That Close

by Suggs

  I’d just about managed to get the slippery bastard in the air, with my knee under it, when Uncle Clapper decided to hurry things along. With Mr P gesticulating wildly behind his back, saying, ‘Something very special indeed!’, Uncle Clapper grabbed me, and the thing shot out of our collective arms and out the back of the truck. Much to the amusement of everyone, it bounced off down the hill towards Farringdon Road.

  ‘Well, don’t just stand there, get after it!’ Mr P stood, hands on hips, as we scrambled over the back and chased after our slippery escapee. ‘That’s a small fortune there!’

  Fortunately there was no oncoming traffic as the twenty-odd-kilo lump of cheese bounced down the tarmac, hitting a lamp post and exploding into Farringdon Road. The rest of the afternoon didn’t go a whole lot better; in fact the only big one we got was a big eff off from the owner of a local trattoria. Even the deli wouldn’t take one – a dry one would be hard enough to shift, never mind wet ones. A lump of cheese that size, eating a shaving at a time, would take a lifetime to get through.

  At about half four we gave up and drove the cheeses back to the newsagent’s and rolled them down into the cellar. Mr P thought if they dried off he might have a better chance of shifting them. I can only presume they’re still there. If you are in a tobacconist’s in Clerkenwell and amongst the aroma of old shag you get a faint whiff of cheese, you’ll know why.

  SULTAN, THE FLYING DEAD PIGEON

  I went to the Jewish deli in Leather Lane, bought some liver sausage, matzos and a small jar of gherkins, and headed back to the flat. I was met by a thick fug of tobacco smoke as I went in. Mum was sitting up in bed smoking a fag and Chalky’s dad, Peter, was sitting in the chair chugging away on his Boar’s Head roll-up. I think they were having a scene. In fact I knew they were.

  Peter must have lived somewhere with an open fire once, cos whenever he’d finished a fag he’d flick the butt into our electric fire, where it would just bounce off and fall into the hearth. The six brown tiles were completely covered in dog-ends and matchsticks.

  Peter was a site foreman, bright, and a communist who earned good money. He liked to redistribute his wealth amongst the bookies, women and booze. The rest, as they say, he just frittered away. I liked him – he took me to Chelsea for the first time and taught me to play chess.

  I ate my tea in my bedroom and gave Sultan, who was perched on the end of my bed, some of my crackers. His flying was definitely improving. He could get halfway up the wall now before giving up and frantically scratching back down the wallpaper into a forlorn heap on the floor. After a while Mum put her head round the door.

  ‘D’you fancy going out for a drink?’

  ‘What? Out out?’

  ‘No, not out out. Just for a drink.’

  I carefully put Sultan back in his box and put it back on top of the cupboard. They were heading up the Merlin’s Cave, a pub off Pentonville Road, to see George Melly and The Feet Warmers. George was an infamous Soho character who played the Merlin most Sunday afternoons, singing his lewd trad jazz business. I wasn’t mad on the music, but it had a certain joie di vivre, and he was funny.

  Opposite the pub was the Merlin Street Baths, a proper old wash house where women did their laundry by hand and squeezed sheets and pillowcases through giant wooden rollers. For a shilling you could have a bath. Yes, a proper bath. A whole fifteen minutes on your own, to luxuriate in three or four inches of hot water with a bar of carbolic soap in one of the twenty or so cubicles, serenaded by happy people singing and whistling to the left and right. The tap was turned on and off with a spanner so you couldn’t have any more than the 6 inches of hot water provided. A sharp rap on the door would break the reverie and tell you your time was up.

  When we got to the pub, it was packed with all sorts of Soho crazies. George was kicking up a storm in a bright pink floral zoot suit and yellow fedora, Humphrey Lyttelton and John Chilton’s Feet Warmers all parp-parping and stamping their feet. Ironically they weren’t so flexible with the under-age drinking in the Merlin. I think they had quite enough to deal with, what with the goings-on inside. A disparate gang of kids would gather outside eating crisps and drinking pop. Some of them were all right but I was very pleased to see Chalky turn up.

  ‘Seen my old man?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s inside with Mum.’

  Peter brought us out a couple of light ales and we chatted about Mr P. I popped my head round the door and Mum and Peter were right into it, down the front waving their drinks in the air, singing and dancing. We decided to head off; we played street golf with two sticks and a stone all the way back. Chalky won, he always did.

  We stopped at the mini-market to get some fags, and other things. Chalky had his old man’s magic leather coat on. The pockets had gone, and his hands would appear to be inside the coat when they weren’t. He came out with priceless riches – a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie, a packet of Smash, a tin of baked beans and a packet of digestive biscuits. The big one, indeed.

  Having finished our gourmet supper we were luxuriating in an Embassy Regal like a couple of swells, when I heard a bang from my bedroom. I went in to find Sultan’s box on the floor – it had fallen off the top of the cupboard. I opened the box. Shit, he wasn’t moving, I picked him up. He was dead.

  I was sad, properly sad. I liked that bird and I’d really bonded with the scraggy little thing. I thought I could bring him back to full strength and release him back into the wild. Like you see in them David Attenborough programmes, you know, that moment of truth after months of nurturing when the bird is released back into the wild and everyone’s looking on nervously through binoculars. Would it adapt again once in the wild, albeit an urban wild in poor old Sultan’s case? Still, the city is the wild for these ratty pigeons. You never see the skinny ones with deformed feet in the country. They’re all chubby and shiny. Some people pay good money to eat them. You wouldn’t want to eat Sultan. He’s bony and cold in my hands. And them wood pigeons make that horrible, depressing, whooo whooo noise, over and over, like a broken record. Sultan never made a squeak. His plumed head lolled over my hand.

  *

  Moping about and feeling sad wasn’t going to change anything and it wasn’t long before I got over it, and made new plans for Sultan. Next thing Chalky and I were tying Sultan to a wire coat hanger with some fishing line. I carefully wound the line round his neck, his head fitted perfectly to the neck of the hanger and then the tips of his wings to the ends. He spread out beautifully, exactly the same size as the coat hanger. Brilliant – he really looked the part of a bird in full flight.

  The obvious next step was to tie some wire to the hook of the hanger and lower him out of the window. Never mind woo-woo. This was whoo hoo! I started swinging him gently to and fro as he went down towards the pavement. He was turning slightly, but otherwise, in the fading light, he looked like a proper flying pigeon. A kamikaze flying pigeon!

  I started swinging him harder and harder, higher and higher. It was great, and by the time he reached ground level he was coming down really fast. It was getting dark and the pedestrians couldn’t work out what was going on – we clocked some geezer and knocked his hat off in a puff of feathers. Go, Sultan, go! The rest were all ducking and diving out of the way as he swooped down, again and again. Alfred Hitchcock eat your heart out.

  The thing was flying better than it had when it was alive. Sadly, on about his fifteenth mission Sultan became detached from the hanger and went flying off down Farringdon Road in a cloud of feathers to join the exploded Parmesan.

  IN CAMDEN TOWN

  Mum had managed to get us rehoused from Cavendish Mansions into the 21st-century delights of a new council flat above Maples, the carpet shop on the corner of Tottenham Court Road. A brand-spanking-new flat, it had two bedrooms, a bathroom, a fridge, everything, it was like a palace.

  It was a lovely flat in the most amazing location. A ten-minute walk to the left and you were in Soho; ten minutes the other way and you were in the heart of Ca
mden Town. And a very different place that was too, in them far-off days. Impossible to imagine quite what it has become, if you were one of the hippy overspill from psychedelic all-dayers at the Roundhouse who, in the sixties, first pitched their stalls in the old stables, selling patchouli oil and joss-sticks.

  And it was in fact outside this flat that I first heard tell of the band. I bumped into Chas Cathal, a sharp dresser and a cool geezer, who I’d seen around and about in Hampstead. He was wearing a Prince of Wales suit and he had short hair which, in a sea of Kevin Keegan lookalikes with big flares and even bigger hair, was hard to miss. While we were talking he told me he was playing bass in a band with Mike, Lee and Chris called The Invaders, and that they were doing covers of Kilburn & the High Roads, some old reggae and Motown. It sounded great and I was intrigued. Little did I know that one day I would also be involved.

  Crossing Euston Road and heading in the direction of Camden, the first thing you would encounter was, and still is, the wild wind whistling round the Euston Tower, the crosswind down Euston Road, where you still occasionally see old people literally being lifted off their feet. Euston Tower was, amongst other great and modern new things, the HQ of the sexy new independent radio station, Capital Radio. I was wary of walking past it, as one afternoon on my way to nowhere in particular I was chased by a load of scary, screaming teenage girls. The Bay City Rollers were making an appearance at the station unbeknownst to me, and dressed as I was, in my half-mast white trousers, DMs and blue and white scarf stuck in my belt-loop, I was mistaken by the hordes for one of the lads.

  ‘B, A, Y. B, A, Y. B, A, Y. C, I, T, Y. With an R, O, double L, E, R, S. Bay City Rollers are the best!’ is indelibly printed in my mind.

  The next port of call, Camden-bound, was Laurence Corner. I don’t know who Laurence was but his shop was on the corner of Drummond Street and sold army-surplus gear, the very place I bought my white bags, in fact. They had everything in there, and should really have a blue plaque as the costumier of most of the teenage fashion of the time, from the hippy/Goth greatcoats, boot-boy army trousers and donkey jackets through to the boiler suits and white naval dinner jackets favoured by the punks.

  Drummond Street was also where for some reason a lot of southern Indians from Tamil and that part of the world, had gathered and opened restaurants, serving the most extraordinary vegetarian food at the most reasonable price. And sweets. Ambala, wow, what amazing things. In fact I got a job, via a friend of my mum’s, who lived above one of the restaurants in Drummond Street, to paint the ceiling of the Ambala sweet factory in Whitechapel. The two of us perched on wooden scaffolding sixty feet up, painting the ceiling of a disused clothes factory. Paint running down our aching arms, the enormous copper pots bubbling below. Evaporating milk awaiting pistachio, coconut and caramel. Ambala have over three hundred outlets now.

  On your left as you carry on down Hampstead Road towards Camden is the Regent’s Park Estate, a huge great sprawling sixties affair. All the tower blocks are named after places in the Lake District – Windermere, The Tarns, Rydal Water etc. God knows why; a cruel joke by the architect I can only presume. A lot of my mates from school lived on the estate. We’d often set off for school there across Regent’s Park. Backs to the wind, trying in vain to light fags with Swan Vesta matches.

  There was a youth club in the middle of the estate, the Cumberland, where many happy evenings were spent playing five-a-side football and giving the Old Bill the runaround. One time when we were all hanging about outside giving the local PC some gyp he grabbed my arm and pressed a front-door key in my hand. ‘There, I’ve got your prints now.’ He was gonna try and fit me up for a flat that had been broken into. Fortunately nothing came of it. I think he was probably just getting a small bit of revenge for all the stick he took.

  Down the road past the old Craven ‘A’ cigarette factory is Mornington Crescent. ‘They made me a present of Mornington Crescent, they threw it a brick at a time.’ The Camden Palace is one of only three surviving variety theatres outside the West End. We played there when it was called the Music Machine and it is the very place where we first decided to call ourselves Madness. It’s now called Koko’s. I first went there as a young man with Thommo, our sax player. I can’t remember what band we were going to see, but I remember the entrance fee was 50p and Thommo, being a man of great ingenuity where saving 50p was concerned, showed me to a more financially agreeable entrance. Via a fire escape at the back of the building.

  Once on the roof of the theatre it was just a small matter of jumping through a small hole in the green copper dome that adorned the building. The only problem was that it was pitch-black and impossible to judge the depth. Thommo was quietly confident, as he’d done it before. I dropped a couple of matches down, but could see sweet FA. ‘Come on!’ he exhorted, starting to worry we’d get caught, and in I went. We reappeared on the VIP balcony, trying to look casual while covered in smuts and pigeon shit. I saw a lot of great punk bands during that period there, The Stranglers, The Adverts, 999 and The Damned, pogo-tastic times.

  Just past Camden Palace was Alfred Kemp’s imperious second-hand clothes shop, a veritable Aladdin’s cave of sartorial treasures. It was a double-fronted emporium with the proud words ‘We Fit Anyone’ above the door. Up the high street to the Tube station and you’re in the very heart of the place. Camden Town started like most of Greater London as a small village on the outskirts of the City proper. It’s described in Pickwick Papers as a desolate place surrounded by fields and ditches. In fact Dickens lived there for a bit, in Bayham Street, and obviously loved the place, describing it: ‘as shabby, dingy, damp and mean a neighbourhood as one would desire not to see’.

  The nineteenth-century Regent’s Canal, and then the railway extinguished the village as it was, and made it what you see today. Thousands of migrant workmen had flooded into the area, mostly Irish, to dig the Regent’s Canal which would run east to west across London.

  The Camden Town I first encountered still had a big Irish community. Pretty much all the pubs were Irish, mostly big old boozers with function rooms out the back and lock-ins. The other half of Camden, going back down to Mornington Crescent, was predominantly Greek Cypriot. Good cheap Guinness and good cheap Greek food. Camden was the perfect breeding ground for an impoverished young chap like me.

  Having said that, I don’t remember seeing a girl in Camden till 1979. I don’t think they’d been invented. But the amount of pubs that could put on live music in their converted function rooms and cellars meant it was almost inevitable that Camden would become a hotbed of live music when punk burst onto the scene.

  The Carnarvon, the Dublin, the Tally Ho, the Falcon, the Bull and Gate, and Dingwalls. Pubs that would give you a chance and cared nothing about what racket emanated, so long as there was a modicum of racket coming from the till.

  There were a couple of great record shops, Rock On and Honest Jon’s, where many happy afternoons were spent flicking through LPs in the pursuit of something special and rare. Sid’s the barber’s, full of a right bunch of old characters. Tilley’s, a restaurant run by George Tilley, whose mum made the most amazing pies.

  And Holts the shoe shop. It specialised in all things Dr. Martens and did a nifty line in brothel creepers. Alan Roumana, the owner, had been the drummer in a swing band. He drove an enormous Ford Zephyr and kept his drum kit in the boot, out of habit, just in case the phone went and he was needed at a gig. He was a kind man who, if he knew you were short, would give you a discount or let you have a pair of boots on tick. In fact he told us that a struggling young artist called Elvis Costello had a pair of creepers on the never-never, and never-never went back to pay for them.

  He was a funny man, and loved young people, so the shop was always full of teenagers. We’d often while away an afternoon in there listening to tales of the swing era. Holts became a mecca for alternative types from around the world, and I really think had a huge part to play in the incredible explosion of Camden market. It’s
still there, as the British Boot Company, serving each new generation of Airwair devotees.

  I had seen a suit I really fancied in Alfred Kemp’s shop window. Most menswear shops in the High Street had strange window displays, often involving wheelbarrows and cartwheels draped in fabric. But Alfred’s was straight to the point. Suits, shirts, coats and jackets hung one above the other on rails all along the windows of its double-fronted exterior. And there, bang in the middle, was what had caught my eye – an aquamarine tonic suit sparkling in the sun like a glass of champagne.

  With a week’s wages from the butcher’s in my pocket, a princely eleven quid, I went inside, the first thing you noticed was the smell, or lack of it. Instead of that noxious mix of sweat and urine (and dare I say it death) that accompanied most second-hand shops, Alfred’s was all Windolene and floor polish. The place was light and airy and the clothes were arranged in size and colour. Suits and shirts on one side of the shop, coats and shoes on the other. The whole place was run more like a Savile Row tailor’s than a second-hand shop in Camden Town.

  The staff wore white shirts, tape measures round their necks and eyes in the back of their heads. You could nick stuff from Oxfam, but not here. You’d never get out of the place alive. Surveying the whole scene from the cash desk by the door was the all-seeing Mr Kemp himself. He could judge the value of a pile of clothes just by looking at them, and tell your measurements correctly at fifty paces. He could also detect the slightest thought of thievery before it had properly formulated in your head. They said every trader in Camden would be roused if you tried to nick one of his suits, but I never saw anyone try.

  The clothes were beautifully cleaned and presented, and it was a treasure trove – proper tailored gear from the fifties and sixties, from velvet-collared coats to spats, and a fine collection of suits. But it wasn’t cheap.