This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (13 page)

I’d been writing my own songs since I was six or seven. I was too shy to sing them to anyone other than Lily and Linda (I found even that something of a challenge). So they’d be subjected to ‘When the Wagons Keep on Rolling’ or my rock classic ‘Fed Up’ (‘We had a date/You were late/And when I tried to kiss you/Baby you hesitate/Well I’m fed up – ooooh’). As always, Lily would offer encouragement though the closest she got to liking pop music was a penchant for the Bachelors (known then as the Harmonichords – they changed their name in 1962) and Elvis singing ‘Old Shep’.

Seeing how besotted I was with the Top Twenty, one Christmas she bought me a tiny crystal radio set so that I could listen to music on my own in my room. It had a metal clasp and a string aerial that led me into the Promised Land of Radio Luxembourg, with its three or four hours of pop music every evening, preceded by Horace Batchelor advertising his ‘Infra-Draw’ system for winning the pools and the American evangelist Garner Ted Armstrong, who would preach in a thunderous voice throughout his programme
The World Tomorrow
. Armstrong’s message, shouted in capital letters, had to be endured in order to get to the music, which thrilled me, despite the snap, crackle and pop of the continuous static.

Steve’s piano had come with us to Walmer Road and Linda
used a screwdriver to break the lock and open it. Either Steve had taken the key with him, or he’d hidden it amazingly well, because we never managed to find it. Although I now had access to the ‘joanna’, the only instrument I wanted to play was the guitar. Happily, the Spanish one Lily had bought me, like the Dansette record-player, had continued to survive the process of down-payment followed by repossession that befell most of the purchases Lily had made with her pools winnings.

I acquired Bert Weedon’s
Play in a Day
instruction manual, first published in 1957 and still going strong today, which is renowned for inspiring so many apprentice guitarists in the 1950s and 1960s. I should have lodged a complaint under the Trades Descriptions Act because it was ages before I began to master even the basics. Sitting alone in my room at 6 Walmer Road, with no heat and a bucket of urine in the corner, I tried my best to imagine I was in the Deep South with Lonnie and his Dixie Darling, fighting the Battle of New Orleans.

But I got there, and by the time I was able to answer Miss Woofendon’s question, I already considered myself to be a singer-songwriter. And I knew in my heart I would never be a draughtsman.

IT WAS BETWEEN
the ages of eight and eleven that the three great passions of my life – music, books and football – began to impose their grip on me. Although Steve was no longer around to influence me, I need to acknowledge the important role he played in sowing the seeds of all three of them.

A little of his musical talent passed through the Johnson genes to Linda and me. Lacking his instinctive genius, I could never play by ear so I needed Mr Weedon’s help. But I would do the kinds of things I can imagine Steve doing had he decided to take up the guitar rather than the piano: retuning the strings so that I could more easily shape major chords, for example. While that instilled habits I’d have to unlearn eventually, my long periods alone with the guitar, finding out for myself the joys of composition and chord progression, might well have echoed Steve’s approach at my age as he taught himself to play the piano.

As for football in general and Queens Park Rangers in particular, Steve was a Rangers fan. That was hardly remarkable because everyone in Notting Hill seemed to be a Rangers fan. With nothing like the huge media coverage of football that
exists today, most boys supported their local team. And for us that meant the club right on our doorstep: I knew of no Chelsea, Fulham or Brentford fans on our manor, even though all three clubs were within easy reach.

As Brentford, like Rangers, were firmly entrenched in the Third Division, they were our main West London rivals. Fulham spent most of the 1950s in Division 2 and Chelsea, a seemingly permanent fixture in the top flight, were literally out of our league. The Rs, though, had tasted success – just the once. In the 1947–48 season QPR had been champions of Division 3 (South) and for the first and, at that point, only time in their existence they had been promoted to the Second Division.

Every football league team used to produce a handbook at the end of each season recording their results, goalscorers and so on. There were photographs and profiles of the players, lots of information on the reserve and youth teams and a little potted history of the club, updated every year.

Steve had the QPR handbook for that gilded 1947–48 promotion season. It was small and stubby, with the photographs printed on shiny paper that felt more expensive than it probably was. It had lost its cover and been knocked about a bit by the time he passed it on to me, but passed on to me it was.

He never actually took me to a match, but to be fair, I’m not sure that he ever went himself. We never talked about football, not even about that glorious pinnacle of success (QPR were back in the Third Division by 1952), but no matter. This precious record had been passed from father to son and I treasured it. I read and re-read everything that had been written about the manager, Dave Mangnall; about the only
QPR player ever to have won an international cap, that season’s skipper Ivor Powell, who played for Wales; and about our magnificent goalkeeper, Reg Allen, who had moved to Manchester United in 1950 for £11,000 – a record transfer fee for a goalkeeper.

I pestered Lily constantly to let me go to see Rangers play at Loftus Road, which was not far from Hammersmith Hospital in Du Cane Road, where she was spending an increasing amount of time. In the end she gave me the few shillings I needed for admission and a programme. I would be going with Tony Cox and Lily was content that his dad, the ever-reliable Albert, would be there to keep an eye on us.

It was the 1959–60 season and we were playing Bournemouth and Boscombe Athletic. Like a camera, I stored away my first images of a real football ground, its open green space marooned in a sea of concrete like a small coral island. I soaked up the atmosphere of excitement and expectation, the smell of hot dogs, Bovril and tobacco smoke. Bournemouth were led on to the pitch by their mascot, a man dressed entirely in red and white and known as the Candyman. But he couldn’t hope to compete with the blue and white hooped shirts of the Rangers’ players.

Lily needn’t have worried about any crowd trouble. There was hardly a crowd worth speaking of. Albert Cox stood sentry at the spot he occupied for every home game: leaning on a crush barrier at the Loftus Road end, about thirty steps up the terrace from the pitch. Pat had provided him with a flask of tea and a couple of rounds of sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper.

Tony and I were free to go anywhere we liked. We settled for standing at the front, behind the wall that separated the
terraces from the pitch, and running up the steps every so often to take a swig of tea from Albert’s flask. Watching the QPR heroes and especially their new signing, the prolific goalscorer Brian Bedford – I tumbled immediately into the grip of an allegiance from which I will never escape. It must have helped that Rangers won 3–0.

From then on I went to Loftus Road as often as I could to marvel at the exploits of Bedford, Tony Ingham, Jim Towers and the rest. Steve’s gift of that tatty handbook is where that allegiance began.

As for books, Steve’s influence is, admittedly, more tenuous. It was Lily, so cruelly deprived of the scholarship she coveted, who had read widely as a young girl; Lily who had signed us up at the library in Ladbroke Grove before we could even read ourselves. But I struggle now to remember the books I borrowed, or to recall Lily ever having the leisure to sit down and read as an adult. The truth is that Lily, Linda and I became less assiduous about making the trek to the library as time went on and the routine of borrowing, reading, returning and collecting the next book lapsed into long periods when our library tickets lay dormant.

To actually possess your own books was different. Being able to pick them up and dip into them or re-read them whenever you liked lifted the pleasure of reading on to another plane. No wonder I was so in awe of the treasures in Mr Cox’s glass-fronted bookcase. And it was through Steve that we began to acquire our own books. Those Cobden Club gifts –
Robinson Crusoe, Tom Sawyer, Little Women
and my
Boy’s Own
annual – formed a tiny library which would never have existed if he hadn’t taken us to those Christmas parties.

It was expanded by two books that followed them into the house, again as presents, I think. One was an Enid Blyton ‘Famous Five’ story. I can’t recall which; what I do remember is the wonderful escapism of immersing myself in the adventures of those children: the delicious-sounding things they ate and how happy their lives were. When the good times gave way to the dark days of the 1960s, I would lie on my bed covered in coats, cold and hungry, drooling over the sausages, pies and cakes and lemonade scoffed by the children of Blyton-land. Their school summer holidays seemed endless, and each day as warm and cloudless as the one before. Well-fed contentment oozed off the page and provided me with genuine comfort for an hour or two every evening.

But it was the other book that, more than any other, instilled my love of reading:
Shane
by Jack Schaefer, a slim Western that I first read when I was nine and to which I returned at least twice a year until I was able to add further to my library.

It’s a simple story of good and evil, set in nineteenth-century Wyoming and told through a boy of about my age then, Bob Starrett, who lives on his parents’ ranch. Shane is a former gunslinger trying to escape his violent past who is hired as a ranch hand and eventually has to return to his fighting ways in order to protect the Starrett family from the powerful landowner trying to drive them from their homestead.

The book had a profound effect on me. I wanted to be like Shane, to be admired like Shane, to carry an air of mystery like Shane and to impress gullible kids, as Shane had impressed Bob Starrett (and me). The 1950s was the era of the Western, which dominated both the cinema and imported television drama; a time when
Gun Law, Wagon Train
and
Rawhide
created stars like James Arness, Robert Horton and a very young Clint Eastwood; when Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger and the Cisco Kid held us in thrall for half an hour most evenings, once Lily eventually managed to rent a telly as well as a wireless from Radio Rentals. (It was, incidentally,
The Lone Ranger
, which used the thrilling
William Tell
overture as its theme tune, that introduced me to classical music.) But Shane, created by Schaefer in 1949, was different from them all. He was darker, more textured; an anti-hero unsuited to the clean-cut innocence of 1950s television.

Music, books, Queens Park Rangers. We had a telly at last, 45rpm discs for our record-player, an embryonic library and I had a guitar. So Steve had played his part in making my life more fulfilling and was now sending money on a fairly regular basis. Credit where credit’s due.

My enthusiasm for the Cubs didn’t last and I hung up my woggle well before the age that a Cub was meant to mature into a Scout. I’d learned to light a match (although I persisted in striking it towards me rather than away from me, as Baden-Powell advised), to use a public telephone and to chop wood. I played in goal for the Cubs football team and Lily would come to watch our games at Wormwood Scrubs and Hyde Park. My role model was Ray Drinkwater, the QPR goalkeeper, and I was never happier than when I trooped home covered in mud at the end of a match.

But I lost interest in the kind of organized fun offered by Akela and her colleagues, preferring the disorganized fun to be
had with Tony Cox (for whom the Cubs had never held the slightest allure) and our band of brothers – and one sister, Carol Smith, the archetypal tomboy.

Because of her friendship with Pat Cox, Lily now had fewer qualms about me going out on to the mean streets of Notting Hill, away from her protective gaze, whenever Tony knocked for me. We would play football, either in St Marks Park, where we set up a five-a-side mini-league, or thundering around a disused car park on Bramley Road, or cricket, usually on the wickets to be found painted on the walls of so many of our streets, bowling from one pavement across the road to the one opposite, where the batsman would stand. Occasionally our game would be rudely interrupted by a passing car or van but not often: there still weren’t many cars around, even as the 1960s approached.

We knew our own streets in London W10 so well that sometimes we liked to wander further afield to the sunlit uplands of W11, where we knew no one and no one knew us. Holland Park, at the far end of Portobello Road, was unlike anything we had in the Town. It seemed to me more exotic even than Kensington Gardens. For a start, it had peacocks, which strutted around as if they owned the place. It had statues and water features, tennis courts and a Japanese garden. Best of all, it had wild woodland and something called an adventure playground that looked like a film set for a Western: logs positioned deliberately for hiding behind, rickety bridges across a real stream and shrubs and bushes everywhere.