by Phil Collins
However, to return to my mum: her stoicism, strength and humor in the face of my dad’s straying (to use that very English word) says a lot about a wartime generation who would go through thick and thin to maintain their marriage commitments. It’s something we all could learn from, myself very much included.
All that said: when I consider my childhood from the vantage point of my advanced age, perhaps close-to-the-bone emotional upset and turmoil seeped into my young self, without my even knowing it.
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I was Born in Putney Maternity Hospital, southwest London, on January 30, 1951, a belated—and by all accounts surprise—third child to June and Grev Collins. Apparently Mum initially entered West Middlesex Hospital to have me, but they weren’t very nice to her, so she crossed her legs, left and headed to Putney.
I was the first “London” child, as both Carole and Clive had been born in Weston-super-Mare after the entire family had been relocated there by London Assurance prior to the Blitz. Carole was not best pleased by my birth. She’d wanted a girl. Clive, though, was over the moon—finally, a little brother to play football with, wrestle with and, when all that got a bit boring, to pin down and torture with his smelly socks.
With Mum and Dad aged thirty-seven and forty-five respectively, my arrival made them, for the times, old parents. This didn’t bother my mum in the slightest. She remained a generous and loving woman her entire life, without a bad word for anybody until the day she died on her birthday in 2011, aged ninety-eight. That said, she did once call a London policeman a “dickhead” when he chastised her for driving in a bus lane.
Dad, born in 1907, came from then-fashionable Isleworth, a riverside neighborhood on London’s western edges. His family home was big, dark, musty, quite imposing, not a little scary. Ditto his relatives. I have no recollection of my paternal grandfather, a time-served London Assurance man just like his son would become. But I do have vivid memories of Grandma. She was warm, embracing and very patient with me, but seemed stuck in the Victorian period, and as if to prove it was permanently clad in long black dresses. Maybe she was still mourning Prince Albert, too.
She and I were very close. I spent a lot of time in her constantly damp below-stairs rooms, watching her paint watercolors of boats and the river, an enthusiasm I’ve inherited.
Dad’s sister, Auntie Joey, was a formidable woman, armed with a cigarette holder and a rough throaty voice, a little like the baddie in Disney’s The Rescuers: “Dahling, doooo come in…” Her husband, Uncle Johnny, was also a case. He had a monocle and always wore heavy tweed suits, another Collins from the land that the twentieth century forgot.
Family history has it that a couple of Dad’s cousins had been incarcerated by the Japanese in the notorious Changi Prison in Singapore. Great store was put by them—they were war heroes, men who survived the pitiless Far East campaign. Another cousin was apparently the chap who first brought launderettes to England. In Dad’s family’s eyes, they were all, each of them, “somebody.” Or, in other words, toffs. H. G. Wells was said to be a regular caller on the Collins household.
Clearly Dad’s family formed his attitudes, not to mention his working life—although after he died I discovered that he had tried to dodge conscription into London Assurance by running away to become a merchant seaman. But the ocean-going rebellion was short-lived and he was told to snap out of it, pull himself together and fall in line under the insurance-salesman yoke imposed by his own father. Conformity was the order of the day. With this in mind, it could be suggested that Dad was a little bit jealous of the freedom the sixties offered Clive, Carole and myself in our chosen fields: cartoonist, ice skater, musician. Call them proper jobs? Dad didn’t.
There’s little proof that Grev Collins ever got used to the twentieth century. When North Sea gas came on stream and all the boilers in the U.K. were converted, Dad tried to bribe the Gas Board to leave us out of the conversions, convinced that somewhere there was a gasholder that would provide fuel just for the Collins family.
For some reason, Dad loved washing-up, and he insisted on doing this on Sundays after the family lunch. He preferred to do this alone as it got him out of socializing at the table. All would be well until a crash exploded from the kitchen. All talk would cease, and Mum would go to the French windows and close the curtains. Within a few moments of the crash, Dad could be heard swearing hard, and then would come the sound of crockery being swept into a pan. The back door would be loudly hauled open and the crockery scattered noisily into the garden, whereupon Dad would kick it around outside the window, accompanied by more loud swearing.
“Your father’s killing the plates,” Mum would wearily explain as us silent children found something profoundly interesting to stare at on the tablecloth. Just your traditional British family Sunday lunch.
Dad wasn’t ignorant of home improvement, but he had no real interest in it. So far as he was concerned, if things were working OK, then everything was fine. This especially applied to electricity. In the early fifties, the plugs were brown Bakelite and the wires had a woven cord covering. They were somewhat unreliable, and in the back room, where the radio was kept, the main plug at the skirting board would often feed five or six other plugs. Electricians would refer to it as a “Christmas tree.” Ours was habitually fizzing, which isn’t ever a sound you want to hear where domestic electricity is concerned, and, as the eldest, Clive was always the one chosen to place a further plug into the already overloaded socket. Carole and I would watch with mischievous fascination as he invariably received a mild shock that ran up his arm like a violent tickle.
“That means there’s power there. No problem with that,” Dad would comment before settling down with his pipe to listen to the radio or watch TV, oblivious to poor Clive and his smoking arm.
Prior to my arrival the family didn’t have a car, as Dad didn’t pass his driving test until 1952, one year after I was born. It was only his seventh attempt. If the car didn’t “behave” itself, Dad would swear at it, believing the malfunctioning motor was part of a plot against him. The iconic scene from Fawlty Towers with John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty apoplectically thrashing his disloyal Austin 1100 Countryman is an accurate glimpse into our family life.
It was around this time that, armed with his first car, Dad decided to take Carole and me out for a spin in Richmond Park. He also thought he’d use this opportunity to carry out some random safety checks on his new vehicle. I was standing in the back of the car, and all seemed to be normal. Suddenly, without announcement, Dad tested the brakes. I flew forward over the seats at some speed. Luckily the dashboard and my face broke my fall. I still have the scars on each side of my mouth.
Dad was so rutted in the past that, when decimalization was introduced in 1971, he declared that it would be the death of him. The nation’s new coinage was a new threat. Taking the long view, I have no reason to doubt that the demise of the shilling did actually help to kill him with worry.
Mum was another time-served Londoner. She grew up in North End Road, Fulham, one of three sisters who were seamstresses. Her brother, Charles, was a Spitfire pilot who had been shot down and killed in the war. One of her sisters, Gladys, lived in Australia and we always exchanged audio tapes at Christmas. She, too, died before I could meet her. Mum’s other sister, Auntie Florrie, was lovely, and as a youngster I’d visit her once a week at her flat in Dolphin Square in Pimlico. My maternal grandmother, Nana to me, was a sweetheart, another strong, formative female influence on my young self.
In the early thirties, when Mum was in her late teens, she danced with Randolph Sutton, the music-hall star of “On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep” fame, before finding a job in a wine store. Dad’s family would always make it clear that he had married beneath him by wedding a shop girl. But after they met on a boat trip at St. Margarets on the Thames, it was love at first sight. They were married within six months, on August 19, 1934. Mum was twenty, Dad twenty-eight.
By the time I came along, just over sixte
en years later, the Collins family were living in Whitton in the borough of Richmond-upon-Thames. Then came a large, three-floored Edwardian house at 34 St. Leonards Road in East Sheen, another corner of southwest London.
As Mum was working full-time at the toyshop, Nana looked after me while Clive and Carole were at school. Nana adored me and we formed a wonderfully close bond. On our pram perambulations she’d push me along the Upper Richmond Road, where she’d routinely buy me a penny bun from the baker’s. The fact that I have vivid memories of this daily treat speaks volumes about my closeness to my nana.
Dad clearly wasn’t one for progress or upheaval, on the surface at least, so much so that when Mum asked if we could move from St. Leonards Road to a slightly bigger, slightly better, slightly less damp house, Dad replied thus: “You can move if you want. But you’ll have to find the house for the same money we sell this place for, I’ll leave for work in the morning from this place, and I’ll come back the same day to the new place, and everything will be moved in.” And so it came to pass that Mum, bless her, managed to do that.
Which is how, aged four, I find myself in 453 Hanworth Road, Hounslow—the house that my resourceful mum found and moved us into in the course of one day.
As is the norm, the house you live in when young seems enormous. Visiting it years later can be a shock. How did we all fit in there? Mum and Dad have the master bedroom, obviously, with a small room next door for Carole. Clive and I are at the back of the house, in bunk beds. Our room is so poky we have to go outside to change our mind. By the time I am a teen, there is barely room to conceal under my bed the collection of girlie mags that have somehow come into my possession. We share those quarters throughout my childhood until 1964 when, aged twenty-two, Clive leaves home.
Being born in the early fifties means growing up in a London still recovering from Hitler’s hammering. Yet I have no memories of bombsites or devastation of any kind in our neighborhood.
The only time I remember seeing anything like the aftermath of bombing was when the family ventured into the City for Dad’s office shows. London Assurance put on plays with their dramatic society, and the family dutifully made the long trip from Hounslow, via Cripplegate, to London’s financial district. My memories of those journeys are studded with images of flattened wasteland around the old London Wall, like the scenes in the 1947 Ealing comedy Hue and Cry, complete with street urchins playing among the rubble.
In fact the London of my childhood was just like that of those Ealing films, or of my comedy hero, Tony Hancock, inhabitant of the fictional London suburban address of 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam. No traffic to speak of, even in central London, and certainly no jams or parking problems—I have home-movie footage taken by Reg and Len of the Great West Road, and you can count the cars that pass by. Droves of bowler-hatted gents trudging over Waterloo Bridge. Teeming football crowds, the supporters flat-capped to a man. Holidays by the seaside—in our family’s case, Bognor Regis or Selsey Bill in West Sussex—with the menfolk getting into the beachside swing by perhaps slightly loosening their shirts and ties. At home, the Saturday 4:45 p.m. family ritual of sitting around the telly, tea and toast and dripping to hand, listening to the football scores come in. Glimpsing the wider world via Disney’s 1955 film Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier, a revelatory moment that launched a lifelong interest in the Alamo.
It’s an idyll, of sorts, one that’s very much of a time and a place. My time, my place, my tightly defined patch.
Hounslow is in the outer reaches of Middlesex, where capital city meets Home Counties. The westernmost extreme, the last stop, on the Underground’s Piccadilly Line. Nowhere near the hub of anything. A 45-minute train journey to the West End. London, but not London. Not quite this, not quite that.
How do I feel growing up at the end of the line? Well, everything is a walk, and then a bus, and then another little bit of a walk, and then a train. Everything is an effort. So you make your own fun. For some kids, unfortunately, their fun is no fun for me.
At Nelson Infants School I seem to be habitually bullied by Kenny Broder, a pupil at St. Edmund’s Primary, which is unhelpfully situated right across the road. Like me he’s only ten, but he has the face of a boxer, with high cheekbones and a nose that’s already seen some action. I dread Broder emerging from his school gates at the same time as I exit mine. He’ll eyeball me the whole journey home, silently threatening violence. It seems to me like I’m always picked on—and, it seems to me, always for no reason. Is there a target on my forehead, a “kick me” sign on the back of my shorts?
Even my debut experience with the opposite sex is warped by the prism of schoolboy violence. I take Linda, my first girlfriend, to a funfair on Hounslow Heath, my pockets bulging with the hard-saved coppers that will buy us passage on the helter-skelter of love and/or the dodgems, whichever has the shorter queue. No sooner have we arrived than a chill runs up my neck. “Oh God,” I think, “there’s Broder and his gang.”
Thinking I’ll be safer on higher ground, I mount the carousel with Linda. But as the galloping horses rotate, each time I pass the gang are giving me the hard stare, and each time they seem to swell in numbers. As sure as eggs is broken legs, I know I’m in for a kicking. Right enough, as I dismount, Broder swaggers over and wallops me. This cowboy tries not to cry. I go home from the funfair with a blackening eye. Mum says, “What happened to you?”
“I got hit.”
“Why, what did you do?”
Like it was my fault.
Still, aged twelve, I manage to break my fight virginity in the park beside my mum’s toyshop. We generally congregate here, near a hefty horse trough from days gone by and a slip road where the 657 trolley buses turn around. Because this, remember, is the end of the line.
The park, then, is our territory. I don’t belong to a proper gang; we’re just a group of young would-be toughs dedicated to guarding our turf. Especially if there are some bigger local lads around to provide back-up.
One day the park is invaded by another group of kids. Some vicious words are exchanged: “ ’Oo you screwing, moosh?” “ ’Oo you calling moosh?” It’s like the Sharks and the Jets, with less blaring jazz. The baiting goes on, and before long I’m rolling and punching and pulling at another lad. After a bit we just stop. We’re not getting anywhere. A score draw. A nose may have bled.
We both feel we’ve stopped with honor. But then the older lads arrive and insist on pressing home our advantage. They prize out of me the location of the infiltrators. Big Fat Dave—not usually called this to his face, especially by me—sets off to “sort him out.” He’s oblivious to my cries of “Stop, we agreed it was a draw!” I feel terrible because, from a distance, I see Big Fat Dave jumping up and down on my adversary’s bike, parked opposite, just outside the sweet shop. Oh well, at least they won’t be messing with Hounslow for a while.
Out here in the suburban sticks you find enjoyment where and how you can. On the downside, this means common-or-garden inter-schoolboy argy-bargy, violence wrought by boredom. On the upside, my mum runs a toyshop, which means I have the pick of the new toys when they arrive. No freebies, just great access. My interest lies in making model airplanes, so when each new Airfix kit comes in, I’m all over them like a Lancaster over the Ruhr.
The environs of the local pub, the Duke of Wellington, soon become a haunt, and I befriend the son of the landlord. Charles Salmon is a couple of years younger than me, but we become fast friends. In our adolescent years we develop shared bad habits, liberating alcoholic drinks from the pub’s on-site off-license and, when Charles’s big sister Teddy is behind the counter, pilfering cigarettes by the fistful. We repair to his garden shed and smoke till we’re sick. I puff my way through cigars, cigarillos, French cigarettes, everything. By the time I’m fifteen I’m smoking a pipe like my dad.
I also become good friends with local lads Arthur Wild and his younger brother Jack. The lives of Jack and me will later entwine: as child actors, we s
hare a West End stage, him playing Charley Bates, best mate to my Artful Dodger in the first staging of Oliver! the musical. He will, however, trump me by going on to play The Dodger in Carol Reed’s Oscar-winning 1968 film.
So this is my life, here at the end of the line. I don’t know what happens even a short way farther up the road. Hounslow ends and then…London? It seems another world. The City proper, where Dad works, doesn’t feature in my mind at all.
As with any young boy, football looms large in my life. In the early sixties I’m an ardent fan of Tottenham Hotspur, worshipping goal-scoring machine Jimmy Greaves. I can still name the team, such is my affection. But Spurs are a north London club, and north London might as well be Mars. I’d never dare venture so far out of my safety zone.
Brentford FC are the closest big club to Hounslow, so I attend their matches regularly. I even sit in on training sessions, getting known around the ground. Sometimes I go to see Hounslow FC play, but that’s very low-key. So low-key that one match day the other team simply don’t turn up.
My horizons are broadened somewhat by the Thames. My dad might not display much in the way of passion, but what enthusiasm he does have is focused on matters riverine.
Grev and June Collins are both keen boat folk, and help to run the newly formed Converted Cruiser Club. They’re part of a wide, river-loving social circle, which includes Reg and Len Tungay, the so-called uncles mentioned earlier. The brothers have their own boat, Sadie. She’s another war veteran, a member of the Dunkirk flotilla, and is a craft big enough for us to sleep on, something I do on many a happy occasion.
