Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography

by Baker, Danny

  Of course, I knew none of this growing up and certainly don’t recall it ever being reflected at home in Debnams Road. To me, the youngest in our family by some distance, Freddie and Betty Baker seemed like the most loved up, perfectly matched couple in the whole world. My sister Sharon now tells me it wasn’t quite like that. I know that must be true, and yet, whatever private storms, public quarrels and dashed inner hopes they battled with, Mum and Dad remained married and together for almost sixty years.

  Skulduggery was possibly my father’s favourite word. He used to revel in its piratical flourish and bellow it with a physical shudder of pleasure, because it usually meant that his world view of everyone being corrupt had once again been borne out. It was a greeting to his kin.

  For example, he didn’t live to experience the recent political expenses scandal, but I know it wouldn’t have been received by Spud as an outrage or something that demanded a legal remedy. No, bizarrely he would have felt vindicated, beaming as the story broke on TV, his hands thrust under his armpits, gleefully writhing in his chair, saying to nobody in particular, ‘Of course. Of course! Skulduggery! Pure and simple. Everyone’s at it, don’t you worry about that.’

  Any time I heard of a football manager being sacked I would call him first and he would usually say, ‘What was it? Skulduggery?’ If I were to reply that it was actually because of a poor run of recent results, he would audibly sneer. ‘Never in your life! You don’t get fired ’less your hand’s in the till, and he must have been well at it. Skulduggery there, boy, nice and tasty.’ Nothing could shift him from this view.

  He ran our house along the same lines. Council gas and electricity meters had within them a flat metal disc that rotated faster the more of the utility you used. The faster it moved, the more the numbers on the panel above clicked over and the more you had to pay. People soon learned that by carefully removing the glass at the front of the meter it was possible to impede these wheels and make them run much slower. With canny and sparing use of this trick you could convincingly knock a few pounds from your bills each month. My dad, however, never cared for this half-measure. The wheels in our gas and electricity meters never moved at all. Had the official figures ever been scrutinized, it would have come to light that our family never used an iota of gas or electricity between 1961 and 1975.

  Fortunately, the men who called to read the meters were supremely ‘approachable’. (The ‘approachable’ world somehow gravitated towards my dad.) Swift, sotto voce discussions would arrive at a low figure that was agreeable to both parties; the deal would then be sealed with a handshake, and parties would come away content with the result. In those happy days before cheques or credit cards, the meter reader had a couple of extra quid shoved into his palm, while my old man had the satisfaction of beating the system. Meanwhile the cobwebs that festooned the innards of our meters remained undisturbed.

  In 1975 the meters were finally changed. During his investigations into how the newer, more secure fixtures might be rigged to suit his previous arrangements, Dad got the shock of his life. Literally. There was a loud crack, all our lights went out and the jolt Dad received threw him halfway up our stairs. We all rushed to his aid. Panting, laid out, eyes shut, he soon pulled himself together enough to call the meter a ‘poxy ponce of a thing’. In the following days, three of his fingernails turned black and fell off.

  Spud adopted the skulduggery approach with every other bill or financial obligation that arrived in our house. During the great hire purchase boom of the sixties and seventies there was a continual merry-go-round of things coming and going from our flat as companies first gave and then recovered their luxury goods. Their fatal error was that they were far quicker to install than they ever were to take back, and once this knowledge got around it was open season on TVs, fridges, cookers and furniture. I remember his unshakeable logic whenever an item was repossessed: ‘What’s it matter? By the time they come and cart it off, there’s a new one out anyway . . .’

  In every aspect of his life – social, family, self – my dad was famously cavalier with his cash. He did not attach the slightest importance to the accumulation of money, whether as a status symbol or for future security. While earning a good weekly wage in the docks he would routinely blow it all, often immediately, on gambling, carousing and, chiefly, making sure we all had plenty of everything indoors – not that these triple priorities were entirely sympathetic. He could not bear to give so much as a shilling to strangers. As for utility companies, debt collectors and ‘straight’ institutions, these were aliens from another planet as far as he was concerned. The way he saw it, if they wanted to give him something before he had even paid for it, well, bring it on and more fool them. When they took it back, he felt no shame. Shame only resulted from not being able to afford things. He could afford them, and everyone knew it. Financially, he had absolutely no fear and chose to tell big business directly through his methods that they could go fuck themselves. Bookies and publicans, oddly enough, were the exceptions to the rule.

  Though my father had this brand of economics down to a fine art, it was practised to some degree throughout the estate. Received wisdom today would suggest that children who grow up in such a casually irresponsible atmosphere will go on to repeat or even escalate the process. This is pure tosh. None of the twenty-odd good chums that I grew up with ended up in prison.

  An underwhelming statistic, possibly; but I offer it to counter the ridiculous assumption that working-class boys of the period either had to fight or be funny in order to survive. I’ve heard such drivel time and again and I still hear it today. Survive what exactly? It wasn’t Alcatraz. I’m also baffled whenever I read how tough we all were, routinely breaking into warehouses or venting our frustrations in battles between nihilistic street gangs. I had maybe a hundred or so peers across our estate and yet I can’t recall a single organized gaggle among their number. There were of course loose amalgamations of kids who lived near each other, but gangs? Golly, how some proles like to romance their early lives by giving it a Bowery Boys wash.

  The only crime I can recall ever being party to involved a disastrous ‘hit’ on our local greengrocer Eric, owner of Eric’s, a business he’d bought from another man called Eric, although the shop was actually named after that man’s father, also called Eric. What, as they say, are the chances of that?

  Fire has already played a large part in this story; on the Silwood Estate, getting a fire going was always on the juvenile agenda. Anything that turned up on the dump was deemed flammable. From old sofas, mattresses and tyres right down to broken toys and discarded cardboard. On those days when nothing was provided, a not-too-thorough forage of the vicinity would result in a sufficient haul of bits and pieces to give us a blaze. Somebody usually had matches to get the thing under way, but it wasn’t unheard of to resort to a magnifying glass and the rays of the sun. Anyway, the point is our bombsite adventure playground smouldered throughout the 1960s like those mountains of garbage you see in the Philippines.

  Once you had a fire going, etiquette required that you throw things on it. What we wished for more than anything was for these items to explode – but they seldom obliged. Batteries weren’t a very common item of detritus in the 1960s; in fact, other than torches, I’m struggling to think of a single battery-operated item people used back then. But whenever we did find the odd Ever Ready, on the fire it would go. Without exception, they never exploded. Neither did light bulbs, old oil tins or tramps’ shoes. (Individual items of footwear that pitched up on the dump were always referred to as ‘tramps’ shoes’; these were rumoured to be so full of toxic loam that, when appropriately heated, a sonic boom and satisfying mushroom cloud would ensue.)

  The other use for a bombsite fire was, believe it or not, cooking. We would throw potatoes into the flames and then, perhaps an hour later, rake them out and gobble them down. Of course, after a spell in the furnace even the toughest spud would look as if it had been lashed to the Space Shuttle for re-entry; bu
t peel away that charred, steaming, brittle skin and inside was as good a meal as I’ve ever eaten. I sometimes feel it’s entirely possible that we might have accidentally invented Cajun food.

  The only snag with this recipe was that first you had to secure your potato.

  To do this we would disband the group temporarily and sneak back into our homes to steal from our own mothers. This was a mission as dangerous as it was shameful. It wasn’t so much that mothers couldn’t spare a potato or would miss it from their carefully budgeted inventory; more the fact that they knew exactly why we wanted one.

  ‘I hope you’re not with that lot over on the dump, round that fire,’ Mum would shout above the drone of the Hoover after hearing my hopeless attempts at stealth. ‘You’ll all go up like the gasworks one of these days.’

  It wasn’t the most effective warning: an entire gasworks exploding was the stuff of dreams so far as I was concerned.

  ‘Anyway,’ she’d continue, ‘I’ve got no potatoes in, so you can bugger off outside again.’

  And so I would. Back at the dump, it would usually transpire that most of us had had the same luck. It was following one of these episodes of being out-mothered that somebody in our ranks had the brazen idea of raiding Eric’s. I couldn’t think of a worse notion and wanted to shout, ‘Eric’s? Raid Eric’s? Are you all nuts? Do you want to go to jail? Do you want to spend a life behind bars because of a potato? Will nobody speak out against this madness? Help! Help!’ I’m sure we all felt the same, and yet somehow this crackpot idea went through on the nod. As we began the short walk up Debnams Road and into the main drag of our local shops I was petrified, on the verge of fainting, my legs heavier with each step. Remember, this was 1964. The Great Train Robbery was still fresh in the mind.

  Here was the plan. One of us would buy a bag of monkey nuts. When Eric turned to put the threepenny bit in the till, the rest of us would each grab a potato from the stack and leg it. From our vast experience of comics and cartoons, we knew that this would reduce Eric to a state of catatonia. While we receded into the distance laughing, he would stand outside his greengrocer’s shop, eyes spinning in his head, spluttering half-formed sentences like, ‘What the . . .’ and ‘Wait a minute . . .’ and shaking his fist. Iris-out, credits roll. What could possibly go wrong?

  I should add that Eric was a large individual, built along the lines of a pro weightlifter – which, now I come to think of it, probably resulted from his humping great sacks of our intended swag around all day.

  Of course ‘the deal’, when it ‘went down’, was an absolute disaster.

  Crucially, of a company of ten, only four of us ultimately walked into the shop. The others, amazingly with even less nerve than I, bottled it and carried on walking as though they had nothing to do with those of us in the front part of the kiddy crocodile. Losing three-fifths of our number left us feeling hopelessly exposed as we entered the grocer’s. Eric could now keep an eye on us all with absolutely no trouble at all. Except . . . where was Eric?

  Where was anybody? The shop stood dim, quiet and deserted. Had we been real crooks, potatoes be hanged, we could have helped ourselves to tenners from the till. But to our credit we remained focused. After a few moments of nonplussed shuffling about, Mark Jeffries, by far our boldest member, reached out for the precious potato pile. To be precise, he reached out for the precious potato at the very bottom of the precious potato pile – and down came the veggie walls of Jericho. Dear Lord, I was never in the Blitz, but it can’t have created much more noise than fifty pounds of King Edwards cascading on to a linoleum floor. And wouldn’t you know it, suddenly there was Eric. Whether he’d been disturbed from sitting in the back room poring over a copy of Sporting Life or hiding in the rafters to foil our heist at its height, I don’t know, but before I could make a move he was looming over me. As I looked up at him, he seemed the size of the Albert Hall – and what’s more the Albert Hall in a particularly tetchy mood.

  ‘What y’doin’? Why’ve ya scattered my pataters all up in the air? What have your mates just run off with?’

  This last question struck me as the most alarming. He had spoken about the rest of my gang almost in the past tense, as if they were no longer present. A swift look round showed me he was, in fact, a master at explaining the facts as they stood. All but me had fled. I was on my own.

  Then there came one last Eric enquiry that I couldn’t figure out at all.

  ‘Why you trying to put that ’tater in your pocket, son?’

  Yes, why was I trying to put a potato in my pocket? Zombie-like, on autopilot, as though my body below the neck had become totally invisible, I was, despite the jig being well and truly up, slowly attempting to push a large spud into a tiny trouser pocket. And I continued with the uneven struggle even as we stared directly at each other. Then I found myself saying:

  ‘I’m cleaning it.’

  There followed a deadly few seconds as we both considered this preposterous defence. Then, snatching the muddy bounty from my grasp, Eric barked a swift, ‘Now fuck off, okay?’ and I fled from the scene.

  Immediately, hot tears and short breaths engulfed me and I ran head first into a pillar box. Now I was laid out on the pavement, my sobs so deep and forceful that I pulsed rhythmically off the concrete. Sweet mother of mercy, was this the end of Dan-o?

  More than any other incident in my entire childhood I credit the Great Potato Failure of 1964 with keeping me on the straight and narrow through later life. Had I been successful in the raid, who knows? Today I might have been a notorious drug baron or at least an infamous vegetable one. One word from me and the movement of 80 per cent of side dishes in or out of South-East London would grind to a halt. It’s a sobering thought.

  My greatest fear in the days after the fiasco at Eric’s was that my parents would find out. What my dad would make of my potato-purloining attempt didn’t bear thinking about, which might be viewed as both odd and hypocritical, given that he was ‘at it’ virtually every day of his life, not just fiddling meters and hire purchase traders, but bringing home booty from his job on the docks.

  ‘Bunce’ was the word for this kind of contraband, and it was never equated with out-and-out theft. Getting things ‘out of the docks’ was considered a perk of the job. At one time any working person who considered a new job would have to factor in what their bunce quotient might be. Bunce can be simple office stationery, or a good supply of cream horns if you work at the bakery. Or, as in the case of my brother’s mate Billy who landed a job at the Ford plant in Dagenham, you could see everyone in South-East London all right for tyres and driver’s side mats throughout the 1970s. Bunce, and the distribution thereof, lay at the very heart of the working-class community. Everybody knew somebody who knew how to get hold of something.

  A terrifically varied selection of goods regularly appeared then disappeared from our home. Sizeable quantities of everything from women’s handbags, brandy, leather footballs, Russian dolls, shirts, mugs, glasses, to rolls of curtain material and garden bulbs. The most bulky and least movable stock we ever housed was an entire tea chest full of curry powder. Today, such a commodity might find a ready market, but back then nobody we knew made curries and there were no Asian restaurants in the vicinity who might conceivably have been interested in purchasing it as a job lot. Indeed, there were no Asian folk at all. My dad tried to divvy up the cargo into paper bags and give it away to friends, but seeing as how the mother lode was stashed out on our back porch it was a messy business and the overpowering unfamiliar aroma soon enveloped the flat, giving us all headaches.

  Many years later I asked Dad how he had eventually disposed of it all.

  ‘Me and Wally Shaw chucked the lot in the fucking canal,’ he said.

  A more successful commodity, and one in which I happily became active, was LP records. In the late sixties, the old man had access to underground rock albums being exported to Europe. I remember the first load he brought home. He walked into my bedroom and lifted hi
s shirt; poking out of his waistband like a psychedelic girdle were about nine LPs.

  ‘’Ere, boy, I got these out today. Any good?’ he said, flinging down on the bed records by Santana, Chicago and Johnny Winter. Any good? These were the groups I was into. I marvelled at them.

  ‘Dad, these are brilliant. Me and me mates love these groups!’

  ‘Yeah, well never mind about your fucking mates,’ he thundered. ‘If I get ’em, can you knock ’em out for me?’

  I said I could, and for the next year or so that’s exactly what I did. Every Sunday I would take the thirty or so titles he had brought home over to Petticoat Lane in East London – two tube trains away – and sell them to stallholders. I was not yet twelve years old, but the men on the pitches soon got to trust me and await my arrival. ‘Down the Lane’, LP records then retailed at about £1.50 and I would get fifteen bob (seventy-five pence) apiece. Of this, I got to keep half. I never really saw any of that cash, because I would immediately trade for other records on the stall – thus sowing the seeds of my life-long obsession with collecting vinyl. Fred couldn’t understand this at all. When I arrived home, he’d look stunned.

  ‘I can’t fathom you, boy, straight I can’t. Every week you come back with more fucking records than you go out with! You’ll never have a fucking tanner to your name, you won’t.’

  Well, he was right there but whose fault was that?

  One Friday he came home with an entire box – twenty-five copies – of an album by a group I’d never heard of called the Human Beast. It looked suitably weird and contemporary, but upon playing it I found it to be the most drawn-out, derivative, psych-rock noise that struck even my young ears as bogus. Over at Petticoat Lane the stallholders cautiously took one copy each, leaving me with about seventeen Human Beasts still in the box. Over the coming weeks they requested no further re-orders of it. I comforted myself in the thought that I knew a dog when I heard one.