Clapton (2 page)

In one respect I was a very lucky child. As much as there was fairly confusing stuff going on at home and dynamics that were difficult to understand, outside there was another whole world of fantasy and the countryside, which I lived in with my pals. Guy, Stuart, and Gordon were my best friends, and we all lived in the same row of houses on the Green. I don’t know if they knew the truth about my origins, and I don’t suppose it would have meant anything if they had. To them I was “El Capitán,” sometimes shortened to “El,” but mostly I was known as “Ric.” Once school was over, we would be outside all the time on our bikes.

My first bike was a James, given to me by Jack after I’d pestered him to give me a Triumph Palm Beach, like the one he had, which was metallic scarlet and cream and was as far as I was concerned the ultimate bike. Because it was a proper grown-up bike, however, and they didn’t make them for kids, he bought me the James instead. Though it was basically the same color scheme, it wasn’t the real thing, and however hard I tried to be grateful, I was really disappointed, and I think I probably showed it. I didn’t let it get me down, though, because by taking one of the brakes off, removing the mudguards, stripping it down, and giving it different tires—the kind for riding over mud—I turned it into what we call a “track” bike.

We’d all meet on the Green after school and decide where we were going to go. In the summer we’d mostly go down to the river Wey, just outside the village. Everybody went there, grown-ups, too, and one particular place was attractive to us because there was a weir. On one side it was seriously deep and we weren’t allowed to swim there—a couple of kids had drowned in that area over the years—but where the weir came down into the shallows and it looked like a kind of waterfall, there were little ledges and pools on either side where it was safe to swim and play around in the mud. Just beyond that it would pan out, deepen up again, and turn into good fishing water, and that’s where I learned to fish.

Rose bought me a rod from a catalog. It was a cheap, very basic bamboo rod, painted green, with a cork handle and a proper fixed reel, but I really loved it from day one. This was the start of my life as a kit junkie. I used to love just to look at it, and I probably played with it as much as I fished with it. We mostly used bread as bait, and because we were fishing near to proper fishermen, we had to be very careful not to get in their way. Normally the best we could hope for was to catch a gudgeon, but one memorable day I caught a fairly big roach that must have weighed a couple of pounds. Another fisherman who was coming up the bank, a real angler, stopped and said, “That’s a pretty decent fish you’ve got there,” and I was over the moon.

When we weren’t down by the river, we would head off to “the Fuzzies.” This was the name for the woods behind the Green, where we used to play serious games of cowboys and Indians, or Germans and English. We created our own version of the Somme in there, digging trenches deep enough for us to stand in and shoot out of. Parts of the woods were so thick with gorse that one could easily get lost, and we called this area “the forbidden city” or “the lost world.” When I was little, I didn’t go into the lost world without an older boy or a gang, because I really did believe that if I went in on my own, I’d never come out. I had my first encounter with a snake in there. I was in the middle of a game and heard a hissing noise. I looked down, standing with my legs slightly apart, and an adder went between them, a big one about three feet long. I went absolutely rigid. I’d never seen a snake before, but Rose was terrified of them and had passed her fear of them on to me. It scared the shit out of me, and I had nightmares about it for ages.

Occasionally, when I was about ten or eleven, we would play games of “kiss-chase” in the Fuzzies, which was the only time girls were involved in our games. The rules were that the girls were given time to hide, and then we went to look for them, and if we found them the prize would be a kiss. Sometimes we played a higher-stakes version of the game in which the discovered girls had to pull down their knickers. But on the whole we were rather frightened of the girls in the village. They seemed aloof and rather powerful, and anyway showed little interest in us, their attentions being reserved for cooler types, like Eric Beesley, who always cut a bit of a dash and was the first one in Ripley with a crew cut. My experience with the pornography had certainly left me with the feeling that any advances made toward a girl would produce some kind of retribution, and I had no intention of getting caned every other day.

On Saturday mornings, quite a lot of us used to go to the pictures in Guildford, to the ABC Minors Club, which was a real treat. We would watch these incredible cliffhanger serials, like Batman, Flash Gordon, and Hopalong Cassidy, and comedians like the Three Stooges and Charlie Chaplin. They always had an emcee and competitions, where we were encouraged to get up onstage and sing or do impersonations, which I dreaded and always avoided. We were no angels, however. When the lights went down, we would all bring out our homemade catapults and fire conkers at the screen.

In the early 1950s, a typical evening’s entertainment for Ripley kids was sitting in the bus shelter watching the traffic, in the vain hope that a sports car would go by, and once every six months we might see an Aston Martin or a Ferrari, which would make our day. We were desperate for excitement, and nothing was quite as exciting as breaking the law…within reason. We might go “scrumping,” stealing apples, on the Dunsborough estate, which in terms of excitement was huge because it was owned by film star Florence Desmond, and we would sometimes see her famous friends walking on the Green. I once got Tyrone Power’s autograph there. Also the likelihood of getting caught was quite high, as gamekeepers were usually prowling around.

Other times we would go shoplifting in Cobham or Woking, mostly stealing silly things like ties or handkerchiefs, or indulge in the occasional bout of vandalizing. For example, we’d get on one of the trains from Guildford that stopped at all the small local stations and choose an empty compartment—the local trains had no corridors—and in between stations we would completely demolish it. We would smash all the mirrors, tear down the maps on the wall, cut up the luggage rack nets with our penknives, slash all the upholstery to ribbons, and then get out at the next station hooting with laughter. The fact that we knew it was wrong, and yet we could do it and get away with it, gave us a huge adrenaline rush. Of course, if we had been caught, it could have meant being sent to Borstal, but miraculously we never were.

Smoking was an important rite of passage in those days, and occasionally we would get our hands on some cigarettes. I remember when I was twelve, getting hold of some Du Mauriers, and I was particularly intrigued by the packaging. With its dark red flip-top box and silver crisscross pattern, it was very sophisticated and grown-up looking. Rose either saw me smoking or found the box in my pocket, and she got me alone and said, “Okay, if you want to smoke, then let’s have a cigarette together. We’ll see if you can really smoke.” She lit up one of these Du Mauriers, and I put it in my mouth and took a puff. “No, no, no!” she said. “Take it down, take it down! That’s not smoking.” I didn’t know what she meant until she said, “You breathe it in, breathe it in.” Then I tried it, and of course I was violently ill and never smoked again till I was twenty-one.

The one thing I didn’t like was fighting, which was a popular pastime among a lot of the kids. Pain and violence frightened me. The two families to avoid in Ripley were the Masterses and the Hills, who were both extremely hard. The Masterses were my cousins, the children of my Auntie Nell, a memorable lady because she suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, though in those days she was just considered a little eccentric. When she spoke, her speech was interspersed with the words “fuck” and “Eddie,” so she would come to the house and say, “Hello, Ric, fuck Eddie. Is your mum in, fuck Eddie?” I absolutely adored her. Her husband, Charlie, was twice her size and covered in tattoos, and they had fourteen sons, the Masters brothers, who were lethal and usually in some kind of trouble. The Hills were also all boys, about ten in all, and they were the village villains, or so it seemed. They were my nemeses. I was always afraid of getting beaten up by them, so whenever they would pick on me, I would tell my cousins, hoping to cause a vendetta between the Hills and the Masterses. Mostly I tried to stay away from all of them.

From the very earliest days, music played a big role in my life because, in the days before TV, it was a very important part of our community experience. On Saturday nights, most of the adults gathered at the British Legion Club to drink and smoke and listen to local entertainers like Sid Perrin, a great pub singer with a powerful voice, who sang in the style of Mario Lanza and whose singing would drift out onto the street, where we would be sitting with a lemonade and a packet of crisps. Another village musician was Buller Collier, who lived in the end house in our row and used to stand outside his front door and play a piano accordion. I loved to watch him, not just for the sound of the squeeze-box, but for its appearance, because it was red and black and it shimmered.

I was more used to hearing the piano, because Rose loved to play. My earliest memories are of her playing a harmonium, or reed organ, she kept in the front room, and later she acquired a small piano. She would also sing, mostly standards, such as “Now Is the Hour,” a popular hit by Gracie Fields, “I Walk Beside You,” and “Bless This House” by Joseph Locke, who was very popular in our house and the first singer to captivate me with the sound of his voice. My own initial attempts at singing took place on the stairs leading up to the bedrooms in our house. I found out that one place had an echo, and I used to sit there singing the songs of the day, mostly popular ballads, and to me it sounded like I was singing on a record.

A good proportion of any musical genes that I may have inherited came from Rose’s family, the Mitchells. Her dad, Granddad Mitchell, a great big man who was a bit of a drinker and a womanizer, played not only the accordion but also the violin, and he used to hang out with a celebrated local busker named Jack Townshend, who played guitar, fiddle, and spoons, and they’d play traditional music together. Granddad lived on Newark Lane, just around the corner from us, and was an important figure in village life, particularly around harvest time, because he owned a traction engine. He was a little strange and not very friendly, and whenever I went round with my Uncle Adrian to see him, he would usually be sitting in his armchair, more often than not quite drunk.

Like Stansfield’s factory, there was something rather Dickensian about the whole thing. We used to visit him a lot, and it was from watching him play the violin that I got the idea to try and play myself. It just seemed so natural and easy for him. My folks got me an old violin from somewhere, and I think I was supposed to learn by just watching and listening, but I was still only ten years old and didn’t have the patience. All I could get out of it was a screeching noise. I just couldn’t grasp the physics of the instrument at all—I had played only the recorder up till then—and I quickly gave it up.

Uncle Adrian, my mother’s brother, who was still living with us when I was small, was an incredible character and a great influence on my life. Because I had been brought up to think of him as my brother, that was the way I always regarded him, even after I found out he was actually my uncle. He was heavily into fashion and fast cars, and owned a succession of Ford Cortinas, which were usually two-tone—peach and cream or something like that—with their interiors upholstered with fur and fake leopard skin and adorned with mascots. When he wasn’t mucking around with his cars, improving their appearance and performance, he was driving them very fast and sometimes crashing them. He was also an atheist who had an obsession with science fiction, and he had a cupboard full of paperbacks by Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut and other really good stuff.

Adrian was also an inventor, but most of his inventions were concentrated in the domestic sphere, such as his unique “vinegar dispenser.” He had a passion for vinegar, which he would put on everything, even custard. This was frowned on and finally forbidden by Rose. So he designed a secret vinegar dispenser, which basically consisted of a Fairy Liquid bottle, hidden under his armpit, with a tube coming out of it that went down his sleeve. He could then pass his hand over whatever he was eating, and, by secretly squeezing the bottle by lowering his arm, vinegar would invisibly spray over the plate.

He was very musical, too. He played chromatic harmonica, and was a great dancer. He loved to jitterbug and was very good at it. It was an amazing sight to see, because he had extremely long hair, which he kept greased down with tons of Brylcreem. Once he got going, his hair would fall down and cover his face, making him look like a creature from under the sea. He had a record player in his room and used to play me the jazz records he liked, things by Stan Kenton, the Dorsey Brothers, and Benny Goodman. It seemed like outlaw music at the time, and I felt the message coming through.

Most of the music I was introduced to from an early age came from the radio, which was permanently switched on in the house. I feel blessed to have been born in that period because, musically, it was very rich in its diversity. The program that everybody listened to without fail was
Two-Way Family Favourites
, a live show that linked the British forces serving in Germany with their families at home. It went out at twelve o’clock on Sundays, just when we were sitting down to lunch. Rose always cooked a really good Sunday lunch of roast beef, gravy, and Yorkshire pudding with potatoes, peas, and carrots, followed by something like “spotted dick” pudding and custard, and, with this incredible music playing, it was a real feast for the senses. We would hear the whole spectrum of music—opera, classical, rock ’n’ roll, jazz, and pop—so typically there might be something like Guy Mitchell singing “She Wears Red Feathers,” then a big-band piece by Stan Kenton, a dance tune by Victor Sylvester, maybe a pop song by David Whitfield, an aria from a Puccini opera like
La Bohème
, and, if I was lucky, Handel’s “Water Music,” which was one of my favorites. I loved any music that was a powerful expression of emotion.