I knelt on the floor and had a look, but I couldn’t see any holes, just little wet pink bits, so I sat on the bed and rubbed myself for a bit while she and my aunt’s old dog sat and watched until I got the feeling. I was getting a few drops of white stuff by then and it tasted salty. Jenny and I tasted it and made the dog taste it too. She wagged her tail but I don’t think she liked it any more than we did. Then we went out and played in the garden until Aunt Bill came home at tea time.
MY BEST FRIEND – MIKE DIMARCO
Mike is my oldest friend. We were at school together. No, we are NOT holding hands. And by the way, EVERYONE stood like that in the sixties. And that is my daughter Charlotte showing a flower to her mother Sue, who was taking the photo. We were all pretending not to notice that Mike was wearing a cardigan.
1958 – TRANSPORT
My first motorbike was one of these – a 1947 125cc Royal Enfield with a gear lever on the petrol tank. It had died and probably been buried a few years before I got it because it broke down all the time. My girlfriends hated it because with two people on it, it was slower than walking and they were always complaining about getting engine oil on their clothes. In the end I had to sell it to pay for its repairs when it broke down in Brighton.
My second and third motorbikes were little better – tired old 125cc BSA Bantams that the Post Office had worn out delivering telegrams. All my early motorbikes had two things in common – they were cheap and unreliable. But then, I suppose I was too.
SEX & DRUGS & ROCK-N-ROLL
In the sixties we were all supposed to have as much sex and drugs and rock and roll as possible.
Sex was my favourite. It was free – as long as you overlooked the potential consequences – and, most of the time, absolutely fantastic.
Rock and roll was fantastic too because we had invented it, the same as sex. Our parents had listened to music by people who wore suits and had tidy haircuts like they did and played in dance bands. And, of course, our parents never had sex more than the one time it had taken to produce us and it had always been with the light out, eyes shut tight, thinking of England as they did their duty while wearing thick pyjamas.
Drugs were something I was much too scared to try. I loved myself too much to take anything that could be dangerous. Not that there was much choice in the sixties. It was mainly pot, which I found pretty boring. It didn’t so much enhance life as send it to sleep. The other new toy was LSD and there was no way I was ever going to try that, not with the thousands of people we kept hearing about who suddenly thought they were birds and flew off the tops of tall buildings. At least two people I knew were changed forever by it.
Drink was a different matter altogether. Well, it was for a while, until I finally connected the throwing up and feeling really shit for hours after about five minutes of feeling great with the cheap cider I was drinking. I finally realised I had almost no head for alcohol and thank goodness I didn’t because I would probably have become an alcoholic.
Smoking – I did have a head for that and from sixteen to thirty-five I chain-smoked all day every day. Twenty-five years later, when I was fifty-nine, smoking was blamed when I had bypass surgery for a blocked artery.
MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC
To understand how important The Ealing Club was, you have to understand how important Ealing wasn’t. We used to say that if there were elephants in England, Ealing is where they would have gone to die.
And they did. Ealing was the graveyard where lots of the old soldiers who had shot elephants and the natives in India retired to die. They kept their dying to themselves and did it very quietly with occasional visits to the saloon bar for a snifter of port and afternoon tea at The House of Tong.
In streets of big Victorian houses, old colonels, retired from a life of subjugating the world, sat behind yellowing lace curtains in gloomy rooms that had remained unchanged since they were children, except that as time passed, cigarette smoke had made everything even darker, even their dreams.
They were forgotten but not gone. The stag at bay, once standing in the afternoon sun, now hid behind the faded varnish of evening. In our west London suburb, there were endless streets of these quiet Victorian houses with their quiet Victorian owners dying off one by one. They had travelled the globe taking their civilisation to poor underprivileged Johnny Foreigner and then retired to Ealing to sit in the twilight, the blood washed from their hands and consciences, waiting for God to call them to paradise where everyone would be white and know their place and three rooms away you could always hear a song by Vera Lynn.
Ealing was also a memory of movies where even the villains spoke like toffs. Alec Guinness in black and white, genteel, finely crafted entertainment with added Carry-On films. I went to school next door to Ealing Studios and stared at Anita Ekberg’s disturbing chest as she and Anthony Steele were whisked away to the country for the weekend.
As I moved through my childhood and teenage bits, Ealing began to change. As the old soldiers died one by one, their houses were converted into flats and bedsitters. But it was still genteeI and quiet.
We knew our place.
It was middle-class veering slightly towards upper-middle-class with a desperate desire to be upper-upper-middle-class, and maybe even drop the ‘middle’. We had accounts at the grocer’s and a little woman my grandmother called ‘the daily’ who came in and did twice a week. My mother and aunts were brought up by nannies who wore uniforms and pushed their prams around Ealing Common in a convoy with an accuracy you could set your watch by. We had a button in every room that rang a bell in the kitchen.
We were very sure of our place. No man may be an island but a suburb certainly could be. Ealing had a moat around it to keep it safe from West Ealing, South Ealing and all the other common places beyond. Our blood was blue, which was strange because our necks were red.
Yet, no one would have had it any other way.
Familiarity breeds contentment.
Each morning, the milk floats radiated out from United Dairies on the edge of the Common. The horses I remember as child were replaced by the hum of electric motors as the floats stopped and started, stopped and started along our peaceful streets.
The price of all this security was a wet blanket that lay over Ealing, smothering laughter, dampening down rash decisions, muffling raised voices, but it kept us safe and warm.
As I grew up, the only music I heard in our house were ancient 78s of Caruso singing opera which my mother adored. Like her, it was cold and mechanical, an overbearing photocopy of real feelings – not from the heart, but from an inflexible book of rules.
But then, in the mid-fifties, we discovered Eel Pie Island. We’d take the bus or go on our motorbikes out to Twickenham where the enchanted island sat in the Thames.
We’d cross the footbridge with an old lady in a cupboard at the far end that you gave sixpence to and enter another world. And it was enchanted, with a small group of eccentric cottages of artists and inventors – including Trevor Baylis, who created the clockwork radio.
Beyond the cottages was the Eel Pie Island Hotel, which always looked like it was just about to start falling down. It had a