Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography

by Baker, Danny

  It brushed my ear. It brushed my ear.

  I screwed up my eyes and made a face like I had just downed some nitric acid laced with lemon juice. If this was the counterculture, give me Matt Monro. Give me Dorothy Squires. But right now, somebody give me a flannel.

  Nobody spoke much on the bus back. When we got home Sharon ran straight up to her bedroom. I was halfway up the stairs when the old man shouted, ‘What was it like?’ Continuing my own hurried ascent, I burbled, ‘It was great, it was great. You wouldn’t have liked it though, Dad – it’s really loud.’

  ‘And do they strip right off?’ he chortled after me. The bang of my bedroom door was all the answer he got on that one.

  ‘Bet they look better with nothing on than in all them way-out dribs and drabs I’ve seen ’em wearing in the paper!’ was his last teasing jab.

  A man being well groomed or ‘near the mark’, as he would have it, along with women and children being ‘well turned out’ was of paramount importance to my dad. As far as he was concerned, appearance defined you – hence the ‘Donovan hat’ line in the sand. Sometimes his work in the docks would cause him to come home absolutely plastered in muck. On these occasions he would ring ahead – or in one of the frequent periods when we didn’t have a phone, he’d ring a neighbour’s house – and tell my mother to have the immersion heater good and ready for a scalding hot bath. The worst he ever looked was always after unloading a cargo called carbon black. I’m not sure what this actually was, but it must have been choking and vile and capable of creating huge permeating clouds when disturbed. On carbon black days he would arrive home looking as though he had been catapulted into a skip of shoe polish. The front door would need to be opened smartly or a second knock would be accompanied by a furious shout of ‘Hurry up, hurry up! Don’t leave me standing out here like a fucking tramp!’

  Once in, he would swiftly disappear into the bathroom for ages. Even when he emerged, and for days afterwards, the ingrained carbon would ooze out of his pores and he would sweat in oily black rivulets that quickly ruined the collar of his always clean shirt.

  ‘Fucking stuff, that is,’ he would thunder, rising to take another in the series of baths. ‘I’m not working down in the hold on that bastard shit any more.’ But he always did.

  At the opposite and far more disturbing end of the scale were the days when he would come home enveloped with a clinging, whitish film. This was asbestos. Unloaded raw.

  In 2007 after a period of feeling ‘a bit rough’, which culminated in him turning an awful shade of yellow, with some difficulty I persuaded him to go to Lewisham hospital. I was taken to one side and told cancer had spread throughout his internal organs. He’d never been a smoker, yet the cancer had started in his lungs. A doctor, when delivering the fatal prognosis, asked me if Spud had ever worked near asbestos. I turned to him and said, ‘You worked on asbestos a lot, Dad, didn’t you? Bloke wants to know how much.’

  Typically he squirmed a bit in his seat and looked at his hands.

  ‘Oh, don’t go on about all that, boy,’ he said, irked as ever that someone wanted to know our business. ‘It was fucking years ago. It’s not that anyway. I’m all right, it’s the fucking flu, that’s all.’

  The doctor and I exchanged a brief glance. And it was never mentioned again in the five months he had left to live.

  When it came to the musical inspiration behind my dreams of being one of the beautiful people, my parents rarely commented. But they did have an uncanny knack of walking into the room just as Zappa or Pink Floyd would be laying down one of their more unlistenable stretches of music concrete. At those times they would never go down the clichéd route of shouting at me to ‘turn that noise off ’ or try and contrast it with the ‘real’ music of their day but rather undermine my earnest concentration with a gently amused, ‘That’s nice, boy. What is it? Joe Loss and his orchestra?’ This would always make me smile and bring me back pretty swiftly from my inner Haight-Ashbury.

  One of the most devastating of these gently critical attacks on our new sound was delivered by Tommy Hodges’ dad, Bill, who ran the newsagents over the wall. One afternoon, Tom and I were in his minuscule bedroom under the stairs listening to Neil Young’s new LP, After the Gold Rush. We were on the track ‘Oh Lonesome Me’ which, even by Neil’s standards, is a bit whiney, when Bill pushed open the door with his behind and turned in with two cups of tea for us. Placing them down on the tiny side table, he momentarily listened to the song and took note of our solemn reverence toward it. Walking the few steps back out of the room he struck up a strangulated parody of Neil’s famous timbre and warbled, ‘Oh I do feel sorry for myself . . .’ As the door clicked closed again we heard Bill walk away chuckling, leaving Tom and me thoroughly undermined, tacitly agreeing that this disastrous counter-revolutionary moment was best not openly acknowledged.

  Toward the end of 1969 Dad announced he had ordered a colour television. This was a sensation and would place us right at the forefront of happening technology in this groovy changing world. More than any single invention I can recall, the arrival of colour television was greeted by the entire nation as a huge leap forward and proof the government was at last doing something to modernize life. You’ll always find the People are generally resistant to the New unless that New happens to be something that will spruce up their tellys.

  It was an indication of how my cultural stance was changing that while my brother breathlessly said we would be able to see next year’s cup final ‘in full colour’, I was more excited by the prospect of at last being able to see the hot new music show Colour Me Pop without feeling short-changed. (In fact, that forerunner of The Old Grey Whistle Test had just been cancelled.)

  Our magnificent new rented colour TV was delivered to our front room on a date heavy with significance: 1 January 1970. The arrival of this gleaming kaleidoscope coinciding with the dawning of a new decade seemed to ooze science fictional possibilities and further speeded my focus away from the path it would traditionally have been taking. Such a shift in priorities had happened quickly.

  When I first joined West Greenwich they were holding mass football trials to see who was worthy of making the school first XI. I had a particularly good spell on the field and was announced to be ‘in’ before I’d even left the pitch. This was all I wanted to hear, know and be. Three weeks later, in our first game against our nearest rivals South-East London Boys, I scored four of the goals in a 10–0 demolition of the opposition. The sports teacher made me captain. We had a good little team and none of the local schools ever fancied playing us. Football, music and home life were in complete balance and the conditions were perfect.

  But during 1969, hair, sounds and ideas began to get wilder, stranger and loose. Playing for the school now seemed routine and ordinary and far away from my engrossing personal world of musical experiment and discovery. On the BBC, Monty Python’s Flying Circus crept out in the same graveyard spots as the very few rock shows they broadcast and its divisive, uncompromising anti-normality tone gathered a knowing clique of us in awed witness to its daring. By the time 1970 dropped into the birthing pool, things underground were gathering strength and alive with secret possibilities. You could feel it everywhere. Or at least a lucky few could.

  I began to take my eye off the ball.

  Whole Lotta Love

  No part of my Pollyanna existence truly suffered as my obsession with rock music snowballed. I didn’t lose my sunny outlook and actually never became one of those grim early teens that, according to cliché, sulk in their rooms claiming nobody understands them. Furthermore, neither my mum nor my dad ever embarrassed me in front of friends or did anything to make me wish I’d been adopted by Frank Zappa. My children have never gone through this generally accepted phase either, so perhaps this whole tired teenage imagery – along with the tipsy deaf ‘gran’ and the strait-laced, easily offended maiden aunt we’re all supposed to instantly recognize – is simply a creation of middle-class comedy writers hoping t
o piggyback on what they suppose is real life. It may be a related fact that none of my crowd ever wound up as bong-hogging college students either. Indeed, out of an eventual crowd of about thirty close friends, only two went on to further education.

  As our teens dawned, and in breaks between playing Joe Cocker, Deep Purple and Santana albums, the other boys from the boat and myself still used to go out across the estate looking for ways to fill up the long splendid days. Usually we’d gravitate to the Surrey Canal or Southwark Park, but sometimes to a weird decrepit area we called Mud Island. This solidly landlocked region had been given island status by the locals because it was an out-of-the-way gaggle of abandoned houses wedged between the back of the railway arches and the street leading to Millwall football ground. The ‘Mud’ part was a clue to the reason the dwellings were abandoned in the first place. They were all sinking on poor foundations and several of them teetered forward or sideways at crazy angles as though Tim Burton himself had drawn up the plans.

  You arrived at this Twilight Zone of a place via creepy Zampa Road, the same location where my father and I had seen the badly beaten man. A stubby, always damp turning, Zampa Road appeared as a low concrete tunnel encased by the high windowless walls of a pickling factory on the right, the Kia-Ora orange squash bottling plant on the left and ceilinged by three low railway lines above. There were no street lights and little colour. It was known locally as the Stink Hole.

  ‘Do you know where Tommy and Pete are, Mr Hodges?’

  ‘I do, son. They said they were going up the Stink Hole to look for grasshoppers.’

  Thus the Stink Hole was the conduit to Mud Island. (I’m starting to think I grew up in Tom Sawyer.) Once ashore at the isle, you would just find things to do – usually by poking around the collapsing ruins. Some of the houses in Mud Island still retained things like iron bedsteads and marble fireplaces, there being little worth in such things forty-odd years ago. Apart from chancing across an obviously human bowel movement in some quietly chosen corner, there was no evidence that anyone had ever squatted in any of the less dilapidated homes because nobody squatted in Bermondsey, full stop. I didn’t even know what the word meant until later, when I fell in with the punk rock crowd, and I still find it a totally alien concept.

  Desiccated shit aside, there were other odd personal items left behind in some of the sinking buildings. A wallpaper sample book. Mangles. Wall-mounted Ascot water heaters. Broken mirrors in ornate frames, and tin baths. One day I found a marvellous toy among all the debris. It was a plastic scale replica of the moped-like vehicle that Steve Zodiac used whenever he left the mother ship in Fireball XL5 – at one time my favourite show on TV.

  I put it on the shelf in my bedroom, but within a week my mother had thrown it out. ‘Pissing old thing, full of germs – no wonder they left it, it’s rotten. I told ya, don’t go round Mud Island, it’s falling down. Somebody’ll get killed there one of these days.’

  And somebody did.

  Martin Connor, a boy about my age who I knew quite well, had got up on the roof of one of the old houses when it suddenly gave way, sending him plummeting straight through to the ground floor, hitting his head on a beam as he fell. An absolute tragedy, and one that shocked the whole of the Silwood Estate. Even more tragically, I can only recall Martin’s dreadful death in tandem with a grimly funny story.

  About a week before he died, Martin had borrowed a pair of two-tone tonic mohair trousers from Lenny Byart, a great mate of mine – indeed, the boy I sat next to in school. Tonic mohair trousers were the last word in high style for a certain, more conventional set, and Nelson’s in Deptford High Street was the only shop that sold them in boy’s sizes. When Lenny went to get his, after many weeks of saving up, the store had just taken receipt of a single, very rare pair in the most sought after plum and blue mohair. You never saw this colour combination on our age group and, quickly snapping them up, Lenny talked about little else for weeks, even delaying his eventual debut in them until exactly the right event in his social calendar.

  He had not wanted to loan them to Martin Connor, but the two of them were very best pals and Martin desperately needed something amazing to parade in at an upcoming family wedding in North London. So, after much pleading and, I think, the passing of a pound, Lenny let him have them, along with dire warnings about what would happen should they come back with so much as a thread out of place. A few days later, before the wedding was due to take place, poor Martin fell through the roof. He wasn’t of course wearing the precious strides at the time, but about a week later Lenny was among a small group of very close friends who were invited to come and pay final respects at Martin’s open coffin. Need I telegraph further exactly what trousers Martin had been laid out in?

  Those who were there say Lenny reeled, he gasped, with many mistaking his desperate panic as delayed grief.

  ‘Me tonics! Me tonics!’ sputtered Len to his subdued chums, his voice at a respectful rasp. ‘But they’re mine. He can’t go down the hole in them – they’re mine! I’ll never get another pair, not like that. They cost me twelve quid!’

  Martin did indeed go ‘down the hole’ in Lenny’s pride and joys. Many say Lenny openly wept at the graveside. Today a team of counsellors would spend many hours talking him down from such a trauma.

  On a positive note, Mud Island was bulldozed into history soon after and no houses have ever been built in that area since. Not out of respect to Martin Connor’s memory, I suspect, but because there must indeed be something unhealthy and rotten in the very soil, the legendary mud, down through the Stink Hole. Tellingly, the only thing standing on the ghost of Mud Island today is Millwall Football Ground.

  The visits to Mud Island were getting fewer and fewer by this time in any case, because girls hated the place and 1970 was the year I properly started courting girls. Sometimes men talk about a year they ‘discovered’ girls, but I can’t fathom that. Surely anyone who grows up with a mother, a sister and at least a brace of aunts knocking about can’t still find the existence of females a complete shock? And if he does, well then he has just not been paying attention. I’m afraid I can’t bring you any of that awkward, confused and tongue-tied ticket either. From a very early age I was happy and confident around the girls. I liked them and loved to make them laugh and like me too. I would happily sell out my male mates and badmouth them too if I thought that’s what the girls wanted to hear. Sorry, fellas, but it’s a cut-throat racket, face facts.

  At Rotherhithe Primary School the beginning of each February would see the arrival of a red cardboard postbox that was placed in the main hall by the teachers. We children were invited to put in our handmade Valentine cards to anyone we ‘loved’. I used to get scores of the things. All cut-out pink hearts and glued-on lacy bits with giant X kisses scrawled on the inside. I would send plenty out too. Beverley Selway, wonderful bee-sting-mouthed Beverley, she was the main gal for me! Oh, and Marion Purkiss, I was mad for her too. And Christine James . . .

  Of course there would be no seeing this fledgling flirting through to anything approaching stepping out together, but it was gorgeous fun and I knew somehow that this was definitely the right stuff. The only boy who got on better with the girls than I did back then was Barry H. He actually joined in with all their games and even made up exciting new ones that they all squealed with excitement about. Barry had this other great gimmick too. He would invent dramatic lies, casting himself as the victim, and then sit sobbing, allowing himself to be comforted by three or four sympathetic cooing females all saying, ‘Oh, poor Barry. Come on now, don’t break your heart.’ It was a class act, but even then I knew Barry was, in fact, as gay as a tangerine, and so it proved. Me? I eventually wanted a solo girlfriend, a real one, not like the imaginary weddings I went through in my head with (a) Diana Rigg in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (b) Judy Carne from Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In and, in a short stormy union that attracted much imaginary press, Cilla Black, who would sing ‘Step Inside Love’ in the most vu
lnerable and erotic way to me alone.

  I eventually made the giant leap from guessing games to kissing games at the age of twelve. Twelve! I’m not sure any more how I feel about that. I’ve gone through various phases of thinking it was roguishly enhancing to downright sick. It wasn’t just a one-off event either. By the time I started going on the road with rock’n’roll groups a few years down the line I saw the physical perks of that lifestyle as pretty much the norm. I’d been around the block for sure. In fact, it is not bravado to suggest that, by then, the path I trod around the block might be known as Dan’s trench. Oh Lord, reading those last sentences, I want to get up and draw the curtains, but there it is. Am I chest-beating, indulging hopeless decadence or identifying generic experience? I know I was always far more comfortable with girls than most of my circle, though it’s also true that I was a lone C of E among Catholic boys. Did I inherit such a drive? It’s possible. I remember when I told my mother that my wife was expecting again, she said, ‘Oh, you’re like your father, you are. He only had to hang his bleedin’ trousers up and I was up the spout.’ My mother, folks.