I’m still not sure about writing this. But Doug Murgatroyd asked me (again), this time from hospital, to write something along the lines of ‘where are they now?’ Where I am now is Hong Kong. Twenty-two years retired from a twenty-year career with the Hong Kong colonial government. Most of that retirement time has been spent in Hawaii. My apologies for having to say that I don’t have significant fond memories of the School. Nothing too negative, mind you.
That first day in 1954 set the tone. I lived in North Pallant, in the middle of Chichester, opposite the doctors’ surgery and a short walk to school. I had rounded the corner into Kingsham Road, carrying my very small, carefully selected, second-hand case, when a master on a bike stopped beside me. The ‘I ain’t a new boy’ camouflage hadn’t worked. He had me down. ‘On their first day, new boys don’t come in until ten’. So I turned, and trundled back home. My years at the School were just ho-hum when I was living them. Looking back, that’s still how they seem. However, there is no doubt that the 25th year reunion in 1987 was out-and-out wonderful. So sad that some of the stars of that celebration are already gone. I will never forget you.
At the School all the way through to 3rd year Sixth Form I never even made junior sub-prefect. Were there any other boys like that? It became a pattern for my life – passed over for this and for that, repeatedly through the years. However, my failures at Oxford in the entrance exams were my own failures through and through. I was kept back over a weekend for interviews. But I had been entered by the school for PPE. I didn’t know anything about any of them. Neither of the Ps and certainly not the E. Being resident in an Oxford college for the exams at all wasn’t my idea anyway. A great experience though. Very special. Oxford reported back to KD that I was ‘a classic case of misplaced talents’. Wish they had told me what talents. They did apparently offer me a place for Classics, but I had zero Greek at school and getting up to speed in any brand new language, let alone a hieroglyphic one, in four months flat wasn’t going to happen. As for PPE, the interviewer’s eyebrows rose when he realised that I didn’t even know the name of the Foreign Secretary, or what ‘Foreign Secretary’ was. The ‘classic case’ comment was really too kind. Funny how one remembers all this small stuff.
So I left school with barely a mark upon me, inside or out. My first weeks of freedom were spent in a sparking, smoking, steaming hellhole of a factory in Westgate, Chichester. A subsidiary of Wingard’s, it made steel roof racks for cars. So I was bending bars, drilling holes in the metal, doing a bit of welding, dunking the racks into the fuming plating tanks. All the while, filling in the little space in the corner a few feet away from me, a couple of guys were laminating sheets of fibreglass, making boats.
So there I was, from seven a.m. until six on weekdays, and until one on Saturdays. Half-hour for lunch and two ten-minute tea breaks. Six quid a week. Subs for tea came out of that. But there were times to treasure in that awful inferno of a factory. The foreman’s name was Dave Hooper. Some of you may already be ahead of me here. When a machine on the assembly line fell idle because of operator absence, Dave Hooper would step in. One glorious day he took over the machinery directly across the line from me, a few feet from my face. And then it struck me. He was singing at the top of his voice, breathtakingly audible above the howling and screeching of the machinery. This was Dave Hooper, rock and roll king. The true Blue Diamond. This was heaven, not hell. I tiptoed into the song. And Dave didn’t frown. Let’s face it, he couldn’t hear me. But I could hear him and pretty soon I was singing out loud along with him. The songs came thick and fast. I’ve never been so happy. Thank you so much Dave.
I read quite recently that Dave Hooper, his son and grandson, are still rocking, together.
But one day the heat, the fumes, the flying metal and fibreglass became beyond forbearance. The giant circular thermometer on the wall said 94. Why was the thermometer there? To taunt us? To stick two fingers up at our suffering? I gave notice and walked out a few hours later. That evening I saw in the Observer an ad looking for a ‘paper picker’. And so began a seven-year sequence of summers spent at West Wittering Car Park, spiking all manner of refuse discarded by the day-trippers. It was useful work that one could do well, where one could see the results, and be proud. And the air was great. We called the refuse ‘rubbish’. I remember being about ten, on one of my train rides to Hove to watch Sussex, seeing a large sign staked into the waste ground some way off. Just two words: REFUSE TIP. I thought then, and for years after, that it was part of a campaign against the giving and receiving of gratuities.
And then there was the time when, standing in class, and reading out loud, I said ‘mizzled’. What did you say? Mizzled. Wretched boy. The word is ‘miss led’. Say it. Say it properly.
Then came Manchester University. I drove up there from Chichester, dropping Doug off in Blackpool on the way. By the time I reached my appointed digs somewhere near Stockport very late that night the landlady wasn’t at all happy with me. And she wasn’t happy with my white Ford Consul, the only car in the street. So I lasted a few nights only. Permission was obtained to find somewhere myself. After a while I found myself sharing a bedsit with Dave Kennard, a sax player and blues aficionado. And psychology student. He played at the Ealing Blues Club. One fine Sunday morning I awoke in our Manchester/Rusholme pad to find a fully-clothed blues band lying on the carpet between Dave’s bed and mine. And there, gradually unfolding himself and pulling the day’s first cheroot fingerandthumb gently from his top pocket, was Alexis Korner.
Dave opened my mind to the Blues, to John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed. And my ears to his own playing. Strangely, a few years later I shared an eleven-room Victorian building at 287 Moss Lane East not only with some fellow students but also with baritone sax player Bernie Hetherington and bass player Dave Cakebread. Paul Young (the Sad Cafe one) would hang out. What a singer. And cool as hell. Jim and I still think of you Paul. And listen to you. And miss you.
Malcolm X spoke at Manchester University in December 1964. For a disconnected fool like me, who had spent his lifesofar standing for nothing and falling, as predicted, for everything, Malcolm X had for several years meant Threat. But I was finally learning. What a man he was, this infamous Malcolm X. What words. What inspiration. My brain had been jumpstarted and primed less than a month previously.
After a three-day juryless trial in Manchester, being forced to listen to false, rigged police testimony, I had on November 18th 1964 been convicted of Grievous Bodily Harm on a police officer, and sentenced to one month imprisonment. A big day for me, November 18th 1964. It was my 21st birthday. And a nightmare day it was to become for my mother and father, down in Chichester, waiting in a telephone box in the evening for my call, holding fast all the while to their Christian faith and faith in the English system of justice.
**************
I discovered around 2012 that, under the matrilineal system of definition, I am Jewish. As a child I prayed to Jesus on my knees at the foot of my bed.