That Close

by Suggs

  My head just below a thick fug of tobacco smoke, which hung permanently across the bar, I navigated past a series of fishnet-clad knees. And that was just the fellas!

  Occasionally a giant hand would reach down through the tobacco cloud and ruffle my hair, or better still proffer a two-bob coin. I couldn’t really see or hear what was going on at adult level, which was probably all for the best.

  I stood at the bar and ordered a Coke – the Colony was the first place I ever tasted Coca-Cola. Coke with ice and lemon. Bill Mitchell spotted me, came over and looked down, his watery eyes and big smiling face framed in a black Stetson, which glided through the tobacco cloud like a shark. Bill was American and was the voice-over king. He had the lowest voice in the world. Every time you heard a deep voice trailing films at the pictures, it was always him.

  He always wore black, head to toe. Although legend has it that when a pal of his went to pick him up from the airport in Ibiza for a holiday, Bill was dressed completely in white, even the Stetson.

  ‘What’s going on, Bill?’ his friend said.

  ‘I have no enemies here,’ replied Bill in his gravelly drawl. ‘How’s it going, son?’ Bill made John Wayne sound positively effeminate.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You seen the new Bond movie?’

  ‘Er … No.’

  ‘It’s good.’ He pulled out a big wodge of notes – he was pissed. ‘Here you go,’ and he handed me a ten-bob note. A whole ten bob. The note was the size of a cigarette coupon in his hand and a tea towel in mine. I folded it carefully and put it in my pocket. Ten bob!

  All the same, I got two bob off me mum for some chips. I was a rich man. I headed out and down the green staircase just in time to hear Muriel screeching: ‘Peanuts, Peanuts! You boring dreary little cunt. This is the Colony Room Club, not London Zoo. Now fuck off.’

  On the pavement outside a wino was shouting: ‘We are living like kings, and these days will last for ever!’ He promptly tripped over and fell flat on his face. I had other issues on my mind, I had the opportunity to live like a king, albeit briefly. If I could just manage to get past the arcade on Old Compton Street and my old chum Mister Fruit Machine. ‘Must not stop at the arcade. Must not stop at the arcade,’ I repeated. I’d gone home hungry more times than I care to remember chasing the elusive three bells in a row.

  I made it past the arcade and on past the Sunset Strip. The door was open and I could see one of the girls bent over while a couple of punters played bongos on her arse. Outside the French, Jenny, a dancer pal of my mum’s, was skipping about on the pavement with a glass of wine in her hand. The French was another watering hole favoured by Soho bohemians.

  All the legendary Soho drinkers were regulars at the French, including Dylan Thomas who, before he went into that dark night plastered, left his one and only manuscript of Under Milk Wood under a table in the bar following a night on the lash. Amazing he managed to misplace it, as that’s where he ended up most evenings. Apparently, Gaston, the guvnor, retrieved the script and kept it safe until the grateful head of BBC radio drama came to collect it.

  The French was originally called the York Minster, but everybody knew it as the French. This had something to do with the Resistance during the war. The Free French used to meet upstairs, and allegedly it was the location where Charles de Gaulle drew up his Free French call-to-arms speech. Although what use they’d have been defending Paris against the Nazis in the upstairs room of a boozer in Soho, I wasn’t quite sure.

  Gaston was standing in the doorway, hands on hips and resplendent with huge curly moustache. He spoke in a broad French accent but although his dad, Gaston Senior, was definitely French, no one was sure about Junior, because his accent slipped into broad cockney every now and then. Gaston Junior, who was born in an upstairs room shortly after his father took over the pub in 1914, was a master of diplomacy when it came to ejecting troublesome customers: ‘I’m afraid one of us is going to have to leave, and it’s not going to be me’ was his signature line when such action needed to be taken.

  Yeah, the new Bond movie. Why not? I had nothing else to do. I headed on down Berwick Street market towards the picture house in Piccadilly. The market was still in full swing, the stallholders calling out and advertising their wares, fruit and veg mainly. There was one fella shouting: ‘Pommygrannies! Get yer pommygrannies!’ He was holding up what looked like a big cricket ball, really red and shiny. I was intrigued. He had one split in half on the front of his barrow, and it looked like it was full of small red jewels. I bought one, it was rock hard, I put it in my pocket and headed for the cinema.

  On the way I stopped for a piss in the public toilets. The white-tiled walls were sprayed with what looked like black ink, which I would only later discover was, in fact, dried blood squirted from the syringes of junkies, so as not to put air bubbles in their veins.

  I tipped up at the box office and bought a half-priced kid’s ticket. I found a seat on the left of the cinema, on the smoking side. It always struck me as odd that cinemas were divided into the two sides, smoking and non-smoking, as the cigarette smoke didn’t know which side it was supposed to be on and just happily drifted about all over the place.

  The lights went down, the curtains drew back, and the screen flickered into life. Bill’s voice boomed, ‘Kia-Ora, in the foyer. Now.’ A giant plastic carton of the orange stuff floated magically in the middle of the blue screen, with a really skinny straw sticking out of its tinfoil lid. I got out my pommygrannie and tried to get a nail through the skin. It was like leather. I was digging in with my thumb so hard it shot out of my hand and disappeared under the seat in front of me. Shit, it had gone down the pitched floor. Bollocks, but I certainly wasn’t about to start crawling about on my hands and knees in a dark cinema in Piccadilly Circus.

  The film was good, with all the usual gear, birds getting slapped then snogged, car chases and explosions. I was really getting into it when I felt the usherette’s torch flashing in my face. ‘You paid half price,’ she hissed. ‘Kid’s ticket. You can be a kid, but you can’t be a kid and smoke. Out!’

  Outside, back in Piccadilly, it was dark and raining with feet shattering neon reflections and taxi wheels spraying diesel rainbows. There was a huge flock of starlings, swooping and swirling as one, like a black cloud across the purple sky. I pulled up my collar and headed up Shaftesbury Avenue. I wasn’t mad on the West End at night, the pavements thronging with out-of-towners, all starry-eyed and wondrous. Made you wonder if they’d ever seen shops or electric light before, the way they just stood about pointing at things, filling the pavements, taking photos of nothing.

  On the way back from the pictures, as I strolled up the avenue beyond the brightly illuminated theatres, to where the streets reverted to their natural dull sodium, I came to a long line of bedraggled hippies. All shivering, skinny, greasy hair, pulling their army great-coats tight with long nicotine-stained fingers. John Bell & Croyden, the chemists, was involved in an initiative to hand out free heroin to registered addicts.

  One of whom, it would turn out, was my dad.

  THE WALES

  I remember walking for the first time

  Into an open field,

  South-west Wales in 1968,

  I’d never seen anything so huge,

  I walked, and I walked and I walked,

  Toward the curved green horizon,

  And the sky.

  I sat down by the track,

  I never felt so sure,

  I lay down on my back,

  Felt like nature pure,

  The grass beneath my back,

  The sky has never been so blue.

  The sunshine and the haystacks,

  Wide tall ochre sails,

  Rows of potato picking,

  A ploughed field in south-west Wales,

  Swimming in the river through the trees,

  Climbing saplings in the woods,

  The bungalow my uncle built,

  The weather’s ever-cha
nging moods,

  The quarrels and the cloud formations,

  In south-west Wales,

  The hymns and the sailing boats,

  Wide tall ochre sails.

  Every summer I’d go to my aunt’s in Wales for the holidays, and this one was no different. As usual, me and Mum got the train from Paddington. It was a long journey but I liked the train as I could read comics whilst eating crisps from that funny little trolley that came up and down. Eating crisps and just staring out the window, it was hard to believe there was so much countryside, miles and miles of the stuff, green fields with tiny stations that seem to be in the middle of nowhere. Who lives in these places, and what do they do? I wondered.

  We changed at Cardiff Central for the second leg, which was about as long as the first. A rickety old train on a windy track which ran right down to the furthest corner of south-west Wales, stopping about a million times at stations with unpronounceable names. My aunt was there to meet us in a school minibus. She was a pillar of the local community and she taught tennis and shared the rota of driving the school bus all around the countryside, picking up and dropping off kids for school.

  When we got to the house my three cousins were waiting and waving. I’d spent most of my holidays with them. Hector, Sarah and Jane were like brothers and sisters to me. My uncle had had a house constructed by local builders. A bungalow. It was smart and white and had a huge panoramic window with a clear view down across the fields to the river. The family joke was that the plans were the wrong way round, as the front door was at the back of the house.

  Mike was a jolly man, always telling jokes and drawing cartoons. He had a good job at the oil refinery in Milford Haven. I dropped off my things and we went straight outside to mess about. When I first came to Wales the enormity of the place was a bit of a shock, the field in front of the house seemed to go on for ever and stuff was growing everywhere. No buildings, just nature, sprouting up untamed in all directions. I felt that if I went too far from the house I’d never find my way back, I’d just be wandering in the countryside for ever. No one to ask for directions and no distinguishable landmarks. ‘Oh yeah, I must remember, turn left at that tree, on past that enormous field and just right at the sheep.’

  The back garden was like a jungle, the grass at head height, it needed a combine harvester to mow it. There were four trees, one in each corner, and we had one each. We’d spend hours just sitting in the highest branches of our own trees shouting rubbish at each other. All day, every day, was spent outdoors, come rain or shine. And south-west Wales had more than its fair share of rain.

  Mum stayed the night but headed back to London in the morning, and my holidays commenced. The sun was shining and we trooped off down the lane to the river. On the way was a strawberry farm, with long rows of plastic sheeting covering the irresistible prize. It was a dangerous business as you had to crawl in to get them and once inside you couldn’t see out, but you could be seen within. You had to crawl on your hands and knees, so inevitably some red juice would end up on your clothes. If you were caught it was impossible to deny the crime and there would be merry hell to pay back at my aunt’s. Sarah kept dog as Hector and I ran the gauntlet. We squashed as much of the juicy treasure as we could in our mouths and backed out with a few for Sarah and Jane.

  Running beside the river was a huge newly planted pine forest. We headed in but it was dark and spooky, dense with bracken and brambles. It was almost impossible to walk through, but climbing to the top of one of the twenty-foot saplings, you could then make it bend over enough to be able to leap on to the next one, and so on and so on. It was like climbing across the roof of the sky with the river below, surrounded by hills.

  At the top of the nearest hill was the Thomas’s farm, and there were five or six brothers and sisters, a ready-made gang. Me and my cousins, and a few others from the lane, formed our own gang and called it The Black Panthers. It was something I’d heard off the telly. We’d have wars in the woods with bows and arrows. Then we’d go swimming and skimming stones in the river. I had my first kiss with a girl called Vanessa under an upturned boat down there.

  The summer flew past. Jane and Sarah made me get married to Mary Rowland from down the lane, in the back garden. She wore a tea towel on her head and I sported a bow tie made from a dock leaf. My aunt led the proceedings and we celebrated with lemonade out of wine glasses.

  We made dens, dammed streams, scrumped apples till we got stomach ache. We went on walks for hours to far-flung farms across the fields. The Scale’s farm where we’d make tunnels in the warm haystacks, shoot rats in the grain store with air rifles and go on torch-lit processions in the woods. All that Van Morrison stuff. We’d skip round in circles staring at the blue sky.

  There were animals everywhere, dogs, horses, cows, sheep. I got to recognise birds and trees and plants. I rode my first horse on the Scale’s farm. It jumped the gate and I promptly fell off onto a pocket of conkers. There was food and fresh milk aplenty. The kitchen door was always wide open, even in the winter, and the log-fired stove permanently glowed.

  I had a pet fly who followed me round. His name was Jim and he’d always find me at some point during the day. It never occurred to me that it might have been a different one. I spent afternoons lying in the middle of a field amongst the dried cowpats, staring up at the vast blue sky, where I could literally feel planet Earth beneath me, roaring through space at (I then discovered) about 66,000 miles an hour. I’d close my eyes for as long as I could and open them in the hope of seeing some inquisitive cows staring down at me with their giant eyes, which I often would, chewing and licking their nostrils with them big pink tongues.

  At harvest time everyone came up from the village to the giant field in front of the house to help move the bales of hay. They were heavy and the string cut into your hands. They would all be carried bit by bit into the middle of the field and arranged into a giant stack so the farmer could get them onto his lorry in one go, and transport them to a dry barn. At the end of a long day everybody sat about on bales happily exhausted, passing round bottles of cider.

  It was a couple of days before the farmer came for his hay, in which time we’d castellated the top of the twelve-foot stack and, via a ladder, loaded it up with wheat stumps. What the combine left made perfect ammo – a four-inch stump which, when pulled out of the ground, came with a big clod of earth. Nature’s hand-grenades.

  The war with the Thomases went on all day. Kings of the castle and the dirty rascals went home every night, covered in scratches and bruises and happy as Larry. There was a jam sandwich and a Tupperware beaker of squash when we came in starving, until tea was ready at about half six. In the evening we’d sit round in the living room while Uncle Mike told jokes, drew cartoons and made up exaggerated stories about his exploits in the war.

  I remember one night he was telling us about, and drawing diagrams, of himself flying a biplane that was being chased by the Germans. They were catching up. He looped the loop and while flying upside down back over the German plane, he dropped a spanner on the pilot’s head. Aunt Diana told him to stop talking rubbish.

  The summer was drawing to its inevitable close and the city beckoned. Uncle Mike suggested we should take a walk in the woods.

  ‘How d’you like it here?’ It seemed like an odd question.

  ‘It’s great, Uncle. You know I love it.’ I thought he was gonna tell me off for playing in the building site up the road. We’d been told not to, and I had been in trouble already for it.

  ‘D’you fancy staying on for a bit longer?’ Now I was totally confused. ‘Staying with us for a few months. A few months while your mum gets some proper accommodation sorted.’ The penny dropped. Mum had said something about staying longer, but I wasn’t sure. We had moved probably eight times in my life already that I could remember.

  ‘Mum’s not coming back?’

  ‘No, she is, but not just yet.’ He threw the stick he’d been tapping the ground with into the undergrowth
.

  So it came to pass that I was nine years old and heading for my first day at the local primary, Houghton VC, I think there were about a hundred kids in the whole school. As my aunt drove the bus up and down windy lanes picking up kids, I knew most of them from the summer days running about in the fields. The school was so small that my class had eight- to eleven-year-olds mixed. They were mostly farmers’ kids, as the whole area was agricultural. The headmaster was Mr Pound, and he was strict. He had an unerring talent for being able to hit you in the earhole with a piece of chalk from twenty paces if concentration was deemed lacking.

  ‘McPherson, McPherson, McPHERSON!’ Whack! Chalk in the earhole. The kids there were great, and although it was strict the school was filled with a real sense of inspiration. I was thriving, doing well both academically and at sports. The fresh country air was infusing my brain and body. The farmers’ kids were fit as fleas, and days running around and climbing trees had had an impact on my puny city body. On sports day I would sometimes win things, competing with my mate James Scale, admittedly not so difficult to win things when there are only five kids in your age category.

  But I was entered for the all Wales county trials in Swansea. It was serious, and held in a proper sports field with an enormous red-ash-covered running track. I had only ever run in the field behind the school before. The first event was the two hundred yards. I was given a pair of running shoes with spikes. Bang, the starting pistol went off and it felt like I was running backwards as the rest of the field shot off in front of me. It was like one of them nightmares where you feel like you’re running in treacle. It set the tone for the whole day and I was last in pretty much everything.

  But I did pass my eleven-plus. They’d phased it out in England but forgot to tell the Welsh. Diana said she’d get me a Polaroid camera if I passed, but it was a bitter-sweet experience. I discovered half of my mates would now be going to a different school, the secondary modern at the bottom of the hill, while the rest of us would be going to the grammar school at the top, to learn about grammar. Secondary modern, modern but secondary. I couldn’t work it out, but it split brothers and friends and the last day of term was sad. But soon I settled in and was doing well at the grammar school. Halfway through the first term my Aunt Diana told me I was going back to London, Mum had found somewhere for us to live.