by Rod Stewart
And similarly the football club parties. My dad would go down in the basement and shore up the dining-room floor from below with scaffolding and planks, and everyone would pour in for dancing and singing. I would be put to bed, but I would sneak down and sit under that baby grand piano watching the feet and the kilted legs. My love of a sing-song was born right there. Sometimes a conga line would leave the dining room, head down the steps and set off up the road and back. It wasn’t hard to understand the exuberance of these adults, when you realised what they had so recently been through. They were dancing off the war.
Mary and Peggy, my sisters, would take me to watch speedway at Harringay, which was hugely popular then. And Mum and Dad sometimes treated me to a trip to the cinema – the Rex, in East Finchley, where the stalls took a big dip in the centre: the front rows were higher than the rows in the middle, and the back rows were higher still. Maybe it was war damage. One day, when I was eight, my mum said, ‘We’re going to see Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. This will be the funniest thing you’ve ever seen’ – a big build-up to give a film. But she was absolutely right. It was slapstick, but so subtle in the way it went about it. We sat there in the Rex’s battered stalls, and I had never laughed as hard as I laughed at Jacques Tati, haplessly creating havoc. Even today Ronnie Wood and I remain huge Tati fans.
Of course, the age gap between me and my siblings meant the family at home rapidly shrank on me. First Mary married Fred, a lorry driver for Wall’s, so that was my guardian angel gone from the house. And then Peggy married Jim, a wonderful cockney greengrocer who had fought in the war at Monte Cassino – an unforgettable experience for him. Many years later, when I had made some money, Jim was part of one of our big family trips on a private plane to watch Scotland play football. Our journey took us down over Italy. Jim sat there, rolling himself a cigarette, as he liked to, and as he looked reflectively out of the window at the ground below, he said, ‘I used to get paid fourteen bob a week to murder that lot.’
Life would be so cruel to Peggy. She was a wonderful tennis player, a real outdoors person, but she was struck down by multiple sclerosis and in a wheelchair in her mid thirties. Multiple sclerosis meant my mother, too, would need a wheelchair eventually. Unfair.
The next to leave Archway Road was Bob, who married Kim, and finally, when I was still only eleven, Don married and left home as well, at twenty-six. News of his imminent wedding to Pat reduced me to tears at his feet. I had cried just the same when he had left for national service – though mostly because I couldn’t envisage this place he was destined for, Aldershot, nor how anybody would get there, let alone come back. This latest betrayal, though, seemed final. How could he desert me like this? Don took me to the West End and talked me round to the idea as best he could, with lemonade.
Yet, in truth, even when my brothers and sisters moved out, they didn’t go far. They took apartments and houses a few doors away, or round the corner at the worst: that Stewart clan thing again. I would come to value this proximity a few years later, when an interest in my appearance properly gripped me and I needed to borrow Mary’s hairdryer or my sister-in-law Pat’s hairspray. Very handy.
‘Spoiled rotten’ tends to be the family shorthand for my childhood. I object to that, on the grounds that materially there wasn’t much around to spoil anyone with. ‘Somewhat indulged’ might be a better expression. At the same time, I acknowledge that Mary never came home from work on a Friday without bringing me a toy – some little car or soldier – from Woolworths. Was that being ‘spoiled rotten’? Possibly.
I also concede this: my mum used to make a rabbit stew, and before my arrival the rabbit’s heart – small, but considered a treat – was cut into four and shared between the children. Once I came along, the heart was given to me.
* * *
Dutiful but undistinguished at school, I failed the Eleven-Plus exam to nobody’s particular astonishment and was sent off in a grey flannel outfit and a black and white tie to William Grimshaw Secondary Modern – where, coincidentally, Ray and Dave Davies of The Kinks also went, at around the same time, although we only worked that out years later. I used to take the bus to North Finchley from outside the house, which was highly convenient. At the other end, though, there was a mile walk the length of Creighton Avenue, which was less agreeable. Still, I travelled light. Schoolboys seemed to then. These days, when my little lad Alastair goes off to school, he has bags and books and laptops and stuff. I seemed to go through my entire secondary school career armed with a solitary pencil. Less than that, actually: a solitary pencil stub, tucked into the top pocket of my blazer. It seemed to be all I needed.
I was diligent enough, and happy enough too, by and large. I was certainly worried about missing school, anxious about falling behind, so I was no big truant, and certainly no big troublemaker. Fights would always find me on the periphery, looking on – never involved. I made friends easily, but I wasn’t one of those kids at the centre of things in the playground, effortlessly attracting all the attention. And I definitely didn’t think of myself as a showman. I would only develop that kind of confidence in myself later, through being in bands. I showed some talent with a paintbrush – although it emerged in a routine test that I am colour-blind (I have some problems distinguishing browns, blues and purples). I got by in most things and did well in sport, becoming captain of the cricket team and captain of the football team. There was only one thing I really couldn’t be getting on with, and that was, bizarrely enough, given my later path, music with Mr Wainwright.
I had always known I was petrified of standing up in front of the class. In Mr Wainwright’s music room, I now discovered what I was even more petrified of: standing up in front of the class and singing. It wasn’t shyness so much as a fear of being singled out and made to look ridiculous. Maybe it was all in my head, but I swear he used to pick me deliberately because of that. He would haul me up to sing a few lines of a song, with him on the piano at the front, and I would quail and quiver and grope miserably for the notes and feel more uncomfortable than I had ever felt, anywhere, in any circumstance.
It was for this reason that I developed the Fake Sick trick.
For the Fake Sick trick you will need: one Shipham’s meat-paste pot, empty; a small quantity of mashed potato, scraped from the side of your school lunch plate; a small quantity of carrots, ditto; and some water. Instructions: while at the table in your school canteen, add the potato, carrots and water to the paste pot. Mix thoroughly, using a knife or any other available utensil. Withdraw with the pot to the school playground and, in a quiet and preferably unobserved moment, sling the resulting goo onto the tarmac. Thereafter, summon the on-duty teacher with a cry of ‘Sir, I’ve been sick’ (or similar), gesturing all the while to the splattered ground. Hey presto: you’re off music for the afternoon and on your way home. Or, in my case, to the pictures.
It’s probably fair to say, then, that the music bug hadn’t significantly bitten at this point in my life. Don had taken me to see Bill Haley and the Comets at the Gaumont State Cinema in Kilburn High Road in 1954. Don liked Bill Haley and could sing ‘Everybody Razzle Dazzle’ probably better than Haley could. (Don really was the singer in the family, as they like to remind me.) I remember being up on the balcony with him and looking down at this heaving mass of jiving, rioting Teddy boys in the stalls, and Haley and the band in their tartan jackets, prompting all this mayhem. The rhythm, the brightness of the clothes and the reactions of the crowd all affected me, and maybe a seed was sown. But it didn’t make me a huge fan.
There was a slight glimmer of the performing bug, though, after my dad gave me a Spanish guitar with a red tasseled cord for a strap, for my fifteenth birthday – completely crushing my hopes initailly, because I had been holding out for a wooden Tri-ang model railway station. (The view from our windows of the Highgate marshalling yards and the line beyond, running steam trains from Euston up to Alexandra Palace, had long inspired my interest in model railways which, to some people’
s completely unnecessary surprise, lives with me to this day.)
Who knows why my dad thought this guitar would be a good present for me? It’s possible that it fell off the back of a lorry, or was offered to him on the cheap. But I swallowed my disappointment and messed around with it for a while, and I took it to school, where other people also had cheap guitars. A bunch of us who had picked up the general idea would head into the playground at break time and attempt to commit this thing they called skiffle, the sound that was reviving the old American home-made ‘jug band’ style of the early twentieth century, with its banjos and washboards and pots and pans. This was when Lonnie Donegan was starting to happen, and Don had Lonnie’s ‘Cumberland Gap’ on a Pye 78. We called ourselves the Kool Kats, which we fancied was a pretty clever name, and at our peak we had seven guitars and one bloke on tea-chest bass. Not your typical line-up, and a bit guitar-heavy, but we hammered away at ‘Rock Island Line’ – the best Lonnie Donnegan song, a real rattler, probably the first number I could sing all the way through, and almost bomb-proof when attacked by novices. That said, the Kool Kats’ version might have sounded better if any of us had had the first clue how to tune a guitar. Alas, that deep musical mystery eluded all seven of us, so we just slapped the strings and hoped.
Fortunately, my dad knew a bloke with the knowledge, so I would set off to his place periodically, clutching my guitar, for a tune-up. Unfortunately, he lived about a mile and a half away, so by the time I had trekked home, the guitar was out of tune again. If there were traces of a future career in these early shamblings, they were hard to spot.
Secondary education’s other principal gifts to me were two immense, highly formative and entirely unrequited crushes: the first on Mrs Plumber, who taught history and, more importantly from my point of view at the time, wore a pencil skirt which came to just below the knee; and the second, at thirteen, on Juliet Truss, who was two years above me, had long red hair and enormous breasts and was utterly, utterly unobtainable, although this didn’t stop me from going and standing uselessly outside her house, near the bus terminus at Muswell Hill. If she even noticed me at all, she never indicated as much. And if she had asked me what I was waiting for, I wouldn’t have been able to tell her because I didn’t know either.
Near the end of my time at school, I was caught up in an unfortunate and deeply regrettable incident involving the release of an air-filled condom in the corridor. (Mindless and juvenile, clearly. But they really go, if you blow them up hard enough.) For this I was given the standard caning (which, I don’t mind reporting, bloody hurt) and was temporarily stripped of my hard-won football and cricket badges. And soon after that, accompanied by no qualifications, and a still lightly throbbing backside, I left.
I was fifteen, the whole world lay before me, glittering with possibilities, and what I was going to do next was . . .
I hadn’t got a clue.
CHAPTER 2
In which the door to a career in professional football opens, only to slam again about an hour later; and in which sundry shockingly menial employments are undertaken, culminating in a period of rebellious smelliness.
THERE WAS, OF course, professional football: the classic outlet for the underqualified, unconnected working-class kid. But here, again, our tale must diverge from some of the previously handed-down versions. According to these, I get snapped up at the age of fifteen by Brentford Football Club in the English professional league, and sign a contract as an apprentice. All is then set for me to break overnight into the first team, lead Brentford to new and undreamed-of heights, reluctantly accept that I have taken the club as far as any player on his own can, agree to a transfer to somewhere bigger, such as Manchester United or Real Madrid, and eventually change the face of world football everlastingly.
But, alas (one version of the story continues), I very quickly realise that the duties of an apprentice at a professional football club include such pain-in-the-arse chores as cleaning the first team’s boots and sweeping out the changing rooms, work which strikes me as beneath my dignity and causes me to pack my bag and quit Brentford, and English football, with my chin held high, after about a fortnight.
I like this story. I may even have . . . helped it along a little, shall we say, from time to time, in moments of weakness, and in televised conversations with Michael Parkinson, among others. The truth is, though, I was never an apprentice footballer – at Brentford, nor anywhere else. And I never turned my nose up at sweeping out Brentford’s changing rooms because Brentford never actually asked me to. I think I may have mentioned in an interview at some early stage that I wouldn’t have fancied the boot-cleaning had the boot-cleaning come up (and I’m sure I genuinely wouldn’t have fancied it), and the story took off from there. But let’s be completely clear about it: I no more signed with Brentford than Gordon Ramsay played for Rangers. (He once said he did, but you will find the record books to be awfully silent on the matter.)
Not that I didn’t show a talent for football – and enough for Brentford to be interested in me for at least a glimmering moment or two. Like a large number of boys of my age and generation, I was genetically programmed to devote huge amounts of time – nearly all of my time, in fact – to the project of kicking a tennis ball against a wall. My dad did not discourage me in this. Indeed, he coated my tennis ball with white emulsion so that I could carry on kicking it against a wall after dark, bashing it against the outside of the Wellington Inn, where on Saturday evenings he took my mother for their weekly night out. I would occasionally pause from kicking the tennis ball against the wall long enough to drink the lemonade and eat the crisps that had been brought out to me, and to look through the distorting bottle-glass of the pub window and see my mum inside with her gin and tonic on the table and her handbag on her lap, my dad beside her, not drinking.
I was physically slight but I could win the ball and move it around, so at school they started me out at centre back and then moved me into midfield and the position known in those days as right half. (Not until I went to live in California and began playing weekly with the legendary Exiles did I make the transition to my natural position, right back. I have a reputation for sitting tight, defensively, in an old-fashioned kind of way, but it’s howlingly unfair. The statistics will show that, in some thirty-five years of competitive action since then, I have crossed the halfway line at least once.)
I also prematurely knew glory in the men’s game at the mere age of eleven, in an incident which for some reason goes largely unmentioned in the game’s history books, but to the momentousness of which we will try and do justice here. I was hanging around on a Saturday morning, as usual, near the pitches where the Highgate Redwing sides were playing, when the reserve team realised they were a man short. There followed a scene which will be immediately familiar to anyone who has ever read a boys’ football comic: a huddled conversation between adults, at the end of which all eyes turn in unison to the pale kid standing on his own on the sideline, looking hopeful. And if someone didn’t actually say to me at this point, ‘You’d better get changed, son – looks like you’ve made the team,’ then they ought to have done.
The kit, of course, was too big. The fabled black-and-white striped shirt came down to my knees, creating the perfect illusion that I was wearing a dress. Just to increase my uncertainty, I was aware of my brother Don, who was due to play for the Redwing first team on an adjacent pitch, protectively having a quiet word with the opposition players before the match, telling them to ‘go easy on the kid, for Christ’s sake’.
And what happens? Fourteen minutes in, I only go and score with a 25-yard volley that screams into the top corner past the goalkeeper’s vainly stretching fingers. Oh, all right, then – with a tap-in from about two feet out which it would probably have taken more skill than I possessed to miss. But anyway, there’s a very grown-up roar of delight from my adult teammates that I can still summon into my head now, and the news spreads to the parallel pitch where my brothers are playing, and there
’s a grown-up roar there, too. ‘’Ere, Don – the lad’s only gone and scored!’ And I was probably prouder in that moment than I had ever been – proud enough to re-screen the action on a loop in the cinema of my imagination for, seriously, weeks afterwards.
Later I played for a weekend team my own age – Finchley Under-15s – in a shirt that fitted me, and it was while there that I was summoned to Brentford for closer examination. Brentford FC had been a bit of a force in the English First Division in the 1930s, but by 1960, when I turned up, they were well into a long and largely undistinguished phase of toing and froing between the game’s third and fourth professional levels. Nevertheless, news of this honour made the sports pages of the local paper, the Finchley Express, and carrying, clearly, the hopes of all Finchley on my fairly narrow shoulders, off I went to the far west of London.
My trial took place at Brentford’s ground on a warm summer evening, and we played a game of five-a-side across the middle of a pitch while a couple of blokes in tracksuits watched from the sidelines. Did I do OK? I can’t recall. But I can’t have set the place alight because they never called back. Yet again, the phone in the hall at 507 Archway Road failed to ring. And that was the end of my career in professional football.
Brentford’s loss. What have they won since?
It would have suited my dad, though, had it worked out differently. He was a really good footballer himself. He had turned out for a team in London called The Vagabonds and, during his wartime duties, for an Air Raid Patrol side. He was gentle at home – the one who put an arm round me and cuddled me far more than my mum did – but on a football pitch he was a stout, tough-tackling, gritty Scotsman. I once saw him play an entire match on a wet pitch in his shoes; he had come without his boots, but he wouldn’t let the team down.
