Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography Read online

  Praise for Going to Sea in a Sieve

  ‘Joie de vivre, this Te. on spirit, is the engine that drives this memoir . . . Indeed, throughout this tome, Baker doesn’t so much drop famous names as . re them at you with a cannon for seemingly no other reason than to amuse and entertain with top-notch anecdotes . . . This book is a hoot, buzzing with Baker’s impressive recall and nuclear-strength warmth and humour. Going to Sea in a Sieve emerges not only as a portrait of Baker the individual, but also as a hymn to bygone times that is as affectionate as it is brutally unsentimental and hilarious. The perfect read for anyone interested in music, football, media, British cultural history, or indeed just having a really good laugh’

  Barbara Ellen, Observer

  ‘A beautifully written memoir’

  Independent

  ‘Like its author, Baker’s book is garrulous, preening, self-mocking and funny. It’s as rattling to read as it evidently was to write. In the proud Baker tradition, it’s a bit of a knockout’

  Stephen Smith, New Statesman

  ‘These memoirs, which cover his childhood and early career, burst with warmth and encounters with the famous, from Marc Bolan to Kate Bush’

  Belfast Telegraph

  ‘Baker writes as he speaks, with honesty and infectious joie de vivre’

  Sunday Express

  ‘Witty, sharp and hilarious’

  Metro

  ‘Reading Baker’s memoirs feels a bit like. fying transatlantic with an irrepressibly garrulous stranger . . . the alacrity and invention of his mind is obvious’

  James McNair, Mojo

  ‘[A] rollicking first instalment of the life story of the broadcaster’

  Saga

  To Teresa Guerrero Urbano and Ricard Simo.

  And for my sister, Sharon.

  In 1976 Steve Martin was making one of his first appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. At some point during the interview Steve began to do a few typically bizarre impressions of showbiz greats. In response, Johnny Carson said he could do only one impression and that was of his second-grade high school teacher, a Miss Vance, and nobody ever wanted to hear that. The audience begged to differ. Carson tried to move on but the clamour from the crowd grew louder until he turned in mock amazement and said, ‘You really want me to do my old high school teacher for you on national TV?’

  The audience made it clear they did.

  Clearing his throat, Johnny Carson then spoke in the strangulated whine of an old maid: ‘Now then, little Johnny Carson, you keep that up and it’s a spell in the old detention dumpster for you!’

  The place immediately exploded in wild applause and deafening cheers.

  During this tumultuous din Steve Martin recalled that Carson leaned across to him and said in his ear, ‘Sorry about that, but you stick around in show business long enough and eventually you’ll do everything you ever knew.’

  So. Here goes . . .

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise

  Title page

  Dedication

  Preface

  When the Saints Go Marching In

  Skulduggery

  Getting Out There

  Just Give Me that Rock’n’Roll Music

  You’re a Big Boy Now

  Are You Hung Up?

  Whole Lotta Love

  What Are You Gonna Do?

  The Jean Genie

  I Went to a Marvellous Party

  Is This the Real Life?

  Is This Just Fantasy?

  Tomorrow Never Knows

  Street-Fighting Man

  1977

  All Shook Up

  Feels Like Home to Me

  Lennon Speaks

  Diversion

  One and One is One

  The Chrome-plated Megaphone of Destiny

  Kid Charlemagne

  Head & Heart

  This is Tomorrow Calling

  List of Illustrations

  Endnotes

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Preface

  I am seven years old and the car in which I sit is, by now, totally enveloped in flames. The old banger had had a good run. Ever since we had found it abandoned on our dump – in the 1960s, bombsites were called ‘dumps’ – we had been using it as a kind of base camp. Now, with its slashed front seats exposing clumps of horse-hair, together with the plywood tea chests we had squeezed into the rear after the seats were removed, it seemed to almost beg for a playful match. So we had all piled in, popped a Swan Vesta and declared whoever got out first was a coward and whoever stayed till last was the game’s winner. I know, I know. And kids these days make all that fuss about Nintendo.

  On fire for about ten minutes now, it was clearly no longer a matter of when I should get out but whether I could get out. But I wasn’t moving. Not yet. Not me.

  The tea chest in which I squatted was starting to give off thin wisps of smoke that foretold, any second now, it would probably go up in a huge fireball. Still I was determined to win. Besides, other than me, there was only Peter King left inside this blazing wreck and Kingy was certainly no champion when it came to a rattling good game of chicken like this. He would definitely lose his nerve before long – I mean, I had to believe that or what was the point of the whole exercise?

  We looked at each other defiantly, head and shoulders poking up above the tin-lined edges of our tea chests, the flames now billowing along the roof of the rusted old vehicle, the smoke funnelling out through where once had been doors on the doomed Ford Popular. The thick plume billowed across the bombsite.

  The front of the car had predictably gone up like a gasworks, disqualifying Tommy Hodges, Stephen Micalef and Tony Plumpton almost immediately as they panicked and leapt out, it seemed to me, prematurely. They hadn’t lasted ten seconds. Now it was down to just Pete and me. And though I daren’t show it, yes, I was beginning to find the growing inferno’s repeated metallic bangs, pops and fizzes a tad alarming. Bit did he?

  Of course what neither I nor Peter King, nor any of our half-dozen or so friends cheering us on from the relative safety of three feet away, had entertained for a moment was the idea that there might still be a petrol tank lurking within the old banger.

  And it was growing fearsomely hot in there . . .

  When the Saints Go Marching In

  Mum preferred the term ‘maisonette’ but nobody else seemed to use the word. The truth is we – mum, dad, sister, brother and me – lived in a council flat: 11 Debnams Road, Rotherhithe, London, SE16. It was a completely fraudulent address, given that there were no numbers 1–10 in Debnams Road. There was barely a road. The turning, sitting around midway between Surrey Docks and the Old Kent Road in the borough of Bermondsey, was a hundred or so yards in length and comprised of nothing but an overgrown World War Two bombsite on one side and a monolithic mausoleum on the other. This was St Gertrude’s Church – just about the most featureless pile the Victorians ever consecrated.

  Like Noël Coward’s Norfolk, St Gertrude’s was very flat; literally a dark solid brick wall with a door on it. You had to back away for several streets before you could see the cross on its roof and the building finally revealed its purpose. Otherwise you could be forgiven for thinking it was a workhouse or a prison. I don’t think there can be another church like St Gertrude’s; whatever glory is given to God by the design of St Paul’s Cathedral, St Gertrude’s certainly snatches it back again. In all the time I lived in Debnams Road – and we’re talking about the first twenty years of my life – I never saw a single wedding, funeral or exorcism team emerge from its portals. It was exactly the sort of functioning but forgotten outpos
t in a rough-house area that, in comedy films of the period, a hapless priest played by Norman Wisdom or Brian Rix would be assigned to in order to get rid of them.

  Debnams Road itself came to a sudden end at the lopsided metal gates of a shapeless yard the council used for storing things they thought they might need later: mountains of empty paint tins, busted braziers, wooden pallets, concrete-encrusted wheelbarrows and various mysterious mounds covered by billowing tarpaulins. The whole ramshackle site was surrounded by a tall corrugated-iron fence – as if anybody would ever want to pinch any of its worthless waste.

  Looming above all these splendours was the railway.

  Raised up on hundreds of blackened Victorian arches, the railway was Bermondsey. Every pub, every school, every block of flats seemed to sit in its shadow and you were never more than a few yards from its grinding shriek and the smell of sparking. The arches themselves housed the sort of nefarious businesses later reduced to cliché by countless wide-boy TV crime series from Minder to Only Fools and Horses. There may have been some legitimate taxpaying concerns beavering away under the railway tracks, but most seemed busy repairing old motors while, simultaneously, right next door they would be breaking up identical models for yet-to-happen insurance claims.

  People in the arches packed household goods, made lino, bundled old magazines, stockpiled scrap, wrapped oranges in tissue paper, melted metals, ran taxi firms, beat panels and swapped goldfish for old rags. They made toffee apples, restored furniture and rendered the flesh from animal bones. Another arch very near our home ‘made paint’. It only strikes me now that I have no idea how you make paint, or how such a huge national industry could possibly be added to by a couple of blokes in a railway arch in SE16. On summer days the fumes from that arch – mixed with various other ‘wavy lines’ emanating from the smelting vats within their neighbours’ caves – gave the local air a bracing caustic edge. On really busy days, the atmosphere would cause birds and light aircraft to plummet from the skies, while people sitting reading on balconies would have their newspapers spontaneously combust as the oxygen content was finally bested by the abundant nitromethane.

  One of the arches, we later learned, housed the Richardson gang’s notorious torture barn. Really. The Richardsons were of course the Kray Brothers’ only rivals in the London underworld of the sixties. I remember one night in 1965, walking home with my dad from a night match at Millwall. The game had ended about an hour before, but Dad was part of a boisterous little mob that liked to unwind with a few pints after a particularly testing fixture. Well, any fixture actually. Zampa Road, the narrow street that ran past the arches, was a favourite shortcut to the football ground; to this day it remains one of the last completely desolate locations in the whole of London, nothing more than a few scrapyards and some littered waste ground. There were no street lights along the route back then, and as we bustled along this always quiet, always edgy stretch we came upon a bottle-green Rover, parked half up on the pavement with its interior light on. On the back seat was a man, well dressed and wearing an overcoat, who looked to have fallen asleep, his head lolled back against the rear shelf of the car. His face, clear and spotlighted by the bulb above him, was totally plastered in fresh blood. He didn’t seem to have any teeth, and blood was pulsing from his gums. My dad hustled me away as quickly as he could. I was babbling about ambulances, but the old man knew better. Our clattering footsteps had interrupted something, and lurking in the pitch-black shadows around us were people who required us to be gone. After dropping me at home, Dad, who had little fear in his make-up, went back for another look. He later told me that when he got to the spot, the car and its badly beaten passenger had vanished. It was many years later that I learned about the torture barn just beyond my bedroom window.

  So where did we actually live? Where was this notional house number eleven in Debnams Road?

  Well, if you walked past St Gertrude’s RC, keeping the bombsite and railway arches on your right, shortly before you got to the council yard gates there was a small opening flanked by cobblestones. Turn in here and you would be in a concrete square from which rose two blocks of flats built in the mid-1950s. The larger of the blocks was Gillam House, the smaller, Debnams Road. Even as a young child I always thought the council had been a little unimaginative when naming our flats. I mean they were off Debnams Road, they were near Debnams Road, but a sane person might walk up and down Debnams Road itself and never find us. They could have called our little block Superman Villas or Elvis Presley Towers, but no. They couldn’t be bothered. Gillam House, on the other hand, was named after the infamous Judge Gillam who hanged more people than any magistrate in British history and was murdered by the outraged mother of his last victim in nearby Southwark Park. (Total poppycock, but that’s what we believed.)

  And what was our life like in this noisy, dangerous and polluted industrial pock-mark wedged into one of the capital’s toughest neighbourhoods?

  It was, of course, utterly magnificent and I’d give anything to climb inside it again for just one day.

  I will never need regression or re-birthing to confirm I was a tremendously happy kid; confident, active and wildly popular. Perhaps that makes your lip curl, but honestly, the most traumatic thing that happened to me in my formative years was watching Millwall lose their fifty-nine-game unbeaten home record after being toppled by Plymouth Argyle. True, as your author and guide I appreciate there’s little communal pathos to be wrung there. P.G. Wodehouse noted in his own memoirs that being a contented and happy child is not what readers want from an autobiography. They look for darkness, regret and conflict, a glimpse of the wounded infant propping up the vindicated adult survivor. In short, a whiff of the workhouse.

  Oh, I know the drill. The BBC recently broadcast a film adaptation of Toast, Nigel Slater’s lamentable, though successful, childhood memoirs: 100 minutes of pre-pubescent loneliness, desolation and misery complete with sad cello accompaniment. This heartache is essential to balance the orgy of fulfilment celebrity later brings. Alas, my tragedy is that I can offer no downbeat revelations, given that I literally beamed with joy throughout the entire sixties. No sad cello music would be required for my childhood; the most apt accompaniment would be a New Orleans jazz band tearing up ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’.

  Why I was the kind of kid who leapt from his bed each day with a wild ‘Hurrah!’ is hard to say. Even as the youngest in our brood I don’t think I was particularly indulged. As you can imagine, we weren’t a wealthy household, though, as far as I could see, we wanted for nothing. Actually, in that very statement, there may be a clue to the apparent sunny atmosphere indoors.

  My parents had, not too long before I arrived, been living a pretty rough existence. I mean real, austerity post-war Britain: rationing, no work, one rented room in the East End of London. Proper poor. Until he joined the docks in 1954, my old man had drifted through employment. Among many casual jobs, he had been a hopeless labourer, trainee rag-and-bone man (failed) and had spent time in prison too. My mum had become pregnant at seventeen and they had married soon after without, I suspect, knowing each other that well. My brother and sister were both born in East London, where the whole family lived in one room of an old house owned by a Mrs Shears (‘Poor old Jeanie Shears . . .’) whose alcoholic husband pissed away every penny he earned as a chimney sweep. After years of struggling to make any kind of progress with their lives, they crossed the Thames – a huge upheaval in itself – to take up residence in a poky flat on the third floor of a pre-war block in downbeat Deptford called Congers House. It was here, in number 51, at 9 a.m. on Saturday, 22 June 1957, that I was born. I was delivered by Nurse Walkerdene and my dad had to be summoned back from the pub as he was about to set off on a docker’s beano – a boozy coach-trip to Margate. It was an outing he had been looking forward to for ages, and over the next few decades he would mention this infuriating inconvenience to me on more than one occasion.

  At this point they had three children cr
ammed into one bedroom. Consequently, when I was still a baby – indeed, because I was a very small baby – they were allocated a brand-new three-bedroom council flat on the ground floor of the Silwood Estate with a bathroom and a garden. They simply couldn’t believe their luck. The railway and arches may as well have been rolling fields and double rainbows. Over the following decade, I harvested all the relief, freedom and optimism they suddenly felt. Things going right in their world had coincided with me coming along and, possibly misguidedly, I couldn’t help but feel partially responsible. Thus, by the age of three, my emerging ego was suitably robust.

  Despite its unpromising location and meagre luxuries, Debnams Road was full of working-class families revelling in the sudden rise in their fortunes. All those who’d grabbed at the chance it offered – a bathroom being top of the boon-list – felt blessed indeed, and our block was a sturdy symbol of proletarian hopes and aspiration.

  Here’s how the occupants on the ground floor ran. Looking at the odd-numbers-only front doors and reading from right to left, it went: the Bakers, the Painters, the Punts. The Micalefs, the Dulligans and the Dempsters. Yes, the Punts. Even as a toddler, I knew the Punts, at number 15, had absolutely no music in their name.

  Punt, let us be clear, is a dreadful surname, particularly if you are a teenage girl and particularly if your first name happens to be Doreen – as was the case with our fourteen-year-old near neighbour. Doreen Punt. I’ll concede that, with some effort, it is just possible to get past the Doreen half of the arrangement, but then to immediately have to confront the Punt part of the deal is too much. One’s ear tends to bridle and shut up shop.

  Doreen Punt sounds exactly the sort of oath W.C. Fields might have muttered shortly after stubbing his toe against the bedstead. The name took the gold medal over the bronze and silver of the other terrible names on our estate: Marion Mould and Lance Savage.