Clapton (3 page)

On Saturday mornings I listened to
Children’s Favourites
introduced by the incredible Uncle Mac. I would be sitting by the radio at nine o’clock waiting for the pips, then the announcement, “Nine o’clock on Saturday morning means
Children’s Favourites
,” followed by the signature tune, a high-pitched orchestral piece called “Puffing Billy,” and then Uncle Mac himself saying, “Hello, children everywhere, this is Uncle Mac. Good morning to you all.” Then he would play a quite extraordinary selection of music, mixing children’s songs like “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” or “Nellie the Elephant” with novelty songs like “The Runaway Train” and folk songs such as “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” and occasionally something at the far end of the spectrum, like Chuck Berry singing “Memphis Tennessee,” which hit me like a thunderbolt when I heard it.

One particular Saturday he put on a song by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee called “Whooping and Hollering.” It had Sonny Terry playing the harmonica, then alternately whooping in falsetto, so fast, and with perfect timing, while Brownie played fast guitar accompaniment. I guess it was the novelty element that made Uncle Mac play it, but it cut through me like a knife, and after that I never missed
Children’s Favourites
, just in case he played it again, and he did, like on a rotation, over and over.

Music became a healer for me, and I learned to listen with all my being. I found that it could wipe away all the emotions of fear and confusion relating to my family. These became even more acute in 1954, when I was nine and my mother suddenly turned up in my life. By this time she was married, to a Canadian soldier named Frank MacDonald, and she brought with her two young children, my half brother and sister, Brian, who was six, and Cheryl, who was one. We went to meet my mother when she got off the boat at Southampton, and down the gangplank came this very glamorous, charismatic woman, with her auburn hair up high in the fashion of the day. She was very good-looking, though there was a coldness to her looks, a sharpness. She came off the boat laden with expensive gifts that her husband Frank had sent over from Korea, where he had been stationed during the war. We were all given silk jackets with dragons embroidered on them, and lacquered boxes and things like that.

Even though I knew the truth about her by now, and Rose and Jack were aware of this, nobody said anything when we got home, till one evening, when we were all sitting in the front room of our tiny house, and I suddenly blurted out to Pat, “Can I call you Mummy now?” During an awful moment of embarrassment, the tension in the room was intolerable. The unspoken truth was finally out. Then she said in a very kindly way, “I think it’s best, after all they’ve done for you, that you go on calling your grandparents Mum and Dad,” and in that moment I felt total rejection.

Though I tried to accept and understand what she was saying to me, it was beyond my grasp. I had expected that she would sweep me up in her arms and take me away to wherever she had come from. My disappointment was unbearable, and almost immediately turned into hatred and anger. Things quickly became very difficult for everybody. I became surly and withdrawn, rejecting everyone’s affection, as I felt I had been rejected. Only my Auntie Audrey, Jack’s sister, was able to get through, as I was her favorite, and she would come and see me once a week, bringing me toys and sweets, and gently trying to reach me. I would often abuse her and be openly cruel to her, but deep down inside I was very grateful for her love and attention.

Things were not made any easier by the fact that Pat, who was now referred to in public as my “sister,” in order to avoid complicated and embarrassing explanations, stayed on for the better part of a year. Because they’d come from abroad, and the kids had Canadian accents, they were treated like stars in the village and given special treatment. I felt shoved aside. I even resented my little half brother Brian, who looked up to me and always wanted to come out and play with my pals. One day I was having a tantrum and I stormed out of the house onto the Green. Pat came after me, and I just turned on her and shouted, “I wish you’d never come here! I wish you’d go away!”—and in that single moment I remembered just how idyllic my life had really been up until that day. It had been so simple; there was just me and my parents, and even though I knew they were really my grandparents, I was getting all the attention and there was at least love and harmony in the house. With this new complication, it was just impossible to figure out where my emotions were supposed to go.

These events at home had a drastic effect on my school life. In those days, at age eleven, you had to take an exam called the “eleven plus,” which decided where you were going to go next, either to a grammar school for those with the top results, or a secondary modern school for those with lower grades. You took the exam at another school, which meant that we were all piled into buses and driven to a strange place, where we took exam after exam over the course of a whole day. I blanked on everything. I was so frightened by my surroundings and so insecure and scared that I just couldn’t respond, and the result was that I failed miserably. I didn’t particularly care, because going to either Guildford or Woking Grammar School would have meant being separated from my mates, none of whom were academics. They all excelled in physical sports and had a certain amount of scorn for schooling. As for Jack and Rose, if they were at all disappointed, they didn’t really show it.

So I ended up going to St. Bede’s Secondary Modern School in the neighboring village of Send, which is where I really began to make discoveries. It was the summer of 1956, and Elvis was top of the charts. I met a boy at the school who was a newcomer to Ripley. His name was John Constantine. He came from a well-off middle-class family who lived on the outskirts of the village, and we became friends because we were so different from everybody else. Neither of us fit in. While everybody else at school was into cricket and football, we were into clothes and buying 78 rpm records, for which we were scorned and ridiculed. We were known as “the Loonies.” I used to go to his house a lot, and his parents had a radiogram, which was a combination radio and gramophone. It was the first one I had seen. John had a copy of “Hound Dog,” Elvis’s number one, and we played it over and over. There was something about the music that made it totally irresistible to us, plus it was being made by someone not much older than we were, who was like us, but who appeared to be in control of his own destiny, something we could not even imagine.

I got my first record player the following year. It was a Dansette, and the first single I ever bought was “When,” a number one hit for the Kalin Twins that I’d heard on the radio. Then I bought my first album,
The “Chirping” Crickets
, by Buddy Holly and the Crickets, followed by the soundtrack album of
High Society.
The Constantines were also the only people I knew in Ripley who had a TV, and we used to watch
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
, which was the first TV show to have American performers on, who were so far ahead on every level. I had just won a prize at school (for of all things neatness and tidiness), a book on America, so I was particularly obsessed with it. One night they had Buddy Holly on the show, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. That was when I saw my first Fender guitar. Jerry Lee Lewis was singing “Great Balls of Fire,” and the bass player had a Fender Precision Bass. It was like seeing an instrument from outer space, and I said to myself: “That’s the future—that’s what I want.” Suddenly I realized I was in a village that was never going to change, yet there on TV was something out of the future. And I wanted to go there.

One teacher at St. Bede’s, Mr. Swan, an art teacher, seemed to recognize that something about me was worthwhile, that I had artistic skills, and he went out of his way to try and help me. He also taught handwriting, and one of the first things he taught me was to write with an Italic pen. I was a little afraid of him, because he was known to be a strong disciplinarian and was very austere, but he was extremely kind to me, which got through to me on some level. So when it came time for me to take the thirteen plus, an exam designed for students who missed passing the eleven plus, I decided that I would try really hard because I owed Mr. Swan something for his kindness. The result was that, with some misgivings, as I knew it would mean leaving all my friends at St. Bede’s, I passed, aged thirteen, into Hollyfield Road School, Surbiton.

Hollyfield meant big changes for me. I was given a bus pass, and every day I had to travel on my own up to Surbiton from Ripley on the Green Line, a half-hour journey, to go to school with people I’d never met. It was very tough the first few days, and hard to know what to do about my old friendships, because I knew that quite a few of them would peter out. At the same time it was very exciting because at last I was out in the big, wide world. Hollyfield was different in that, though it was a regular secondary school, it also contained the junior art department of Kingston Art School. So while we would study normal things like history, English, and math, a couple of days a week we would do nothing but art: figure drawing, still lifes, working with paint and clay. For the first time in my life I actually started shining, and I felt like I was hitting my stride in every way.

As far as my old friends were concerned, I had moved up in the world, and though they knew to a certain extent that this was okay, they still couldn’t help but have a go at me about it. I knew I was on the move. Hollyfield changed my perspective on life. It was a much wilder environment with more exciting people. It was on the edge of London, so we were skipping class a lot, going to pubs, and going into Kingston to buy records at Bentalls, the department store. I was hearing so many new things all at the same time. I became aware of folk music, New Orleans jazz, and rock ’n’ roll all at the same time, and it mesmerized me.

People always say that they remember exactly where they were the day that President Kennedy was assassinated. I don’t, but I do remember walking onto the school playground on the day Buddy Holly died, and the feeling that was there. The place was like a graveyard, and no one could speak, they were in such shock. Of all the music heroes of the time, he was the most accessible, and he was the real thing. He wasn’t a glamour-puss, he had no act as such, he clearly was a real guitar player, and to top it all off, he wore glasses. He was one of us. It was amazing the effect his death had on us. After that, some say the music died. For me it really seemed to burst open.

The art annex at Hollyfield Road School was a short distance away up Surbiton Hill Road, and on the days when we were doing art we would walk up to this building where our teacher put us to work doing still lifes, sculpture, or drawing. On the way up we would pass Bell’s Music Store, a shop that had made its name selling piano accordions when they were all the rage. Then, when the skiffle boom took off, made popular in the mid-fifties by Lonnie Donegan with songs like “Rock Island Line” and “The Grand Coulee Dam,” Bell’s changed track and became a guitar store, and I would always stop and look at the instruments in the window. Since most of the music I liked best was guitar music, I decided that I would like to learn to play, so I badgered Rose and Jack to buy me one. Maybe I harped about it so much they did it to keep me quiet, but, whatever the reason, one day they took the bus up there with me and put a deposit on the instrument I had singled out as being the guitar of my dreams.

The instrument I had set my eyes on was a Hoyer, made in Germany and costing about two pounds. An odd instrument, it looked like a Spanish guitar, but instead of nylon, it had steel strings. It was a curious combination, and for a novice, it was really quite painful to play. Of course, it was a case of putting the cart before the horse, because I couldn’t even tune a guitar let alone play one. I had no one to teach me, so I set about teaching myself, and it was not an easy task.

To begin with, I had not expected the guitar to be quite so big, almost the same size I was. Once I was able to hold it, I couldn’t get my hand round the neck, and I could hardly press the strings down, they were so high. Playing it seemed an impossible task, and I was overwhelmed by the reality of it. At the same time, I was unbelievably excited. The guitar was very shiny and somehow virginal. It was like a piece of equipment from another universe, so glamorous, and as I tried to strum it, I felt like I was really crossing into grown-up territory.

The first song I chose to learn was a folk song, “Scarlet Ribbons,” made popular by Harry Belafonte, but I had also heard a bluesy version by Josh White. I learned it totally by ear, by listening and playing along to the record. I had a small portable tape recorder, my pride and joy, a little reel-to-reel Grundig that Rose had given me for my birthday, and I would record my attempts to play and then listen to them over and over again until I thought I’d got it right. It was made more difficult because, as I later discovered, the guitar was not a very good one. On a more expensive instrument the strings would normally be lower in relation to the fingerboard, to facilitate the movement of the fingers, but on a cheaper or badly made instrument, the strings will be low at the top of the fingerboard, and as they get closer to the bridge they get higher and higher, which makes them hard to press down and painful to play. I got off to a pretty poor start because I almost immediately broke one of the strings, and since I didn’t have any others, I had to learn to play with only five, and played that way for quite a while.

Going to Hollyfield Road School did a lot to enhance my consciousness of image, as I was meeting some heavyweight characters there who had very definite ideas about art and fashion. It had started for me in Ripley with jeans, which in the early days, when I was about twelve, had to be black and have triple green stitching down the outside, very cutting-edge stuff at the time. Italian-style clothes came next, suits with jackets, cut very short, and tapered trousers with winkle-picker shoes. For us, and for most other families in Ripley, everything was bought from catalogs, like the Littlewoods catalog, and, in my case, was altered if necessary by Rose. The guitar went with the beatnik look, which came in the middle of my time at Hollyfield. This consisted of skintight jeans from Moffats, taken in down the inside, a black crew neck pullover, a combat jacket from Millets—complete with “Ban the bomb” signs—and moccasins made up from a kit.