It was there on that hot August day early in the decade of hope and ration books that the removal van drew up outside. From that point onwards imagination and adventure were to be constantly allied. Young as I was I was fired with the pioneering spirit. For me at least the removal van could have been a part of any of the legendary wagon trains opening up the West. The porters in their aprons and cloth-caps could just as easily have been cowboys in chaps and leather waistcoats. “What d’you want shifted furst missus,” they harmonized, and slowly we decamped. Sticks of furniture, moth-eaten rugs and a 14-inch state of the art, black and white Fergusson television-set joined the trickle of possessions deemed indispensable to our new lives. I was impatient for the off. Not for me the interminable goodbyes to weepy neighbours. Not the kisses and the handshakes or the promises to keep in touch. A new life beckoned. There was territory to be claimed. Land to be staked. As a special treat I was allowed to travel in the back of the van. I stood up with my arms across the tailboard and waited for my past to recede.
At six years of age you may think that the past was in rather short supply; but past there was in plenty. I was born in Hampshire, but that as well as just about everything else that had happened in my life thus far was due entirely to the war. According to family tradition I could have been born in any number of places. I was an integral part of a pregnancy at various locations throughout London. Was on the verge of birth in Folkstone and finally came up, or down, for air in Westover Road, Fleet, near Aldershot. My memories of Hampshire stretch little further than the umbilical cord itself. I remember a bridge, a river, what I’ve subsequently found out to be watercress and inconceivably to me a vision of goldfish. This set of somewhat disjointed psychological memorabilia have since been explained to me in terms of separate events in a logical sequence of time, but for me they’re inextricably linked and form part of my unique mythic development. To put it another way, I’d like to be able to claim rustic origin - to explain my life as it now is as the inevitable consequence of my earliest experiences. Unfortunately, truth is, that apart from those few rather vague bucolic reminiscences, my real foundations are those of the city. The Thames is in my blood. Every slick polluted corpuscle slopping against the grey wharves of my brain. My mind is bricked-in and stacked-up layer upon layer into the grim smoke-confusing skies of E16. Pie and mash was my gestation and sarsaparilla the baptism.
My recollections take me by the hand and I find myself in my grandmother’s house at Leicester Avenue. I was there for a street party. Festival of Britain or Empire day, I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that it was a party, that I was being dressed up as Little Boy Blue in reams of crepe paper, and that I didn’t like it. Mind you, at least I won a prize. It could have been worse, my brother was entered as a Red Indian and it took a week to scrub him free of boot-polish. As is the case with most people of note, I had an Irish grandmother. It seems almost obligatory. There’s something deeply unsettling about a purely Anglo-Saxon heritage - a truly atavistic sense of tribal guilt. Claims of Celtic ancestry abound; we seem to need them somehow. Rumour has it that Katy Kerns, nee Barnet, wasn’t really Irish at all, but that her mother was. Kinsale and Cork are somewhere there in the background, with my lapsed catholicism to the fore. Whatever the reality, priests are more familiar to me than vicars and words like shenanigan come easily to the lips. In my own way I idolized that woman - that grey-haired diminutive goddess with a red-faced devilish temperament. What she lacked in physical stature she more than made up for by an abundance of spirit. Always dressed for work, her day-clothes protected by a floral pinafore with a large pouch in the front of it, she sat there in her chair by the pot-black stove for all the world like some sort of monarch of misrule; legs dangling like a naughty child. Her pinafore was better than a Jamboree-Bag. A lucky dip of the first order. “You in me pinny agin boy, what yer afta?” she’d say. Well, there were things in there to activate the sparkle in the eyes of innocence. The commonplace took on an inordinate mystery: plasters and boiled-sweets, sticky with their different reasons, pennies and bits of string, a bottle-opener for her Guiness. I especially remember the packets of Woodbines with their orange and green art-nouveau design, resonant of exotic places, like an archetypal jungle of the mind, sibilant with coiling snakes and raucous with macaws and parakeets.
My grandfather was a different proposition altogether. He lived deep in the mists of Apocrypha. Did he play for Aston Villa in the days when footballers turned up for the match in top hats and tails? Was he really once a professional boxer? I know he fought in the First World War but where he fought I couldn’t tell you. I think he worked for the local council, and yet spent most of the Depression unemployed. Taciturn would be an understatement. He sat in the chair opposite my grandmother, mostly obscured by the Daily Herald. Plumes of smoke billowed out from behind the headlines and the sport’s page. An occasional hand thrust out a spill into the stove, and then drew back a flickering flame into his private world of newsprint and Nutbrown. “Don’t listen to im,” my grandmother used to say. Which was ironic to say the least. At Christmas though there was a metamorphosis. In the topsy-turvy world of Saturnalian Cockneydom, silence was broken. He would dress up as a woman displaying all the garishness of a pantomime-dame. He would mince about the house singing and dancing as terrified children scattered in his wake. At tree-picking time he was transformed again into a somewhat taller, thinner than usual Father Christmas. I don’t think that I was ever really fooled, but it didn’t matter, the willing suspension of disbelief came easily in those days.
Uncles and aunts were legion. My mother had six sisters and two brothers. The house seemed always to be full. At Christmas dinner there were two sittings, one for the children and then another for the adults. Poor as they were the season of peace and goodwill was celebrated in a manner fit for royalty. They saved all year for this annual blow out and no expense was spared. The kitchen was a veritable slaughterhouse. Ovens were spitting and sizzling with their loads of turkey, goose, rabbit, pork and chicken. The pantry was hung with all kinds of cooked meats, which were gamey enough to have been the envy of any country mansion. Barrels of beer were set up on trestles in the backyard and wooden crates with their quart-bottled cargoes of stout and brown-ale were stacked to the ceiling on the back porch. We children weren’t forgotten either. There were those drinks that memories are made of: ginger-beer, cream-soda, dandelion and burdock, and of course the ever popular Tizer, fizzing up your nose and making your eyes water. In that Aladdin’s-Cave of a front room, decked out for the festivities, we feasted like we’d never done before. There were crackers and party hats, screams of laughter, sleeves dipped in gravy and jelly and cream on the tips of indelicate noses. Nobody cared, nothing mattered; we were free, licence had been given. Great wedges of Christmas pudding buckled the table. There was treasure in every piece. Silver-joeys, wrapped in greaseproof paper, had been carefully inserted so as nobody went without. It was a three-day party. ‘Knees-up-muvver-Brown’, Jimmy Shand, granny on the piano thumping away with one hand and picking out a tune with the other. Uncles and aunts were tipsy and giggling. Caterwauling through the old songs, sharp and flat and discordant; setting the teeth on edge. Adults never went to bed. They stayed up for three nights. Sleeping in chairs, playing cards, drinking themselves sober. Beds were reserved for the children - three at one end and three at the other. Too excited to sleep, rooms were awash with whispers. Moonlight filtered through chinks in the curtains. It was a silent-movie world of silhouettes and shimmering silver. Stories of ghosts and rattling skeletons, goose-pimpled the flesh and lifted the hairs on the back of the neck. But sleep would come at last, as inevitable as the end of Christmas itself. Light was engulfed. Laughter extinguished.
My first school was St Teresa’s Roman Catholic Primary School in Canning-Town. My memories of it are somewhat shadowy. That first morning, hand in hand with my mother, walking beneath the trees at the edge of the Hermit Road Recreation Ground still fills my mind with terror. There it was that another small birth took place. Had I been dangled by the feet and slapped bodily into the shock of existence, my screams and tears could not have been more authentic. There it was that the seeds of recalcitrance were sown. Being dragged away by a nun off into the unknown, never again - as I thought at the time - to see my kith and kin, was a jolt to the system that I’ve never fully recovered from. There it was that my first groping intellectualisms grasped at the meanings of distrust. My propensity towards the solitary life had its