by David Lines
‘That’ll do nicely, Davey Boy.’
Half an hour later Chris, Phil and Mum and I were standing in the front garden, waving goodbye to Grampa. Sitting next to Dad in the front passenger seat, Grampa looked tiny. I watched him open his handbag and take out a plastic Barclay’s bank bag, the sort you keep coins in. Because Grampa dealt in cash at the barber’s shop, this is what he’d got used to carrying his money around in all the time. He didn’t have a wallet; what he had was a different bag for each coin and each note. He took the twenty pound note bag out, peeled one off and placed it on the dashboard for petrol money. He’d always done the same whenever Dad took him anywhere, but none of us had the heart to tell him that Dad claimed back the petrol on expenses. Dad took the money, put it into his pocket and the dark brown Austin Maxi slipped quietly away.
I went straight to my room because I could feel a poem coming on. It’d been a little while since I’d felt the urge to write anything, so this came as a nice surprise. I got my pen out in readiness. After more than an hour I hadn’t made one single, solitary mark on the page. No words would come, no poem, no lines to rhyme. This was the best possible news in the world! I was overjoyed by it – I was a real, living, breathing writer. How could I not be when I was quite clearly suffering from writer’s block? I celebrated by having a sly smoke out of the bedroom window whilst listening to Paul singing words so soulful and sweet. Afterwards, I laid back on my bed and drifted off, like the smoke in the summer’s breeze.
I awoke after a couple of hours, got up and straightened my bed. There was a weird silence in the house that I could only put down to Grampa going which was odd because he never made any noise when he was there. Maybe it was just me, but I somehow got the feeling that he wasn’t coming back. I shook out the duvet, and there, fluttering from inside, was a piece of square, silk cloth. It was golden, with a claret paisley print and was exactly the sort of thing that Paul would have worn, an item of great style and fine beauty, and I wanted it for myself. He wouldn’t mind if I borrowed it till next time I saw him. I tied it around my neck and stood in front of the mirror. It looked superb, and became a highly original addition to my modernist wardrobe. The first time Rik saw me wearing it, I swear that he actually went a deep, dark shade of jealous jade.
The next day, I came home from school and as I turned the corner I saw Dad’s car parked in the drive. This was unheard of. Not only was he supposed to be in Cardiff, it had only just gone four in the afternoon. Dad was never at home at four in the afternoon. There was more chance of me coming home and finding the batmobile in our drive.
Dad sat in the garden, perched on the little low wall between the patio and the clipped lawn. He was smoking a cigarette and playing with his hair. He looked older, he looked like his dad. Mum was sitting next to him, and next to Dad this made her appear much younger. Her face was fresh and her freckles were having a field day. She looked like she could be in the sixth form at school.
‘It’s over.’
I looked at Dad and now his face was ashen. His face was thin, in an instant, his face was thinner.
‘What’s over?’
He bit his thin, wide bottom lip and there were tiny pools of tears in his eyes. His trouser leg had risen up and I noticed that his bony ankles matched his sharp cheekbones.
‘Grampa Lines died today. The warden found him, they called an ambulance but by the time it got there he’d gone, it was too late. I never should have left him in Nottingham.’ Dad whispered this last sentence and I looked at Mum and she looked at me as if neither of us were meant to hear it.
I wanted to ask if it was something specific that killed him, or just old age. I wanted to ask Dad if it was the endless Scotch, the constant cigars or loneliness? But I didn’t, because I saw how upset he was. He didn’t deserve that sort of questioning, he’d done the best thing for all of us, moving the family up here. It wasn’t my father who undid the necks on those hundreds of bottles of Scotch, it wasn’t him who poured them down Grampa’s throat every night. My dad brought us to Leeds so that we could have a better life and the blame, if that’s the right word, rested solely with Grampa. Grampa had been here the day before and now he would never come here again. It was deeply weird to think that. I was upset, but I was upset for my dad. Both of his parents were now dead and his ties with Bridgford buried with them. I truly felt for him.
Later that night, I was in my room listening to the last Jam tape Rik and I had made. It’d got lots of slow songs and it suited my mood. There was a brief knock on the door and Dad opened it, popped his head round and asked if he could come in. I almost fell over in shock. Normally, he came through it like he was in The Sweeney. He sat down and gave me a hug and I hugged him back and there was just a moment when we looked each other in the eye and even though we said nothing, we said everything. Dad had bought me my first razor and he’d come up to give it to me. I stared at the slim, silvery-handled instrument and ran my finger lengthways across the twin blades.
‘Be careful, son – you’ll cut yourself.’ He handed me a can of shaving foam and said, ‘I didn’t think it was wise you trying to use the cut-throat, not yet. Not after what you did to your head.’
I laughed, and agreed with him. ‘Thanks. It feels weird owning one of these.’
Dad nodded, ‘Well, you’re growing up. You’d better get used to it.’
He led me to the bathroom and filled the sink. I rinsed my face and Dad dabbed the foam over it for me. He took the razor from my hand. ‘Here, let me show you, son.’
The following Wednesday was Grampa Lines’s funeral. It had been decided that Phil was too young to attend, and, because Chris had flu, I should stay at home and look after them. It wouldn’t have felt right going to school anyway. I would have wanted to be at the funeral. Instead, I made scrambled eggs on toast for tea for the three of us. I would have liked to have gone, to say goodbye, but as it was always hard enough saying hello to Grampa, I didn’t feel too bad. I don’t think that Dad would have appreciated me seeing him upset. Anyway, I liked playing at being Big Brother – maybe I should have tried it more often. I wore the cravat around the house that day – it was my way of saying goodbye. I felt like I was wearing a paisley flag, at half mast.
It was a while before I came to discover just what ‘Start!’ was really about. It was Paul’s interpretation of George Orwell’s book, Homage To Catalonia. In it, Orwell wrote about how he fought against fascism during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell documented how he, and many other people who shared his own ideals of democratic socialism, travelled to Barcelona to fight for what they thought was right. They came from all over the globe, and even though the first man did not know what the second was saying in their mother tongues, if they could get through for just two minutes then it would be a … Start! When I hear it now, it reminds me about how much I’d have loved to communicate, to get through to Grampa.
6
Absolute Beginners
IT WAS OCTOBER, 1981, and my fifteenth birthday was four months away. It was more than a year since Grampa died and I was surprised that the time had gone so quickly. It was the first time for me that death became a date to remember.
Mum had been on and on at me to ‘get stuck in more’ at school. I had been toying with the idea of joining an after-school society and I felt a definite pull towards drama. There was a drama club which met every Thursday after school and I’d been six or seven times. I couldn’t tell you if I’d enjoyed it or not because I’d never actually been in. I was too intimidated to walk in and introduce myself: I just watched through the glass panel in the door.
I’d embraced being a mod, but, like Paul, I’d grown out of the mob culture that went with it. For me, modernism wasn’t so much about being part of the mod movement, it was becoming increasingly more about my connection to Paul. If 1980 was a peak for Weller, then he thought 1981 was a filthy, lousy trough. Paul said as much in an interview, that it had ‘been a horrible year for songs’. I disagree – ‘Absolute Be
ginners’ is one of The Jam’s cleanest, crispest, most enduring tunes. It’s bitter, like chewing lemons, and it’s full of hope and incredibly revealing all at the same time. It has an almighty kick to it, an urgency fuelled by the horn section who play short, sharp, stabbing notes which drive it along, lifting the melody and adding weight and substance. This song sounded to me like a new chapter – it’s classic Jam and even today, never far from my turntable: it was released on 16 October, 1981, and reached number four in the charts.
‘Absolute Beginners’ – what a song title; where did it come from? What was the story? I sat down and read an article in Sounds which credited the title to a book by a writer whom I’d never heard. His name was Colin MacInnes, and I set out my stall to find out just who he was. It didn’t take me long. MacInnes wrote the theme tune to ‘Being Young’ long before anyone else did. I ordered a copy of Absolute Beginners from the library and when it arrived, I devoured it in one sitting. I ate the book up.
MacInnes wrote with the keenest, brightest of eyes. His take on Being Young is inspired, and I wondered how old he was, how many summers he had under his belt when he set pen to paper. Despite it being set in the sixties it was written in the fifties, so what this man did was chronicle the most famous English decade even before it had actually begun. He wrote books like Paul Weller wrote lyrics – from the heart.
Absolute Beginners blew my mind. MacInnes wrote about the path of boyhood and its journey into manhood like his own footsteps were still wet and sticky in the sand, warm from the sun between his toes and hot and humid from the London tarmac on the soles of his handmade, shining Italian loafers. The hero has no name; his profession: photographer. He neither drinks nor smokes, preferring the buzz of simply being cool to that provided by artificial stimulants. He moves within certain circles, clocking the characters and taking them in, rarely passing judgement, simply making mental notes and moving on. When I read Absolute Beginners I had to listen to the song of the same name at the same time – the two went hand in hand, they complemented and enhanced each other. Paul had set this coming-of-age novel to music, and I danced through the pages to his tune. It made me feel like maybe becoming a man wasn’t such a hard slog after all; that by being true to myself, I might just get there. That is until one day when the act of growing up took a rather embarrassing turn.
I was walking home from school at the end of the day, down the old railway track, and I’d just made a promise to myself that this was the last time I’d ever take this route because I was completely and utterly pissed off at getting mud splashes all up my trousers and crap caked all over my shoes – very unmod indeed.
It was a little blustery and the empty, colourful crisp packets dressed the hawthorn like bunting on a car lot. I passed an abandoned pram rusting under a hedgerow and spied a baby, made of moulded plastic, its head sticking out from under one wheel. The wind rustled its hair and its eyes stared out at me and for just a moment, I could swear that it said ‘Help me’. It was disgusting, all this litter everywhere, yet I was drawn to the baby doll. I wanted to help it. It was a thoroughly ridiculous feeling, but it was an urge that I was unable to control. The crappy litter, the discarded, dumped rubbish was enough, but the plastic baby, that had to be tidied away – I couldn’t leave it there, it sickened me so. The least I could do was to put it in the black bin liner full of newspapers that had been left next to it.
I tramped through the brambles, careful not to snag my tonic Sta-Prest trousers – this was dangerous territory for clothes, and I was ultra-careful on my way in, flattening down any potentially evil bits with my haversack before moving further on. I picked up the baby and went to drop it into the bin liner and there, staring up at me from inside the bag, was the most gorgeous woman I’d ever set eyes on in my whole life.
She was blonde, with long, thick curls as golden as a wheat field in the midday sunshine and she was spread over the centrefold of a porn mag. Her eyes were heavily made-up and her beautiful face had the filthiest feel about it, she looked directly into the camera and she’d got the most brilliant breasts, not like anyone at school, full and round and barely stuffed into a black, lace bra. I whipped out the magazine and crammed it into my haversack, flung the baby in the bag and hotfooted it home sharpish.
After cheese on toast for tea I retired to my room making the excuse that I had to deal with homework. I could hardly manage to swallow a mouthful because I was so excited at the thought of being left alone with the model in the mag. I shut the bedroom door and got her out. Her body was so smooth, and her long, graceful legs went on and on and on. She was perfect in every way. Her name was Melissa, she was twenty-three years old and, according to the magazine, was currently without a boyfriend. I quickly turned the page, and when I saw what she was doing next, I could hardly contain myself. She only had on the most gloriously sexy pair of … shoes. Black, velvet, strappy high heels with little ribbons which tied around her ankles; her little toenails painted pink peeped out from the front. It was almost too much for me. I tore off my trousers and stretched out on my bed and began to enjoy her heels properly. I was almost oblivious to the outside world, I was nearly there, just me, Melissa and her fucking horny footwear. Downstairs, I think I heard the phone ring but I was just about ready to come. I couldn’t tear my eyes off her shoes. I adored them, I adored the heels and her toes and just as I was about to go off like a pistol … I heard footsteps on the landing.
Christ, those were definitely footsteps and they were coming for my door. I couldn’t be found like this with a porn mag, it’d be the worst thing in the world, so I grabbed the nearest thing to hand to cover up Melissa. There was a quick knock and the door opened and just in time I opened Smash Hits at a page I was reading that morning and there I was, with a vicious hard-on in one hand and a picture of Paul Weller in the other. My mother stood in the doorway, her eyes out on stalks. She swallowed once, and said, ‘I think this obsession might be going too far. I’ll tell Rik you’ll ring him back later.’
She couldn’t get out of there quickly enough.
Neither of us ever mentioned the incident again – we didn’t need or want to. I do know that Mum must have said something to Dad, though I don’t know exactly what, because when I came home from school next day he’d very kindly fitted a bolt to my bedroom door.
Rik told me at school that he’d been ringing to tell me that he’d got a girlfriend. Her name was Louise Harrison and she sat next to him in biology. I was kind of miffed, because I quite fancied her myself and I used to love seeing her in her little blue sports skirt when we occasionally teamed up together to play badminton in PE. Rik was over the moon at having a girlfriend and all he talked about was Louise this and Louise that and Louise said this and me and Louise are going to go and see such and such film. I was chuffed for him and all that, but Jesus, after a while it became too much to take. I’m not sure if it was me just being jealous or whether I was simply bored with it but in the end I thought I’d have to say something. But I didn’t. I couldn’t, he was happy and what sort of a rotten mate would I be if I said something. Anyway, Rik had Louise and I’d got Paul.
By the time the next single came out, Rik and Louise were firmly established as long term boyfriend and girlfriend and I’d completely got used to the idea of sharing Rik with someone else and I wished them all the best together. Even if she was a dumpy little tart with no taste in music. I mean, Spandau Ballet, what was all that about?
* * *
My favourite album by The Jam was, and still is, Sound Affects. It was released at the back end of 1980 and had more than kept me going until ‘Absolute Beginners’. That year also saw ‘Funeral Pyre’ come out as a single. It was released on 29 May, and went to number four in the charts. ‘Funeral Pyre’ sees Rick Buckler drumming away at the top of his game. He keeps his foot firmly on the accelerator all the way through, and delivers a performance that’s as near to drumming nirvana as anything I’ve ever heard. Powerful, driving, thrusting – Rick’s tempered
venom on the kit is as angry as anything Paul’s ever written.
Sound Affects has some works of genius on it. It’s pure quality, a really special sound with a slightly psychedelic, arty feel to it. The album opens with ‘Pretty Green’. This instantly catchy strike at naked capitalism features a bass line beating like a heart pumping money through the veins of those who have and ignoring those who have not.
Paul writes about power and the way in which it is measured, he says that that’s done by either the pound or the fist. It’s clear that this is a juicy slice of Marxist thinking aimed fairly and squarely at the new Thatcher parliament. Paul could see quite easily the way things in the country were going: rampant consumerism, second homes and not a thought from those in control for the people who needed them most. I loved this track, but I remember that Rik wasn’t so keen.
My next fave track is the second song in. It’s called ‘Monday’, and is too raw and personal a song to be completely made up. It has to be about Paul and his girlfriend, it’s sung in a daydreamy kind of a way, like someone left alone with their thoughts, musing about their relationship. It’s slow and thoughtful and doesn’t stomp away like so many Jam tracks; rather it saunters after tea, going for a walk and looking at neighbours’ front gardens like Mum and Dad used to. I loved it, but was envious that Paul and Rik had girlfriends and could share these feelings of examining their relationships with each other. Not that Rik had much time for that, he was going to see that clown Tony Hadley and his bunch of wankers in Spandau Ballet with Louise next weekend. Rik actually had the audacity to ask me if I wanted to go along with them. I’d have rather sawn both of my legs off with a rusty grapefruit knife but I didn’t say as much – I told him I was going to Nottingham with the family.
I love ‘Set The House Ablaze’ and when I hear it today, it’s one hell of a signpost to what was happening within The Jam. The house is Paul’s group, and he feels he’s torched the thing – that’s it, in a nutshell. PW sings about losing sight of his ambition, but the older I become the more it’s dawned on me that, even though he clearly saw the end of the band in this track, he was also writing about antifascism, about George Orwell’s essay, ‘The Lion And The Unicorn’ and (although not as much) about his novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Again, it’s such a passion-fuelled number so typical of the band’s heartfelt honesty it almost feels like it’s a warning from Paul to steer clear of antipathy and to move forward, whatever the cost, without becoming bogged down in the mire of self-examination. Quite hippy-ish for one so mod.
