by Danny Baker
Real-life explosions, I have found, do not always resound with the ear-shattering edge they display in feature films, where an increasingly jaded audience require more bang for their buck. The one that I registered as I sat looking at the small print on Curtis Mayfield’s Sweet Exorcist album – all selections arranged by Rich Tufo except * arranged by Gil Askey – was more of a muffled ‘dooomph’, like somebody striking a bass drum while secreted beneath a tarpaulin. Nevertheless, you are immediately aware that all is not well. There is something in the tone of the thing that lets you know that this is not simply a hat stand falling over and you really ought to go and see what that was. So I did. As I emerged from my old bedroom on to the small upstairs landing my mum was already at the bottom of the stairs looking up.
‘Was that you?’ she said, as though Curtis Mayfield albums had the habit of exploding unexpectedly.
Before I could say no, I smelled something acrid and intense. Standing stock-still I just let my eyes swivel left and right, looking for the source, and calmly said, ‘Fire.’
Perhaps because of the soft way I had said it, Mum failed to grasp the urgency. ‘Fire? Don’t say that. What d’you mean, fire?’
‘Something’s on fire!’ I underlined, this time with added alarm to let her know I wasn’t just ordering troops to discharge a cannon. Bolting across to their bedroom, I flung open the door. Now every know-all will tell you that if you suspect a room is ablaze the last thing you should do is open the door to find out, but the trouble with know-alls is they haven’t ever had to put this lofty theory to the test while their entire LP collection might be about to melt like a field of Dalí clocks. As soon as the bedroom door got halfway open it almost blew itself shut again as a rush of searing air bellowed out. Stopping this action with my foot, I could see the whole far side of the room was rippling with flame similar to those upright grills they have in kebab shops. At this point I started shouting ‘Fire!’ repeatedly like Clive Dunn in Dad’s Army.
Now here’s a strange thing. As I slammed the door shut again, not so much as a sensible precaution but more in the hope it would just go away, one image filled my head. Wendy had had a fire at her house when she was young and her father, the pipe-smoking, utterly bald Jim, had attempted to put it out himself. As he aimed buckets of water at the blaze, the heat, having risen to ceiling level first, made the plastic shade they had around their central light-fitting turn molten and it plopped down in one on to his hairless head like a scalding turban. Apparently he dashed about screaming, ‘Me nut! Get it off me nut!’ Though his sons subsequently swiftly dealt with the flames, the scars to his bonce remained for the rest of his life. Nobody ever told this tale with the slightest sympathy for the old father-of-ten and even he used to chuckle as he recounted that he had to hold his head under the bathroom tap to cool the mass down, whereupon it set hard and had to be removed at the local A&E. This was the only thing running through my mind as Mum now ran up and down the stairs shrieking, ‘Oh my Gawd! Somebody help us!’
Dad meanwhile had legged it past her in the passage downstairs and was banging on the neighbour’s door, shouting at them to dial 999 – our own phone was an instrument only intermittently connected, depending on Dad’s willingness to pay the bill on time. Incredibly a fire engine came flying down the turning within a couple of minutes because somebody in the block opposite had seen the curtains burning some time before and, believing there might be no one home, had raised the alarm. The upshot of all this was my parents’ bedroom was almost completely gutted, but the rest of the home remained untouched.
So what had happened? Well, those of you whose lips purse at my father’s deviance from the straight-and-narrow norm might find some succour in the fact that this fire came as a direct result of Spud being ‘at it’. Having had one of his occasional ‘burglaries’ a few weeks before the conflagration, he had asked friends and neighbours to harbour some of his household goods while the insurance inspector made note of what had been ‘taken’. This was a very common favour across the estate and quite often as a child I would come home to find we temporarily owned all manner of extra TV sets, radiograms, clothing and canteens of cutlery. I remember we had to ‘look after’ somebody’s Bontempi home organ once and my brother and I became really attached to it while this monster dominated our front room. Neither of us could play it and we weren’t allowed to even plug it in while Dad was home.
‘I’ve got to give that back to Alfie in a few days. If it’s fucking out of tune when I do, he’ll go wild.’
I never figured quite how it could go ‘out of tune’, but there it is. Anyway, after salting away some of the more valuable things he possessed, as well as inventing quite a few he didn’t, Dad struck on the idea that it would be entirely feasible if the thieves had carried off his and Mum’s very latest addition to the home and hearth: a tumble dryer. For some reason he thought he could just hide this in one of the rooms ‘the burglars’ hadn’t touched, and so with his mate Paddy Buckingham assisting, the pair of them hauled the bulky bit of white goods up the stairs and into the small main bedroom. Just in case the insurance assessor was ‘a nosy bastard’, Dad stuck it right in the corner and put an angled tallboy wardrobe in front of it. The dryer was supposed to be moved back downstairs several days previous to the fire, but this hadn’t happened and apparently Mum had started using it again where it was. While sticking the moisture exit hose into a bucket worked well enough to keep the thing running, the heat-escape vents were jammed up against the long bedroom curtains – conveniently fashioned from a combustible man-made fibre. Mum’s laundry must have had the dryer put in a good shift the evening of the blaze and it was the curtains that went up first – thankfully spotted early by Mrs Windsor in Gillam House. I had only been alerted when the flames bested the tumble dryer itself, causing the boom, before moving on to the next job of razing Mum’s tallboy to the ground.
The only good to come of it was that Dad had another insurance claim to get stuck into, though he never seemed to derive the same satisfaction from a legitimate one.
While we’re dealing with Notable Explosions I Recall From My Youth, I must once more park the chronological narrative and bring you the tale of Paul Fennel’s hand grenade. Paul was one of the crowd of us estate kids who made the local open spaces, which had lain undeveloped since the Second World War – literally bomb sites – our meeting places and playgrounds. There was one of these overgrown, rubble-strewn areas immediately adjacent to our flats in the shadow of the railway arches. It was here that Going to Sea in a Sieve began with that game of dare in a burning car.2 One day – and I can’t claim to have been present at the time – some of the lads were thrashing around amid the longer grass, digging for centipedes and beetles to put into matchboxes, when, as I understood it, they unearthed a hand grenade. Quite what it was it was doing there nobody can explain, but it was very real and loads of us went round to Paul’s house to ask to see it. He was only too happy to oblige, taking us up to his bedroom where he would retrieve it from the box he kept it in under his bed. Without fail, every kid would pretend to pull the pin from it, although this would have been difficult because the device was far from pristine. How long it had been half-buried on the bombsite was anybody’s guess, but on the several occasions I saw it up close it was a sorry-looking decrepit old lump of metal, that’s for sure.
After secretly curating the grenade for a few weeks, Paul was eventually found out by his mum, Ivy, who came across it while she was Hoovering under his bed. Furious that her child had a bomb in his bedroom, she demanded he come upstairs and explain himself immediately. Paul babbled that it wasn’t real and he was only looking after it for someone, but Ivy said that was no excuse, she didn’t want it in the house and he should either give it back to whoever he got it from or just get rid of it. Paul took the missile and said she would never see it again. What he meant by that of course was that he would find a better hiding place for it.
After stashing it behind a couple of big flower
pots in his back garden for a few days, Paul snuck it back in again and hid it behind a row of books in his bedside cabinet. He then placed several toy knights in armour in front of the hardbacks – he and I shared a common hobby in collecting plastic medieval soldiers – and left it there, confident that his prized possession might be handily accessed for a fondle before bed each night while completely bamboozling any house-proud mums who went snooping about. Mrs Fennel found it again approximately forty-eight hours later.
This time she decided to deal with the matter herself. Doubtless muttering, ‘The sneaky little sod,’ she made her way down to the front door, up the short front path outside and bunged it in the metal dustbin by her gate. ‘There – gone!’ she would have said.
The next day was a Saturday and like many men on the estate, Paul’s dad used the day off to set about some tasks in the garden. For a start, the grass had to be cut and plants thinned out and dead-headed. This he did and after hours of such toil he gathered all the garden waste he’d amassed and squashed it down into the same metal bin by the front gate that held our Paul’s hand grenade.
Now then. I have never concocted a compost heap myself, but I have been invited many times to shove my hand into the base of one to marvel at the nuclear heat they miraculously manage to generate all on their own. Inside Mr & Mrs Fennel’s tin bin, the bacteria and chemical process involved started heating the container up almost immediately.
It was about 2 a.m. on the following Thursday that everyone on the estate got woken up by the explosion. Rather impressively, one window as far away as Silwood Street was shattered as the great KABOOM! echoed off the arches and bounced off all the blocks. Everyone came out of their homes and stood about speculating as to what it might be. Detonators up on the railways tracks, often used in daylight hours to warn of work in progress, was the favourite theory. Some thought that Cyprus Alex’s hot-dog van – an unsavoury, jerry-built affair that featured some poorly realized cartoon characters painted on the side along with its menu: ‘Hot Doks’ and ‘Hamburgas’ – must have exploded at last.
A couple of the neighbours joked that it sounded like a bomb going off, although nobody believed one actually had. Over in Westlake Road where Paul lived, the evidence was harder to deny. The dustbin itself had vanished, leaving a little hole in the earth. All the front garden fencing for yards either side had been knocked down flat and barely a window remained intact in Paul’s house and the two or three either side. Alarm bells rang in the one or two arch-based businesses that bothered with such things. Needless to say, when we learned the facts, we kids thought it was just about the greatest thing that had ever happened on the estate. Even sweeter, Paul’s parents were given all the blame for their lack of liaison re household bomb disposal.
I suppose a more superstitious type than I might have seen the detonation at my parents’ house on the night I gathered my records as a sinister omen for my new job. The portents grew even more ominous when I got the vinyl back to my home in Scawen Road. The plan was to put the LPs in the cellar that ran under the entire length of the house, a long space but not deeply excavated enough to allow a person to stand upright. For much of the twentieth century it had apparently been little more than a coal hole and I’d enjoyed exploring it by torchlight when we had first taken possession. Propped up against a back wall I discovered several large framed Victorian prints of a young girl sitting beside a Husky and then posing on a swing. A small sturdy box of keepsakes was packed with rosary beads, costume jewellery and many cards of condolence marking decades of bereavement. There were also some photographs on glass plates, a couple of which showed a wedding taking place in what was recognizably the back garden of the house.
We had started to use the subterranean space for storing various tea chests of our own things – ‘just for now’, as they say; probably as the original owners had with all these forgotten bits and pieces a hundred years before. Having prepared a large area for the arrival of my record collection, it was hard work carrying load after load from Dad’s car boot, along the hallway, down the narrow stairway that led into the cellar and then having to complete the last bit of the journey almost completely doubled over in order to stay clear of the supporting beams that criss-crossed the basement ceiling. I didn’t manage every circuit successfully and after about the tenth time I had shouted out, ‘Fuckin’ hell, I’ve hit my head AGAIN!’ Wendy gently asked whether I was planning on visiting my vinyl on a regular basis, because if so, a dangerous, pitch-black, four-foot-high crawl space was probably not the ideal storage venue. I reminded her that she did not want them – and there were thousands of them – in any of the otherwise tastefully decorated rooms in the house. So below decks they went, setting me up nicely for what remains the only time I have ever been knocked spark out in my entire life.
On the Friday night before I was due to start the first radio show of my career I had just finished sorting out all the records I thought I would need when I found myself humming ‘Who’s Gonna Love Me (When You’re Gone)’ by a soul group called the Imperials. I couldn’t shake it from my mind and, it having been a minor hit in 1978, I decided I would have to remind everyone of it when I made my debut the following morning. The thing that made me smile most about the record was its spoken introduction where the singer has just discovered his wife is leaving him:
Where you going, baby? No – you can’t take the car! Take the kids! Take all these bills on the table over here! We’ve been together too long for you to walk out on me now . . .
It then leads into a gorgeous breezy melody of the kind I favoured 100 per cent over the relentless punk stuff I was ostensibly immersed in at the time of its release. I HAD to find it. Down into the cellar I went. Directly before this latest descent, I had the following shouted conversation with Wendy, who was upstairs in one of the bedrooms:
‘Wend!’
‘What?’
‘Where’s the torch?’
‘What torch?’
‘The torch I use for the cellar!’ Then tetchily: ‘How many torches have we got?’
‘All right, calm down. You had it, don’t ask me.’
‘Well, somebody’s moved it! It was here.’
‘Where?’
‘At the top of the cellar stairs – on the gas meter. Has one of the kids had it?’
‘Dan – how could the kids reach up to the gas meter? You had it, don’t blame them.’
I remembered at this point what I’d done. The last time I’d gone down there I had been trying to locate a bell – the kind they have on hotel reception desks. The reason for this will become apparent later. Anyway, I’d started my search in an area where I had an adequate pool of light coming down from the cellar door and so I had put the torch on the floor while I went through a box of things. Lo and behold, I found the bell in question pretty quickly, but I had obviously neglected to pick up my torch again as I scuttled back to street level. I couldn’t possibly allow Wendy to know this.
‘Well, it’s not here now!’ I thundered. ‘Someone’s had it and now I really need it. I’ve got work in the morning, you know!’
Point made and, as far as I was concerned, argument won, I began to make my descent into the darkness. When I arrived at the box where the bell had been stored I looked around the floor for the errant illuminator. It was nowhere. Many months later I discovered that when I’d hurriedly stuffed all the things that weren’t the hotel bell back into the container, like an idiot, I’d scooped up the torch and packed that away along with the rest. As I sat on the cellar floor that night, though, I was absolutely flummoxed.
For a moment it occurred to me that perhaps I should just abandon the quest and go without the Imperials’ single. I dismissed this ridiculous idea almost immediately. Raising myself into the required stooping right angle, I now started groping ahead to where my records were. The plan was to locate the tea chest in which all my singles were stacked and carry individual armfuls back to base camp at the bottom of the stairs. There in the hal
f-light I would sort through until the Golden Sound was found. One difficulty here was that the singles were not with the LPs but in an area I hadn’t visited since depositing them down into this inky underworld. Bent double, one arm waving in front of me like a wizard conjuring up a toad, I inched onwards into total darkness.
Now let us go back in time from that moment as I shuffled about in the Stygian gloom to a few months previously – the Christmas holidays, in fact; my favourite time of the year. Though I always long to prolong the festivities, on Twelfth Night, following the big day, I refuse to allow the decorations to remain up a second longer than tradition allows. Wendy and her sister Carol had taken the children off to the pictures and I said the house would be decoration-free when they returned. This was quite a boast because I am only truly terrified of three things in life: lightning, wasps and balloons that suddenly go bang. I would literally rather put my head in a lion’s mouth than sit beside someone who refuses to concede when a balloon is fully inflated. However, when Sonny and Bonnie were small they liked to see these treacherous gasbags on display, signifying as it did for them that a celebration of some sort was in the offing. This particular year I feel we had rather overdone it with the amount of ghastly, distended orbs hanging about the place; when I set about gingerly removing the drawing pins that anchored them to various points, I found there must have been north of twenty. Against all odds, I bravely managed to pop three of this number, but the agonizing and nervous sweats involved in doing even that trio had meant the process took over twenty minutes, by which time I was on the verge of passing out. You couldn’t just bin them because I worked out that our council wheelie would only take about six fully inflated balloons, and that was probably enough to cause the fixture to float up and away across Deptford like a refuse-tip UFO. So I decided to postpone the day of reckoning by gathering them up and chucking them to the back of the cellar where there was nothing else of interest and where they could just deflate of their own accord over the coming weeks. Because that’s what balloons do eventually, isn’t it? They start to sag and then gently collapse as the air within escapes via minuscule flaws in the once secure knot. Don’t you believe it!
