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CHAPTER ONE WAKEY WAKEY!

It began with an unwanted Christmas present. The year previously I’d been given a lunar landing module—well, a six-inch one, but I could hover it over a grey plastic moonscape with such grace and stability that my ten-year-old mind felt the primal thrill of power rushing through it. You controlled the landing by aiming a fan-gun at the module’s attached balloon while issuing orders in a croaky American accent with lots of ‘beeps’ thrown in between the commands. What the ‘beeps’ in space-talk were for I was never quite sure, but they had something to do with adventure, bravery and the future that we now lived in. American accents were a must if any boy were to cut the mustard in an Islington playground and have any level of cultural credibility among his peers. Whatever the asphalt fantasy, it usually demanded you being an American, be it a Thunderbird, a superhero, or one of the Rat Patrol. I even did James Bond in American.

Apollo, though, was everything. The Christmas before, my family had all sat spellbound in front of our small television as Apollo 8 vanished into radio silence around the dark side of the moon, a phrase coined especially for a child’s imagination, and we waited, gripped, for its return.Man had never been so far from home and those men had taken my imagination along with them. Sitting in awe, new presents suddenly ignored, we listened to Commander Jim Lovell, floating in a black sea of risk, reading to us across the void from the book of Genesis. The following summer I was woken early to see black-and-white ghosts walk upon the moon. My father cried. We watched it over and over until the morning came and the magical moon faded from outside our window.

My lunar module also needed a bit of space to be successfully manoeuvred and in our front room that wasn’t easy. It would often catch its leg on the net curtains. But if I were careful with its flight I could edge it along the drinks cabinet, with its purely ornamental miniatures and solitary bottle of Stone’s Ginger Wine, over my father’sNews of the World as he read it, past the budgie, perched proprietorially on the paper’s edge, and down over the floral-patterned settee towards the moon surface in front of my father’s slippers, while trying not to go too near the heat of the glowing electric fire with its shadowy flame effect. The right side of the plastic coals had, sadly, broken, but the other side benefited hugely from the spinning device that created the ‘flames’ and added a greater sense of homeliness to our lives. One electric bar out of the two was always cold and ash grey whatever the weather, thus saving my parents the money to buy toys for their two boys, like Lunar Landing, or guns that shot ping-pong balls around corners.

But on this Christmas morning of 1970, no toys appeared for me. My younger brother Martin was rapidly tearing the wrapping off the presents that had been delivered soundlessly into the pillowcase he’d left at the foot of his bed.My pillowcase, on the other hand—and to my horror—was empty. My father winked knowingly at me and left the room while my mother helped Martin eagerly unwrap an endless procession of gifts. My toy was obviously so huge it couldn’t fit into any pillowcase, but my heart sank as Dad sheepishly returned with something clutched awkwardly to his chest: a guitar. He looked as though he were about to dance with it.

‘We thought you’d like this,’ he said, turning it around in his hands.

I found it hard to hide my displeasure. It wasn’t even wrapped.

‘We saw you playing with your cousin’s toy guitar and thought you’d like a proper one.’ He could see he had some convincing to do and held it out gingerly towards me.

My childhood felt over. Was this to presage a future of socks and underpants for Christmas? I accepted my fate, took the guitar and sat it in my lap. It smelt of polish. Furniture smelt of polish, not Christmas presents; this was something adult, belonging to a world I wasn’t sure I wanted to enter yet. My arms clumsily wrapped themselves around its curvaceous body with its two ‘F’ holes like mournful, drooping eyes. Scratches on its tobacco-brown skin revealed that I wasn’t the first. It had its own story and I immediately felt pity for the thing—it was made to play beautiful music, but it had found itself in the hands of a disappointed child.

Nobody in the known history of the Kemps or Greens—my mother’s family—had ever played a musical instrument. I had attempted the descant recorder for one term, until I found myself at a junior school concert standing in a pool of my own drool while playing ‘Sloop John B’. A dripping recorder does not do much for a young boy’s standing among giggling schoolgirls.

But we were the proud owners of a radiogram—an old-style record player-cum-radio that fitted my mother’s brief of looking like a piece of furniture. When this highly polished example of veneered technology was not in use, it became a plinth for chalk ornaments, frogs made from seashells, and a miniature glass lighthouse filled with coloured sands from the Isle of Wight, all placed strategically by my mother on lace doilies. Our record collection was sparse and mostly never played: a Frank Sinatra anthology that had lost its inner sleeve; a rollicking Billy Cotton album of innuendo-filled music-hall standards called Wakey Wakey!, plus some random Matt Monro, Patsy Cline, and Dave Clark Five singles, some of which had lost their centrepieces. To play these, one would have to place the record as centrally as possible upon the deck, and then suffer the wow and flutter as it gradually ellipsed in ever-expanding orbits around the spindle. The radio part of this dual wonder was more often used, and appears quite vividly in one of my earliest memories.

October 22 1962 was six days after my third birthday. My memory starts with my father leaning into the radiogram and tuning into the one o’clock news. He’d come home from work on his ‘dinner break’ but was agitated and I must have felt this as I’d followed him across the room, attempting noisily to get his attention. I watched as, hushing me, he stared hard at the amber-lit panel, hungry for the information its warm, authoritative voice was delivering. And then Dad said, ‘There might be a war.’

I can assume that his statement shocked me, even at that age, as why else should it be so deeply branded upon my memory? So real was the nearness of the last war that even as a three-year-old it was a concept I had already began to grasp—and fear. But I suppose what stunned me most of all was that first shocking experience of witnessing my father’s vulnerability. My superman, the one whom I thought I could absolutely rely on for constant protection, was frightened. Something one day might slip through the protection of our perfect world and destroy it, and even he couldn’t stop it.

It was the Cuban Missile Crisis and, of course, the man who could save the world had an American accent. Kennedy never joined the list of heroic characters that I tirelessly embodied in the playground, but his assassination the year after became another early memory, primarily because it stopped the TV and instead of Top Cat, The Beverly Hillbillies or Supercar, I was forced to stare at a photograph of him, silently being broadcast across the channels.

I was born at St Bartholomew’s Hospital within earshot of St Maryle-Bow’s bells on 16 October 1959. No one seems to remember at what time, for like all things to do with childbirth or war it was never spoken about and eventually forgotten. I was brought home to a house in Islington that was more connected with a Victorian past than any nuclear present. It belonged to an era of austerity that was yet to taste the ‘white heat’, or even the white goods, of the technological revolution. It seems hard to imagine now, but this central-London dwelling would not have electricity until 1960, when my father and his brother finally connected us to the modern world, so I must picture myself entering 138 Rotherfield Street by the yellow shroud of gaslight.

My father, Frank, had lived in this early nineteenth-century terraced house since 1945, when, as a fourteen-year-old, he had moved there with his father and mother and his brother, Percy. His two sisters had already moved into their own marital homes, while his older brother, Bill, was away fighting in Burma, a war from which he would never fully recover, or mentally leave, until his death in 2008.

I have a picture of my paternal grandmother, the wonderfully named Eliza Ettie Ruth Crisp, taken in 1912 when she was aged sixteen. Her large, moon face looks slightly bewildered by the photographic situation she’s been thrown into. She’s dressed in the high white collar, lace apron and bonnet of a girl in service—a maid. She sits, her hand resting awkwardly on a book—undoubtedly under the direction of the studio photographer—giving her the look of being caught reading during a break in work. I can just see the book’s title on the spine and I take a magnifying glass to discover what it might be. It leaves me a little saddened and with a feeling that she’s been slightly humiliated as the title’s two words enlarge into focus: Stickphast Cement. Of course, it would be a surprise if Eliza had ever read or owned a book other than the family Bible.

My paternal grandfather, Walter, wounded out of Flanders, had become disabled from his work at a veneering factory after a swinging tree trunk delivered itself into his shrapnel-softened leg. Jobless and desperate, he and Eliza created and ran a business from the kitchen of the rooms they rented above a mews garage in Islington. There, the two boys, Frank and Percy, along with Eliza’s father, Granddad Crisp—a hansom cab driver and a man whose photos prove that braces always need a belt for extra security—would bag up nuts and sweets and help Eliza make toffee apples to sell to the queues outside the nearby Collins’ Music Hall. It kept the Kemps fed and housed, but unfortunately, when the SecondWorldWar came, Eliza’s little helpers were soon considered to be in danger from the new threat of German bombing raids. Equipped with gas masks, the two boys made their way through crowds of weeping mothers to Highbury and Islington station and a two-year stay away from home.

One evening, during the London Blitz, a Luftwaffe pilot caught in ‘ack-ack’ fire evacuated his payload of bombs. Below him was Walter, tall and lean, quickly making his way home through the empty streets, the sky above alight with tracer. Within seconds the eight bombs had landed around him, sucking him into the huge hole they’d created in the road. Luckily the bombs didn’t detonate and, dazed, he crawled out and back to Eliza. But Walter’s nerves were forever blown apart. Afterwards, he became wrecked and sleepless, and my father would often see the red glow of his cigarette as he lay smoking in bed through many a long night.

Unfortunately my father and mother were experiencing another hell. Both tell similar evacuation stories of beatings, accusations of stealing, and destroyed or censored letters home. Sadly for my mother it would end at the age of nine, in a breakdown of bed-wetting, fear of noise and inconsolable night-crying. While they were both away, two bombs fell silently through the London night sky and destroyed each of their family homes and any evidence of their younger lives.

Walter and Eliza were temporarily relocated to the relatively peaceful suburb of Finchley, and Frank was granted his wish to return from rural exile to his family. His war was not over, though, and as a Boy Scout he was drafted into the role of stretcher-bearer at Finchley Memorial Hospital. On 6 June 1944, D-Day, a heavy raid delivered itself in retaliation upon the city. Frank carried eight dead bodies, young and old, into the morgue that evening, at one point having to shuffle them around to fit them all in. Later that night he lay sleepless in his bed, listening to Allied planes making their way to France and the final act of the war.

With the war over, the Kemp family returned to Islington and new rooms in Rotherfield Street, rented from a local landlord. But the brothers would still have to replace the walls and ceilings themselves, as a doodlebug had dropped in the street and partially destroyed them. They took the top floor, their parents’ brass bed set up in the living room creating a centrepiece reminiscent of Roald Dahl, but in reality it was nothing but cramped and stifling. On the floor below, even more Dahl-esque, lived two ‘filthy old boys’, as my father called them.

Sadly, the family didn’t have the means to indulge Frank’s aspirations or potential, and his desires to stay on at school beyond fourteen and become a journalist were impossible even to contemplate. So Frank was sent to work as a printer—ironically, printing ruled lines onto paper for others to write on. In 1952, after his two years in National Service, he returned to the print and a blind date with a shy, Irish-faced girl from the New North Road called Eileen Green. Their first evening together ended with what must have been a memorable visit to the London Palladium to see Little Richard perform. A few dates later and they were helping to shake its Grand Circle up and down while watching Bill Haley and the Comets. Somewhere between the rock and roll they fell in love.

On Eileen’s first visit to her new boyfriend’s house she was welcomed at the front door by one of the resident ‘old boys’. Wrapped against the cold in ancient grey clothes and carrying an oil lamp in his greasy fingers, he beckoned her in, slowly guided her up the narrow stairs, and pointed her on past their own stinking rooms towards the top floor and the waiting Frank. The fragile Eileen swore she would never come again to this decrepit place, but eventually married Frank, and, as a proud virgin in white, moved into the house on their wedding night. Awkwardly undressing for bed, she broke the gas mantle, casting them both, gratefully, I’m sure, into darkness.

Eventually, they rented two rooms on the floor below and uncomfortably shared the kitchen with the elderly gents, now in their nineties, who infuriated Frank with their habit of keeping coal piled in a corner of the landing outside their door. Thankfully, the two nonagenarians soon shuffled off their shabby mortal coils, and with my arrival my father took over their space and turned it into a bedroom for me, giving his new family the whole floor.

Almost two years later my brother was born in my parents’ bedroom. My father looked after me, banned, like all men of his time, from the proceedings, while two midwives and a doctor saw Martin into the world.My mother had chosen to haveMartin at home, not for any holistic purpose or lack of NHS service, but because she couldn’t leave me, as my father was unable to take time off work. Unfortunately, Martin was thought to be a ‘blue’ baby—meaning he might have a potentially fatal blood condition—and was immediately rushed to hospital. When cleared, he would return home to two murder attempts from his brother.

The first was more of an experiment. He was asleep in his cot and my fury at his satisfied, gurgling presence was unbounded. I must have realised his breathing was essential to life because first I poured the remains of a pot of Lyle’s Golden Syrup on to his face, and then, pleased with my initial syrupy delivery, followed it with a bowl of sugar—a fine recipe for suffocation, I thought. He would at least enjoy it while it lasted. I watched little sweet bubbles form and pop around his mouth and nostrils and then suddenly there was a room full of screams, a crying baby, and a punished, whimpering child. I’d failed. This time.

A few weeks later I took my chance again. A sunny day meant a stroll to the New River Walk, a faux little brook that was actually designed to bring in fresh drinking water to thirsty Londoners but was now a favourite haunt of new mothers. Outside our house my old perambulator proudly stood with its new incumbent tucked tightly inside. My mother went back to shut the door and I took my chance. I grabbed the handlebar and shoved the huge beast of a pram into the road. A woman passing by screamed as it flew from the kerb, tipped backwards onto its canopied end and, wheels spinning helplessly in midair, came to a stop. But so swaddled was Martin that he never moved from the security of the covers, his head safely cushioned by the pillow, and within seconds my mother had him and the pram back on the pavement. With a stinging arse I saw that he was blessed, and probably worth keeping.

Below us, on the ground floor, the landlord had his rental office, and one day a week a line of people would snake through our ‘passage’ to pay their rent through a hole in the wall, a public encroachment which never seemed to bother us, although my mother would struggle to push her pram past the grumbling tenants. On a wet day they’d all cram into the narrow hall for protection, filling the house with the smell of damp clothes and the murmuring of local rumour. Under all of this, in the basement, lived an elderly woman, who eventually filled the house with a fetid stench of her own, alerting us to her lonely death.

The house contained no bathrooms, and the only toilet was outside in a small walled yard where my father had once kept chickens that he horrifically ‘burst’ by swelling their stomachs with an inappropriate diet of barley. On one side stood a brick air-raid shelter full of paint pots, rusting bicycles and hidden creatures. On the wall hung a tin bath that I never remember coming into the house—a ‘good wash’ was always had in the kitchen sink. I only remember this being once a week, unless my father took me to the local baths, where I’d lie tense and repulsed in one of their large cubicled tubs, with its flaking enamel and worryingly brown rust spots, timidly calling, ‘More hot water, please’ to the old geezer patrolling the corridor outside. Our outside toilet was a reeking, damp home for insects, and although torches were required in the evenings, it was beyond the call of nature to visit it at night. I also feared the empty basement that you had to pass to get to it, especially in the knowledge that the old woman had recently rotted there, not to mention our cat Ginger, who’d spent his last hours of life spewing on the dusty floorboards. To make things worse, in winter the pipes would freeze and the cistern would stop working altogether. Night-time relief was had in a bucket, and it was common in the morning to see Uncle Percy or Aunt Jean carrying theirs down to the loo. A stroke had taken Eliza before I was born andWalter just after, so my uncle, now married, lived upstairs with his wife and two children. We were joined in the house by my older cousin, her Turkish-Cypriot husband and their son, who all moved into the old ground-floor rent office when the council took over the property and turned the room into a dwelling.

It was now a house full of relatives (and, oddly, a monkey—my cousin’s husband having bought one in Club Row market as a pet); and although the three families kept themselves separate, sequestered on their different floors, the children claimed the doorstep, the yard and the damp basement space for their adventures in imagination.