I Know This Much: From Soho to Spandau

The woman stood. She was young.

‘Hello, Gary,’ she said, ‘it’s lovely to meet you. I’m Anna Scher.’

Her beaming face and the lightly tongued Ts of her Irish accent rapidly melted me into the semicircle of people and, with a fragrant hand upon my shoulder, she introduced me as though I were the answer to all their problems, the missing piece to their puzzle, the most important person to ever enter the room. This was her skill and it made me stay for the next eight years.

Anna Scher was a diminutive, twenty-three-year-old Irish Jew from Cork. Coming to England at fifteen, she found her desire to be an actress squashed by her authoritarian father and, as a compromise, she went into drama teaching. Her long, blonde hair, plump mouth and honeyed complexion were made all the more striking by her fierce control of some of the wildest kids from the borough. She managed to exert this power while dressed in miniskirt and suede boots. I fell in love with her.

The man sitting next to Anna, with long, dark hair and skinny-rib tank top, was Charles Verrall, Anna’s assistant. He gently played second fiddle to her strident lead, yet they seemed to quietly harmonise. Although their relationship was never apparent to the students, he was in fact Anna’s lover. Tall and thin, with a patient temperament, he’d studied to be a scientist at Oxford but found himself enjoying the rewards from teaching working-class kids how to act. Charles was everything we weren’t: upper-middle-class, well spoken and gentle, but contrary to the fashion of the time, neither he nor Anna attempted to be one of us or change themselves to suit. Yet the respect that they received was palpable.

Anna’s technique was praise mixed with discipline and she delivered it for just two shillings a lesson. Even if your kernel of talent was extremely small, she would highlight it and sing its praises.Many of the children had never experienced approval or encouragement and this was hard for them to trust, but very quickly their spirits grew.

Her method was improvisation. We never looked at scripts or texts, and Shakespeare or Pinter were never mentioned, although Martin Luther King and Gandhi may well have been. We were, on the whole, not literary creatures, and generally frightened of books or anything that resembled schoolwork, so, without any level of condescension, Anna cleverly built her classes around what we could create ourselves. She would get us to play out mini-dramas based on problems that we all knew uncomfortably well: communicating with teachers or parents; issues of unfinished homework or coming home late; and, more importantly, bullying.

It might begin with one of us playing the role of the Parent and the other the Child returning from school or play, trying to hide the fact that he or she is suffering; a simple exercise that was set in the world we knew. As a by-product we’d gradually learn how to deal with those situations and, by acting them out at Anna’s, exorcise any frustrations that we felt in real life. It was a kind of gestalt therapy by default, spooling out our inner anxieties, giving them a voice and, to a certain extent, freeing us of them. Acting is about tapping into one’s emotions and, with Anna’s kids, the emotion that poured out initially was anger.

At that time, we were mostly young people from the poor side of Essex Road, but Anna’s would gradually become a meeting place for the different classes and cultures of the Islington kid. The borough was divided into two distinct sides by its main road, which ran from Newington Green to the Angel. On our side, the treeless streets of council accommodations, rough and rented; on the other, the leafy lanes of mortgaged Georgian homes, proud and well-proportioned. Here, three families to a house; there, one (plus, of course, an au pair or two). The child of the printer will also meet the child of the professional at Dame Alice Owen’s grammar school, but that is for the future, a future that will have Anna take her theatre across the Islington divide and lose it to a group of trustees, and the attractive standing girl and the fat one from the sofa become household names. But for now we are at the beginning, and it is gloriously innocent.

‘I’m going to be in a film.’ Stephen was behaving quite normally considering his news.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘It’s called Junket 89.’

He was about to take on the lead role in a Children’s Film Foundation production. His mother seemed unimpressed and carried on with her tidying, but then, to our parents, born before the age of desperate celebrity-craving, it was all childish frivolity, and to be too excited would only encourage us to let it get in the way of normality. A picture of Stephen’s father looked on stoically. I glanced at the upturned glass on the Ouija board. It remained unmoved.

As for me, I was amazed and envious. Every Saturday morning from the age of six, I’d walk up the Essex Road to the Ancient Egyptian styled ABC cinema. In my jeans pocket (not Tesco Bombers, but some equally cheap market-stall pair) I’ve two bob, round my waist maybe a snake-belt, on my feet possibly Trackers (the ones with the animal footprints on the sole and the tiny compass in the heel—on the other hand, it could have been the later design, Grand Prix, with the racing-car tyre I Know This Much (4thEstate) 22/7/09 13:44 Page 31 tread), and in my mouth an anatomically pink Bazooka Joe. I was on my way to Saturday Morning Pictures.

I was an ABC Minor and would faithfully belt out the song that began the morning’s programme: ‘We are the boys and girls well known as the Minors of the ABC…’ as about two hundred of us, wired to the tits on Jublees, Munchies and Kia-Ora, infested the cinema with such virulence that even the toughest usherettes would scurry off to cleaning cupboards for a couple of hours and smoke themselves sick. But the manager, in our case a balding Uriah Heep, hard bitten and seasoned from years of abusive children, would have no truck with us urchins, and if the noise became too much—which was inevitable, given the combination of parental absence and unnatural food colouring—would halt the film in a second, march down the aisle in his tired maroon blazer, and threaten us with early expulsion into the light.

The first half of the programme had not changed since my father was a boy and invariably started with a cartoon. This was followed by a non-sequitous episode of either the 1930s Flash Gordon or the original 1940s ‘fat’ Batman serial, and then a Western. In accordance with some long-forgotten lore of cinema, the cavalry coming meant you had to lift your seat and drum your feet rapidly on its underside until the manager turned the lights on or the cavalry arrived.

The programme would always end with a Children’s Film Foundation movie. This might be a fifties, black-and-white, gritty, Osborne-for-kids, kitchen-sink morality tale, with a gang of malnourished children with dirty knees finding a stolen FA Cup or whatever else would have them and a dog scurrying over a bomb site; or it could be a full-colour, contemporary story, set in a world where children looked like us and were always right.

The CFF had been making movies for Saturday mornings since 1951, all shot on 35mm and aiming for a high quality of directing and acting. Junket 89 was to be their next production and it would co-star a thirty-six-year-old Richard Wilson—who would later become popular as the grumpy old man from One Foot in the Grave—as an absentminded science master, and my mate Stephen as his eponymous pupil. The other child roles and minor parts were all to be filled by Anna Scher kids and, as I would soon find out, that would also include me.

The story has Junket stealing a ‘matter-transporter’ from the science master and keeping it in his locker, number 89. It allows its user to ‘jump’ to different locations. A ‘returning device’ is in the shape of a cricket ball, a ruse to end up at Lord’s Cricket Ground and have the real Gary Sobers appear as himself. On the way there are many high jinks involving two stupid bullies who get their comeuppance, a tap dancing mummy’s boy whose mother (played wonderfully by Fanny Carby, one of the original members of Joan Littlewood’s company) becomes embroiled in some clothes swapping with the headmaster, and the Benny Hill-style appearance of a sexy French maid.

I have a tainted recollection of filming Junket 89 that summer of 1970. The producers and the director, Peter Plummer, had been coming to watch us at Anna’s and picked their leads without auditions. I was to play one of Junket’s classmates, a non-speaking role but one that required quite a few filming days. Around then I became the brunt of some hurtful teasing, or, more correctly, bullying. I was a skinny new boy, not good at football, shy with girls and getting lots of attention from Anna. I was very close to Stephen and always sat next to him, all of which prompted two or three of the lads, including a spiteful one named Norman, to decide I was a ‘poof’ and ‘definitely queer’. I didn’t even know what it meant. For them, Anna’s ‘therapy’ wasn’t quite working yet. One day’s filming became horrendous for me, with some brutal teasing. I wasn’t physically scared of them, just humiliated, a painful experience that still makes me wince to remember. The pain had everything to do with separation and not belonging. The next day I didn’t want to return.

The meeting place for everyone was on the corner by the post office opposite my house, where a bus would take us to the set. I peered through the net curtains and saw them gathering there like a storm; all friends; a clucking gang. My mother was having none of it, and to my horror, marched across the street to talk to Anna. I cringed as the main antagonists watched the conversation. Oh my God, she’s made it worse. I will be killed if I go there now. I sank lower behind the sill. She returned, and with a tone oddly sharp, considering she was on my side, told me that it’d be all right and to get over there now. With stomach-churning apprehension, but abiding faith in Anna and my mother, I crossed the road and went immediately to Stephen. Thankfully, she was right, and Norman et al. never made another snide remark about me again.

Recently a series of the best of SaturdayMorning Pictures was issued on DVD and Junket 89 was one of them.With some curiosity, I slip the disc into the machine, hit play, and the movie fades up. The CFF opening titles have a familiarity that comes from being burned into a fresh young brain. The shot is of the fountains at Trafalgar Square with St Martin-in-the-Fields dominating. The bells are ringing out across the square and then the feeding pigeons suddenly take wing into a perfect sunlit sky. It’s a symbol of Britain at its Ladybird Book best. Fade out and up on to hands filling the screen and a football-terrace clap begins. And here’s Stephen, blond and squinting in the early seventies sunshine, just how I remember him. And there’s Linda Robson, the attractive ‘standing girl’ from my first visit to Anna’s, in miniskirt and long white socks. Twenty years later, Linda will become nationally famous in the hit sitcom Birds of a Feather, along with her best friend, the ‘fat girl’ from the sofa, Pauline Quirke. Pauline will appear any second now, in her sulky ten-year-old incarnation, but before then the camera pans down a school building and follows a young Christopher Benjamin as the pompous headmaster. A school bell rings for playtime and here’s an interior shot of kids coming down the stairs, screaming and fighting. The faces are all familiar. Here’s my good friend, Tony Bayliss, the coolest dresser I knew at the time. He’s the only one wearing Levi’s, narrow, of course, and also a Brutus check shirt with button-down collar and a half-pleated back (both bought from a small boutique at the Angel run by ex-mods), a real suedehead look, and one that I would soon aspire to. He’s already ahead of the game and starting to grow his hair. Here’s Ray Burdis, who would enter my life again twenty years later as one of the producers of The Krays. And here is Mario, playing the ‘mummy’s boy’, who, in a few years’ time, will try to seduce me to the sound of a Diana Ross record. Hopping down the steps comes a sweet-looking black girl, hair pinned up. I can’t see her clearly, but now she appears again, face smiling, and I see that it’s Hyacinth, gaily unaware that she would, sadly, only have a short life.

Cockney voices sing the title song: ‘Who takes the cake then lands in ‘ot wa’er? I know because he’s a mate o’ mine. It’s Junket eigh’y nine!’ This was what the producers wanted when they picked Anna’s children, genuine street kids, not drama-school fakes or hams. It’s a different cockney to the London voice of a ten-year-old today, but this is the London of my memory, and here I am, coming down the stairs.

During this process of thinking and writing about my past I suppose I’ve envisaged myself as a slightly smaller version of who I am today, albeit younger, obviously. But as I rewind and play again, the boy I see here is not the one I’ve had in my mind; he’s fresher, with no great experience or aspirations; he’s not seeing this moment through any nostalgic haze or wry cynicism, and hasn’t even thought about playing in a band yet. He comes from a different world to the man watching him now.

I suddenly feel a sadness, a pathetic desire to speak to him, and, with a deep sense of loss, realise that I miss him; because he no longer exists.

CHAPTER FOUR WATERLOO SUNRISE (#ulink_4f91e93b-0103-5da4-aa3c-d37c2065703d)

The guitar was awkward to carry. I held it by the neck, my skinny arms aching as I fought to keep it from hitting the pavement. I had its body tied in a plastic shopping bag, probably from some peculiar idea of decency—it felt wrong to parade the thing exposed through the street, especially its two mournful ‘F’ holes. A late spring sun was starting to warm the air as I walked the few hundred yards to school. Apart from where Bentham Court now stood, our street had survived the Blitz—and the developers—and the little front gardens of the more privileged tenants blossomed with roses and hydrangeas, their morning scent reassuring. Being so close, school felt part of my home, my little universe of four blocks that included the swings, shops, family and friends.

Every lunch break I would come home with Martin for ‘dinner’. Dinner was always at one o’clock—the evening meal at six being ‘tea’ and usually something like Spam or fish fingers (sometimesMum would boil a pig’s trotter as a ‘treat’—a pink and often hairy amputation in a bowl of broth that you’d tug at with your teeth until it was mutilated). But dinner meant chops, sausages or mincemeat, and Dad would come back from work for that hour and we’d sit together as a family. It was wonderful but, with some sadness, I was already anticipating its loss. In September I would begin at the local grammar school, Dame Alice Owen’s, and today Rotherfield leavers were to receive their end-of-school prizes. The headmistress, Miss Bannatyne, would make a little speech, hand out the books and then, at some unrehearsed point, I was to provide the entertainment by performing two songs that I’d written.

I’d had a choice that Christmas: to ignore the guitar and sulk until it was returned to the music shop in Holloway Road for the five pounds it cost, or make an attempt at learning it. I soon found myself becoming obsessed with the thing. I loved it most of all for the privacy it gave me. This was different to the solitary wonder of books and comics; here I could create the atmosphere I wanted and the sound of it soon became a close friend.

BertWeedon was a London guitarist who’d had some success in the fifties. A smiling, unassuming celebrity, he based his style on Les Paul and enjoyed a hit with ‘Guitar Boogie Shuffle’. Play in a Day was his successful tutorial book for the guitar. Its red cover with black-and-white photo of the smiling, freckled Bert looked dated even in 1970, but inside was a method based around chords and rhythm that was simple for the novice. Hours were spent with Bert attempting to get my fingers into the correct positions, which wasn’t easy as my guitar’s steel strings were like cheesewire on my young fingertips. The usual guitar for beginners was the nylon-stringed Spanish version; however, the sound and style of my guitar, picked by my father by chance and from budget, were much more rock‘n’roll. And it also looked damn good in a mirror.

And then something odd happened. I’m not sure what inspired it or why I did it as I had no concept of writing a song, but once comfortable with some prosaic chord changes on the cheese-cutter, I began to sing my own melody over them. It was thrilling and I couldn’t stop lalaring it.Mr Allison, my class teacher at Rotherfield, was a guitar player too. Young and geeky, in Buddy Holly glasses and tweed jacket, he offered to help me with my playing during break times and I showed him what I’d come up with. A friend, Gary Jefferies, was present, and Mr Allison suggested that we both try writing some words to go with the tune. As it was the end of March, he thought that it might have an Easter theme.

My mother had deep beliefs, but like alcohol, church was only for weddings, and though within a year or so I was, precociously, to dump all spiritual belief, Religious Knowledge was at that time one of my better subjects. Equipped with the story the lyrics for the song came easily and the first verse still remains firmly in my head.With soft rhymes and bad grammar, I was obviously made for pop music.

Jesus rode through Jericho on his way to the cross

He met blind Bartimaeus, who his sight had lost

Jesus touched his eyes and Bartimaeus could see again

So Jesus rode on safely to Jeru-oo-oo-salem.

Probably under the influence of a recent Roger Whittaker single, I decided to intersperse the verses with an annoyingly whistled phrase, but Mr Allison was impressed, and within the week we had a group of children from my class singing it. We performed my first song in front of the school just before Easter—whistling included. My parents were thrilled; their gift was worth more than they’d thought.

That weekend Dad drove me and my guitar to Waterloo. In the novel Brighton Rock the anti-hero, Pinkie, records a nasty message for the innocent Rose in an acetate-booth at a railway station. The booths were the size of telephone boxes and once inside you’d pop a coin in a slot and through a window you’d watch a smooth acetate disc being lowered on to a turntable. A needle landed and as you spoke your voice would be etched into the disc’s soft blankness. When finished the disc would slide out, equipped with an envelope for you to post it to a loved one or, as in Pinkie’s case, not so loved. In 1971 on the concourse at Waterloo Station stood what must have been the last booth in London, the telephone now being ubiquitous, except of course in our house, where we’d have to wait another four years for that modern pleasure.

I slipped the plastic bag off my guitar and, holding it ready to play, stepped into the booth.

‘Dad, my guitar won’t fit in.’

‘Go on, I’ve got to shut the door, you’ll be all right.’

He lifted the guitar gently and I bent sideways about ninety degrees. The guitar’s arm was now facing downwards. Dad carefully closed the door and I shuffled farther in.

‘Hang on,’ he said, opening it again, ‘I’ve got to put the money in.’ His arm reached through and the door banged against the front of my guitar as I pressed tighter against the opposite wall. ‘OK, it’s ready. Wait for the light. It lasts a minute.’

A minute? How long was my song? He closed the airlock and it went silent. I saw the fresh, black disc drop and the needle approach its edge. The red light went on and I looked outside at Dad, who was mouthing ‘Go on’ through the glass. I began strumming.

‘Jesus rode through Jericho on his way to the cross…’

The station was busy with Easter trippers and I was aware of people glancing at us while I sang and Dad proudly guarded his young artist’s recording studio. I reached the final verse and saw that the needle was only a few revolutions away from the end of the disc. I sped up, trying to fit it all in. The final bars were now frantic as I began racing towards the end; and then the light went off. The needle lifted and the disc whirred and started its sedate little journey towards the exit hole. I hadn’t quite finished.

Nevertheless, I’d made my first record. It felt warm and smelt of summer pavements. I clutched it all the way home in the car, staring at its grooves and wondering at the fine impression my song had made. I played it over and over on my parents’ gramophone until its tiny trenches, ploughed that Easter weekend onWaterloo Station, wore into each other and my voice became a soft shadow, receding into the distance, until eventually I was gone.

The school hall was abuzz with excited pupils. No classes made it too thrilling to behave in any way other than berserk, and the staff were struggling to get everyone quiet and seated in class rows. I settled at the side, my guitar on my lap, plastic bag removed.

At the end of the little hall, thin Miss Bannatyne stood next to a tall, grey, stately-looking man in a long maroon robe. His huge chin supported a wide friendly grin. Around his neck hung a heavy plain cross. ‘Good morning, everyone. I’d like to welcome the Bishop of Stepney, Trevor Huddleston, who has kindly agreed to hand out the prizes today.’

There would have been some singing and some recorder playing, and a long-drawn-out giving of prizes to the leavers. At some point during the proceedings, I was called up and sat on a chair in front of the school. My now minuscule shorts rode up tight into my crotch and the guitar felt cold on my bulging, naked legs that were being drained of blood by the second. Uncomfortably, and unseasonably, it being midsummer, I played and sang ‘Jesus Rode Through Jericho’—an encore from Easter that my headmistress had insisted upon—followed by a new song. The record-buying and private listening having influenced my playing, I’d written a more contemporary follow-up to the now dissolved first acetate.