During the evening the atmosphere changed, and home turned into a living Gary Larson cartoon. Folding wooden chairs turned the place into a pop-up hair salon, with blue as the only colour and beehive the only game in town. Women with vast knees and polythene bags over their heads sat slowly evaporating under heat lamps as my grandmother roasted, curled and produced that awful smell of dank hair and industrial shampoo.
My escape committee was my uncle John. He forms quite an important part of what button to push next.
First of all, he wasn’t my uncle. He was my godfather – my grandfather’s best mate – and he was in the Royal Air Force and had fought in the war. As a bright working-class boy he was hoovered up by an expanding RAF, which required a whole host of technological skills that were in short supply, as one of Trenchard’s apprentices. An electrical engineer during the Siege of Malta, Flight Sergeant John Booker survived some of the most nail-biting bombardments of the war on an island Hitler was determined to crush at all costs.
I have his medals and a copy of his service Bible, annotated accordingly with verses to give support at a time when things must have been unimaginably grim. And there are pictures, one with him in full flying gear, about to stow away on a night-flying operation, which, as ground crew, was utterly unnecessary – done just for the hell of it.
While I sat on his knee he regaled me with aircraft stories and I touched his silvered Spitfire apprentice model, and a brass four-engined Liberator, with plexiglass propeller disc melted from a downed Spitfire and a green felt pad under its wooden plinth, the material cut from a shattered snooker table in a bombed-out Maltese club. He spoke of airships, of the history of engineering in Britain, of jet engines, Vulcan bombers, naval battles and test pilots. Inspired, I would sit for hours making model aircraft like many a boy of my generation, fiddling with transfers – later upgraded to decals, which sounded so much cleverer. It was a miracle any of my plastic pilots ever survived combat at all, given the fact that their entire bodies were encased in glue and their canopies covered in opaque fingerprints. The model shop in Worksop where I built my plastic air force was, amazingly, still there the last time I looked, on the occasion of my grandmother’s funeral.
Because Uncle John was a technical sort of chap, he had a self-built pond the size of the Möhne Dam, full of red goldfish and cunningly protected by chicken wire, and he drove a rather splendid Ford Consul, which was immaculate, of course. It was this car that transported me to my first airshow in the early sixties, when health and safety was for chickens and the term ‘noise abatement’ had not even entered the vocabulary.
Earthquaking jets like the Vulcan would shatter roofs performing vertical rolls with their giant delta wings while the English Electric Lightning, basically a supersonic firework with a man perched astride it, would streak past inverted, with the tail nearly scoring the runway. Powerful stuff.
Uncle John introduced me to the world of machinery and mechanisms, but I was equally as drawn to the steam trains that still plied their trade through Worksop station. The footbridge and the station today are virtually unchanged to those of my childhood. I swear that the same timbers I stood on as a boy still exist. The smoke, steam and ash clouds which enveloped me mingled with the tarry breath of bitumen to sting my nostrils. I walked to and from the station recently. I thought it was a bloody long way, but as a child it felt like nothing. The smell still lingers.
In short order, I would have settled for steam-train driver, then maybe fighter pilot … and if I got bored with that, astronaut was always a possibility, at least in my dreams. Nothing in childhood is ever wasted.
Somewhere, the fun has to stop, and so I went to school. Manton Primary was the local school for coalminers’ kids. Before it was closed, it achieved a level of notoriety with Daily Mail readers as the school where five-year-olds beat up the teachers. Well, I don’t recollect beating up any teachers, but I was given the gift of wings and also boxing lessons, after a fracas over who should play the role of Angel in the nativity play. I was lusting after those wings but instead got a good kicking in the melee that continued outside the school gates. The outcome was far from satisfactory. When I returned from school, dishevelled and clothes ripped, my grandfather sat me down and opened my hands, which were soft and pudgy. His hands were rough, like sandpaper, with bits of calloused skin stuck like coconut flakes to the deep lines that opened up as he spread his palms in front of me. I remember the glint in his eye.
‘Now, make a fist, lad,’ he said.
So I did.
‘Not like that – you’ll break your thumb. Like this.’
So he showed me.
‘Like this?’ I said.
‘Aye. Now hit my hand.’
Not exactly The Karate Kid – no standing on one leg on the end of a boat, no ‘wax on, wax off’ Hollywood moment. But after a week or so he took me to one side, and very gently, but with a steely determination in his voice, said, ‘Now go and find the lad that did it. And sort him out.’
So I did.
I think it was about 20 minutes before I was dragged away by the teacher and frogmarched home with a very firm grip. My boxing lessons had been rather too effective, and my judgement, at the age of four or five, rather less than discerning.
The ratatat-tat of the letterbox elicited an impassive grandfather: slippers, white singlet and baggy trousers. I don’t remember what the teacher said. All I remember was what my grandfather said: ‘I’ll take care of it.’
And with that, I was released.
What I got was not a beating, or a telling-off, but quiet disapproval and a lecture on the morality of fisticuffs and the rules of the game, which were basically don’t bully people, stick up for yourself and never strike a woman. A gentle, forgiving and thoroughly decent man, he never failed to protect what mattered to him.
Not bad for 1962.
In the midst of all this, my real parents, Sonia and Bruce, were back from the dog-show circuit and living in Sheffield. They would visit on Sunday lunchtimes. I still have the cream-and-brown Bakelite radio set that was on at these occasions. They were always rather strained affairs, leaving me with a lifelong horror of sit-down meals, as well as gin and lipstick. I would push food around the plate and be lectured about not leaving my Brussels sprouts and the perils of not eating food when it was rationed, which of course it wasn’t anymore, but no one could comprehend that reality. The same post-war hangover restricted you to three inches of bathwater, anxiety over the use of electricity and a morbid fear of psychological dissipation caused by speaking on the telephone excessively.
Conversations were peppered with local disasters. So and so had a stroke … auntie somebody had fallen downstairs … teenage pregnancy was rife … and some poor lad had sunk through the crust of one of the many slag heaps that surrounded the pit, only to find red-hot embers beneath, leaving the most horrific burns.
It was following one particular Sunday lunch, when I’d eaten the Brussels sprouts and the chicken formerly wandering about in the garden allotment, that it was time to move on and in with my parents. With my uncle John, I always rode in the front seat, but now I was in the back, staring through the rear window as the first five years of my life shrank away into the distance – then around the corner.
I finally faced forward, into an uncertain future. I could fight a bit, had caught several nasty bugs, commanded my own air force and was pretty close to defying gravity. Living with parents – how hard could it be?
I have never smoked tobacco, except in the odd joint when I was aged 19 to 21, which we’ll address a bit later on. I say this because, in fact, I probably smoked a pack a day just by being around my parents. My God, could they puff away. Aged 16, they tried to enlist me in the filthy weed society, but it was my greatest act of rebellion to evade