Read Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography Online
Authors: Danny Baker
Firstly, and on reflection, it was not a good choice to see with your sister.
Hair
may have some powerhouse tunes in it and make many valid points about the warmongering hypocrisy of straight society but, to be honest, all anyone talked about was the fact that, at one point, the cast all took their clothes off and wigged out. As people used to say then, ‘You see everything.’ Now I knew about this and thought it an unlikely bit of show-stopping, just so much hype. I was ready for a brief suggestion of nakedness, a representation of it under low lights, enough to be scandalous but nothing that wouldn’t be over in a flash (as it were).
Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen
Hair
, but they really do take all their clothes off and wig out. I remind you, I was twelve, my sister eighteen. Though our house could often be a churning urn of boiling bawdiness and earthy humour, we didn’t do nudity or discourse upon sex. Lewd double-entrendres and bodily functions, yes. Actual sex and nude erotica, no. This is entirely as it should be. The myth of treating sexual matters and our bodies as perfectly natural subjects that hold no embarrassment and should be openly discussed by all is pure horse manure and liable to take all the fun out of growing up. I could no more have had a talk with my parents about sex than fly in the air unaided – and thank God for that. I genuinely cannot think of anything worse. So. Now it’s showtime.
I’m not sure any more at which point in
Hair
the cast go naked, I think it might be during ‘Let the Sun Shine In’, although that now strikes me as too preposterous a cue for everyone to get their bums out. Whenever it was, it was not my hoped for brief coup de théâtre but a full-on, extended, jiggle-flop-bounce pubic master class under full house lights. Swallowing something hard and jagged, I suddenly wished I was dead. I wanted my best stalls seat to absorb me down into its velveteen plush, to somehow grow microscopic and invisible, to be anywhere but sitting next to my own sister.
Then things got really unbearable.
The cast started to come down off the stage and into the auditorium. They were directly addressing individual members of the audience and urging us to get up and dance with them. How could people do this? By now I could hardly breathe. As the pit orchestra vamped the ‘Age of Aquarius’ or whatever it was – it made no difference, I could hear nothing but the blood rushing to my face – each cast member picked a row and stood in the aisle next to it imploring its occupants to free-form some radical shapes. Ladies and gentlemen,
I was in an aisle seat
. Sure enough, and as if in a nightmare, some sweaty naked Equity-card-holding hippy stopped on our row but inches from my head and started to dance the Frug like there was no tomorrow. All eyes in our party remained welded forward even though the stage was by now totally deserted.
This was not happening
. Except that it was. My peripheral vision could not block out the flapping old dick whipping back and forth and back and forth across my tormentor’s pelvis as he gyrated himself into a scripted frenzy. Then – and I promise you I am not retrospectively embellishing any of this for heightened effect – the worst thing in the world happened.
It brushed my ear.
It brushed my ear
.
I screwed up my eyes and made a face like I had just downed some nitric acid laced with lemon juice. If this was the counterculture, give me Matt Monro. Give me Dorothy Squires. But right now, somebody give me a flannel.
Nobody spoke much on the bus back. When we got home Sharon ran straight up to her bedroom. I was halfway up the stairs when the old man shouted, ‘What was it like?’ Continuing my own hurried ascent, I burbled, ‘It was great, it was great. You wouldn’t have liked it though, Dad – it’s really loud.’
‘And do they strip right off?’ he chortled after me. The bang of my bedroom door was all the answer he got on that one.
‘Bet they look better with nothing on than in all them way-out dribs and drabs I’ve seen ’em wearing in the paper!’ was his last teasing jab.
A man being well groomed or ‘near the mark’, as he would have it, along with women and children being ‘well turned out’ was of paramount importance to my dad. As far as he was concerned, appearance defined you – hence the ‘Donovan hat’ line in the sand. Sometimes his work in the docks would cause him to come home absolutely plastered in muck. On these occasions he would ring ahead – or in one of the frequent periods when we didn’t have a phone, he’d ring a neighbour’s house – and tell my mother to have the immersion heater good and ready for a scalding hot bath. The worst he ever looked was always after unloading a cargo called carbon black. I’m not sure what this actually was, but it must have been choking and vile and capable of creating huge permeating clouds when disturbed. On carbon black days he would arrive home looking as though he had been catapulted into a skip of shoe polish. The front door would need to be opened smartly or a second knock would be accompanied by a furious shout of ‘Hurry up, hurry up! Don’t leave me standing out here like a fucking tramp!’
Once in, he would swiftly disappear into the bathroom for ages. Even when he emerged, and for days afterwards, the ingrained carbon would ooze out of his pores and he would sweat in oily black rivulets that quickly ruined the collar of his always clean shirt.
‘Fucking stuff, that is,’ he would thunder, rising to take another in the series of baths. ‘I’m not working down in the hold on that bastard shit any more.’ But he always did.
At the opposite and far more disturbing end of the scale were the days when he would come home enveloped with a clinging, whitish film. This was asbestos. Unloaded raw.
In 2007 after a period of feeling ‘a bit rough’, which culminated in him turning an awful shade of yellow, with some difficulty I persuaded him to go to Lewisham hospital. I was taken to one side and told cancer had spread throughout his internal organs. He’d never been a smoker, yet the cancer had started in his lungs. A doctor, when delivering the fatal prognosis, asked me if Spud had ever worked near asbestos. I turned to him and said, ‘You worked on asbestos a lot, Dad, didn’t you? Bloke wants to know how much.’
Typically he squirmed a bit in his seat and looked at his hands.
‘Oh, don’t go on about all that, boy,’ he said, irked as ever that someone wanted to know our business. ‘It was fucking years ago. It’s not that anyway. I’m all right, it’s the fucking flu, that’s all.’
The doctor and I exchanged a brief glance. And it was never mentioned again in the five months he had left to live.
When it came to the musical inspiration behind my dreams of being one of the beautiful people, my parents rarely commented. But they did have an uncanny knack of walking into the room just as Zappa or Pink Floyd would be laying down one of their more unlistenable stretches of music concrete. At those times they would never go down the clichéd route of shouting at me to ‘turn that noise off ’ or try and contrast it with the ‘real’ music of their day but rather undermine my earnest concentration with a gently amused, ‘That’s nice, boy. What is it? Joe Loss and his orchestra?’ This would always make me smile and bring me back pretty swiftly from my inner Haight-Ashbury.
One of the most devastating of these gently critical attacks on our new sound was delivered by Tommy Hodges’ dad, Bill, who ran the newsagents over the wall. One afternoon, Tom and I were in his minuscule bedroom under the stairs listening to Neil Young’s new LP,
After the Gold Rush
. We were on the track ‘Oh Lonesome Me’ which, even by Neil’s standards, is a bit whiney, when Bill pushed open the door with his behind and turned in with two cups of tea for us. Placing them down on the tiny side table, he momentarily listened to the song and took note of our solemn reverence toward it. Walking the few steps back out of the room he struck up a strangulated parody of Neil’s famous timbre and warbled, ‘Oh I do feel sorry for myself . . .’ As the door clicked closed again we heard Bill walk away chuckling, leaving Tom and me thoroughly undermined, tacitly agreeing that this disastrous counter-revolutionary moment was best not openly acknowledged.
Toward the end of 1969 Dad announced he had ordered a colour television. This was a sensation and would place us right at the forefront of happening technology in this groovy changing world. More than any single invention I can recall, the arrival of colour television was greeted by the entire nation as a huge leap forward and proof the government was at last doing something to modernize life. You’ll always find the People are generally resistant to the New unless that New happens to be something that will spruce up their tellys.
It was an indication of how my cultural stance was changing that while my brother breathlessly said we would be able to see next year’s cup final ‘in full colour’, I was more excited by the prospect of at last being able to see the hot new music show
Colour Me Pop
without feeling short-changed. (In fact, that forerunner of
The Old Grey Whistle Test
had just been cancelled.)
Our magnificent new rented colour TV was delivered to our front room on a date heavy with significance: 1 January 1970. The arrival of this gleaming kaleidoscope coinciding with the dawning of a new decade seemed to ooze science fictional possibilities and further speeded my focus away from the path it would traditionally have been taking. Such a shift in priorities had happened quickly.
When I first joined West Greenwich they were holding mass football trials to see who was worthy of making the school first XI. I had a particularly good spell on the field and was announced to be ‘in’ before I’d even left the pitch. This was all I wanted to hear, know and be. Three weeks later, in our first game against our nearest rivals South-East London Boys, I scored four of the goals in a 10–0 demolition of the opposition. The sports teacher made me captain. We had a good little team and none of the local schools ever fancied playing us. Football, music and home life were in complete balance and the conditions were perfect.
But during 1969, hair, sounds and ideas began to get wilder, stranger and loose. Playing for the school now seemed routine and ordinary and far away from my engrossing personal world of musical experiment and discovery. On the BBC,
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
crept out in the same graveyard spots as the very few rock shows they broadcast and its divisive, uncompromising anti-normality tone gathered a knowing clique of us in awed witness to its daring. By the time 1970 dropped into the birthing pool, things underground were gathering strength and alive with secret possibilities. You could feel it everywhere. Or at least a lucky few could.
I began to take my eye off the ball.
N
o part of my Pollyanna existence truly suffered as my obsession with rock music snowballed. I didn’t lose my sunny outlook and actually never became one of those grim early teens that, according to cliché, sulk in their rooms claiming nobody understands them. Furthermore, neither my mum nor my dad ever embarrassed me in front of friends or did anything to make me wish I’d been adopted by Frank Zappa. My children have never gone through this generally accepted phase either, so perhaps this whole tired teenage imagery – along with the tipsy deaf ‘gran’ and the strait-laced, easily offended maiden aunt we’re all supposed to instantly recognize – is simply a creation of middle-class comedy writers hoping to piggyback on what they suppose is real life. It may be a related fact that none of my crowd ever wound up as bong-hogging college students either. Indeed, out of an eventual crowd of about thirty close friends, only two went on to further education.
As our teens dawned, and in breaks between playing Joe Cocker, Deep Purple and Santana albums, the other boys from the boat and myself still used to go out across the estate looking for ways to fill up the long splendid days. Usually we’d gravitate to the Surrey Canal or Southwark Park, but sometimes to a weird decrepit area we called Mud Island. This solidly landlocked region had been given island status by the locals because it was an out-of-the-way gaggle of abandoned houses wedged between the back of the railway arches and the street leading to Millwall football ground. The ‘Mud’ part was a clue to the reason the dwellings were abandoned in the first place. They were all sinking on poor foundations and several of them teetered forward or sideways at crazy angles as though Tim Burton himself had drawn up the plans.
You arrived at this Twilight Zone of a place via creepy Zampa Road, the same location where my father and I had seen the badly beaten man. A stubby, always damp turning, Zampa Road appeared as a low concrete tunnel encased by the high windowless walls of a pickling factory on the right, the Kia-Ora orange squash bottling plant on the left and ceilinged by three low railway lines above. There were no street lights and little colour. It was known locally as the Stink Hole.
‘Do you know where Tommy and Pete are, Mr Hodges?’
‘I do, son. They said they were going up the Stink Hole to look for grasshoppers.’
Thus the Stink Hole was the conduit to Mud Island. (I’m starting to think I grew up in
Tom Sawyer
.) Once ashore at the isle, you would just find things to do – usually by poking around the collapsing ruins. Some of the houses in Mud Island still retained things like iron bedsteads and marble fireplaces, there being little worth in such things forty-odd years ago. Apart from chancing across an obviously human bowel movement in some quietly chosen corner, there was no evidence that anyone had ever squatted in any of the less dilapidated homes because nobody squatted in Bermondsey, full stop. I didn’t even know what the word meant until later, when I fell in with the punk rock crowd, and I still find it a totally alien concept.
Desiccated shit aside, there were other odd personal items left behind in some of the sinking buildings. A wallpaper sample book. Mangles. Wall-mounted Ascot water heaters. Broken mirrors in ornate frames, and tin baths. One day I found a marvellous toy among all the debris. It was a plastic scale replica of the moped-like vehicle that Steve Zodiac used whenever he left the mother ship in
Fireball XL5
– at one time my favourite show on TV.