Life (4 page)

I remember going from Aunt Lil’s to infant school, to West Hill school, screaming my head off. “No way, Mum, no way!” Howling and kicking and refusing and refusing to go, but I did go. They had a way about them, grown-ups. I put up a fight, but I knew it was a full-on moment. Doris felt for me, but not that much. “This is life, boy, something we can’t fight.” I remember my cousin, who was Aunt Lil’s son. Big boy. He was at least fifteen, with a charm that cannot be imagined. He was my hero. He had a check shirt! And he went out when he wanted. I think he was called Reg. Cousin Kay was their daughter. She pissed me off because she had really long legs, could always run faster than me. I came in a valiant second every time. She was older than me, though. We rode my first horse together, bareback. A great old white mare that barely knew what was going on, that had been put out to pasture, if you could call it that round where we lived. I was with a couple of mates and Cousin Kay, and we got on the fence and managed to get on the horse’s back, and thank God she’s a sweet mare, otherwise if she had taken off I would have gone for a loop. I had no rope.

I hated infant school. I hated all school. Doris said I was so nervous she remembered bringing me home on her back because I couldn’t walk, I was trembling so hard. And this was before the stickups and the bullying began. What they fed you was awful. I remember at infant school being forced to eat “Gypsy Tart,” which revolted me. I just refused it. It was pie with some muck burned into it, marmalade or caramel. Every schoolkid knew this pie and some actually liked it. But it wasn’t my idea of a dessert, and they tried to force me to eat it, threatening me with punishment or a fine. It was very Dickensian. I had to write out “I will not refuse food” three hundred times in my infantile hand. After so many times I had it down. “I,I,I,I,I,I,I… will,will,will,will…”

I was known to have a temper. As if nobody else has one. A temper that was aroused by Gypsy Tart. In retrospect, the British education system, reeling from the war, had not much to work with. The PT master had just come from training commandos and didn’t see why he shouldn’t treat you the same as them even though you’re five or six years old. It was all ex-army blokes. All these guys had been in WWII and some of them were just back from Korea. So you were brought up with this kind of barking authority.

I
should have
a badge for surviving the early National Service dentists. The appointments were I think two a year—they had school inspections —and my mum had to drag me screaming to them. She’d have to spend some hard-earned money to buy me something afterwards, because every time I went there was sheer hell. No mercy. “Shut up, kid.” The red rubber apron, like an Edgar Allan Poe horror. They had those very rickety machines in those days, ’49, ’50, belt-drive drills, electric-chair straps to hold you down.

The dentist was an ex-army bloke. My teeth got ruined by it. I developed a fear of going to the dentist with, by the mid-’70s, visible consequences—a mouthful of blackened teeth. Gas is expensive, so you’d just get a whiff. And also they got more for an extraction than for a filling. So everything came out. They would just yank it out, with the smallest whiff of gas, and you’d wake up halfway through an extraction; seeing that red rubber hose, that mask, you felt like you were a bomber pilot, except you had no bomber. The red rubber mask and the man looming over you like Laurence Olivier in
Marathon Man
. It was the only time I saw the devil, as I imagined. I was dreaming, and I saw the three-pronged fork and he was laughing away, and I wake up and he’s going, “Stop squawking, boy. I’ve got another twenty to do today.” And all I got out of it was a dinky toy, a plastic gun.

A
fter a time
the town council gave us a flat over a greengrocer’s in a little row of shops in Chastilian Road, two bedrooms and a lounge —still there. Mick lived one street away, in Denver Road. Posh Town, we used to call it—the difference between detached and semidetached houses. It was a five-minute bike ride to Dartford Heath and only two streets away from my next school, the school Mick and I both went to, Wentworth Primary School.

I went back to Dartford to breathe the air not long ago. Nothing much had changed in Chastilian Road. The greengrocer’s is now a florist called the Darling Buds of Kent, whose proprietor came out with a framed photograph for me to sign, almost the moment I’d stepped onto the pavement. He behaved as if he was expecting me, the picture ready, as unsurprised as if I came every week, whereas I hadn’t been around there for thirty-five years. As I walked into our old house, I knew exactly the number of stairs. For the first time in fifty years I entered the room where I lived in that house, where the florist now lives. Tiny room, exactly the same, and Bert and Doris in the tiny room across a three-foot landing. I lived there from about 1949 to 1952.

Across the street there were the Co-op and the butcher’s—that’s where the dog bit me. My first dog bite. It was a vicious bugger, tied up outside. Finlays tobacconist was on the opposite corner. The post box was still in the same place, but there used to be a huge hole on Ashen Drive where a bomb dropped, which is now covered over. Mr. Steadman used to live next door. He had a TV and he used to open the curtains to let us kids watch. But my worst memory, the most painful that came back to me, standing in the little back garden, was the day of the rotten tomatoes. I’ve had some bad things happen, but this is still one of the worst days of my life. The greengrocer used to stack old fruit crates in the back garden, and a mate and I found all these far-gone tomatoes. We just squidged the whole packet up. We started having a rotten-tomato fight and we splashed them everywhere, tomatoes all over the place, including all over myself, my mate, the windows, the walls. We were outside, but we were bombing each other. “Take that, swine!” Rotten tomato in your face. And I went inside and my mum scared the shit out of me.

“I’ve called the man.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve called the man. He’s going to take you away, because you’re out of control.”

And I broke down.

“He’s coming here in fifteen minutes. He’ll be here any minute now to take you away into the home.”

And I shat myself. I was about six or seven.

“Oh, Mum!” I’m on my knees, I’m pleading and begging.

“I’ve had it up to here with you. I don’t want you anymore.”

“No, Mum, please…”

“And on top of that, I’m going to tell your dad.”

“Oh,
Muuuuuum
.”

That was a cruel day. She was relentless. She kept it going for about an hour too. Until I cried myself to sleep and realized eventually that there was no man at all and that she had been putting me on. And I had to figure out why. I mean, a few rotten tomatoes? I guess I needed a lesson: “You don’t do that around here.” Doris was never strict. It was just “This is the way it is, this is what’s going to happen and you’re going to do this and do that.” But that’s the only time she put the fear of God into me.

Not that we ever had the fear of God in our family. There’s nobody in my family that ever had anything to do with organized religion. None of them. I had a grandfather who was a red-blooded socialist, as was my grandmother. And the church, organized religion, was something to be avoided. Nobody minded what Christ said, nobody said there wasn’t a God or anything like that, but stay away from organizations. Priests would be considered with much suspicion. See a bloke in a black frock, cross the road. Mind out for the Catholics, they’re even dodgier. They had no time for it. Thank God, otherwise Sundays would have been even more boring than they were. We never went to church, never even knew where it was.

I went down to Dartford with my wife, Patti, who had never been there, and my daughter Angela, who was our guide, being a native of the place and brought up, like me, by Doris. And while we were standing there in Chastilian Road, out of the next-door shop, a unisex hairdresser’s called Hi-Lites that only had room for about three customers, came what seemed like fifteen young female assistants of an age and type I recognized. It would have been nice if it had been there when I was there. Unisex salon. I wonder what the greengrocer would have had to say about that?

In the next minutes or so, the dialogue went along these familiar lines.

Fan:
  Can we have your autograph, please? It’s to Anne and all the girls at Hi-Lites. Come into the hairdresser’s, have your hair cut. Are you going to Denver Road where Mick lived?

KR:
  That’s the next one up, right?

Fan:
  And I want you to sign one to my husband.

KR:
  Oh, you married? Oh, shit.

Fan:
  Why you asking? Come into our salon.… Got to get a piece of paper. My husband’s not going to believe this.

KR:
  I’d forgotten what it was like to be mobbed by Dartford girls.

Older Fan:
  These are all too young to appreciate it. We remember you.

KR:
  Well, I’m still going. Whatever you’re listening to now, they wouldn’t have been there without me. I’m going to have dreams about this place tonight.

Fan:
  Did you ever imagine, in that little room?

KR:
  I imagined everything. I never thought it would happen.

There was something intrinsically Dartford about those girls. They’re at ease, they hang together. They’re almost like village girls—in the sense that they belong to one small place. Still, they give that feeling of closeness and friendliness. I used to have a few girlfriends in Chastilian Road days, though it was purely platonic at the time. I always remember one gave me a kiss. We were about six or seven. “But keep it dark,” she said. I still haven’t written that song. Chicks are always miles ahead. Keep it dark! That was the first girlfriend thing, but I was mates with a lot of girls as I grew up. My cousin Kay and I, we were friends for quite a few years. Patti and Angela and I drove past Heather Drive, near the heath. Heather Drive was really upscale. This is where Deborah lived. I got this incredible fixation on her when I was eleven or twelve. I used to stand there looking at her bedroom window, like a thief in the night.

The heath was only a five-minute bike ride away. Dartford’s not a big place, and you could go out of it, out of town and out of mind, within a few minutes into that piece of Kentish scrub and woodland, like some medieval grove where one tested one’s biking skills. The glory bumps. You used to be able to drive your bike through these hills and deep craters under low trees, zoom about and fall over. What a great name, the glory bumps. I’ve had many since, but none as big as those. You could hang there all weekend.

In Dartford in those days, and maybe still, you turned one way to the west, and there was the city. But if you went east or south, you got deep country. You were aware you were right at the very edge. In those days, Dartford was a real peripheral suburb. It also had its own character; it still does. It didn’t feel part of London. You didn’t feel that you were a Londoner. I can’t quite remember any civic pride in Dartford when I was growing up. It was somewhere to get out of. I didn’t feel any nostalgia when I went back that day, except for one thing—the smell of the heath. That brought back more memories than anything else. I love the air of Sussex, where I live, to death, but there’s a certain mixture of stuff on Dartford Heath, a unique smell of gorse and heather that I don’t get anywhere else. The glory bumps had gone, or were grown over or weren’t as big as I thought they were, but walking through that bracken took me back.

London to me when I grew up was horse shit and coal smoke. For five or six years after the war there was more horse-drawn traffic in London than there was after the First World War. It was a pungent mixture, which I really miss. It was a sort of bed you lay in, sensory-wise. I’m going to try and market it for the older citizens. Remember this? London Pong.

London hasn’t changed that much to me except for the smell, and the fact you can now see how beautiful some of the buildings are, like the Natural History Museum, with the grime cleaned off and the blue tiles. Nothing looked like that then. The other thing was that the street belonged to you. I remember later on seeing pictures of Chichester High Street in the 1900s, and the only things in the street are kids playing ball and a horse and cart coming down the road. You just got out the way for the occasional vehicle.

When I was growing up, it was heavy fog almost all winter, and if you’ve got two or three miles to walk to get back home, it was the dogs that led you. Suddenly old Dodger would show up with a patch on his eye, and you could basically guide your way home by that. Sometimes the fog was so thick you couldn’t see a thing. And old Dodger would take you up and hand you over to some Labrador. Animals were in the street, something that’s disappeared. I would have got lost and died without some help from my canine friends.

When I was nine they gave us a council house in Temple Hill, in a wasteland. I was much happier in Chastilian Road. But Doris considered we were very lucky. “We’ve got a house” and all of that crap. OK, so you drag your arse to the other side of town. There was, of course, a serious housing crisis for a few years after the war. In Dartford many people were living in prefabs in Princes Road. Charlie Watts was still living in a prefab when I first met him in 1962—a whole section of the population had put down roots in these asbestos and tin-roof buildings, lovingly cared for them. There wasn’t much the British government could do after the war except try and clean up the mess, which you were part of. They glorified themselves in the process, of course. They called the streets of this new estate after themselves, the Labour Party elite, past and present—a little hastily in the latter category, maybe, given that they had been in power only six years before they were out again. They saw themselves as heroes of a working-class struggle—one of whose militants and party faithful was my own granddad Ernie Richards, who had, with my grandmother Eliza, more or less created the Walthamstow Labour Party.