had a new van within a week. And as it turned out, it didn't
cost the Insurance Company a penny. My Dad paid for the new van.
The Police said the address on the piece of paper did not exist.
Karma.
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