Authors: David Essex
The hop-picking trips were fantastic, though. Mum would pack our bare necessities and we would jump on the back of a lorry with a load of other families and head off for the depths of Kent. At that age, having hardly left east London, heading beyond the Blackwall Tunnel was an incredible adventure. Rolling through the villages and the acres of countryside, singing songs and waving to everyone we saw, was all too exciting for words.
Our destination was a village called Rolvenden, near Ashford. Once we arrived at the farm, with its motley collection of barns, huts and cowsheds, we would be given a hut – well, basically a shed – and a mattress, plus hay to stuff it with. Everyone shared a washhouse. Maybe Forest House had been good training for this.
The hop-picking jaunts may sound now like something from Victorian times, but they were amazing, enabling my naïve, impressionable young self to experience so many new things. I saw stars for the first time, in skies clear from the obscuring murk of the industrial East End. Cows were also new to me, as was falling asleep on a hay-smelling mattress under a gently flickering oil lamp as the adults sang around an open fire.
I say that I loved hop picking, but I must admit I didn’t pull my weight when it came to the actual labour. I left my mum and nan to gather the bushels, much preferring to run around, climb trees and generally go wild in the country, including setting my new personal best for the high jump when I leapt a five-foot fence to avoid being gored by an irate bull.
The weekends in Kent were best because my dad and the other men would all come to visit, and we’d have impromptu
football
matches out in the fields, go fishing and sit outside pubs till late at night. Even at the time I knew these days were idyllic and now, nearly sixty years on, I can still recall how special they were.
Hop picking was also a chance to hang out with some of Mum’s gypsy relatives, who would be doing seasonal work on the farms. Uncle Levi entranced me. He was a handsome and very charismatic swarthy man with jet-black hair, twinkling blue eyes and spellbinding stories. He told me that the most important things in life were being healthy and appreciating sunsets and nature. He seemed impossibly exotic and glamorous, and I guess he was a bit of a street philosopher.
Back in London, life in Avondale Court was pretty good. Mum and Dad gave me a fair amount of freedom, but I knew if I stepped out of line, they would come down on me. They rarely hit me, although one morning, when I let my hamster out of its cage instead of getting ready for school, my mum saw red and chased me around the flat trying to whack me with a cane from the clothes dryer.
There again, the hamster fared far better than another pet, a mouse named – and how original was this? – Mickey. Mickey had a bump on his tail so my mum told me to take him to the vet. The vet gave him one look, told me to hold him still, put a big needle into him and killed him. I was traumatised for days.
In the evenings I would chase around the neighbourhood with friends from school, playing in the ruins of houses destroyed in the Blitz or in old bomb craters. My real passion, though, was football. From the end of school to bedtime, I virtually lived in
the
playground beneath our flat, honing my skills in never-ending kickabouts.
By the age of ten, I lived and breathed football and nothing else mattered. I would have played 24/7. My dad rarely lost his rag with me, but he did one night when he called me in for my tea from our balcony. We were playing ‘Next goal wins’ but the next goal was proving elusive. Dad had run me a bath, and after tiring of waiting endlessly for me, he eventually marched down to the playground, picked me up, carried me upstairs and threw me in the bath fully clothed.
It was my obsession with football that led me to make a decision that impacted on my academic carer, and not in a good way. As I began my last year at Star Lane, the dreaded Eleven Plus exam loomed. Everyone knew what that meant: those who passed entered the hallowed portals of the local grammar school, the gateway to a bright and privileged future. Failures were doomed to become factory fodder in a bog-standard secondary modern.
I had been an A-class student throughout my time at Star Lane and so was viewed as a shoo-in to sail through the exam – but things weren’t that straightforward. There was a major complicating factor. On the all-important sports side, the grammar school majored in rugby, while at the state secondary it was football all the way, meaning they had a far better team.
Now, 99 per cent of people would feel that education and the career it could lead to were way more important than getting a game in the school soccer team, but that wasn’t how I saw it. By the age of eleven, I was sure that my future lay as a professional player with a local team – West Ham United or, at the
very
worst, Leyton Orient. I couldn’t let this ambition be jeopardised by anything as daft as rugby. As I pondered my options, I hit on what Baldrick from
Blackadder
would doubtless characterise as a cunning plan.
My chance to put this plan into operation came in the Eleven Plus maths test. In the exam room, the maths teacher, Mr Milner, moved among us with the question paper then told us to turn it over and begin. I took a cursory glance at the detailed questions about long division and fractions, ignored them, and carefully drew a picture of that spinach-loving comic-book hero, Popeye. It wasn’t even a good picture. In fact, it was crap.
My Eleven Plus failure thus came as no surprise to me but was a major shock to my parents, who had been proud of my decent academic record to that point. Loyally, they blamed it on my teachers and the failures of the state education system. I never had the bottle to tell them what I had done.
I was sad to leave Star Lane but not nearly as sad as I was when I realised what awaited me. Shipman County Secondary School, where I was to waste the next four years of my life, was to prove the archetypal dead-end, no-hope secondary modern. Forget about getting an education – you were happy just to get through the day in one piece.
Shipman County didn’t have a uniform, unless you count the jeans, leather jackets and steel-toe-capped boots that all the boys wore. I was nervous on my first day, walking into school with an older lad, Mike Newell, who lived downstairs in Avondale Court. Mike abandoned me as soon as we got in the gate, to preserve his street cred. I can’t say I blamed him.
The school had a local reputation as a violent, under-achieving hellhole, and gazing around the playground, the first thing I noticed was how huge a lot of the boys were. To a pocket-sized nipper like me, they looked like fully grown men. A lot of the girls looked pretty well developed too, but that was another matter entirely.
I survived my first week making new friends and trying to stay out of the way of the playground bullies and apprentice tasty geezers. Shipman County, and West Ham as a whole, had produced a stream of boxing champions, and I didn’t fancy a future as a human punchbag. I also drew the short straw in the classroom seating plan, being stuck with a boy called Trevor who smelled of old biscuits and had a constant river of snot cascading from his nostrils.
After a few days, I was seriously questioning whether sketching Popeye was the best idea I had ever had, but at least one part of my plan worked out. We played football every Friday afternoon, and the sports teacher took note of my ball skills, honed night after night in the playground under Avondale Court. After our first kickabout he picked the team to represent the school. Number 6, the left half, was Dave Cook.
I couldn’t have felt more proud, and my dad was just as chuffed when I got home and told him the news. The first game was the following morning, and I headed off to our home ground, the romantically named Beckton Dump, my red-and-white-squares shirt and black shorts tucked under my arm. I knew most of our opponents, Pretoria: they had been at Star Lane with me.
Pretoria’s best player was Frank Lampard, who lived opposite Avondale Court and often joined in the after-school kick-about. Even at that age, Frank was special, and it was no surprise that he later went on to become an icon at West Ham, playing more than 550 games in an amazing eighteen-year career before becoming assistant manager to Harry Redknapp. (He is also, of course, the father of the Chelsea and England midfielder, Frank Lampard junior.)
Even with a future England international in the opposing team, Shipman still managed to edge the game 4–3, and thus began a period of my life when weekends were the be-all and end-all for me. I would play for the school every Saturday morning. Dad would be working overtime on the docks so could never come to watch, but he would get home the same time as me and I would furnish him with a full match report as he cooked us bangers and mash from Taylor’s, a local butcher’s that I knew for a fact made the best sausages in the world.
After lunch, on the weekends they were at home, I would head off to watch West Ham. Funnily enough, the Hammers weren’t my first team. As a nipper, I was smitten with Wolverhampton Wanderers because I loved their nickname, Wolves, and their Old Gold shirts. I must have been the only little boy in the East End running around in a Wolves shirt. It got a lot of suspicious looks: quite right, too.
Yet Wolves was a passing fancy. West Ham was love. I would feel my heart beating faster as I jumped on the bus or walked the two miles from Canning Town to Upton Park and merged in with the crowds of people all thronging in the same direction.
By
the time I got to the ground at 1.30 p.m., a full hour and a half before kick-off, there would be thousands of blokes, mostly dockers, in flat caps queuing to get in.
Football grounds were all-standing in those days, and once I’d got through the turnstile I would find myself stuck at the back, but the crowd took care of the kids and would pass us down over their heads until we were right at the front with a fantastic view. Everybody smoked, and I can still picture the hazy clouds of blue smoke that hung over the terraces. It was all part of the atmosphere of that magical place.
West Ham was a good team to watch in those days. Most of the players came from the East End. The great Bobby Moore, who went on to captain England to the World Cup in 1966, was just coming through from the academy team, as was Geoff Hurst. An Irish international, the gentleman Noel Cantwell, was a giant in defence alongside John Bond. The forwards were Vic Keeble and John Dick and our veteran goalkeeper, Ernie Gregory, looked about sixty years old to me.
It was my Saturday afternoon fix and I couldn’t get enough of it. I remember walking home giddy with happiness one day after we beat Blackburn Rovers 8–1. It felt like our players were one of us: I would sometimes see them having a bacon sandwich and a fag in McCarey’s café opposite Upton Park.
Back at school, Shipman County felt more like a Borstal than an educational establishment. The headmaster, Mr ‘Ding-Dong’ Bell, was a strange man with no inspirational qualities, and most of the teachers were just plain lousy. Nobody stuck around: an endless stream of temporary or supply teachers took one look at the place and headed for the hills, horrified.
After Star Lane, which I had loved, Shipman was a horror show. It can’t have been easy for the teachers because I have to admit that we were a rebellious bunch, but in truth we had nothing to stimulate us. We didn’t study art, music or anything creative, and a bleak mood of edgy indifference permeated the school.
We had science lessons, for a while, but even these stopped after the ‘Gassing of the Bees’ scandal. Our science teacher, Mr Dines, known to us for some reason as Daddy Dines, brought in some of his pet bees for us to see. He was proud of the way they would fly out through a small hole in their glass case, somehow locate some pollen in the urban sprawl of Custom House and return to the glass hive with their spoils.
Mr Dines showed us the queen bee and her workers and then made the mistake of turning his back. As he headed towards the blackboard, a couple of the boys inserted the rubber tube from a nearby Bunsen burner into the hole, fastened it in place with chewing gum, and turned on the gas. By the time Daddy Dines returned to the case, his precious bees were in a lifeless pile at the foot of the hive.
Mr Dines went completely crazy. Thinking back now, he may have been having a nervous breakdown, but at the time we could only laugh as this tall beanpole of a man, not unlike John Cleese as Basil Fawlty, leapt on a chair waving his cane and began yelling at us: ‘Who gassed my bees?’ He totally lost his mind, smashing desks and test tubes as the kids ran for cover. A few of the more sensitive ones were crying.
The classroom had descended into mayhem, but this doesn’t explain why one of the boys then set fire to a broken chair (and
can
I make one thing clear: this was NOT a repeat performance by the Canning Town Arsonist). The fire alarm bells sprang into life and we all sprinted for the safety of the playground chased by a gabbling Mr Dines, who by now appeared to be verging on the certifiable.
This was an extreme incident but it reflected the mindset of Shipman County. Most kids felt that the teachers were all idiots who couldn’t teach them anything. I was sorry for the teachers but I also had to consider my own self-preservation. Even if I could answer a question, I knew that if I put my hand up and did so, I’d simply draw attention to myself and most likely get my head kicked in later in the playground.
The playground was where your status in the school was decided. I was reasonably popular but I tended just to keep my head down as the bullies ran riot because there was nothing else you could do. I saw some awful scenes. One boy was duffed up for wearing brown winkle-pickers. Another lad, Peter, told his postman dad he was being bullied, and when his father turned up to confront the thugs, they kicked him to the ground and beat him up in front of his crying son. I found it all disgusting and very distressing.
My own key moment came in the first year when some older kids began picking on me. I stood up to them and was informed, ‘We’re going to have you after school!’ Pre-arranged fights after school normally happened on a patch of wasteland at the appropriately named Boot Hill nearby, but this was the first time that I would be a participant.