Pie 'n' Mash and Prefabs (5 page)

Mr Moore was not nearly so keen on corporal punishment as Mr Brown was, although he wasn't entirely opposed to using it. I don't remember anyone ever being sent to the Headmaster and his worst action was a sharp smack on the bottom or on the legs. But he only did this to boys; he wouldn't touch girls. One day I heard him telling off one of the girls in our class for something she had done and he said to her, ‘If you were a boy, I'd give you a smack.' This struck me as most unfair. Why should girls be able to get away with doing what they liked without fear of reprisal whereas boys couldn't?

The other ‘old timer' at the school was Mr Bristow, who had been John's class teacher. Now retired, he came back every now and then to help out. He was quite a decent old boy and not like Mr Brown, whom everyone hated. The only other teacher who had been at Rushmore in John's time was the Headmaster, Mr ‘Fatty' Foreman. He, too, was a decent sort, though he never saw much of us as he mostly stayed in his office. I don't remember him ever doing any actual teaching.

Most of the other teachers were fairly young like Mr Moore. The two I saw most were Mr Wills and Mr Evans. Mr Wills taught the ‘B' stream and was responsible for destroying my illusion that teachers knew everything. One day, when I was
about nine years old, he came into our classroom and said loudly to Mr Moore, ‘What's the speed of light? Someone's just asked me and I can't remember.' I couldn't believe it, a teacher not knowing something! Impossible. Even with Mr Moore's immediate response, ‘186,000 miles per second,' I was still left in a state of shock that Mr Wills didn't know this.

Mr Evans was my favourite teacher. The sporty one, he did all the things we liked. He took us for games and also held drama classes after school, which I loved. His only failing was not recognising in me the great footballer I considered myself to be, but I put this down to the fact that the school employed one of the parents, Mr Hart, as an outside coach. I played at centre-half, which, sadly, was the favoured position of Mr Hart's son, John. Guess who he chose for the school team?

We got on better with cricket, though here again I never quite made the team except on one occasion when I came on as a substitute. However, I did manage to become the school's official scorer, so I went to every match. In those days, the school cricket team took part in a properly structured league with all the other local primary schools. Our home ground was on North Millfields, next to the children's playground. I became scorer by accident when the boy who was doing it was off sick one day. Mr Evans asked me if I'd like to do it. As it happened, I had a cold myself that day, and my parents had told me to come straight home after school. To make matters worse, the sky was very dark, threatening an impending storm; so, naturally, I said yes. Bob Marriott, who lived near me and passed my prefab on his way home, asked if he should tell my parents I would be late. I don't know why but I told him not to
tell them. So off I went to score my first match as Rushmore's official scorer. The rain held off for most of the match but then started to pour down and I faced the walk home with my cold in the pouring rain. When I got home, I explained where I'd been. Immediately they forgot their worries about what might have happened to me: Dad, who loved cricket, was so proud of me becoming the official scorer that was all he could talk about.

That first time I scored was also the first time I heard the same joke that every opposition scorer made. When we arrived, the two scorers got together to let the other know the names of his team members. Our opening bat was Alan Oakley, but we always just gave initials, so it was A. Oakley. I don't think there was one boy who didn't make some joke to the effect that we had Annie Oakley opening our batting and think it was a) highly amusing and b) original. I continued as Rushmore's official scorer until I left school.

The only sporting event I didn't enjoy with Mr Evans was swimming. On Friday afternoons, he took our class to Hackney Baths in Lower Clapton Road but he never really bothered to teach us how to swim. Because I couldn't swim, he used to leave me, along with the other non-swimmers, in the shallow end just playing around, while he concentrated on the swimmers and helping them get their 50-and 100-yards certificates. For me, the best part of the afternoon was going into the sweet shop next door to the baths to buy a piece of honeycomb, which I took home to share with Mum. She looked forward to this treat as much as I did. My friends Andy and Terry always came back with me and we'd sit down to watch
Jungle Jim,
starring former Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller, on television.

A good swimmer herself, Mum was disappointed by my lack of progress so she wrote a letter to the school, telling them that she was not going to let me go to any more swimming lessons and she would teach me herself. It never struck me as strange at the time but just writing this makes me wonder why the school agreed to this. However, agree they did and once under Mum's tuition I quickly learnt the rudiments of the breaststroke. My big breakthrough came one summer when we were on holiday and, on my return to school, I was allowed back to Mr Evans and his lessons. I joined the swimmers and quickly gained my 50-yards certificate. However, I have to say to this day I have never really been that keen on swimming.

Apart from sport, Mr Evans' other contribution to the life of the school was drama. As well as organising the annual Christmas play, he also ran a voluntary drama class after school. He taught me a lot about theatre techniques, both acting and technical. The best acting tip I can remember was his telling us that comedy acting was best done seriously. He got about seven or eight of us to stand in line and asked how we would march if he told us to make it funny. Some of the boys started doing exaggerated movements and making wild gestures as they were marching. He stopped us and got us to line up again, this time behind each other but as close as we could get, before saying, ‘Turn left and march in line without trying to be funny.' The result was hilarious as we marched in step so close together, trying not to bump into each other. It looked really comical but we were trying to do it seriously without the exaggeration and silly gestures. Lesson learnt.

Mr Evans was also the first person in authority I came across
who didn't try to persuade us that the new musical craze for rock'n'roll was rubbish. Everyone else, parents and teachers and so on, thought it was a bad influence and did all they could to dissuade us from listening to it. But Mr Evans actually brought in records to the after-school classes and got us to loosen up by doing a bit of jiving. His favourite for getting us going was the theme from
The Man with the Golden Arm,
which in itself was a bit controversial as the film, released in 1955, was one of the first to deal with drug addiction, though, of course, none of us knew anything about this at the time.

With the arrival of rock'n'roll, youngsters had their own music for the first time; it was music generally reviled by adults, and it was that which made it so attractive… well, that and the excitement of the music itself, of course. Until then, popular music could be and was enjoyed by all generations. The popular singers were mainly crooners such as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Perry Como. But the first sign of youngster-specific music came when Johnnie Ray hit the big time with songs like ‘Cry', ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried' and ‘Such a Night'. Though not full-blown rock'n'roll by any means, Ray attracted a younger audience with his exaggerated movements and voice intonation, but it was when Bill Haley & His Comets hit the scene that young people (the word ‘teenager' was still a new word in those days) discovered they had music of their very own that was hated by their parents and other authority figures. There was outrage in Hackney when our nearest cinema, The Castle in Brooksby's Walk, showed
Rock Around the Clock
and teenagers actually got up out of their seats and danced in the aisles.

A new era had begun. And things got better (or worse, according to your point of view) when Elvis Presley arrived on the scene. His singing was electrifying, but what the older generation found really offensive were his overtly sexual dance moves that earned him the nickname of ‘Elvis the Pelvis'. In America, after a show in Wisconsin, the local Catholic Church sent an urgent message to the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover warning that ‘Presley is a definite danger to the security of the United States. … [His] actions and motions were such as to rouse the sexual passions of teenaged youth. …' American youth, meanwhile, took a different view. After the show, more than a thousand teenagers tried to get into Presley's room at the auditorium. Youth culture had arrived and led to a whole new way of life, not just in music but in everything, especially clothes.

Until the 1950s, youngsters followed their parents' fashions, but, with the birth of rock'n'roll, this changed forever. Teenagers were no longer younger copies of their parents, but became people in their own right with their own fashions, language and identity, of which the Teddy Boys were the most extreme example. At school, the first signs of this came when many of the boys stopped wearing school uniform. It had never actually been compulsory, although most wore it but in the late 1950s there was a big fashion for leather jackets, something our parents would never dream of wearing. Most boys had black jackets, a few had red ones, but even then, although I wanted to take part in this rebellion, I still wanted to show my individuality and so I persuaded Mum and Dad to buy me a green leather jacket. I was the only boy at school to have a green one.

Milk bars with jukeboxes also arrived as places where teenagers could hang out on their own and where kids were encouraged to listen to and even make their own music, skiffle. Hackney had its very own milk bar in Mare Street, where you could also buy that other modern innovation: espresso coffee straight from Italy. To see the shiny new Gaggia Espresso Machine spluttering away amid clouds of steam and spilling out its glamorous new drink was a wonderful and liberating experience, one that belonged exclusively to the young. Not only was skiffle played on the jukebox but groups of kids would give impromptu performances too.

British skiffle music was a homegrown development of American rock'n'roll that shot to prominence following the release of Lonnie Donegan's hit record ‘Rock Island Line' in 1956. Its main appeal was that it was cheap to imitate and therefore popular among the young, who could improvise or build their own instruments at little or no cost. Not only was skiffle a different type of music, one we could call our own, but it was also easy to have a go. No need for expensive instruments, just get a secondhand beat-up guitar or, if you couldn't afford that, you could join in with your mum's washboard or a large box with a string attached for a bass. And, better still, you didn't even have to be American. Whereas rock stars like Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were looked on as superstars that we could never aspire to be, the leading skiffle proponents were local working-class kids like ourselves. Along with Lonnie Donegan, other homegrown acts such as The Vipers and Tommy Steele burst onto the scene, encouraging British kids like me to have a go. When I was ten years old, there was talk of some of us in our
class forming a homemade skiffle group. I auditioned in front of the boy who decided he'd be the group leader, giving a full rendition of ‘Cumberland Gap'. I thought I'd performed pretty well, but his only comment was, ‘You need to move your hips more.' And so, at the tender age of ten, that was the end of my career as a rock star. Mind you, the group never formed anyway.

My parents and grandparents were forever grumbling about rock'n'roll. Although not quite a teenager yet myself, I wanted to watch television programmes like
6:5 Special
and
Oh Boy!
just coming on to BBC television in the late 1950s to cater for this new young audience but Dad wouldn't hear of it. ‘That music is rubbish,' he used to complain. ‘It'll never last like the old songs.' And he'd quickly turn over to ITV, much to my great disappointment. In the mid-1950s, many Victorian and Edwardian Music Hall songs were still well known. We are now about as far away from the mid-1950s as they were from the late Victorian and Edwardian period so I think it's safe to say we can dismiss the theory that rock'n'roll singers and songs will never last as long! I mean, whatever happened to Cliff Richard anyway?

It was with the start of Junior School that I began to make some real friends with whom I played outside of school. In particular, there were Andy Shalders, Bob Marriott, Peter Hannaford, John Walker, Howard Bradbury and Terry Gregory. We formed a group – I think it would be wrong to say a gang – and stuck together for the whole of the time we were in Junior School. Of these boys, my best friend was Andy, a slightly tubby boy, who, like me, was very keen on playing and watching sports. His father managed a grocer's shop in Chatsworth Road
and, although it wasn't one we frequented as shoppers, I did go round there quite a lot to play with Andy. There was one occasion when I was there alone in the shop after he had gone off to the toilet. For some reason I decided to see how sharp the bacon slicer was. I can confirm that it was very sharp indeed – I just touched it and it almost sliced my finger off! There was blood everywhere. I ran home as fast as I could. Fortunately, it looked worse than it was and Mum was able to sort everything out with an Elastoplast. Andy must have wondered what had happened when he came back from the loo and saw a trail of blood on the floor but no sign of me.

Bob Marriott lived closest to me. He had quite striking ginger hair and lived on the top floor of a terraced house in Chippendale Street. The bottom floor was occupied by the owner, Mrs Percy, a widowed woman in her eighties. She had snow-white hair and was always dressed completely in black from head to toe as though in perpetual mourning. I had strict instructions to knock on the door twice if I wanted to see Bob as one knock was for Mrs Percy and she wasn't happy if a caller knocked once and made her come to the door and then it turned out to be for upstairs. Bob said when that happened she complained to his parents and wouldn't let him forget it for days afterwards. His father was in the wood trade like my dad and also worked in Shoreditch. Bob was the only friend I had whose parents actually owned a car, a Ford Zephyr, which enabled them to go off to such exotic locations as Cornwall for their holidays.