I guess that, by the time I was around fourteen or so, I was becoming what my friends would call confident and those on the other side of the argument might describe as cocky. I started to get my dad to drop me off for school where he couldn’t see the gate, then I’d walk on by and spend my days in a local workmen’s café playing the pinball machines, smoking and drinking enough coffee to make a corpse hyper. Before anyone starts to criticise, just realise that it would have all worked out fine if I’d been content with being a pinball wizard. Instead I had the illusion I could be a decent footballer and occasionally went back to school for games afternoons.
One day as we were making our way down to the pitch, this whiny little kid behind me kept saying he was going to tell the teachers that I played truant. Eventually I got pissed off and spun round to shut him up. I didn’t mean to hurt him – well, not badly – but when I caught him with my swinging football boot it was harder than I’d intended. He was knocked out and taken to hospital. I was invited to leave school. I was shocked – I never expected to be expelled from a school I was paying to be at.
Dad was livid and knew exactly how to punish me. He signed me up for Wilsden Technical College. But any hopes he nurtured that I would become a scholar were soon dashed. I’m just not the kind of person who can sit down and absorb theory. I’ve never read a single instruction manual. If I take something out of the packing and can’t make it work by common sense, I send it back because it must be faulty. Wilsden wanted to teach me the ins and outs of everything without ever letting me get my hands on anything. I survived nine months and then had to get out.
I may not have been good at school but I was never work shy. Dad made sure of that and set me a great example. He seemed to have endless energy and it never occurred to him not to be doing something. I knew all about the bike shop and his involvement in speedway, but I also became aware that he spent a couple of nights a week working in a hall at the top of Barnet Hill. Eventually, he took me with him and outside the main doors, amid the posters for popular jazz acts such as Kenny Ball and Acker Bilk, there was a notice advertising twice-weekly whist drives organised by Mark Hines. I have to admit seeing dozens of people sitting round playing cards all evening wasn’t my idea of fun, but Dad assured me it was very popular and there was a reasonable profit left after paying for the hire of the hall and buying the prizes.
In fact, it must have been quite a good profit because soon afterwards he announced he had taken the lease on the Temperance Hall at Tally Ho Corner, a large, old, parquet-floored building that at the time was a failing snooker club. Dad tidied it up and put on his whist drives there for a number of years while he thought up his next bright idea.
I was at home one day when a guy delivered a steel frame, about 1.8 x 1 metre and 3 foot high. Like most people, we had a ‘front room’, which was used only on high days and holidays. Dad would occasionally turn it into a temporary workshop in the evenings to straighten out a bike wheel that was needed urgently, and that was where he put the frame, ready to start work. It was quickly followed by a board that slotted on top of the frame, bits of wire, small electrical switches and several sheets of glass about 15–20 cm square.
I was intrigued and one evening I poked my head round the door and found Dad screwing ninety switches on to the board. I couldn’t contain my curiosity any more. ‘What on earth are you up to?’
‘Well, we’re not getting the turnout for whist drives any more, so I’m going to change it into a bingo hall. You know, like the bingo at the seaside. But instead of prizes our players will win money.’
I thought he was nuts but over the next few weeks he continued to work on his new board. By the time he erected it on the stage at the Temperance Hall, it was connected up to light bulbs behind the glass panels, which had been painted alternately red and black and numbered 1 to 90.
‘See,’ he said, ‘when you call a number, you flick a switch and it lights up so the punters can see it as well as hear it.’
It was a terrific idea and inevitably ripped off. Someone saw the board and asked Dad to make one for him. He did and within six months all the major companies had a similar setup in their halls. I’ll never be able to prove they lifted the idea from us but I know what I think.
The changeover from whist to bingo saw the whole family working flat out and Dad sent me to help his brother. Uncle John was one of those guys who can turn their hands to anything: he could run a pub, do a bit of plumbing or even build you a house as long as you didn’t require more than a year’s guarantee. I found him in the shed he used as a workshop, welding steel tubing into simple seat frames. He raised his protective mask and pointed to a huge blue pile in the corner. It turned out to be squares of wood that had been covered with foam and then had PVC stretched over them, and I had to screw two on to each frame to make a seat and a back. It was tedious, fiddly work and I had six hundred to do before the bingo hall could open.
I think it was the first commercial bingo hall in London and, when the opening night came, the queues stretched round the block. We started the first session an hour late because we hadn’t anticipated the time it would take to get so many people into the hall and kitted out with bingo cards and pencils. But the waiting didn’t put them off, and they clearly had a good time because they kept coming back.
The bingo crowd became an extension of our family. Bingo evenings were social events and everyone got to know each other – it was a bit like EastEnders in a Temperance Hall. Mum loved it. She would probably have described herself as ‘just a housewife’, yet she also did the secretarial work for the shop, kept all Dad’s books and worked in the bingo hall. Mum was about 5 foot 9 inches tall with long legs. She had been a chorus girl in the 1940s, when that was considered not entirely proper, so she had learned to cut through hypocrisy and bullshit. She took people as she found them and was as comfortable with a cleaning lady as with a duchess.
She quickly befriended the bingo regulars, especially their kids, and I think it helped her a lot. She had been through some rough times – twice when she miscarried, she slumped into a severe depression and had to go into hospital. On one occasion the doctors kept her drugged for around six months. Dad wouldn’t let me go to see her when she was very ill and, despite his and my grandparents’ efforts, there was a big hole at home. Even when she was getting better, I can remember him taking me along to Knapsbury Hospital, a specialist mental unit, and I could hardly recognise the sad, tentative woman in front of me as the vibrant, lovely mother that I knew. Yet, when she eventually recovered, she would become her old self again and enjoyed nothing more than sitting in the kiosk on bingo night, selling people their sweets and cigarettes and having a chat.
Just like the Queen Vic in EastEnders, the bingo hall was always alive with gossip. At times it seemed there were as many tales as punters. None caused more of a stir than when one of our MCs disappeared. He was a lovely, gentle man, probably in his forties, with a smile and a joke for everyone. He and his wife seemed to have an idyllic existence, until one night he simply didn’t turn up for work. No one has seen him since.
You can imagine how quickly the rumours started to fly around as people speculated what had happened to him. Among the suggestions I heard, he’d been kidnapped, murdered or wandered off into oblivion having lost his memory and was probably sleeping rough beneath the arches by the Embankment Underground station. In the end, the majority view was that he’d run off with a much younger woman. With examples like that, is it any wonder I had so much trouble holding down a relationship in my early years?
The family atmosphere of the bingo was summed up every Christmas when we threw a massive party, where we would hand out cake and drinks. The other young MCs and I used to don our round-necked, collarless suits and wigs and mime to Beatles records. Dad rounded off the evening with his rendition of ‘White Christmas’. There wasn’t a dry