by John Taylor
Mom Jean, born Eugenie, had wartime experiences of her own, working on the Austin automobile assembly lines at Longbridge, which had been converted to manufacture parts for the massive Avro Lancaster bomber planes. Also in her twenties during the 1940s, Mom enjoyed the society and fellowship on the swing shift.
In 1946, the processes of life that had been interrupted by the war began again, and thoughts returned to the normal: jobs, marriage, and starting families. Hope returned. Being neighbors, Mom and Dad had been aware of each other for years, but only on shyly-passing acquaintance terms. Dad was good pals with Mom’s brothers, Sid and Alf, and one night, at the Billesley Arms, a plan was hatched by the three of them.
The following bright November Saturday morning, Dad strode down the block to the Harts’ house and knocked on the front door. Familiar as he was to the family there, he was immediately invited in. But he was not there this time to ask Sid if he fancied going fishing tomorrow, or to ask Alf if he had a game of bowls lined up later on up at the Billesley. He was there to ask old Joe Hart if he could take his younger daughter, Eugenie, out on a date.
I don’t think either of my parents had great expectations about love and marriage. They were both practical people. They each wanted a family and to not grow old alone. They would have both felt enormous gratitude to have been wanted and accepted by the other but would never have expressed it in quite that way.
From the first date, they knew they were a good fit, and all their friends and family knew it too. In their community, their partnership was a symbol of survival in the aftermath of the war: two working-class families giving up their youngest to each other. Their marriage would be a source of great pride to many.
The forty-two guests at the wedding all lived within a few miles of one another. When I was ten almost all of them were in my life; they were the fabric that formed me. They were good, honest, and loving folk. I was raised to love them as they loved me—nonjudgmentally and unconditionally. There is something about my parents’ wedding that represents the apogee of English working-class family life.
There was a shortage of new, affordable homes in the 1950s, another legacy of the war, so after Mom and Dad married, they moved in temporarily with Mom’s parents.
They would soon become part of the working-class diaspora that was moving out of the inner cities into the new housing estates and “garden cities” that were being built to replace the bombed-out town centers and to accommodate the exploding population. The story would be told many times about how Dad had shown up at the site office of one new development in Hollywood at 7:00 A.M. on a Monday morning in 1954, demanding to be allowed to buy the last house available.
The new house was perfect. It was a two-up, two-down, with a roughcast relief between the ground floor and upstairs bow windows. The living room, where we would eat, watch TV, sit, do just about everything, was 8 by 12 feet. The other room downstairs was known as the “front room,” and it was where the wedding gifts and the alcohol were stored. The three of us would have lunch in there every Sunday, and it’s where the Christmas tree was put up every year. Other than that, it went unused.
Number 34 Simon Road had its own garage, where my father would spend weekends tinkering with his car. There was a small garden at the front and a slightly larger one at the back.
In June of 1960, Mom gave birth to me at Sorrento Maternity Hospital in Solihull after an easy labor. I was never any trouble, she would tell me. I was soon brought back from the hospital, by which point the house was well lived in and comfortable, perfectly snug for a newborn.
My parents named me Nigel. It was quite an unconventional choice. My second name was John.
3 Sounds for the Suburbs
Living in the suburbs was fine for Dad. More than fine. He jumped into his Ford every morning at eight, drove himself to his job in export sales at Wilmot-Breeden, an engineering and manufacturing firm that made car parts, and was back home around six. He even got to make trips abroad, primarily to Sweden, handling the firm’s accounts with Volvo and Saab. Those trips were infused with romance and glamour for me. He would return home smelling of cigars, airport lounges, and expensive alcohol, with gifts of perfume for Mom and toys for me. In the 1960s, Dad loved his work and loved his life. He was living the dream.
For Mom, who didn’t drive, Hollywood was isolating. She was stuck out there in the suburbs, away from her family and friends, and had stopped working the day she found out she was pregnant. Alone with me, the only child.
There were few local shops, and she made friends slowly. But Mom was a churchgoer, had been all her life, and that became her social life, which is why the daily journey to St. Jude’s had to be made, regardless of distance or weather.
Of course, I went along with her to church too.
I still remember the music. St. Jude’s was where I would get a handle on the Catholic songbook; “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” “The Lord Is My Shepherd,” “Faith of Our Fathers” formed the daily fare. But they saved the real megahits for Christmas: “We Three Kings,” for example—not even I could resist singing along with that one; it was a real “manthem,” a manly anthem, proud and forceful—or “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” which could be sung in Latin as “Adeste Fideles” if the priest was feeling confident.
Some of those hymns, like “Away in a Manger,” they have to be amazing. They’ve been written to grab the imagination of people aged from five to ninety-five. Some of the arrangements had been appropriated from titans like J. S. Bach, so without even knowing it, I was being exposed to some of the greatest music ever written. The organ would be cruising those major-to-minor moves, and the hairs would be standing up on the back of my neck.
Most European pop music is based on Christian church music, in the same way that so much American pop is based on gospel church music, which is more call-and-response. Le Bon turned me on to that idea. The experience of church music in my childhood has never gone away and continues to be a deep influence on any songwriting I am involved in.
Mom’s other savior from her suburban exile came by way of technology and her transistor radio, which was always on, tuned to the BBC Light Programme. My waking memory of any new day was the sound of that radio. I would hear the radio before I saw or heard any parent.
Mom adored popular music. She had been a fan as a teenager, a stage-door Jeannie, idolizing the bandleaders of her day: Harry James, Artie Shaw. I found a little black book of hers recently in which she had transcribed, in her always elegant handwriting, about sixty hit songs of the day, with titles like “My Foolish Heart,” “Come with Me My Honey” and “Boy in My Dream.”
All of this passion built to a crescendo for her—and almost everyone else in the country—when the Beatles came along in 1962, when I was two. They were, in equal measure, romantic, cheeky and adventurous. And they were from Liverpool.
All those new mothers in love with the mop-tops—while we were learning to walk, some of us still in our cots—would be singing to us, “Love, love me do,” “All my loving,” or “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah . . .”
Oedipus, kick up your heels.
4 The Catholic Caveat
When I reached the age of four, church was replaced by school. I was happy to go. If I had known what was in store for me, they would have had to drag me there.
I now look back, somewhat wryly, on those preschool years as idyllic. It was my first experience of being at the exclusive center of a woman’s attention.
Mom and Dad had signed me up for a Catholic primary school, Our Lady of the Wayside. Despite Dad’s agnosticism, he was all for it. The theory was there was a better quality of education to be had there than at the local school.
The first morning, Mom dressed me in my new school uniform—yellow-and-gray tie, gray flannel shorts and a tiny blazer—fed me, and walked me up the hill to join the other half-dozen victims waiting for the bus.
I was perfectly relaxed about all of this. Confident, excited, keen. Mom and Da
d had done a good job of preparing me for this day. I must have exuded a certain calmness, as the boy who was causing the most trouble in the classroom, screaming and shouting, was sat next to me.
The best aspects of the primary school classroom were the sandbox and the “tuck trolley” that delivered the jam-filled cookies we called Jammie Dodgers at eleven o’clock sharp. My clearest memory of first-year infants is of the Monday I showed up wearing my new National Health standard-issue thick-rimmed glasses, at age five. The teacher suggested I stand on the desk so everyone could get a good look at the new me. It was like, “Hey, just call me four-eyes, guys!” I’m sure Mrs. Gilmore hadn’t meant it to be humiliating but, for a five-year-old, it was.
Jammie Dodgers were not the only religion handed out at Our Lady of the Wayside. Catholic dogma was high up on the curriculum, with religious knowledge—or “RK”—nestled cozily next to math, history, and geography. Two plus two equals four, the Battle of Hastings was in 1066, the capital of France is Paris, and Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding in Cana.
Despite all the hours I had spent at church, all that ceremony, all those readings, the music, the incense, I still didn’t get it. Intellectually, it never made sense to me.
Like a member of the crowd at the feeding of the five thousand, I sat there, scratching my head, trying to figure out how on earth Jesus could have made all that food out of five loaves and two small fish. How? Why? Because he was Jesus? Because he was The Man? What was I missing?
But one thing you learn early on is that asking how or why is frowned upon in the Catholic Church. Not for us the intellectual rigor of the Jewish religious people. Or the spiritual curiosity of the Buddhists.
For us, ignorance is a matter of pride.
It’s what I call “the Catholic Caveat,” and it’s a minor stroke of ecclesiastical genius, because what it says is this: If you have to ask, then you don’t have faith, and if you don’t have faith, you are totally fucked, because lightning will come searing through your bedroom window that very night and BLOW YOU OFF THE FACE OF THE EARTH!
It can be a scary and confusing world to grow up in.
5 A Hollywood Education
Dad smuggled in some coded messages that there may be life outside St. Jude’s and Our Lady of the Wayside.
At Christmas 1966, when I was six and a half, he brought home the Wilmot-Breeden works calendar. It was not to be hung in the kitchen, this calendar, or any of the other “public spaces” in 34 Simon Road. What Dad did was take the scissors to the thick, shiny pages and separate them, creating twelve images from around the world: Red Square in Russia, Sydney Harbour Bridge, an ancient village of red brick and tile sitting on an unimaginably blue sea, and another, of the most gorgeous raven-haired temptress, dressed in red, atop a black horse that matched her hair.
Dad mixed up some wallpaper paste and glued the pages to my bedroom walls, alongside and over my bed. Above my pillows there already was the ubiquitous Jesus on the cross, the crucifix that no self-respecting Catholic is ever far away from. Now he had some competition for my imagination.
Jesus: tortured; blood dripping from the nails that had been so brutally hammered home through his hands; the crown of thorns. It was a nightmare vision, and the intention was to give Catholics a conscience. All it gave me was guilt.
Dad’s presentation of beauty and adventure, of what could be found across the seas and oceans, seemed to be saying to me, in a whisper, “There’s more to life than this, lad. It’s not just about Hollywood, Him, and school.”
Gazing up at those pictures, illuminated only by the streetlight that filtered in through the curtains long after my lights had been turned out, night after night, was where all my dreams of romance, travel, and escape began.
The next step in the home education that Father introduced was to begin drilling me on geography; capital cities, rivers, and flags became favorite subjects of mine, and I fast became an expert. It’s a useful interest to have when you are on the road six months a year.
I would beg, plead to be quizzed on my geographical knowledge on weekend mornings, when I would climb into bed with Mom and Dad.
“Ask me some rivers,” I would say excitedly, eyes popping out of my head.
Dad would fold up his Daily Sketch, saying, “Can’t you ask him, Jean?”
“I don’t know them, Jack. No good asking me,” Mom would say.
Dad would smile resignedly and say, “Amazon?”
“Brazil!” I would snap back like a piranha. And we were off.
It’s a pretty cozy life, the life of an only child, especially when both parents are present and love is not in short supply. I had a good thing going.
We had three neighbors in the adjoining house, number 36, over the years. The worst of them were police officers. I knew the seventies had arrived when I saw that pale blue police car roll up onto the drive.
They were fascists, man—that was clear from the uniforms.
They didn’t have kids so they were like, “Turn the music down!” “Turn the TV down!” and “No, you are not going to get your ball back if you keep kicking it over the fence!” I thought the husband was a real blockhead and the sight of him shouting at Dad, eyes popping out of his head—“If you don’t sort that son of yours out, I will!”—terrified me.
All I was doing was being a kid. As I got older and music took over, I wanted to listen to music all the time, ideally when no one else was in the house so I could turn it up really loud. To be fair, I had no idea what it must have been like for them on the other side of those paper-thin walls.
My parents hated these confrontations with the neighbors. Mom was very timid, and Dad wasn’t up for another fight. Given that he was a soldier, a hero, I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t just weigh in there with his fists flying. It was an early lesson in the limitations of my parents’ power.
6 In Between and Out of Sight
I enjoyed learning and acquiring knowledge, but it was a habit rarely manifested in the classroom. Only in the privacy of home, in the snug, close-fitting world of Mom, Dad, and me, did I have the confidence to let fly.
Intelligence needs training, and training includes making mistakes. I never felt judged in my parents’ world; at school I felt nothing but judgment. At school, being an only child had its drawbacks; I have never liked sharing my toys.
And I didn’t like the rating, the constant comparative system that was going on. Who is good at this, who is the best at that? The best and the worst. Always.
“Games,” that ironic synonym for sports, was the worst. In contest after contest, you could find me and my four eyes faring not too well on the playing fields of Our Lady of the Wayside. Never once was I to get the call-up: Your school needs you. Not once would I represent my school at sports. I would develop some nagging self-doubt about that.
Is there anything worse than being laughed at? I’ll take surgery every time. I couldn’t stand it—still can’t. Thank God my friends and family know me well enough today to do it out of earshot, but back then, coming last meant getting laughed at. That had to be avoided. I began to take myself out of the race.
I didn’t like coming first either—what was a boy to do?—because that meant walking to the front of class or, worse, assembly hall, to receive a prize and maybe even having to say, “Thank you, sir,” out loud in front of all those hooligans. Stepping forward to receive my Bobby Moore gift token from Mr. Lahive for my work on “The Lives of the Saints” was the most humiliating moment to date. All those eyes burning into my back, the sniggers of reproach. No thanks, I’ll pass on the prizes too. I set my sights on being in between and out of sight.
By the age of ten, in 1970, I had become a less frequent visitor to Mom and Dad’s bed (although I still remember crawling in between the two of them to read about the breakup of the Beatles. It was as unbelievable to us as the sinking of the Titanic), so I needed to find other ways to get their approval.
Particularly Dad’s.
/> Military model-making was the hobby du jour, supremely popular with boys of my generation and a terrific father/son bonding pursuit to boot. More sons and their fathers of the late sixties bonded over Airfix models of Centurion tanks, Spitfire planes, and Victory ships (“featuring life-like Nelson with amputated arm”) than anything, other than a leather football.
Dad set the bar for me when he constructed my eighth birthday present, the Short Sunderland flying boat, to such a degree of perfection that I knew I had to get up to speed pretty quick.
Which I did. I became addicted to making models. Maybe there was something in the glue, the “construction cement,” and the enamel paint?
Planes, boats, trucks, cars; I built ’em, painted ’em, and stuck them in little landscape surroundings known in the modeling fraternity as “dioramas.”
Every week my pocket money would go on something new to add to my collection. By Saturday afternoon I would be disturbing Dad in the garage. “Look, Dad, what do you think? It’s Monty on the road to Alamein.”
“That’s very good, lad,” he would say. “Fancy a trip to the off-licence to get some pop?”
Victory!
My tastes in model-making had no nationalistic allegiance. I was as happy building a Japanese Zero fighter or a Panzer tank as I was General Montgomery’s Humber staff car. The Graf Spee or the Ark Royal, Grummans or Messerschmitts, I didn’t care, it was all of a piece, all part of the great game: war, a battle of uniforms and battledress, crosses versus roundels. The Airfix catalogue was an astounding education and gave my generation a great primer in industrial design, as well as developing our hand-eye skills. It was as good as anything I got taught in a classroom, and it cannot be done on a Game Boy.
It was an almost exclusively masculine world. Airfix’s only concession to the female form was their Joan of Arc, which did not interest me. The only human models I built and painted were of men. Manly men doing manly things. Like killing each other.
