‘Give us a suck of yer lolly, then,’ said the skinny one.
‘Who are you?’ I countered.
‘We run this place,’ said the oik. ‘Don’t we, Jeff?’
Jeff said nothing, but looked at me with a scowl.
‘What, all of it?’ I said, looking round. ‘You mean, you own this whole street?’
‘Where d’you live?’ asked the oik, with an attempt at truculence.
‘Round here,’ I said neutrally.
‘That your dad’s motor?’ he said, indicating what was indeed my father’s Rover 2000.
‘Might be,’ I said.
‘Rich ponce, are you?’
‘Where do you live, then?’ I asked in return. ‘I ’aven’t seen you round ’ere before.’ I had slipped, cautiously, into the Battersea vernacular.
‘His dad,’ said the skinny one, indicating the fat Jeff, ‘he’s been in the nick. Got no time for rich ponces.’
‘Oh, really?’ I said. Our encounter was proceeding in meaningless, small steps, but there was no doubting the threat that lay beneath our trading of questions and answers. The back door of my house was precisely ten yards away, but I could hardly flourish my key and let myself in, leaving them to trash my father’s car and run away laughing.
‘I got to go,’ I said. ‘Got a karate lesson in fifteen minutes.’
The blatant lie hung in the air, an unmistakable counter-threat.
At last the fat boy spoke. Like an old tape-recorder switched on and slowly whirring into life, Jeff gathered his great brain and said: ‘D’you want a fight?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I got to be somewhere else. ’Bye now.’
‘You startin’ somethin’, mate?’ Jeff persisted – an absurd question, since I was clearly trying to signal my departure. ‘Cos if you are, I’m going to finish it.’
It was obviously a speech he’d been practising for a while, part of a preamble to violence he’d learned from a cooler kid, and was desperate to try out on somebody, no matter how unpromising the circumstances.
‘No, no, honestly not,’ I said. Whereupon he hit me with his fist, surprisingly gently, on the chin.
I couldn’t believe it. Nobody had ever hit me there before. At school in Wimbledon, surrounded by the cream of the Catholic middle-classes, we didn’t do such things. We wrestled, we inflicted arm-locks and head-locks on each other, we dealt in Chinese Burns and Dead Legs and agonising Half-Nelsons, but we never took a swing at another chap’s face. That was the stuff of gangster movies and cowboy films.
The blow in my own backyard, didn’t actually hurt, but it was incontrovertibly a punch in the face, and demanded some form of response. Though it didn’t hurt, it was extremely annoying. So I did what any bourgeois movie-going kid would have done. I balled my fists, narrowed my eyes and bore down on the fat pillock with the words ‘Why, you …’ grating from my ten-year-old lips.
Amazingly, he and his skinny friend hastened away down the street. It was enough that they’d laid a featherweight blow on a local boy (especially a rich ponce). They had no more interest in a full-scale fight than I had. The gesture was, it seemed, enough.
In the badlands around Clapham Junction in 1963, you had to watch yourself. I was a well-educated doctor’s son, living in a working-class neighbourhood populated by criminals, toughs, tearaways, blag-artists, shoplifters, dodgy market traders, the weasel-faced sons of whippet-thin men who worked in the motor business.
Most of my days were spent at school five miles away in Wimbledon, where the streets were leafy, the shops were full of new pastel fashions, and the houses on the Ridgeway and the Downs sported glamorous, off-street driveways. Around my home in Battersea, everything was terraced, shuttered, council-owned, bleakly functional. I wish I could say I became street-wise from growing up in a tough neighbourhood, but the only streets I knew were the long shopping thoroughfares of Battersea Rise and Lavender Hill, places down which I tramped aimlessly on Saturday mornings without picking up any proletarian savoir-faire at all. Most of the time, I longed to get home, where I could read my comics and make my Airfix models in peace, away from the noisome reek of Northcote Road market and the hopeless furniture shops on Rise and Hill; full of leatherette-and-draylon three-piece suites.
When I encountered the tough kids in the neighbourhood, I had no idea how to behave – what to say, how to initiate or conclude a fight, how to handle the endlessly protracted, preambular exchange of insults. But what struck me about the encounter in Lavender Sweep was that we were all – all three of us – going through the motions of a fight rather than actually fighting; and that everything we said and did came from movie Westerns.
Take that moment when the skinny one affected to ‘run this place’ and I scoffed at his presumption. God knows what he meant by saying it, but he and I were mimicking a scene from Red River, a classic John Wayne movie. In an early scene, an exotic Mexican dude rides up just as Wayne is explaining to his toothless sidekick Groot (Walter Brennan) and his adoptive son Matthew (Montgomery Clift) that the patch of land on which they’re standing is an ideal place to start a homestead (‘There’s good water and grass – plenty of it’) and that he will establish the Red River D cattle company on this very spot. The Mexican explains that all the land is, in fact, owned by a shadowy megalomaniac called Diego, and that Wayne has a bit of a nerve to claim ownership of it on a whim.
‘Go to Diego,’ grunts Wayne, ‘and tell him all the land north of the river is mine. Tell him to stay off it.’
‘Others have come here and tried to take this land,’ says the smiling Mexican. ‘Others have thought like you …’
‘And you’ve always been good enough to stop them?’ says Wayne, employing a sophisticated play on the words ‘good’ and ‘enough’.
‘Señor,’ says the Mexican, smiling fit to bust, ‘eet ees my job.’
‘Pretty unhealthy work,’ says Wayne, waving his compadres away from the imminent shoot-out.
‘I’m sorry,’ says the Mexican, and pulls his gun, but Wayne shoots him, right there on his horse, and that, it seemed, was the way you ended any tiresome disputes over who owned the territory with the good water and the plentiful grass.
If only we could all be like John Wayne. The thought filled the heads of several million Americans (and several million English schoolkids) for decades. If only we could bully our way into acquiring land and telling people what to do, if only we knew, like him, when to pull a gun and do the right thing about territory, or justice, or cattle, how much simpler life would be. Whatever character he played, Wayne seemed to make up the rules of the Old West as he went along, and everyone just agreed with him. It saved time and meant you didn’t have to get shot. He was the Man, the Chief, the natural leader – a gun-slinging Moses who knew the way to the Promised Land and who assumed personal charge of the Ten Commandments. He had a gruff authority nobody could argue with. He showed you how things were done around these parts, and you just had to go along with it.
Perversely Red River was the key Western of my young days precisely because it presented John Wayne, for once, as wholly un-admirable. But before we get into that, a word about the stranglehold that Western movies exerted on the impressionable youth in the Granada stalls.
Being ten years old, in 1963, wasn’t much fun. You were still a kid, but you weren’t a child any more. You lived in a worrying interregnum between childish toys and pubertal exhibitionism. Your life took a sudden turn into intense physicality. Your friends suddenly turned into football fans, and their conversation degenerated into a recital of goal statistics or players’ names. Two of my closest pals became Boy Scouts and went around with flashes of green