Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography Read online

  I often wondered what would happen if Doreen Punt were to marry Lance Savage. What a terribly cruel trick of fate that would have been. There’s Doreen, waiting her whole life to expunge the curse of Punt, and the one man to whom her heart calls out is called Savage. So she becomes Doreen Savage – which hardly seems to lighten the load, does it? Hyphenating makes it even worse. Doreen Savage-Punt. He’d be Lance Savage-Punt, which, frankly, is the kind of grim amalgamation that would see postmen leaving the mail at the end of their path before legging it.

  By contrast, and here endeth my thoughts on names, in Congers House, we lived next door to a man called Jumbo Dray. Jumbo! Everyone called him ‘Jumb’.

  The square occupied by the Debnams and Gillam blocks was completed by a snaking, six-foot-high brick wall that served to mark exactly where council property ended and St Gertrude’s Church property began. The clergy hated us council kids and would stick knives in our footballs rather than heave them back over the partition. So the only place we had to legally loiter was a kind of misshapen part-cobbled plot in front of the flats, which was far too small for another housing project and yet just big enough to be, well, something. And something is exactly what the council made of it.

  They built us a boat. A boat!

  Every community has a spot where the local youth hang out. Everyone from our flats congregated around the twelve-foot-long solid concrete ‘boat’. It was the focal point for all those between the ages of two and the mid-teens, a catchment area that in those baby-boom times made for a sizeable crowd.

  Technically, I suppose it was more of a tug than a ship. It boasted a solid six-foot funnel at its centre and a crude but definite fo’c’sle. There were no ‘decks’ and it had no cover over it, but a well-sculpted solid-cement vessel it most certainly was and kids would slouch and slum all over it as they decided there were sufficient numbers for a two-a-side football tournament or whether they’d be better off opting for a game of ‘run-outs’ encompassing the entire sprawling estate of which our blocks were only a small part.

  Run-outs really was the beautiful game. Have you played it? One person would be told to ‘hide their eyes’ – a phrase plainly handed down the centuries – while the rest of the crowd would scamper away to secrete themselves somewhere in the surrounding miles of flats, back alleys, bombsites and side turnings. Then they must all be found. Run-outs should not be confused with hide and seek. In run-outs, the search party swells as players get discovered and switch sides. There was an unspoken gentleman’s agreement that, once you had found your hiding place, you did not move from it. Not only would that have been cheating but it risked prolonging the game way beyond the two hours it usually took for all to be safely gathered in.

  In my time I have hidden under parked cars, in rubbish chutes, on top of bus shelters and, on one occasion, inside one of the huge ‘wigwam’ bonfires pre-prepared for the upcoming November 5 celebrations. That was a terrific choice and much admired at the time. Strictly a seasonal retreat though.

  Throughout the sixties the annual bonfire was one of the biggest deals in our calendar of events, and the gathering of wood to build these giant pyres in the months prior to Guy Fawkes’ Night was taken very seriously indeed. Our part of the estate was adjacent to a few streets of wonderful but doomed Victorian houses, left abandoned and thoroughly gutted over the years of all fixtures that might feed our bonfire flames.

  The shocking amount of superb front doors, back doors, cupboards, panels and window frames that we torched for fun – or at a pinch, tradition – sickens me when I think of it now. Particularly the lovely interior doors that we thought extra groovy because you could see the flames dancing through their stained-glass panels before they literally melted in a psychedelic dissolve.

  There would be two bonfires on the estate, one on each of the large bombsites to the north and south. Key to having the best blaze would be the mighty centre pole. This, as you can surmise, would be the totem around which all other lumber would be draped. I never went on the search for a centre pole – bigger boys’ work, that – and I have no idea where on earth they managed to find the perfect telegraph pole, plane tree or ship’s mast that would be hoisted on teenage shoulders and marched back to the dump to be gradually festooned with top-drawer Victorian carpentry and subsequently ignited.

  One year, ancient Mrs Scott, one of the last residents of wood-denuded, earmarked-for-demolition Silverlock Street called out to us:

  ‘You boys want some old books for your bonfire?’

  We did. We knew old books would make excellent kindling for the conflagration to come, and she had loads, so many that we had to fetch a builder’s wheelbarrow and transport them in two trips. Scattered around the base of our growing monster, their pages and colour plates yanked out to poke in key crevices, up in urgent flames these lovely old volumes went. More disturbing to me today than the creepy Nazi imagery of it all is the nagging thought that beautiful first editions of Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Jorrocks’ Jaunts and, gulp, Oscar Wilde would have been sacrificed simply so we could use the first wisps of that towering inferno to light our Jumping Jacks. Younger readers may marvel in wonder at the long-prohibited Jumping Jack – an unpredictable concertina’d fizzer designed to cause panic within a fifty-yard radius. If you weren’t quick to back away after lighting the touchpaper, it might land on you, popping and exploding in your turn-ups. Oh, a terrific firework, the Jumping Jack.

  Ironically, and despite the casual vandalism of Mrs Scott’s library, I was completely besotted with Victorian authors at the time. No wait, that sounds hopelessly grand. What I mean is that from as early an age as I can recall, I adored Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, particularly ‘Jabberwocky’ and Lear’s short story about Violet, Guy Lionel and Slingsby who sailed around the world.

  Just pondering the comic brilliance and sheer oddness in the name ‘Slingsby’ – and remember, I had been raised on Jumbo Dray – would make me stare off into the middle distance, mouth set in a frozen chuckle. Surely nobody had ever been called Slingsby, had they? It sounds like somewhere in North Yorkshire. Oh, hang on, it is somewhere in North Yorkshire. What genius! Like the nonsense words scattered throughout ‘Jabberwocky’, here was a writer who didn’t care for form and the norm. He called a character Slingsby and defied the world to make something of it. Nonsense, that was the way forward. Utter, baffling nonsense. Let the world walk this way and I will walk that way. All who choose a similar path will be friends for life. Prog rock here I come.

  There was one particular book in our infant school library that mesmerized me like no other. It was called, rather generically, The Book of Nonsense and was a hefty compendium with Charles Folkard’s magnificent cover illustration featuring an assortment of the freakish characters featured within – Shockheaded Peter, Aged Uncle Arly, Jabberwocky, Baron Munchausen, ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ and countless others – gathered, for some reason, at the seaside. I had it out on virtual permanent loan. The volume encompassed not only Carroll and Lear but a whole storehouse of oddities such as:

  Yesterday upon the stair

  I met a man who wasn’t there

  He wasn’t there again today

  Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

  And:

  One fine day in the middle of the night

  Two dead men got up to fight . . .

  And my favourite:

  He thought he saw an elephant

  That practised on a fife

  He looked again, and found it was

  A letter from his wife.

  ‘At length I realize,’ he said,

  ‘The bitterness of life!’

  Indeed, by the age of seven, had anyone asked if I could recite any Charles Dickens I could have said absolutely. After all, I recognized him as the man who wrote

  Choo a choo a tooth

  Munch Munch Nicey

  Choo a choo a tooth

  Munch Munch Nicey.

  And that’s not an extract. That’s the whole thin
g. Take that, so-called Tale of Two Cities.

  Virtually all this word fascination can be credited to my father, for all that he himself only ever appeared to read one book over and over again: Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. But it was my old man who sat me on his lap when I was about five and read aloud Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin from an enormous Bible-sized compilation of ‘good’ literature that, otherwise, went un-browsed. Oh man, what an experience. All that ‘munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon . . .’ and grumbling, rumbling, tumbling, Doom’s tone and tombstone. Not to mention:

  Nor brighter was his eye, nor moister

  Than a too-long-opened oyster,

  Save when at noon his paunch grew mutinous

  For a plate of turtle, green and glutinous

  I had absolutely no idea what most of it meant, but can clearly recall how shocked I was at the betrayal in the lines:

  A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!

  And how much I too yearned to vanish into the side of a mountain like the Hamelin youth – so long as I could emerge very soon after and heroically tell everyone the full eye-popping exclusive story.

  Skulduggery

  My dad was a big man, a dock union organizer, a notorious brawler and dedicated pub patron. His readings of The Pied Piper went deep, very deep, and even today I can still catch a whiff of his comforting Guinness breath, the size of his hands on the page, the way I fitted perfectly into his lap, the way his voice would soften and even pronounce the ‘g’s and ‘h’s of Browning’s words.

  An extremely popular and well-known face in the neighbourhood – and even more so across the Thames in East London – Frederick Joseph Baker, always known as ‘Spud’, was my dad and I never ever wanted another or wished him in any way different.

  He was, and I think the word is a perfect fit, explosive. A no-nonsense, energy-filled expletive factory who left you in ABSOLUTELY NO DOUBT about his position. He was not offering an opinion, he was telling you how it was. People today may romance the quality of sixties television but, according to him, 98 per cent of it was ‘fucking daft’. Most music of the period was ‘a fucking noise’. The Prime Minister was ‘a long streak of piss’. The news was ‘a load of balls’. Thanks to the instant catharsis of such statements, he was never a morose or frustrated man. Dad was immensely proud; proud of himself, his appearance, his family, his job and his home. Very bald from the age of twenty, I never realized how touchy he was about it until one night, on our annual holidays on the Norfolk Broads, the whole family were sitting in the front row for a variety show at the ABC Theatre, Great Yarmouth. (We had front-row seats because the old man put a lot of store in such things.) Jimmy Tarbuck was the evening’s compère and at one point he looked down at us and delivered what I suspect was a stock line from his repertoire: ‘Excuse me, pal, could you change seats?’ he said to my father. ‘The lights are bouncing off your bald head right into my eyes!’ This got a good laugh from the audience. As it died down and just before Jimmy moved on, my dad bellowed; ‘You know, you can fucking go off somebody, Tarbuck.’ There were gasps all around and I screwed myself deep into my seat. Anita Harris was swiftly introduced and the show went on.

  All his life my dad remained convinced that the whole world was crooked, that everyone was corruptible – or to use his word, ‘approachable’ – and that, provided you found the right angle, nothing in this life was ever sold out or beyond reach. In this, along with his hairline, he resembled Phil Silvers’ Sergeant Bilko. Reputations and circumstances didn’t intimidate him in the slightest. In the 1990s, when I was earning an absolute fortune, he came with me to the very upmarket Conran furniture store in West London. As I dealt with the salesperson – a tall, rather fey fellow who was acting as though my time in his day was stopping him getting on with something far more important – I could hear Dad off in the distance turning over price tags and groaning, ‘Faaaackin’ hell!’ as well as his famously sing-song refrain ‘Oh what a load of balls . . .’

  Eventually I made my choices and the salesperson said he would go and confirm the items were in stock. Suddenly Dad was by my side. ‘I say, Chas,’ he barked. (He had a peculiar habit of addressing strangers as ‘Chas’.) ‘I say, Chas . . .’ Then, very deliberately, looking right into the sales assistant’s eyes: ‘We don’t want a receipt.’

  I heaved my shoulders and stared at my shoes. Here we go again.

  The man looked nonplussed. ‘I’m sorry?’ he muttered. Dad snorted as though this half-wit was already attracting too much attention. ‘I said: We don’t want. A receipt.’

  Of course what he meant by this was that we, or rather he, was not looking for a ‘straight’ transaction like all the other browsing civilians. It meant he wanted to give ‘Chas’ a twenty-pound note directly into his hand and then meet him round the back to put my £500 cupboards straight into our car. No paperwork. We all win.

  Such an arrangement might be the norm in a breaker’s yard in Deptford, but they’d never come across it at Terence Conran’s flagship store in Fulham. ‘Ah . . . okay, then . . . I won’t make you one . . .’ said the confused assistant before scuttling away.

  Disgusted, Spud turned to me and growled, ‘I don’t know why you shop in these fucking places.’

  The only times I ever saw my father quiet and cowed was when he was with his magnificent mother, Nan Baker. He and his equally hearty brothers, my uncles Charlie, Tom, Arthur, Alfie and Godfrey, would become as kids again in her presence. An extraordinary matriarch, Alice Baker had, in her time, given birth to twelve children, lost a few more, lived in every district in East London, served as a docker during the First World War, got bombed out twice in the Second, she’d run shops, managed pubs, worked in factories making everything from jam to armaments, flummoxed landlords, outsmarted debt collectors, terrorized pawn-shop owners, been barred from bookmakers, physically fought both men and women, and downed more Guinness and gin than might have flowed over Niagara Falls since you started reading this book. She was NEVER, and I mean this as a tribute, a sweet little old lady. She was, all of her long, long life, the kind of tough Victorian working-class woman who at closing time each night would stand in the street and sing.

  To her dying day she would listen to current-affairs shows on the radio, continually arguing with them aloud. Often, we would turn up at her flat on the Isle of Dogs and she’d wave her hand at us to be quiet. ‘I want to finish hearing what this lousy pisspot is on about,’ she’d snap. Her other favoured insult was a caustic use of the word ‘thing’. Looking daggers at her transistor, she’d hiss, ‘Oh, hark at him, the bastard THING!’

  At age ninety, when she broke her hip after falling down pissed, she refused to stay in hospital a second longer than necessary. Upon discharging herself, and not willing to succumb to the public indignity of a zimmer frame, she put bricks in a pushchair and covered them with a shawl so that it looked like shopping. Thus aided, she continued to walk everywhere, including the several miles to our house, a journey that included a hair-raising trek through the noisy Rotherhithe Tunnel under the Thames. When she died in 1982, her funeral was a big event on the island, and the saloon bar in her local pub was soon after officially re-named ‘Ma Baker’s’ in her memory.

  As you are probably figuring out, I come from hardy stock. To a young boy it was a boisterous and competitive cast among which to find a place.

  In total contrast to Nan Baker and my dad’s hellzapoppin’ side of the family, Mum, Betty, wouldn’t even try to compete. How could she? She had grown up almost totally bereft of family – particularly a father – and any kin she did have (I only know of one distant sister and a half-brother) was totally overwhelmed by the sheer size and confidence of the Baker brood. In fact, I know so little of her side of my genes that even today, when banks ask me for my mother’s maiden name in a security check, I have to tell them that I have absolutely no idea and, frankly, don’t see how they could possibly know either. To the best of my knowledge, I
think she might have once been Betty Ward, but then again I’ve heard it said she was Betty Cuddahey. There are a couple of other options too.

  She used to tell me that she’d met my dad after he tried to steal her purse following a dance on the Isle of Dogs. She chased him and got it back – suggesting to me he wasn’t running away that fast. I asked if she knew of him at that point, to which she replied, ‘Everyone on the island knew your father.’ Whatever the story of their meeting, she would have only been seventeen, he nineteen. They married a few months after her eighteenth birthday, because she was already pregnant with my sister Sharon. Wild boy though Dad might have been, he was never a coward and a respectable union was what was required at that point and in those times.

  There are no photographs of their wedding. There was no party. No honeymoon. Only Nan Baker went along, probably to make sure her boy actually turned up. There must have been many periods in my mother’s life when she thought how differently their lives might have turned out had circumstances not dictated the tale. She was a beautiful, shy young girl with amazing dark eyes and a terrific appetite for all things Hollywood. She also had a prodigious memory for seemingly every song she had ever heard and, even during her failing years with Alzheimer’s, is still able to recall lyrics to hundreds of obscure musicals with fantastic accuracy. Yet overall she has a quiet, insecure personality that was completely at odds with the brio, confidence and reputation of her new husband.

  Here was a big outgoing man, his full, rumbustious home life the polar opposite of her own, a local lothario who by all accounts could have had his pick of the neighbourhood girls, yet had now been forced by grim convention to marry her. At least, that was how it must have felt to young Betty.

  Their home following that joyless, probably loveless, ceremony at Poplar registry office in the freezing February of 1950, was a single rented room in an old house shared by three other, much older yet still desperately struggling families. Even worse, within a couple of months of the marriage my dad was sent to Maidstone Prison, where he served a year for receiving stolen goods. For Betty, that tiny cold room in Stepney must have seemed at the other end of the earth to her teenage dreams of Hollywood heaven.