Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography

by Baker, Danny

  Then there was Mr Kaye. Oh, what a piece of work was Mr Kaye! He had spent some time in the US marines and like most of the masters he could be very physical with the kids – and by that I mean he’d hit you hard if you failed to belt up on cue. Of course, West Greenwich had no shortage of boys who, even if walloped by ex-Vietnam paratroopers, would fight back. In those instances Mr Kaye would use all his military training on the kid, who would wind up dazed and helpless on the deck, with Mr Kaye in combat stance, his foot hard across the insurgent’s throat. Sometimes, upon release, the boy might threaten, ‘I’ll get my dad up here after you,’ to which the teacher would calmly reply, ‘Good. I look forward to it – I’ll do that to him too.’ It would end there because everybody knew he was as good as his word.

  Appalling and traumatic? Today maybe. Then, a wild gleeful uproar would engulf the rest of the class as the one-sided tussle took place, most vocally from the friends of the victim, and the whole thing was looked on as the most tremendous hoot. By and large, all the kids liked Mr Kaye – he was a hard nut and we knew where we stood with him – even if it was under his boot heel.

  What I now find utterly unforgivable was the treatment of teachers by the boys. Two examples here – and I warn you, neither of them comes under the banner of knock-about youthful high jinks.

  Mr Thorpe was a rotund old Yorkshireman with a bald head and white moustache. He had been at the school for many years, garnering a reputation as a strict disciplinarian who wielded the cane pretty much non-stop. By the time I arrived at the school he was winding down into retirement, and had mellowed to such an extent that he was even calling a few of us by our Christian names. The hard nuts among us, learning of his past legend, went out of their way to make him a figure of fun. During lessons he would sit at his desk and distractedly smoke a pipe as we scribbled away into our workbooks, once placing a stick of chalk in the pipe’s bowl to see who noticed first. Having had this silly bit of business identified, he chuckled for minutes on end about it, saying, ‘Don’t mind me, boys, I’ll be getting out the road in a few months.’

  One morning, toward the end of term, his lesson included mention of a crystal radio set with its cat’s whisker. None of us knew what this was. Mr Thorpe seemed energized by this gap in our experience and after a few minutes excitedly explaining the antique radio process, told us that, the following day, he would bring in his mother’s old set which he still had by his bedside. This he did. The pleasure he felt in presenting the piece was obvious and after a short talk about it we were invited to form a queue and listen through some Bakelite headphones to the crackling reception. Many pronounced the reception to be tinny and terrible, which made him chuckle even more.

  ‘Well, that’s all we had years ago,’ he chortled. ‘It wasn’t all Top of the Pops and stereo then, you know. Mam and I thought this to be the miracle of the age!’ We all took our time pretending to marvel at his beloved relic, chiefly because, as with the Geography manoeuvre, this was eating up lesson time and there could be no homework as a result.

  When the bell sounded for the change of lesson, Mr Thorpe sat back beaming in his chair and delicately began replacing everything on the radio to a position whereby his demo could begin anew for the next class. The next class would be 3K.

  The way West Greenwich worked was the first three years were divided into four large classes, each identified by the initial letter of the form teacher’s surname. My class began as 1B – under Mr Bullock – and had progressed through 2B to our current third-term status. The classes were streamed according to pupils’ assessed ability. We were the top tier; next came 3S, 3R and lastly the absolute dregs of 3K. It was the members of the latter, notoriously wayward group that, later on the day described, I saw giggling and agitated in the corridor at dinner (lunch). I was no sensitive plant, but what they were celebrating made me feel thoroughly ashamed.

  Apparently Mr Thorpe had gone through exactly the same lecture with them as he had with us and then asked them to gather round for the headphones test. During this, and for whatever reason, he said he had to leave the room for a moment and that they should form an orderly line so that everyone could get a listen. Above all he had told them to be careful with it.

  As soon as he had left the room some of the Neanderthals of 3K had thrown the set to the floor. They then began jumping on it until it was a mass of small pieces. Upon his return, the class was still gathered around his desk. One of them, a huge thick-necked animal called Lee, held out two shattered fragments of the radio’s innards and said with a smirk, ‘Here’s your mum’s radio, Thorpy – sorry, we dropped it.’

  It was what happened next that seemed to cause most joy among the celebrating mob in the dinner queue. Stunned and disbelieving, Mr Thorpe had looked at the scattered smithereens of his set all across the floor and wordlessly slumped into his chair. Putting his face into his hands, he started to cry. As his shoulders heaved with deep sobbing, the boys had noisily whooped in triumphal delight. Their presumed victory over an old school force was complete. The whole of 3K received a week’s detention. Mr Thorpe never returned to West Greenwich again.

  An awful story, and yet one that pales significantly when set against what happened to Mr Dingley, another veteran, and one who had a reputation for mild eccentricity rather than discipline. On the last day of term, at our sports day in Crystal Palace, a pupil killed him. Having brooded over a perceived slight from the old boy, the kid heaved a shot put at his head, putting him into a coma from which he never recovered. I had completed all my events for that day and was sitting in the stands when we noticed a small knot of masters chasing somebody down the tunnel on the far side of the playing area. Another group of teachers huddled around somebody on the floor. All games were halted as the feverish word spread: Somebody has ‘done’ Mr Dingley. Shortly afterwards an ambulance made its way on to the competitors area and we were told school was over for the term and could everyone make their way back to the coaches. I sincerely don’t recall there being too much sensation on the ride back to Deptford. It was the last day before the six-week holiday and by the time we all reconvened again the story was stale. It was only when, shortly before Christmas, the headmaster told us in assembly that this stalwart of the staffroom had finally passed away that it became the buzz of the playground once more. His killer was never seen again – he had been due to leave that day anyway – and whenever I tell this story people always ask what happened to him. I have no idea. Today the media would be all over a tale like this, but in 1970 it seemed of little interest beyond those directly involved.

  However one story from West Greenwich that did go national was when an outbreak of food poisoning at the school killed one boy and hospitalized over a hundred others. I appreciate these bombshells may be striking you like the Python sketch in which four Yorkshiremen attempt to up the shock and awe with every subsequent anecdote but, believe me, I am having to cherry-pick even these from a vast storehouse of incident.

  In fact, it was the school-decimated-by-mouldy-meat-pie scandal that saw my very first television appearance. ITN had sent a camera crew down to SE8 to cover the event and as the presenter spoke straight to camera about hygiene lapses and something called botulism, Bernard Sibley and I stood over his shoulder mugging and pretending to be sick. Our performance made it on to the evening bulletin and all our other friends wasted no time in informing us that we looked like ‘a right pair of cunts’. Plainly then, I had this knack from the very beginning.

  Bernie Sibley was one of a growing group of us who, drop by musical drop, knew what was going on. Obviously, you had ‘Sugar, Sugar’ by the Archies all over the radio, but some of us had cottoned on to a shadowy off-air culture featuring things like ‘Peaches en Regalia’ by Frank Zappa and ‘White Room’ by Cream. The received wisdom now is that the cool set at the time listened to reggae, Motown and soul, but that rather overlooks the fact that everybody listened to reggae, Motown and soul back then. I can’t think of a household, ours included, tha
t didn’t have one of the Tighten Up albums or Motown Chartbusters or the Atlantic Record samplers featuring Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin. Those records were okay, they were very popular at parties, but they weren’t new and peculiar to me in the way that In the Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson, with its startling album cover, suddenly was. This was weirdo music, different and difficult to track down – you wouldn’t find albums by (Peter Green’s) Fleetwood Mac, the Mothers of Invention and the newly formed Led Zeppelin in Starr’s at Surrey Docks. It was vital and it was happening and I set my controls for the heart of this underground scene.

  Are You Hung Up?

  As the incident with my brother Michael’s Donovan cap has demonstrated, it was no easy matter to adopt contemporary looks and attitudes in our house. This was testing enough in the innocent era of Beatle boots and miniskirts, so what chance did I have of becoming a freak? Being a freak – a status I lusted after – meant, as I understood it, adopting the attitude of an uncompromising free spirit who had seen through the hippy smells and bells and was now intent on totally corrupting straight society through a mixture of shock, protest and a violent rejection of traditional values. Well, good luck getting that past my old man.

  The real problem for me was that being a true ‘head’ required a real year-zero attitude to the cosy past, and I was simply too fond of home, Sunday dinners and Tommy Steele’s ‘Little White Bull’ to throw in my lot with Ken Kesey and his Magic Bus crowd. Yes, I certainly wanted to bring down ‘straight’ society – or at least give it a black eye – but just on the side, as a hobby, and only in theory. Oh, and it had to happen while my brother was out and I had the bedroom to myself.

  Then, I would stare at the cover of the Mothers’ We’re Only in it for the Money album and yearn to be one of those free-living screw-you guys. Of course, I knew I was never even going to get close to that wigged-out look in Debnams Road. As soon as my hair reached anything approximating revolutionary length, Spud would shoot me an incredulous look and say, ‘Sure you should be walking past Carrington House with hair like that? They’ll be dragging you in free of charge.’

  Added to this, I was only twelve, so my parents still bought all my outfits. Locally sourced them, too, and as far as I was aware, no member of Jethro Tull got their stage gear from Kustow’s Men’s Outfitters in the Tower Bridge Road. That said, I was free to choose my fashion statements and I wasn’t a Little Lord Fauntleroy by any means, but there was a definite cut-off point. Had I been a mod like brother Michael, there wouldn’t have been a problem, but by 1970 mods were a corny curiosity. Crushed velvet loon pants and tie-dye T-shirts were the way forward. Though Dad liked his boy to be in with the latest styles, I knew there was no way of introducing the phrase ‘velvet loon pants’ whenever he generously offered me a £20 note to ‘rig myself out’.

  A more dramatic repercussion of Spud’s sartorial intolerance was what happened to my sister’s first serious boyfriend, Colin. I idolized Colin, and his influence on my life has been sizeable. He liked, and even seemed to know personally, such groups as Chicken Shack, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and the Groundhogs. Aged about nineteen, he played the guitar and whenever Sharon took me to his flat he tried to show me how to do it, patiently explaining what a plectrum and frets were. As with any other manual skill it was totally beyond me. Most importantly, though, he began giving me books of the Peanuts cartoon strip by Charles Schulz. The dryness, irony and suburban surrealism of Schulz’s genius drawings totally absorbed me and I began to seek out any editions I could afford. He even had a heroic ailment that by far eclipsed my phantom colour blindness. He was a diabetic – the first I ever heard of – and as he sat on his bed, playing a Johnny Winter LP, chuckling to Peanuts and injecting himself with insulin, I simply could not imagine a cooler dude and lifestyle.

  You’ll notice I would always be at his flat. This was because Sharon would not let him come round to ours for fear of what the old man might say, both in terms of ‘protecting’ his daughter and his reaction to Colin’s funky style. He was not a long hair but was certainly post-mod casual in a decidedly downbeat way. For example, he always wore white plimsolls. They would be spotless and looked good, but they were definitely a statement. When Sharon finally caved in to Mum’s nagging ‘Are we ever going to meet this Richard Burton of yours then?’ she warned Colin not to wear the white plimsolls. He didn’t listen. Dad answered the knock on the front door that evening – had been eagerly waiting for it, in fact – and looked at this diminutive figure, a prospective son-in-law, on his doorstep wearing a Fair Isle pullover, lived-in 501s, a weathered cream mac and white pumps.

  ‘Well, you can fuck off for a start,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve just come to pick Sharon up,’ soldiered on Colin.

  ‘You ain’t come to pick no one up, son. The only thing you’ll be picking up is your chin off the pavement if you don’t shift.’

  Sharon was by now downstairs and dolled up to go out.

  ‘Dad, leave him alone. That’s Colin.’

  ‘Is it?’ came back Spud, unimpressed. ‘Sure it ain’t Andy fuckin’ Capp?’

  ‘We’re going out.’

  ‘Not with him you’re not, Sharon.’ And then Dad really started to move up through the gears: ‘If you think . . .’ Any sentence Spud started with ‘If you think . . .’ was always going to rise to a climax. ‘If you think I’m letting a daughter of mine walk out with a soapy fucker in plimsolls – fucking plimsolls! – you got another think coming!’

  Colin, understandably rattled, now spoke to my sister over the old man’s shoulder.

  ‘I’ll wait for you up by the bus stop,’ he gasped.

  ‘Will ya? Good. I’ll be up there too in two minutes meself and if you’re still there, son, you’re going straight under the next double-decker that pulls in.’

  The door was slammed shut.

  Now Sharon was crying, Dad was leading off even more, Mum was saying ‘Give the poor sod a chance, Fred!’, Michael was laughing excitedly and I was quietly devastated, watching through the kitchen window as Colin stood dazed in the square, not knowing what was the safest next move.

  My sympathy for him that day was grounded in more than adulation, I have to confess. He and my sister were going to the West End to buy tickets for the musical Hair. They were going to include me in the package – they often took me out with them – and I was understandably thrilled to be getting a seat booked at the hippest show in town. Whether our places were eventually secured on that stormy day with Dad or subsequently I can’t recall, but eventually we did pitch up at the Shaftsbury Theatre to witness the Freak Out the whole world was talking about – even if it was on about its fourth cast by then. It was a night that almost traumatized me off musical theatre for life.

  Firstly, and on reflection, it was not a good choice to see with your sister. Hair may have some powerhouse tunes in it and make many valid points about the warmongering hypocrisy of straight society but, to be honest, all anyone talked about was the fact that, at one point, the cast all took their clothes off and wigged out. As people used to say then, ‘You see everything.’ Now I knew about this and thought it an unlikely bit of show-stopping, just so much hype. I was ready for a brief suggestion of nakedness, a representation of it under low lights, enough to be scandalous but nothing that wouldn’t be over in a flash (as it were).

  Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Hair, but they really do take all their clothes off and wig out. I remind you, I was twelve, my sister eighteen. Though our house could often be a churning urn of boiling bawdiness and earthy humour, we didn’t do nudity or discourse upon sex. Lewd double-entrendres and bodily functions, yes. Actual sex and nude erotica, no. This is entirely as it should be. The myth of treating sexual matters and our bodies as perfectly natural subjects that hold no embarrassment and should be openly discussed by all is pure horse manure and liable to take all the fun out of growing up. I could no more have had a talk with my parents about sex than fly in the
air unaided – and thank God for that. I genuinely cannot think of anything worse. So. Now it’s showtime.

  I’m not sure any more at which point in Hair the cast go naked, I think it might be during ‘Let the Sun Shine In’, although that now strikes me as too preposterous a cue for everyone to get their bums out. Whenever it was, it was not my hoped for brief coup de théâtre but a full-on, extended, jiggle-flop-bounce pubic master class under full house lights. Swallowing something hard and jagged, I suddenly wished I was dead. I wanted my best stalls seat to absorb me down into its velveteen plush, to somehow grow microscopic and invisible, to be anywhere but sitting next to my own sister.

  Then things got really unbearable.

  The cast started to come down off the stage and into the auditorium. They were directly addressing individual members of the audience and urging us to get up and dance with them. How could people do this? By now I could hardly breathe. As the pit orchestra vamped the ‘Age of Aquarius’ or whatever it was – it made no difference, I could hear nothing but the blood rushing to my face – each cast member picked a row and stood in the aisle next to it imploring its occupants to free-form some radical shapes. Ladies and gentlemen, I was in an aisle seat. Sure enough, and as if in a nightmare, some sweaty naked Equity-card-holding hippy stopped on our row but inches from my head and started to dance the Frug like there was no tomorrow. All eyes in our party remained welded forward even though the stage was by now totally deserted. This was not happening. Except that it was. My peripheral vision could not block out the flapping old dick whipping back and forth and back and forth across my tormentor’s pelvis as he gyrated himself into a scripted frenzy. Then – and I promise you I am not retrospectively embellishing any of this for heightened effect – the worst thing in the world happened.