by Suggs
‘What, not the cricket as well, sir?’
He stared into space and sighed. ‘You know exactly what I’m talking about, the fight with St George’s, and I’m telling you it’s not going to happen.’
‘What, have you lost the balls, sir?’
‘Macreanor, just shut up, I’m saying this for your benefit. It’s got out of hand. Mr Phillips has informed the police. Arrests will be made.’ We all knew, including him, that was bollocks, because we were all minors.
‘So if I get the slightest whisper, d’you hear me, the slightest whiff that any of my year have been involved in this stupidity, I shan’t hesitate in handing you in. D’you hear me, boys?’
‘Yes, sir, the slightest whiff.’ Terry started laughing. The deputy had drifted away to perform his now-rehearsed piece in the pub. ‘Here, sir, sir! I think McPherson’s just whiffed.’ The deputy plodded off towards the school gates without looking back.
Terry scooped up his winnings, a princely 12p, and we drifted across the playground towards the loitering station. Four mopeds buzzed past like wasps, Suzuki 125s. ‘The cavalry’s here.’ Two minutes later they buzzed back again, parping their insect horns.
‘Get bzzz into schzzzchool! Wheeeee!’ Mr Phillips had the loudhailer on overload, and was starting to sound like Jimi Hendrix with his face all purple haze as he hung out of the top-floor window. The mopeds were already leading a phalanx of the more dedicated school traditionalists at walking pace down the road towards St George’s. The odd cider bottle flew through the air and smashed on the pavement like an impotent Molotov cocktail.
Steve New, wild-eyed, stood on the wall with his long blond hair blowing in the breeze. He was playing ‘Children of the Revolution’ on an acoustic guitar. He was really good. Last time I’d seen him play that song was at assembly one morning. Steve came in with his guitar, and a nun. She proceeded to strip in front of the whole school, while he gave it some Marc Bolan. She liked an audience too. She was a stripper he’d met in Soho. It didn’t half liven up a dull assembly. I reminded him of this some years later. He looked blank. ‘Did I?’ he said. ‘How on earth did you remember that!?!?’ He led a colourful life, did our Steve.
He wasn’t interested in the fighting, he just turned up cos he knew there’d be an audience. And what an audience – there were about two hundred of us by now, all cheering and jumping up and down.
Steve stamped his foot and serenaded skyward, as the rebels without a brain flooded out of the gates and trooped off behind the mopeds, down Carlton Vale in the direction of St George’s. Mr Phillips was chocks away, throwing himself in through the sliding door of the minibus. ‘Get down off the wall. Now!’ Hanging out of the side he put the magic hailer to his lips. ‘Go … bzzz … squeak … gzzzz!’ The deputy promptly kangaroo-leaped the bus into the school gates.
St George’s was only five minutes down the road, and we were being escorted by a patrol car, but by the time we got there it was already like a medieval siege. There were volleys of bricks and bottles as the first wave of infantrymen scaled their school wall. I launched myself at it, clambered up, and sat on the top, surveying the scene and calculating whether I could get back up again if I jumped down. But my presence wasn’t required in the affray. On the other side the St George’s lines were already broken and scattered. The rout was completed in a matter of minutes. St George’s was a mixed school and one or two of our foot-soldiers, bored with fighting, were chatting up the girls. By the time the second panda car arrived everyone was drifting off.
Right next to ours was an even posher school, the American School. Wow, well that was another world. Tales were told from some who reckoned they’d sneaked in there, that they had Coca-Cola machines, a disco and a cinema. And they had girls, pretty girls with long blonde hair and fresh, healthy faces. I don’t ever remember talking to anyone from that school in all my time at Quintin’s, even though we passed it pretty much every day. It really was another world, all confident young people, smiling and chatting, and doing normal things. Talking – to each other. It was like watching a different and superior race. They took their lunch break up the posher end of St John’s Wood in restaurants and that.
Strangely, we never attacked their school. This might have had something to do with the three burly, CIA-looking fellas, with their earpieces and Ray-Bans, who permanently stood guarding the school gates. Legend also had it that the huge smoked-glass window above their entrance was bulletproof. After school one night, someone got half a brick to test the theory, and guess what? It fuckin’ wasn’t.
There were some great teachers at Quintin’s and my form teacher, Mr Thomas, was one of them. He was Welsh and took me under his wing, but the battleground was pretty much the same every day. Given a strong desire to catch up socially and fit in, it wasn’t long before things went rapidly downhill.
My Welsh academic successes were wilting at an alarming rate. I had an aptitude for English, and art, but was constantly distracted by the urge to be a clever dick. I was bright but was becoming increasingly uninterested and, let’s be honest, falling behind. Ultimately and inevitably, I became disruptive.
Here’s a school report from my third year:
Can’t wait to show that to my mum! The funny thing was the report book I found these in only had four reports in it. I used to tear out the bad ones.
But I also found this maths report, which was a surprise:
‘Works quite well in class.’ What? I was useless at maths. But then I remembered that I was so disruptive that the maths teacher told me he’d sign me in if I promised never to turn up at all. And I didn’t. There was so much to be getting on with out on the streets for me and the other four-thirds of the maths class.
Up to this point, writing on walls at school had amounted to not much more than scribbling ‘Mr Pringle is gay’, ‘Man Utd are shit’, and ‘I like cock’ (then, obviously, writing your mate’s name and phone number underneath). But a book from New York appeared on the scene, Subway Art, which was full of dramatic photos of huge multicoloured three-dimensional nicknames or tags, which kids were spraying on the subway trains of New York. It looked incredible and I was keen to get started right away. But my name, Graham McPherson, wasn’t quite right, and it wasn’t a great idea to deface private property with your own name. However the only nicknames I’d managed to get from my highly imaginative classmates so far were Grey and Mac.
And Flea-Bitten-Jock-Welsh-Bastard was going to use up far too much spray paint.
I needed to find my own nickname, my own tag, but how? Time was of the essence as this exotic street art was starting to appear all over North London and legends were being born. Mr B, who had done a huge train coming out of a corrugated-iron fence in Hampstead, Kix, Dare-devil, Sha-na-na. Multicoloured wonders on the walls, bus shelters and train stations were sprouting up all over North London.
But where to start in my quest for a distinctive tag? We didn’t have a lot in the flat, but Mum always had books and she was always giving me things to read, like Anthony Burgess and Graham Greene, and reading books like these really was my saving grace, as my school education drained rapidly down the plughole.
I was sitting in the flat one evening when I noticed on the bookshelf a fat tome called The Encyclopedia of Jazz Musicians. I don’t know why but I got it down and opened it, and in the index I saw all sorts of weird and wonderful names like Satchmo, Jelly Roll Morton, Bird, Thelonious Monk. Hang on, I thought, this could be it – a positive treasure trove of diverting nicknames. But which one to go for? Given the mind-boggling choice, I decided I would leave it to fate. I would pick one at random, and it somehow felt more real, that I would feel more ownership of this borrowed tag, if the gods had a hand in it.
I would give it one go and that would be it. Russian roulette. No matter what happened I would stick to my side of the bargain and forever more be known as … ?
I opened a page at random and held a pin aloft. Now what nom de plume did fate have in store for m
e? No more Jock, no more Haggis. I closed my eyes and thrust the pin downwards. I opened them to discover the pin stuck in the middle of the letter ‘e’, of the word ‘Peter’. Peter. Pete … Well, that’s no good! What sort of kudos was I gonna garner from my contemporaries by spraying ‘Peter’ on the wall? None.
Bollocks. So much for my deal with fate. I was just about to close the book and start all over, when I noticed his second name … Suggs. Peter Suggs, a jazz drummer from Kentucky.
Suggs?!! Hang on, Suggs. It was weird, and not really the kind of New York street thing I’d imagined. But Suggs, yeah, well, that was the deal. It was certainly different, I was keen to try it out straight away. Having acquired some tins of spray paint from the car parts shop via Chalky’s old man’s coat, which had holes in both pockets, I got going that night on the wall of a disused factory off Theobald’s Road. It looked good, and there was something about the double Gs. I liked it. That was it – Suggs.
At school the next day I announced my new title to my mates and for the whole week made a point of not answering to anything but Suggs. After a while it caught on, and now I was Suggs. I was diligently spreading the good news on the private property of the good people of North London – their walls, their garage doors, their bus shelters and stations. I was really putting in the hours. The proclamations becoming more and more preposterous. ‘Suggs is our leader.’ ‘Suggs is everywhere!’ ‘Who is Suggs?’
Naughty boys in nasty schools,
Headmasters breaking all the rules,
Having fun and playing fools,
Smashing up the woodwork tools,
All the teachers in the pub,
Passing round the ready-rub,
Trying not to think of when
The lunchtime bell will ring again,
Oh what fun we had,
But did it really turn out bad,
All I learnt at school
Was how to bend not break the rules,
And oh what fun we had,
But at the time it seemed so bad,
Trying different ways
To make a difference to the days.
Headmaster’s had enough today,
All the kids have gone away,
Gone to fight with next-door’s school,
Every term that is the rule,
Sits alone and bends his cane,
Same old backsides again,
All the small ones tell tall tales,
Walking home and squashing snails,
Lots of girls, lots of boys,
Lots of smell and lots of noise,
Playing football in the park,
Kicking pushbikes in the dark,
Baggy trousers, dirty shirt,
Pulling hair and eating dirt,
Teacher come to break it up,
Back of the head with a plastic cup.
Oh what fun we had,
But did it really turn out bad,
All I learnt at school
Was how to bend not break the rules,
And oh what fun we had,
But at the time it seemed so bad,
Trying different ways
To make a difference to the days.
BUTCHER BOY
I looked at my watch. I was late. At the weekend and in the holidays, I worked in a butcher’s in Chapel Street market in Islington.
Mum was asleep. I climbed on a chair and put some bread and water in the cardboard box inhabited by the pigeon, who I’d christened Sultan due to the plume of feathers sticking out of the top of his head, turned and ran, slamming the front door behind me. I didn’t stop till I got to the bus stop halfway up the road.
I just managed to jump aboard a number 19 as it was pulling away. There were no seats, so I went upstairs. The air was clogged with fag smoke. All the windows were steamed up and shut. Panting, I flopped in an empty seat near the front.
I rolled the loose Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes around in my pocket and thought about lighting up myself, but decided I probably had about twenty fags’ worth of smoke in my lungs already. The top deck was full of the hungover, the living dead. Buses in the morning are always the most melancholy, but better than the Tube, where you had to sit facing the miserable bastards.
It was perfectly obvious to everyone at the butcher’s that I was not apprentice material. I got all the most menial tasks, the ones whose instruction barely needed communicating, apart from a boot up the arse. The day normally started with cleaning the congealed fat out of the metal trays in the back yard. There was only a cold tap, and the water was cold, really COLD.
It was so cold, it turned your hands blue instantly, and that’s how they stayed for the whole day. You could chop off one of your fingers, wrap it in a packet of sausages and not notice till you got home. And fat is impervious to cold water – that’s why ducks wear it.
Everything about butchery is cold. The display units, the walk-in fridge, the freezer cabinet, the meat … and the manager, Mr Althroppe. He hated me with a lust and took the fact I hadn’t left school to become a full-time apprentice as a personal insult to his trade. You could say I wasn’t one of his ‘boys’.
‘Ho ho, it’s yzal’, said Geoff, top apprentice (and definitely one of Mr A’s ‘boys’), in one of his many unamusing derivations of butcher’s slang. In this one you just said the words backwards, in another you put ‘thg’ after the first letter of every word, and in another the first letter at the end of the word. They were used, mistakenly, with the idea of insulting people without them noticing. Or maybe just to protect the butchery trade from avaricious greengrocers.
Geoff was an unpleasant character whose genetic line had done away with the vulnerability of a neck, or more like years of humping huge carcasses around had left his head flush on his shoulders. The butcher’s was his life.
‘Go stuff yourself,’ I hit back in plain Queen’s.
‘Oothgoo, gthget hthgim!’
‘Where the hell have you been?’ A red-faced Mr Althroppe burst out of the cold store, eyes bulging out of his frosted bottle-end glasses. ‘You know this is our busiest time. I wouldn’t bloody employ you if it wasn’t. Now get out the back and scrub them soddin’ trays!’
Mr Althroppe had a big red face even when he wasn’t angry – it was in the butchers’ constitution. I made as if to go out into the yard, but slipped right and up the stairs instead. On the second floor was the toilet and a rudimentary office where the tea and coffee were made. On a Formica shelf stood the company kettle and some grubby mugs. I made myself a coffee and tried to get a spoonful of sugar that didn’t include any mice droppings from the lidless Tupperware container. Under the window was an old wooden table covered in green dockets and a Bakelite phone and a clapped-out office chair. I sat in it, put my feet on the table and sparked up, imagining I was the boss of the firm. I picked up the phone and dialled Chalky’s number.
‘Hallo,’ came his dulcet tone, eventually. ‘What are you doin’?’
‘Nothin’. Did you get the ball back?’
‘No, the silly old sod wouldn’t come to the door. It’s knackered anyway.’
‘No it’s not. It could be fixed, it’s real leather.’
‘I’ll get the old bastard. What are you doin’?’
I blew a smoke ring in the direction of my feet. ‘I’m working, aren’t I.’
‘Not coming to football later?’
‘Nah, can’t. The tips get shared out today. I can’t afford not to be here.’
‘Well, we’re meeting at the King’s Head at one thirty. We’ve got to get over to Charlton, wherever that is.’
‘Nah, I can’t. Maybe see you after.’
I got straight back into wallowing in the luxuriousness of the first cigarette of the day. I gazed out of the office window and down onto the market. It was bustling to bursting point with Christmas shoppers. So many that the ebb and flow was almost at a standstill. Most of the stallholders were wearing them red nylon Father Christmas hats, bobbing up and down as they filled an
d whirled brown paper bags.
The market was mainly fruit and veg with the odd stall selling plastic buckets and mops, pet food or, at this time of year, Christmas decorations. All of them bedecked in tinsel, baubles and lights. In the dim early-morning light the whole market was twinkling and swaying like a gigantic Christmas tree that had just fallen over.
The nicotine was sliding in. Player’s Navy Cut tasted most foul but were so strong they gave you a brief high. Curling round your brain and down through your legs, inducing a kind of dizziness. I was almost drifting off when the door burst open. Wordlessly Mr Althroppe strode across the floor and pulled me to my feet by my collar, and projected me through the doors and down the stairs.
Taking my blue hands back inside it was all hands on deck. The shops were only closed for four days over Christmas but people were shopping as if a nuclear holocaust was imminent. The queue went out the door, past the window and down the street. My presence was required behind the counter. The pecking order was thus: Mr Althroppe fretted up and down behind the serving staff, tut-tutting and redoing the things he felt needed redoing. Absent-mindedly chatting to the regulars while checking their raffle tickets, finding their turkeys from out the back and, ‘not-minding-if-he-did’, having the odd shnoofter from the sherry bottle that had been set on the counter.
Next came Ted, who was very old and a master butcher, which meant he mooched about at the back doing the specialist cuts. Then Geoff, the top apprentice and top bore. He and Andy took turns to man the till while I fished about in the display cabinet, my dead fingers searching for chipolatas and chops, as well as the hamburgers, a new line from the States.
Hamburgers, like sausages, had to be constructed in the hours of darkness, and definitely not in front of the customers. I made them and they definitely didn’t require any specialist cuts, more like all the bits of a pig with hair on, the ears, the snout, the bollocks and the bum hole all went in the hand mincer.
