Having people my own age around was a revelation in our new home – in fact, having any neighbours at all was a little different after the farmyard. But I wasn’t actually that keen on all the other kids. I think I was already getting to like being the centre of attention. Sharing the limelight with other children was never going to be my thing. So I didn’t mix that well during our first few years back in town. Mum remembers me playing with the rest of the so-called Sidney Street gang, but I only really remember playing with one of the kids from the newsagents’ shop opposite, Noyce & Sons. Kay, the owners’ daughter, was that one early pal. We played Doctors and Nurses, the way you do. That’s when I discovered the female form, though strictly as an observer.
Where I did have fun was Southampton with my other grandparents. Lil and Jack Parsons had a little flat there and I was always desperate to visit. Lil was very theatrical, which I already loved. She was always singing and she could play the piano by ear. She also gave me my first taste of real theatre. She had a huge extended family and one of her brothers was a leading light in amateur dramatics. I never got the chance to see him in a play – at this point I’d never even been inside a village hall, let alone a theatre. But I listened when he talked about his rehearsals and performances. It all sounded so thrilling, so magical. I wanted some of that excitement to rub off on me. So, while Grannie cooked a meal and Granddad sat around in his long johns and vest chain-smoking untipped cigarettes, I set up my own little fantasy world.
I would hang a sheet up in my bedroom to look like a theatre curtain. And I would put on little shows for the Southampton branch of the family.
Back in Salisbury our family’s only other very loose link with the entertainment world was a friendship with the Neagles, a trio who sang on cruise ships and had moved to Florida before I had even met them. Dad missed them and didn’t just talk about them all the time – he tried to talk like them as well. The head of the Neagle family had given him a Star of David as a keepsake. So Dad put on a cod-Jewish voice that made me laugh and drove Mum mad. ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about. He’s not even circumcised,’ she said after one particularly long impression.
‘I won’t take my coat off. I’m not stopping.’ That’s what Grannie B would always say when she arrived from Oldham. Then she would stay for weeks. Sidney Street always seemed to be crowded. Yes, it was a lot bigger than the caravan. But it wasn’t exactly a palace. We had an outside toilet – everyone did back then. And our toilet was never empty. We had a very big resident spider. I was terrified, quite terrified, of spiders back then, which meant going to the toilet as a boy was all a bit of a nightmare. Now, after the jungle, I have learned to take both spiders and outside toilets in my stride.
Monday night was bath night on Sidney Street. Dad dragged out the standard-issue tin bath and Mum filled it up with water boiled up on the fire in the front room. Then I got in for my weekly wash. Now, having a bath in front of your parents is bad enough. But I had a bigger audience. Every Monday, every single one for around 16 years, my mum’s friend Maisie came round. The regularity of it drove Mum mad. The embarrassment of it nearly did the same to me.
Maisie’s husband Les would go out to the pub with my dad and she would settle down for the night as I got undressed and began my ablutions. Yes, I already liked having an audience and being the centre of attention. But this was ridiculous. Couldn’t Maisie arrive later or leave earlier? Did her visits always have to happen on a Monday? Some weeks when my bath water had been drained away, Mum would change into her nightdress and put her curlers in to try to persuade Maisie it was time to leave. But she never got the hint. I was so pleased when we finally had enough money to have an indoor bathroom put in. Maisie still came round every Monday night until I was well into my teens. But at least I was no longer the main attraction in the middle of the living-room floor.
Monday must have been one of my mum’s rare nights off. She had a new job in a cocktail bar at the Cathedral Hotel on Milford Street in the middle of town. Today it’s a sad and tired-looking place. But in its heyday, in Mum’s day, the hotel and its main bar absolutely glittered. People dressed up to drink there. Nights out were few and far between, so everyone felt a sense of occasion when they enjoyed them. And the job could hardly have suited Mum more. She was so glamorous, so gregarious.
The place suited me just as well as it suited my mum. The hotel manager and his family lived upstairs and I would hang around with their daughter, Pam, while our parents worked. I think Pam and I were supposed to do our homework and play games. But we found something else. We discovered the wonder of room service. We rang down for whatever we wanted. Beans on toast. Strawberry milkshakes. Cheese sandwiches. A matter of minutes later, as if by magic, our orders would arrive. Men and women in uniform would bring them, on trays and trolleys, the white china plates covered in shiny silver domes and resting on starched white cloths. It was divine. And there was something else. Pam and I were kids. She was the manager’s daughter. So we never had to pay the bill. For many, many years I don’t think I realised that with room service there was a bill. The pattern of my life was already beginning to emerge.
Food aside, I wasn’t just in love with being treated like a king at the hotel. I loved having free run of the place. I could walk through all the doors that were off limits to the guests. I saw the way the hotel worked, saw how different things were in the staff corridors, the kitchen, the laundry rooms. Our guests were shown a calm, clean and elegant world. But I knew how different it was behind the scenes. This was my first taste of going backstage. I adored it.
When Mum was working day shifts and Pam wasn’t around I would be left in the Chelsea Tea Rooms at the Red Lion Hotel opposite. It was almost as much fun as ordering free room service. Mum says I sat and charmed all the ladies in their fine hats – they would feed me tiny little sandwiches and elegant little cakes off their serving towers. I would listen to the chink of the china tea cups and the soft chatter of conversation. It was an awful long way from a farmyard caravan. It was bliss.
Sitting in the tea rooms, I also got to watch my mother a little closer. In the evenings I watched her even more from the back of the hotel bar. It was like watching a command performance. All good waiters and waitresses put on a show. My mother was up with the best. She practically danced as she flitted between tables. Watching her serve drinks was like watching a ballerina. Watching her charm the customers was like watching an award-winning actress. And the set wasn’t too shabby either.
I’ve always said that, if I could, I would happily live in a hotel. Coco Chanel lived at the Paris Ritz for 30 years and Elaine Stritch put down roots at the Carlyle in New York – the same hotel where I would one day meet a certain Ms Joan Collins. Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I would have happily moved into the Cathedral Hotel. I loved the place and I loved the cast of characters that were constantly flitting through its doors. That was just as well.
One of mother’s best friends at the Cathedral Hotel was a pretty waitress called Christine who was dating a fellow worker there called Jock. He lost his room at the hotel when he quit his bar job to go and work in a local wine shop.
‘Can he lodge with you? Just for a few months till he finds a new place?’ Christine asked.
Mum and Dad said yes, and Jock stayed for the next 11 years.
He was a good man. It was like having a new live-in uncle. And once more I was happy to be with another adult. It was when someone my own age moved in that things went wrong.
To their huge credit, my parents decided to foster another child as I grew up. We might not have had much money, or much room, but we could still offer someone a chance. Trouble was, the boy in question didn’t want to take it. Some bad things happened between us, things I was determined to keep from my parents. But while I could keep that secret, I couldn’t hide how often I was physically thrown into the rubbish bin in our backyard. So, after one incident too many, this troubled lad was moved on.
Life had changed completely by the time I approached secondary school age – because Dad’s business had started to boom. He had moved on from selling motorbikes to selling cars. He bought