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Nurture, nature, the cards were dealt, character, context, choice, chance; In 1955 the year of my birth the distinct 1950s mood of post war austerity could be likened to an itchy uncomfortable demob suit and progress nibbled away at its crotch and its seams like moths until at last it was no longer serviceable and fell off the hanger useless but for dishcloths. I didn't see a television until I was about four or five and when I did it had only one channel in black and white and programs didn't start until about 4 pm finishing god knows when past my bedtime with closedown an abrupt and joyless puritan causing worlds to diminish to the disappointing dot in the centre of a grey screen accompanied by a high-pitched wine that felt redolent of some psi-ops sonic weapon. At the national anthem which followed members of the older generation required one to stand stiffly to attention until it finished. Life was about brown leather lace-up shoes and brussel sprouts and if one embarked on an excursion to the sea-side it would be in a coach still known as a charabanc and there would be a stop for lemonade at "The halfway house" followed by communal singing at the back on the latter part of the journey. If travel was by car it would reek of petrol to the point of causing car-sickness and an iron handle was required to be inserted front-central to turn over the engine and get it started. Even living as we did close to the Great West Road I assiduously along with all other small boys collected car registration numbers, writing each one down carefully in a small notebook.
All males were expected to dress and behave like Trevor Howard and only damp wool clothing that itched was allowed to be worn. The very peak of interior luxury was to fill ones house with loud plumbing configurations which belched loudly and made knocking noises whilst rigeur pour tous-les-gens was to have floor covering of freezing lino set off by threadbare central carpet positioned beyond reach of bed or bath or anywhere from which one attempted to launch bare feet.
There was no radio just the "Wireless" and the music that I heard tended to be selections from "Oklahoma" and "Teddybears picnic".
One early memory was accompanying my mother to the High street and Clarke's shoe shop to be fitted with a pair of "Start-Rite" sandals; the shop was equipped with an ambitious typically 1950s "Quatermass" type piece of technology designed no doubt with all good intentions but in retrospect and in view of the fact that the installation was short-lived potentially highly dangerous. It resembled a static Dalek into which one's shoe-clad feet were inserted at floor level, one peered through a small rectangular screen to see a luminous green x-ray of the bones in one's feet encased in the ghostly outline of leather shoes. Health and Safety was but a twinkle in a future bureaucrat's eye at the time and the probability of irradiation and its consequences had yet to be considered.
When I remarked in passing to a Whitechapel neighbour that I had two sisters of four and five years older than myself she replied "hag ridden were you?" not my choice of words exactly but certainly a remark loaded with insight. We had little in common except through the routines and ceremonies of unavoidable family life; they kept to each other for company and regarded me as a nuisance to be ignored whenever possible and early memories include the pair of them running to lock themselves in and hide in the upstairs lavatory when their piano teacher turned up at the front door a response depriving me of music lessons and the subsequent loss to posterity. Bathtime forced us into an unwilling proximity with deafening clamour to be situated "at the tap-end". They disapproved of my propensity to wander around the back garden picking up the wriggling pink earthworms which I secreted in the pockets of my shorts from whence they would be duly removed by my mother desiccated and flattened having been steam ironed.
The two older girls were a constant presence but I can remember no sense of empathy or kinship only an iredeemable "otherness'. An abiding resentment derives from being observed by the younger of the pair as I struggled up onto the cork-topped bathroom stool to reach the mirrored door of the wall cabinet. I was engaged in guzzling down a quantity of orange flavoured junior aspirin when she ran screaming from the room calling my mother who moments later was forcing a glass of salty water to make me puke and leaning over the bathroom sink I watched small fuzzy orange blobs slide down the cold white porcelain towards the plughole. She was pre-empting Nancy Reagan's "just say No!" by some twenty five years at least.
I recall around that time there was a sensation because a little black girl had been adopted by nearby neighbours would stand motionless quite naked at an upstairs window for all to see, a confused child seeking attention.
I have no memory of it but my father had a motor-bike at that time and would ride it up to Hyde Park corner to evangelise the idle crowd, preaching the gospel from an orange-box pulpit. There was a local parishioner called Mr Really who worked in the fossil department at the Natural History Museum. He presented me with sliced and polished ammonites and lead us, the three year old boy and thirty five year old father on fossil hunts at a local gravel pit.
My father's family hailed from Yorkshire while he had been borne just across the border in Derbyshire shortly after which Grandfather Tom transported his family to the outskirts of Belfast where his sons would not face a lifetime working in the pits. He built up a thriving market garden and grew tomatoes under glass, after they were married my parents lived for a short while in Antrim. From three years old I retain vague images of a family holiday in Northern Ireland which we reached via a boat-train and the huge steam-engines at Liverpool, stentorian clanking gushing huge clouds of smoke and steam. The rectory where we stayed was served from a well by a pump the iron handle of which had to be vigorously worked. There were visits to friends living in whitewashed farms where they kept goats and drives out to the surrounding hills, once down across the border into Eire with the Mourne Mountains slumbering deep mauve in the far distance. My father leading our car-borne chorus in the song of the same name, "Slattery Mountain Phut", "The Sash My Father Wore", songs which by the troubles of the 70s were problematical and resigned to the past.
At about four years old a career development prompted a move to Hounslow, Middlesex and into a pebble-dashed semi-detached house. We didn't stay there very long and my most abiding memory is of lying in bed boring holes into the wallpapered soft plaster walls. The man next door across the black creosoted fence kept pigeons which would wheel around the rooftops before flying down and settling into their lofts.
About that time my parents and close college pal of father's plus family decided on sharing a cottage in Cornwall for the Summer holiday and after an interminable train journey we arrived at a one story cottage opposite Widmouth bay near Bude on the North Coast. The beach is broad and sandy with a gentle slope and I was hardly out of the water learning how to catch waves and surf in on a plywood skimmer board. This was the occasion of absolute innocence and my unwary capture on film unclothed with my back to the sea and eyes and mouth wide agape at the freshness of it all. This was all before "The Fall"
All males were expected to dress and behave like Trevor Howard and only damp wool clothing that itched was allowed to be worn. The very peak of interior luxury was to fill ones house with loud plumbing configurations which belched loudly and made knocking noises whilst rigeur pour tous-les-gens was to have floor covering of freezing lino set off by threadbare central carpet positioned beyond reach of bed or bath or anywhere from which one attempted to launch bare feet.
There was no radio just the "Wireless" and the music that I heard tended to be selections from "Oklahoma" and "Teddybears picnic".
One early memory was accompanying my mother to the High street and Clarke's shoe shop to be fitted with a pair of "Start-Rite" sandals; the shop was equipped with an ambitious typically 1950s "Quatermass" type piece of technology designed no doubt with all good intentions but in retrospect and in view of the fact that the installation was short-lived potentially highly dangerous. It resembled a static Dalek into which one's shoe-clad feet were inserted at floor level, one peered through a small rectangular screen to see a luminous green x-ray of the bones in one's feet encased in the ghostly outline of leather shoes. Health and Safety was but a twinkle in a future bureaucrat's eye at the time and the probability of irradiation and its consequences had yet to be considered.
When I remarked in passing to a Whitechapel neighbour that I had two sisters of four and five years older than myself she replied "hag ridden were you?" not my choice of words exactly but certainly a remark loaded with insight. We had little in common except through the routines and ceremonies of unavoidable family life; they kept to each other for company and regarded me as a nuisance to be ignored whenever possible and early memories include the pair of them running to lock themselves in and hide in the upstairs lavatory when their piano teacher turned up at the front door a response depriving me of music lessons and the subsequent loss to posterity. Bathtime forced us into an unwilling proximity with deafening clamour to be situated "at the tap-end". They disapproved of my propensity to wander around the back garden picking up the wriggling pink earthworms which I secreted in the pockets of my shorts from whence they would be duly removed by my mother desiccated and flattened having been steam ironed.
The two older girls were a constant presence but I can remember no sense of empathy or kinship only an iredeemable "otherness'. An abiding resentment derives from being observed by the younger of the pair as I struggled up onto the cork-topped bathroom stool to reach the mirrored door of the wall cabinet. I was engaged in guzzling down a quantity of orange flavoured junior aspirin when she ran screaming from the room calling my mother who moments later was forcing a glass of salty water to make me puke and leaning over the bathroom sink I watched small fuzzy orange blobs slide down the cold white porcelain towards the plughole. She was pre-empting Nancy Reagan's "just say No!" by some twenty five years at least.
I recall around that time there was a sensation because a little black girl had been adopted by nearby neighbours would stand motionless quite naked at an upstairs window for all to see, a confused child seeking attention.
I have no memory of it but my father had a motor-bike at that time and would ride it up to Hyde Park corner to evangelise the idle crowd, preaching the gospel from an orange-box pulpit. There was a local parishioner called Mr Really who worked in the fossil department at the Natural History Museum. He presented me with sliced and polished ammonites and lead us, the three year old boy and thirty five year old father on fossil hunts at a local gravel pit.
My father's family hailed from Yorkshire while he had been borne just across the border in Derbyshire shortly after which Grandfather Tom transported his family to the outskirts of Belfast where his sons would not face a lifetime working in the pits. He built up a thriving market garden and grew tomatoes under glass, after they were married my parents lived for a short while in Antrim. From three years old I retain vague images of a family holiday in Northern Ireland which we reached via a boat-train and the huge steam-engines at Liverpool, stentorian clanking gushing huge clouds of smoke and steam. The rectory where we stayed was served from a well by a pump the iron handle of which had to be vigorously worked. There were visits to friends living in whitewashed farms where they kept goats and drives out to the surrounding hills, once down across the border into Eire with the Mourne Mountains slumbering deep mauve in the far distance. My father leading our car-borne chorus in the song of the same name, "Slattery Mountain Phut", "The Sash My Father Wore", songs which by the troubles of the 70s were problematical and resigned to the past.
At about four years old a career development prompted a move to Hounslow, Middlesex and into a pebble-dashed semi-detached house. We didn't stay there very long and my most abiding memory is of lying in bed boring holes into the wallpapered soft plaster walls. The man next door across the black creosoted fence kept pigeons which would wheel around the rooftops before flying down and settling into their lofts.
About that time my parents and close college pal of father's plus family decided on sharing a cottage in Cornwall for the Summer holiday and after an interminable train journey we arrived at a one story cottage opposite Widmouth bay near Bude on the North Coast. The beach is broad and sandy with a gentle slope and I was hardly out of the water learning how to catch waves and surf in on a plywood skimmer board. This was the occasion of absolute innocence and my unwary capture on film unclothed with my back to the sea and eyes and mouth wide agape at the freshness of it all. This was all before "The Fall"
