Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography

by Baker, Danny

  Later that summer, hanging out on the dump, Tommy Hodges turned up one morning with an air rifle borrowed from his cousin Alan, along with an entire tin of 100 ‘slugs’, or pellets. After tiring of shooting up cans, bottles and various improvised targets (the cross on the roof of St Gertrude’s being one), I had a brilliant idea. ‘Wait there!’ I instructed the team and ran indoors to fetch that box of Human Beast clunkers. The shiny vinyl twelve-inchers were then set up at various distant points around the bombsite, the game being to get your shot as near to the hole in the centre as possible. Terrific fun! Half an hour later, nothing remained of the discs but a few shards. We then retired to throw the glossy album covers on our fire.

  Now then.

  I don’t know if you are a record collector too, but if you are it’s possible you may be aware of the Human Beast. Since the rise of the Psych Rock genre in the 1990s, their sole LP has become one of the most rare and sought after on the entire world scene. The last copy I saw on eBay sold for about £1,300. Taking this as our guide, we can assume that in our giddy half-hour of bagging big-game vinyl at the dump, Tommy, Peter King and I shot into fragments exactly £22,100 worth of rock’n’roll history.

  ‘You’ll never have a fucking tanner, you won’t.’

  Maybe. But I still say it’s a lousy LP.

  Getting Out There

  Between the stages of toddler and starting work I attended just two schools; Rotherhithe Junior Mixed and West Greenwich Secondary Boys. Both solid, state institutions in the Victorian style and I loved every last minute of being at both. You see, I really was the most enormously popular kid – isn’t that a scream? You hardly ever hear anyone say that and even typing it makes me feel like it’s poor autobiographical form. In my school years I never felt awkward, left out or lost. I sailed through all the lessons, was always first in year, always given the lead role in school plays and was even captain of the football team. Teachers, pupils, they all liked me and I had the most terrific time. Of course, I can fully understand it if you find that to be conceited swanking of the highest order, but those are the bald facts and we’re stuck with them. It was only many years later and after my first appearances on national television that it suddenly occurred to me that I might not be universally beloved.

  The one school activity I recall spectacularly failing in and being totally crushed by was when we all had to be tested, at about the age of nine, for colour blindness. Oh, I desperately wanted to be colour-blind. It struck me as the perfect ailment: a genuine disability that you could appear heroic about while being completely free from any pain or danger. Come the day of the test, as was typical in schools, the word about a nurse being in the building ran through the classrooms at the speed of light and, typically again, most of the boys duly inflated this news by warning that, whatever it was she was here for, it would involve an enormous needle being stuck into us, probably around the bum area. A pensive mood duly settled over the classroom.

  When it was announced that we were all to undergo a check for colour blindness, many jeered at the lack of danger; for my part I was not only excited by the prospect but doggedly determined to fail it. This would be my war wound, my tragic secret of which I would never speak, the reason I could never allow any of the girls to get truly close to me. What would be the point? In my mind I saw myself chewing on a matchstick and telling some poor, lovestruck doll, ‘Forget it, baby. I’m colour-blind and the docs say it’s only a matter of time.’

  Rotherhithe Junior Mixed didn’t have a proper sickbay so we all lined up outside the little library in the hall and were sent in one at a time in alphabetical order. Another reason why I had such confidence throughout my childhood was because my surname was always first on the register. In all my years in education I never once shared a class with an Anderson, Ambrose or Allcock, so every day it was I who would lead the charge when it came to the monitoring of attendance. To me it felt only right and proper as each morning, before any other business was commenced, the form’s cast list in order of appearance was confirmed – and it ran BAKER, Ball, Barnes, Biffen, Burridge, Byart . . . Thank God this was before today’s touchy feely first-name terms with teachers – all those Annes, Bobbys and Christines would have buried my billing way down among the wines and spirits. That wouldn’t have done at all.

  Anyway, back at the temporary doctor’s office, my name was called before all others and in I went. Now I don’t know if colour-blindness tests have come on much over the years, but in 1965 the job involved looking at a few cards full of psychedelic bubbles which, to fully functioning eyes, would reveal hidden numbers. If you could see the numbers you were a-okay. Even as I made my way to the little table where the welcoming nurse sat I could already see the numbers on the cards as clearly as if they had been neon signs. Breaking into something of a sweat, I decided I was going to lie my way into courageous disability.

  Pleasantries over, the nurse held up the first card. ‘Now then,’ she said, ‘can you see anything on that card?’ I could. It was a huge dayglo number 63, but she wasn’t getting that. ‘Yes, I can,’ I trembled, ‘I can see a cow.’ She immediately withdrew the card and looked at it herself. ‘A cow? You can see a cow on there?’ I confirmed that I could. She moved on: ‘How about this one?’ The second card had 27 mapped out across it as clear as day. I thought for a bit and said, ‘A bus.’ Again she withdrew it and looked at it a while herself. ‘And this?’ The third card showed a noisy 10. ‘A tank,’ I chanced, but clearly this was too much. She turned on me.

  ‘Now you’re just being silly, aren’t you?’ snapped the medic as the atmosphere suddenly became frosty.

  ‘I just want to be colour-blind,’ I croaked with eyes now brimming.

  ‘You WANT to be colour-blind?’ she blazed. ‘What an awful thing to say. Do you think your parents want you to be colour-blind?’

  Well, I knew Dad wouldn’t mind if there was a few quid in it.

  We began the test again and this time, full of shame, I mumbled each correct sequence of digits as they shone out of the cards. Chumminess dissipated; I was dismissed with a curt, ‘Send in Deborah Ball on your way out please.’ As I made my deflated way along the snake of waiting classmates outside, quite a few hissed, ‘Have you got it, Dan?’ With a resigned shake of my head I had to confess I was ‘normal’.

  Barry Jolley was the only child to be identified as having a warped visual palette and, sure enough, all the girls cooed over him for weeks. He properly milked it for a while too, pretending not to be able to see things like biscuits and people’s heads. He even fooled some of the more impressionable kids into believing he could see right through people’s clothing. I was livid.

  Much later in life, I talked on the radio to somebody with chronic colour blindness and he told me a genuine and fascinating symptom of the malady. It seems if he attended any football match being played on a snow-covered pitch, the orange ball traditionally used in such circumstances would be clearly visible. All well and good. However, as the game progressed, any parts of the pitch where the snow had melted or been worn away became a huge problem because each time the orange ball moved across the green grass it simply vanished. Suddenly he could only see the player’s legs thrashing away at thin air. I’m sorry, but that still sounds a pretty cool condition to me.

  The colour-blindness episode apart – and perhaps one other involving being sick after having a go at apricot crumble in school dinners – I consider every day I spent in school as bordering on the marvellous. That said, like any kid I recognized one of the sweetest phrases in the English language was a mother saying, ‘I don’t think you’d better go in today . . .’ This would be a rarity. I was robust and sporty. I have never broken a bone in my life and it wasn’t until my fifties that I had to spend even one night in a hospital. My friend Geoffrey Kelly was constantly breaking his arm and, frankly, it looked like a real drag, so I tried to avoid any of that. I did once get mumps, and all I can recall about that is a certain swelling of the jaw and being told
– actually instructed by a doctor, mark you – that all I could eat for a week would be marshmallows. I mean, what? A Willie Wonka approved virus? Yes please.

  Whenever I did have to be ‘off school’ I would be left alone in the house. This was not the callous and neglectful act it sounds. That was simply the way it was. My mother worked just a couple of minutes across the way and came home for lunch – or dinner, as we called it – and would be finished at work by three. If I needed anything, I was to shout out my bedroom window to Mary Lloyd upstairs, who would, I was assured, be keeping an ear out for me. Added to this my mum would always, before leaving for work, buy a bag of ‘stores’ to see me through. These stores were quite gloriously indulgent and involved various sweets like Toffos – the anti-marshmallows – Majestic wafers, sherbet flying saucers and Rainbow Drops. Rainbow Drops were tiny pieces of highly coloured sugared rice that for some reason were always served up loose in a cone-shaped container. Also in my stores would be a comic – Playhour gave way to the Beezer as I matured – and possibly a small round cardboard packet of caps. Now one thing I promised I wouldn’t do in this autobiography was simply list bygone products in an orgy of sluggish reminiscence but, equally, I know that you can’t mention caps without letting the younger folk in on the gag.

  Caps were a long, thin, tightly packed spiral of paper on to which, at short intervals, had been glued small black circles of explosive. Ideally, you were supposed to tear off an individual cap and place it in the nose cone of a little plastic made-in-Japan rocket that could be cheaply bought for precisely that purpose. Next you would throw the rocket upwards and watch as it came down to earth, nose first, thus exploding the cap with a satisfying bang. As an extra bonus, I would always pick the rocket up and closely inhale the deep metallic tang of the recent combustion. This whiff of freshly exploded cap remains for me one of the great smells of a sixties childhood. There were cap guns too, but nobody I knew could ever get those to work. Naturally we would also throw complete spirals of caps into fires and listen as they urgently popped and fizzed. Best of all was taking a strip of about ten caps, folding them tightly and then placing them between two old pennies. By bringing your boot down hard on this cap-sandwich you could get an almighty crack echoing through the square. The only thing to rival this home-made thunderclap was an ice-lolly wrapper full of your hot breath that, if stepped on smartly enough, could rattle a few windows. The same loud report could also be achieved by blowing into any flimsy paper bag, twisting it off at the neck and then smacking its base very hard – though I eschewed this thrill once my mother told me that every time I did it, it blew somebody out of work. Quite how this shaky piece of folklore came about I cannot fathom, but being from a staunch union family I certainly wasn’t going to endanger the workers just to get my kicks, so bag explosions were out.

  Television output was nothing like today, so a small boy at home could not reach for his bedside remote and zone out among 160 channels of insistent hollow dross. Indeed, the idea of having a TV in any room other than the living room was as alien a concept as having a swimming pool in the garden. I don’t make the claim that TV was any better decades ago, but it certainly was a lot braver. For instance has there ever been a bolder, more empowering statement in broadcasting than that made by the BBC every single day at midday. Following the handful of inertia-enabling Programmes for Schools, which were all that would be scheduled for a morning’s viewing, the BBC’s logo would appear and a calm, confident voice would inform the nation, ‘Well, that was the last of this morning’s broadcasts for schools and BBC One is now closing down. Our next programme is Jackanory at four p.m. so until then, here’s some music.’ And on would come the peculiar static picture of the test card. Oh, what strength! What nerve! What balls! Imagine today a network having the guts to say, ‘We’ve got nothing worth broadcasting right now, so why don’t you all go and do something else?’ That is the correct way to operate the medium; the old BBC lords it on the high ground compared to our current keep-the-vacant-crap-coming-at-all-costs culture.

  The only alternative, ITV, operated a similarly select agenda, although they were later guilty of allowing the rot to set in when in the early seventies they chanced popping into life for an extra hour or so in the middle of the day with cheap, airless imports like Young Doctors, The Cedar Tree and Paint Along with Nancy, the latter being a curious show in which a matronly American woman stood in a poorly lit studio and applied oil paint to canvas with a knife. A knife!

  Throughout the sixties, daytime television simply didn’t exist – with one bizarre exception. Strangely, covertly, almost magically around every fourth Monday morning, ITV – or the ITA as my dad always insisted on calling it – would parade all the new and upcoming advertisements that they would be running during the coming month. Broken down into those that would run fifteen, thirty or forty-five seconds this unbroken stream of commercials would last about twenty minutes or so before coming to a sudden halt and giving way to dead air again. The sensational sight of ‘proper’ TV actually appearing in broad daylight would leave me spellbound. Who were they aimed at? Did they know we could all see them? Was I even supposed to be watching this? The ‘new adverts’ slot became my favourite programme of all and if ever I decided to become ill, it would usually be every fourth Monday. I don’t think this pattern of sickness was ever detected.

  My best friend during those primary school years was Stephen Micalef from the Anglo-Maltese clan two doors along from us. Today, Steve is a rather eccentric ‘street poet’ with a curiously underpowered lifestyle and much lauded among a hardcore of the alternative literati. I have to tell them that their man was ever thus. Steve, and to a much greater extent his brother George, were the first true bohemians I ever met. Whereas our home was modern, bright and aspirational, theirs was ramshackle and do-as-you-please. My dad was a hard-working docker who led his union and went on marches. Papa Salvatore Micalef seemed to live in his bedroom and spend his days playing the accordion. Steve’s dad also spoke with a stutter in a virtually impenetrable machine-gun Maltese accent of the kind that, once in conversation with him, had you doing it too.

  Smoking roll-ups the circumference of an ant’s leg, he would throw his arms wide and jabber at us kids about urgent world events as though he had stumbled across us playing chess in the Jardin du Luxembourg. At least, we trusted he was expounding on world events. For all we knew, it might have been a discourse on his bets that day at Plumpton racecourse, because Salvatore liked to gamble as much as he seemed to like not working. When he was drunk he would weep openly for the old country, lapse into full Maltese and then disappear upstairs to play the accordion once more. His wife, Dolly Micalef, came from New Cross. In the main, she would ignore her husband’s Mediterranean ways and regularly implore us to do the same, usually by making faces behind his back. The Micalefs always seemed to have about half a dozen relatives lodging with them, including Uncle Fred, who, while being the nicest of men, had the largest head I have ever seen on a human being outside those carnival ones much favoured during Mardi Gras.

  Steve and I were absolutely inseparable from the age of three and remained so until we both turned twenty when, without any reason or warning, one day we didn’t see each other and have never seen each other since. Men can do that sometimes.

  Though we were best friends, one thing totally divided our interests – football. I cannot remember a time when the love of football wasn’t a churning, driving engine within me, absorbing my time, causing me to pore over every result, pondering its impact and ramifications. I played it, studied it, lived it. Steve, on the other hand, collected fossils.

  Millwall Football Club’s floodlights were just the other side of the railway arches from my bedroom window and so, inevitably, I followed the entire male side of our family into their glare.

  It was once I reached the age of five that Dad deemed me steely enough to attend my first fixture. It was Millwall v Newport County, which we won handsomely, 4–0. Few moments in m
y life rival the experience of attending my first game, of being instantly exploded into the screeching Hogarth sketch wired to the national grid that was match day at the Old Den. Overnight, Watch with Mother had lost its edge.

  As we left the ground that winter’s night in Cold Blow Lane, inching our way along familiar pavements made fantastic by the tumult, with a dozen or so of his dock mates smoking, jabbering, swearing all at once, Dad shouted down to me:

  ‘Enjoy that, boy?’

  Enjoy it? I haven’t stopped shaking since.

  My dad felt the call of this club deep in his bones. Millwall as a thing, a manifestation, walked with him always, making it absolutely part of who he was. Christ, he was actually from Millwall, one of those children raised in Millwall, he worked the Millwall docks. Such personal identification made him wildly over-protective toward his club and down the years he chalked up a remarkable record for being physically ejected from many different grounds, including the nearby Den.

  Some of my earliest football memories are of being beside him as we noisily departed various stadiums long before the final whistle – usually with several stewards or sometimes an actual policeman showing the way.

  On one Sunday in 1964 a local copper came to our door and asked me if my father was home. He was actually in bed, but on learning a policeman was asking after him he pulled on a pair of trousers and came down. I sat on the stairs and watched the exchange with a wobbling lip. Was he going to have to go to prison or something? Their talk seemed friendly enough, and at its conclusion some money changed hands. I learned soon after the exact sum the old man forked across was two pounds ten shillings: compensation for the policeman’s helmet that he’d crushed with his backside as he was thrown out of the home game against Coventry the previous day. In those days, if a policeman lost or damaged any part of his uniform he was liable to pay for it unless a felon could be produced. Not wanting to arrest my father – the Den police personally knew most of the more volatile dockers – he’d simply called round the next day for his fifty bob. With a hangdog apology and but a sketchy memory of the skirmish, my dad was more than happy to pay up.