1. In the early Nineties, I went back to Benbow Road for the first time since I’d gone to America. The place had come up a little, but once a shithole, always a shithole
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473535930
Version 1.0
Published by William Heinemann 2016
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © A Thousand Miles Long, Inc. 2016
Foreword © Chrissie Hynde 2016
Cover photograph © Dennis Morris / Camerapress
Steve Jones has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Lines from ‘Lonely Boy’ here: Words and Music by Paul Thomas Cook and Stephen Philip Jones. Courtesy of Universal Music Publishing Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.
First published by William Heinemann in 2016
William Heinemann
The Penguin Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA
www.penguin.co.uk
William Heinemann is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781785150678
I’m all alone,
I ain’t got no home
‘Lonely Boy’, Sex Pistols
He was a teenager when I met him. I didn’t notice him carrying a sack full of dreams around, but he was. Like all of us, he wanted to play guitar in a rock ’n’ roll band. But none of the bands out there fit.
We hung around Malcolm and Viv, and with them, the prog rock and Top of the Pops candy floss of the day seemed irrelevant. When he appeared onstage one night in a nihilistic little outfit, the Sex Pistols, only the girly decals on his Les Paul betrayed the pose.
Here was an Elvis fan. A dandy.
The girls had a soft spot for this shy West London thug and he took full advantage. (The crack of dawn wasn’t safe around him.) When it all fell apart with the band, he pulled a Lemmy and absconded to LA. Got a truck and a dog.
No one could have predicted that he’d become host to the best radio show in the state. But then, no one could have predicted Jonesy.
Chrissie Hynde, July 2016
One of the main things I remember about growing up in West London in the 1960s was the corrugated iron, that and the odd Ford Anglia driving about. There were building sites and debris everywhere – it was like the whole place was falling down around us. And the corrugated iron was a real nause (i.e. a fucking pain in the arse) to climb over. It was eight feet high and sharp enough to cut into your hands as you pulled yourself up to the top. It was almost like those builders didn’t want me to get in there and develop my driving skills by hot-wiring bulldozers to smash up their tea huts, the inconsiderate cunts.
You didn’t see a lot of film stars on the mean streets of Shepherd’s Bush in those days, even though the BBC TV studios were just around the corner. So when Jack Wild – the kid who played the Artful Dodger in Oliver! – walked past the end of my road, one day in the late 1960s, that was always going to be something which caught my eye. I was already a bit of an artful dodger myself by that time – maybe not picking a pocket or two yet, but certainly giving the odd stolen bike or brand-new train set fresh from the Hamleys stockroom a good home. But I wasn’t looking at Jack as a criminal role model. All that interested me was the fact that he was famous – if it’d been Elsie Tanner from Coronation Street walking down my road, I’d have been just as excited.
Me and a few other kids cottoned on to who he was and started following him. I suppose this wasn’t anything too weird in itself, just the common reaction any thirteen-year-old might have to someone they recognised from a film or off the TV – wanting to be as close to him as possible in the hope that some of the magic might rub off. But I always had to push things one stage further. One by one, all my mates dropped away, but I carried on trailing him, like he was Peter Pan or something. I’m not sure why now. I guess I was just more strongly drawn than they were to that special quality stardom gave to him.
Jack Wild was a couple of years older than me, but he wasn’t much bigger than I was. He didn’t look nothing special – he wasn’t wearing his top hat or anything. It’s just that when you’re one of those kids who has that sense of yourself as being trapped and maybe a bit lonely, if you see someone who seems like they’ve got it all sorted, you think if you can just be close to them everything will be all right and all the pain you feel will just go away.
I don’t know what he thought about me following him. I guess it freaked him out a bit, especially with all that corrugated iron along the sides of the road that he’d never have been able to escape over. At that time my mates and I were part of the first wave of skinheads; listening to Motown, Ska and Blue Beat, loving the music of people like Prince Buster who we’d picked up on from the West Indian kids who lived around us. So if Jack had turned round to sneak a glance at me – trying to look casual while he did it – he’d have seen me bowling along behind him in my oxblood Dr Marten boots with the space-age soles you could see through. I polished the shit out of my first pair of those. I’d have probably been wearing some nice Sta-Prest or Prince of Wales check trousers as well, and one of the crisp Ben Sherman shirts I’d go all the way to Richmond to nick from a shop called Ivy League.
He probably felt quite relieved when I finally gave up the pursuit about a mile further on. In later years I’d cross a lot of lines to get close to people I thought could fix me, but I hadn’t started boozing yet by this time, so I still had a few boundaries left. Jack Wild would be off to Hollywood a short while after, but I don’t think his story ended too happily. A lot of those child stars seem to have tragic lives in the end, don’t they? Fame fucks them up at an early age, but when you’re busy envying someone you never think about the fact that they might have problems of their own.
As a kid I used to have fantasies where I would imagine having different parents. I’d see people in films or on TV shows and think, ‘Why can’t I be in their family?’ Diana Dors, who was kind of the English Marilyn Monroe, she was one of them. I would spend ages thinking about how much better off I’d be if I was her kid: ‘Let me be with Diana, instead of these parents I’ve got.’ The funny thing is, I don’t even think it was a sexual thing at the time, I just didn’t like my shit life and I was looking for anything I could grab onto to get me away from the place I was in.
It’s not like I had the worst childhood ever. You hear horrific stories of kids going through way worse abuse than I did, and I’d hate it to look like I’m trying to put myself on that level. What I do know is how much things that happened when I was a kid fucked me up – still now, to this day. Of course the chemistry of everyone’s brain is different, so some people might deal with a lot worse and come out fine, and others could have it really easy and still feel very hard done by. All I can tell you about is my own experiences, and given how dodgy my memory is, I can’t even be too sure about some of them.
I ain’t got a clue what my story is gonna look like once it’s all set down on paper. I haven’t got any kind of agenda at the outset, beyond a few things I want to set straight, and maybe hoping I’ll be able to make a bit more sense of how different stages of my life fit together. One thing I’m pretty sure of is that I’m not going to come out of the whole thing smelling of roses.
You know that bit in A Clockwork Orange, where the main guy has his eyes forced open to make him feel like shit every time he remembers what a rotten cunt he was? That’s pretty much how writing this book is going to feel for me. Obviously no one’s forcing me to do it, and I’ve had my share of good times as well, but now I can’t be doing with my old shenanigans any more it does sometimes make me feel almost physically sick to think of some of the horrible shit I used to get up to.
Even though it’s been half my life since I first stopped drinking and taking drugs, I still wake up in a cold sweat sometimes, thinking about all the things I’ve done that I’m not proud of. But if I made a big song and dance about holding myself accountable for every new crime against humanity as I commit it, this book would get very boring very quickly. So I’m going to have to ask you to take it on trust from the kick-off that I’m trying to be a less despicable person these days, and then anyone who wants to judge me can do so at the full-time whistle.
One thing I can promise you is that I won’t be pontificating about how everyone else needs to get sober. I don’t give a fuck if other people wanna get high. I’ve had my go and now it’s your turn – knock yourself out if that’s what you wanna do. Of course if someone else can relate to my experiences and by some miracle that helps them to be less of an arsehole than I was, then that’s all well and good. But I don’t want to be that cunt where it’s like, ‘Oh, he was a rock and roller, but now he’s telling everyone else how to live.’ Fuck that preachy guy. He’s the last person I want to be. Just because I eventually ended up following Jack Wild to Hollywood, that doesn’t mean I bought a one-way ticket to La-La Land as well.
It’d be a few more years after bumping into the Artful Dodger till I met my own Fagin, aka Malcolm McLaren (who loved all that Dickensian shit). Once that happened, it was like ol’ Jack had passed on the baton, and it wasn’t long before our merry band of musical outlaws started picking record companies’ pockets like there was no tomorrow. But by the time we’d realised that our light-fingered Svengali had spent all the loot on The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle – a film explaining how the whole punk thing was his idea and we were just a bunch of suckers who couldn’t play – it turned out the joke was on us.
And as for the annoying little brat with the great bone structure who’s always asking for more … well, let’s leave Johnny Rotten out of this for a while, shall we? He’s had his say a few times. Maybe enough times. It’s my turn now. Because much as the Sex Pistols couldn’t have existed without John – or Malcolm, or Cookie, or Glen, or even Sid – it was my shit upbringing that got the ball rolling. That’s not me showing off, it’s just a fact.
I was born in 1955 – around the same time as rock ’n’ roll. I got my sense of rhythm from my mum, Mary Jones, who was a Teddy girl, so I was in her fucking womb when she was jiving down the Hammersmith Palais.
Teddy girls – and Teddy boys, which is what my dad was – were the first in the long line of British youth cults which would brighten up the post-war years. Their name was shortened from the Edwardian style of clothes they favoured (like drainpipe trousers and long, drape jackets) and they were the ones who started rioting to ‘Rock Around the Clock’ when the film Blackboard Jungle came out. It’s no wonder I’ve got such a strong connection to all those old rockers from the early days – Eddie Cochran for sure, but not just him.
Up until the age of about six years old, my childhood was going pretty smoothly. OK, so my dad had fucked off without hanging around long enough to say hello to me, and at that time it was a bit of a no-no to be what was still technically known as ‘a bastard’. But you couldn’t really blame him, as I don’t think he and my mum had been together that long when she got pregnant. And the household I lived in felt like quite a normal – even loving – home. You might say, ‘How does a kid know what normal is, when they’ve got nothing else to compare it to?’ But I think they just know. I certainly did.
My mum and I lived with my nan Edith and grandad Fred in a third-floor flat in Riverside Gardens, Hammersmith. It’s that big brick Peabody buildings estate, near the bridge. If you were heading out of London towards Heathrow airport, you’d see the Hammersmith Odeon – or Apollo, as it is now – on your left as you drove west over the flyover, then our flats would be on the right as you come down off the flyover and the main road levels out. I say that as if it’s changed, but they were still there last time I looked (although admittedly that was in 2008).
It wasn’t just the four of us. My gran and grandad’s three other children lived there too. I slept in a cot at the bottom of the bed my mum shared with her sister Frances. My gran and grandad had their own room, and my uncles, Barry and Martin, shared the last bedroom. The flat ran between two corners of the block, so one main window looked out over the flyover towards the Odeon (the scene of a few memorable adventures later on in my life) and the other faced the opposite way. There were no lifts, so you had to walk up the stairs to get there, but this was nobody’s shithole. It was a proper Victorian housing estate – decent accommodation for decent working-class people who were getting by OK.
I’m not sure how the Joneses were keeping up with everyone else, though, because my grandad was a lazy cunt. The story was he’d avoided having to fight in World War II by putting his foot under a tram to mangle his leg. I don’t know if that was true, but he certainly never worked the whole time I was there, maybe because of the same injury that kept him out of the army.
He just used to sit there in his chair all day smoking roll-ups while my nan went out to work cleaning other people’s houses. He’d still managed to buy himself some wheels, though – an Austin A40 which started with a crank. Having a car parked in the square down below the flats was quite a status symbol at that time, even if it did always break down when he tried to drive us down to Brighton in it. Come to think of it, his leg couldn’t have been that bad if he could still drive. I remember him sitting me in his lap sometimes and letting me steer when he’d take the car for a turn around the square – my first underage driving experience; maybe that’s where I got the bug from.
Most of my memories of those times are happy ones. Like my nan giving me a bath in the sink, or making those amazing old-fashioned steamed suet puddings where she’d stretch a cloth over the top of the bowl and tie it with a piece of string. She’d fill the bowl with raisins and then cover the whole thing in treacle from a green and gold Tate & Lyle tin. There’s some things which happened last week that I don’t remember too well, but fifty-five years on I can feel how good that pudding tasted on my tongue as if I’m eating it right now.
My nan wasn’t spoiling me, she was just doing what any normal grandparent (or parent, come to that) would’ve done – nurturing, I suppose, is what you’d call it. I don’t remember my mum so much at this time, even though she was there. The flat was pretty crowded, so it was easy to lose track of people, but it’s my nan I remember doing all the cleaning up and making the dinners and checking everyone was all right. She was great.
I got the feeling that my nan had always preferred boys to girls, and as a result her sons had probably got the lion’s share of her attention. Maybe that was part of what my mum didn’t like about my nan being so warm and loving towards me when I was little. It made her quite cold towards me when I was growing up.
All I knew about my dad (apart from the fact that he was a Teddy boy, which was how he and my mum had met) was that his name was Don Jarvis and he was an amateur boxer from Fulham. That was the only information my mum gave me then. I think I’d picked up that it wasn’t a subject she was too keen to talk about, though I do remember going down to some kind of court at a very early age where my mum was hoping to get money off him. I don’t think she had any luck, because they’d never been married and she was definitely having a good old moan outside the court after.
My family did like to complain, but there was a lot of laughter, too. My grandad was a grumpy old sod, but he was funny with it. He would sit me on his lap – there was no weird shit there, nothing noncey – and he had this rag that he used to blow cigarette smoke into and then hold it over my face. I fucking loved the smell of those cigarettes. Breathing in the smoke from that rag was one of the best and most comforting feelings I’ve ever known. When it got put back in the drawer I’d be shouting, ‘Where’s me rag? Where’s me rag?’ It wasn’t just for special occasions, it was for all occasions.
I can see now that this was probably the start of my first addiction. I don’t think it was just the nicotine I loved, it was the fact that my grandad cared enough to blow smoke into the rag just because he knew I wanted him to. Either way, I really craved that rag when I didn’t have it, and it certainly didn’t take me long to progress to a pack of Players No. 6 as soon as I was old enough to buy my own fags (although I did get into Gauloises for ten minutes at one point because I heard Ronnie Wood smoked them; they were a good strong smoke). A few years later, when I was on heroin, I’d be on five packs a day. You smoke a lot more once you’re on dope. As if it’s not fucking unhealthy enough already.
Obviously you don’t see the nicotine pacifier recommended by too many parenting manuals these days, but to me it was part and parcel of what I look back on as really good times. Even though she wasn’t exactly the maternal type, I think my mum and I got on OK at that stage. Once she got me a brand-new pair of Tesco bombers – just shit jeans – and plimsolls that were like Converse but weren’t Converse. I used to love it if ever I got new clothes: I’d be on top of the world the minute I had a bit of fresh clobber on, and I felt like I could walk tall through the squares that linked up the different Peabody buildings.
There was a real sense of community on that estate. There was a boozer on the corner with an off-licence next to it, and when we’d take back the R. White’s lemonade bottles to get the deposits, I’d sit outside the pub listening to the guy who played the piano. That’s one of my first conscious musical memories, although there’d be plenty more to come (and a few unconscious ones to go with them).
I also loved going to the matinees at the ABC cinema, just round the corner on King Street, to see Commando Cody and all those shit Saturday serials. I preferred sitting in the back row, because I didn’t want to be close to all the other kids, and for some reason I loved it when the geezer would come out between the films and go, ‘Hey, kids, what do you think?’ Then everyone would go home and you’d have to come back next week to see the spaceship with a little bit of string holding it up.
Looking back on them, these were some of the happiest days of my life. I’d made a few friends on the estate and started primary school at Flora Gardens in Ravenscourt Park down the road. My grandparents loved me. It was all good.
I think I’d still have ended up being an alcoholic even if I’d had more of a charmed upbringing and stayed with my nan and her steak and kidney pies till I was old enough to leave home. There were quite a few big drinkers among the men in my family, and I just had that obsessive–compulsive alcoholic gene from day one. That’s nothing to do with scenarios that have unfolded in my life, it’s just who I am, or that’s what I believe, anyway. But I don’t think the Sex Pistols would’ve ever existed – at least, not with me in them – if it wasn’t for what happened to me next. Apart from anything else, the urge to look for a better life wouldn’t have been there, because I’d already have had one.
So there I was, having a great old time in the shadow of the Hammersmith flyover, when all of a sudden this guy comes along and my life takes a turn to the dark side. Ron Dambagella his name was, and I think my mum met him at work. She’d had a few part-time jobs. I remember one as a ‘telephone girl’ – that meant cleaning other people’s spit off the telephones in offices, which can’t have been a barrel of laughs. But then she got something a bit more permanent at this factory making rubber components, I’m not sure if they were for shoes, or cookers, maybe both.
Anyway, after a while she got moved to a smaller workshop under the arches, right next to Flora Gardens, my first school. I think he was in charge of that place, and I always remember the two of them working there alone, because once they’d got together she used to tell me proudly, ‘Ron’s the boss,’ and I used to think, ‘You’re the only ones there!’ But when I asked my auntie Frances about this, which I had to do, because my mum and I haven’t spoken for a few years and I wanted to make sure I’ve got everything as accurate as possible, she told me there were other employees as well. Apparently old Ron (and he was old – a good ten years older than my mum, anyway) had a reputation of being ‘very flirtatious’ with the female workers.
I’ll have to go into a lot of detail about things that happened over the next few years, some of which will probably be quite difficult for anyone who was involved to read. But I want to say from the outset that I’m not doing this to make my mum look bad. I’ve absolutely no interest in coating her off (though my stepfather is a different matter). I understand that her life wasn’t easy. She had me too young – when she was about twenty – my dad had left her, and she maybe didn’t feel like she had too many options, so I can see why she might have lowered her standards a bit. She probably thought, ‘Well, I’ve got this kid, which is baggage to a lot of men, and I ain’t gonna get anyone better.’ My mum was not a square, in fact she was kind of hip – she bleach-blonded her hair and had massive knockers – so I bet Ron couldn’t believe his luck.
The first time I sensed something was going on was when my mum was walking me along King Street to school – she’d drop me off there on the way to work – and we stopped at a crossing. I can’t be sure if this actually happened or if I’ve elaborated on my mental picture over time, but I do have a memory of the wind catching my mum’s coat and blowing it open, and me thinking she didn’t have anything on underneath – well, maybe stockings, but not a skirt. That momentary flash kind of spun me a bit, and when I was older I’d wonder if they were maybe up to some kinky shit at work. For the moment, though, I was only six years old, and my whole world was about to go down the toilet.
The next thing I know, this Dambagalla guy’s in the picture. He never came up to visit at my nan’s, but I guess part of the deal for my mum in getting a new geezer in tow was so she could get her own place. So we waved goodbye to happy times with my nice, nurturing nan and grandad, and began our shit new life in a one-bedroom basement flat at 15 Benbow Road, Shepherd’s Bush. It wasn’t much more than a mile away from where we’d lived before – I even stayed at the same school – but it might as well have been on the other side of the world.
Fuck, that place was grim. It was dark and damp and horrible and I was sleeping on a fucking camp bed at the bottom of what was now my mum and Ron’s bed. The khazi was outside, and when the tin bath came out in the front room, mum went first, then step-dad, then me.
When I’ve talked to Americans over the years about what being poor meant in Britain at that time, they’ve never quite seemed to get it. I don’t remember having a fridge or a TV, no one ever had showers, and for hot water there was the sink with the Ascot heater above it. You’d put money in the meter to get the radiator on and most people would knock the lock off and keep putting the same 10p in. I remember when I first went to America in the late Seventies, even poor people who were near the bottom of the ladder seemed to take things for granted that I’d always seen as luxuries.
Where I grew up, it was fairly normal to turn a blind eye to the odd bit of opportunist thievery. If people were struggling to get by and could get away with nicking something every now and again to make ends meet, that was maybe frowned on a little bit but no one was really going to hold it against them. We were all living at subsistence level – in short, none of us had a pot to piss in – so I can understand now why when families went to the Tesco supermarket on King Street together I’d sometimes see them putting stuff under their overcoats. Maybe there was nothing left in the house for dinner and it was their only way to put food on the table. At the time, though, I didn’t really get it. Maybe because it wasn’t really talked about afterwards, I’d be thinking, ‘What’s going on here?’
Another time they had some kind of competition in Tesco’s where they would read out a number over the PA and if it was your number you could win a prize. I don’t know how it happened, but my mum or Ron must have known someone on the inside, because their number came up and they won something, but for some reason it was obvious that the whole thing wasn’t legit and they got rumbled. It was all a bit of a farce and quite humiliating, but again because nothing was ever really explained to me, I found it all very confusing.
A similar thing happened at school at Flora Gardens when we had an assignment to draw a picture and bring it back to class the next day. One of my mum’s brothers – I think it was my uncle Barry – drew something and it looked good, so he said, ‘’Ere you are – try that,’ but when I took it into class the next day, the teacher caught on straight away. He just asked me to draw the same thing again, and of course I couldn’t do it. Barry was no master draughtsman, but I couldn’t match him. I suppose looking back the feeling that incident gave me was shame, but at the time it just felt like I was worth a bit less than everyone else.
It was the same at home, too. I was second fiddle, I was put in the back, while my mum did everything she could to keep Ron happy. It felt like I was in a competition – with my stepdad, for my mum’s attention – that I couldn’t possibly win. I’m not saying my mum got off on the power this gave her, but sometimes it felt like she did. When you’re a kid, you don’t think of your mum the same way you think of other people. You don’t think she’s entitled to have character defects or do shitty things or just generally fuck up like everyone else does. So when that does happen, it can be hard to deal with.
It’s only recently that I’ve started to look at her as a person like any other and not just my mum. I would love to know what her motivation was and what her life was like when she was growing up, but I don’t think she would know where to start when it came to that conversation. I tapped on the window of it a few times when we were still talking but the curtains got drawn very quickly. If I tried to ask her about what my nan and grandad were like as parents it just seemed to make her really uncomfortable, almost as if something bad went on there. You’d think if nothing did she’d gladly talk about it, wouldn’t you? But there’s no knowing with my mum.
She’d say, ‘Make sure you wipe your arse and put clean underwear on when you leave the house … in case you have an accident. I don’t want the doctors thinking your mum doesn’t look after you.’ It was like that was all she cared about – not whether you’ve had an accident and ‘Are you OK?’ but would your arse be clean enough to reflect a positive light on her?
A lot of it was that classic English thing of ‘What will the neighbours think?’ My response to that has always been, ‘Who gives a fuck what the neighbours think?!’ But it was part and parcel of a working-class upbringing in Britain in those days that you got brainwashed into apologising for living in shit. ‘Just shut up and get on with it, let the rich be rich and the poor be poor, Henry the Eighth is up there in his castle and everyone else is down below in their little mud huts.’
In a way, the Sex Pistols would be the end of that way of thinking, but even now I lapse into it every so often. Sometimes when I know I am selling myself short I feel that old lack of self-esteem reflex stirring within me – ‘Oh, that’s OK, I’ll make do with this thing I don’t really want because I haven’t got the right to ask for anything better.’ The programming is deeply rooted.
My mum didn’t tell me much more about Ron than she had about my real dad – and she never had any good words for him, only that he was a cunt who never made any paternity payments. I think Ron had lived in East London before they met, and I had a feeling that maybe he had a daughter, although I never met her. I found out later that he was still married when he and my mum got together, which might explain why the two of them never got hitched, although they stayed together till he died a few years back, so they must’ve loved each other in their own way.
From his dark skin, jet black hair and foreign-sounding name, I got the impression that maybe Ron had originally come from Italy, or maybe Turkey, or Greece – there could easily have been a bit of Bubble (bubble and squeak = Greek) in there – but this wasn’t talked about much either. In fact, nothing was. Without ever saying much, Ron made it pretty clear that he’d have preferred it if I wasn’t there so he could have my mum all to himself. I quickly learnt not to ask too many questions, because curiosity seemed to be frowned upon. It’s only over the past few years that I’ve started to find some of the answers that a person who’d grown up in a normal family would’ve known all along.
I’d often wondered what my nan and my uncles thought of Ron, because I got the vibe that maybe he wasn’t popular with the rest of the family. So I asked my auntie Frances if this was because the family disapproved of the way my mum and Ron got together, and she said it was more likely because the brothers and sisters weren’t close. She also said my grandad was a grumpy old sod who wouldn’t leave the house, but if a trip to 15 Benbow Road was all that was on offer, I don’t really blame him.
No one would’ve been going back to that dingy gaff voluntarily, that’s for sure. The whole time I lived with my mum and Ron as a kid – after a few years in the basement in Benbow Road we’d move to an upstairs flat in the same house, and then later my mum got a council flat in Battersea – I never remember them having friends or family over. I found that weird at the time and I still do now. I’m not saying my mum and stepdad were like the Moors Murderers, but Ian Brady and Myra Hindley probably had more visitors.
The workshop under the railway arches where Ron was supervisor was even worse. Obviously this wasn’t my mum and Ron’s fault – they weren’t hanging out there for fun – but I hated it when I had to go there. That whole place stank of rubber, the curved roof and bare brick walls made it really claustrophobic, and there was this one big fucking machine with steam coming out of it that stamped out rubber rings all day long. It made so much noise you couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. It was like something out of the movie Eraserhead.
The one glimmer of sunshine that came into my life during this dark and depressing time was when I got a dog. He was only a little mutt but his name was Brucie and I got very close to him very quickly. That dog was fucking great and he really loved me, but one day I came home from school and he wasn’t there any more. My mum just told me, ‘Oh, Brucie’s gone.’
She never explained what had happened to him, so I assumed they’d just got rid of him because he was too much work. It felt like the same thing might happen to me at any time when I was living in Benbow Road, and at a couple of points, it did.
This is where the gaps in my memory really start to widen – presumably because I was so upset by some of the things that were going on that my mind just tried to close them down. Auntie Frances can’t help either because, as I’ve already mentioned, she kind of lost touch with us once we moved to Shepherd’s Bush. Later on, as a teenager, I’d be sent to several different institutions for a variety of reasons (mostly connected with getting nicked), which I can generally recall quite well, but there’s one place I half remember getting carted off to soon after we got to Benbow Road and I’ve just got no fucking idea what – or where – it was, or why I had to go there.
All I’m sure of is that it was out in the country and I was only there for about a week. I don’t think it was a punishment, I think it was some kind of children’s home, so maybe my mum couldn’t look after me and no one else was willing to take me cos I was too much trouble. It’s not like I was a total hooligan by that stage, though – I was only a little kid when I got sent there.
The only clear memory I have is that when I arrived they had a litter of kittens in a basket in the hallway. All you cat-lovers out there should look away now – I don’t want to turn the cat people against me at this early stage, the pussy’s going to be in enough jeopardy later – but I was so fucking angry about having to be there that I started trying to strangle them. These poor little fuckers have only been born a few days and already they’ve got my traumatised child’s hands closing round their throats. I’m glad to say I didn’t go through with it, but I sure as fucking hell did miss Brucie.
Your brain’s still developing when you’re young, and when you’re quite isolated and you make a close attachment like that – even if it’s only to an animal – and that contact gets taken away, it can mark you. All of a sudden this thing that made you feel like you mattered has fucking disappeared, and you don’t get the hope of that back. When the scar heals over, it gets kind of hard. No wonder I can’t have a proper fucking relationship with a woman … but let’s not go down that road just yet.
For the moment, the main side effect of how fucking miserable I felt was that I started to fall even more behind at school. I couldn’t read or write that well from the beginning, anyway. When it came to all the kids’ comics with little stories in them like The Hurricane and The Topper, it was only really the pictures I was looking at. But the more unhappy I was, the more I fucked about, until eventually I got put back a year for not learning enough.
If I was a kid at school now, I’d probably get diagnosed pretty quickly as being dyslexic and/or having ADHD, but there was no ‘special needs’ teaching in those days. Or at least, none that applied to me in the schools I went to. I guess I seemed like a normal kid, just a bit more loony than the others. My problem was I just couldn’t keep words in my head as they came off the page. Even now in later life, when I’ve taken steps to sort myself out on the literacy front, I still struggle to focus – it’s like I’m not listening in my head to what I’m reading, because my mind is already away thinking about a pair of socks or something.
I’ve never been the sort of person who’d show off about not having once read a book all the way through. This was always a source of embarrassment to me, and another reason I never paid attention in school for one fucking second. It was the first of a series of situations where it became easier to find a way of blocking out the reality than to face up to it. No one was saying, ‘Maybe this kid could be dyslexic.’ Not at school, and certainly not at home, where no one had anything but the worst expectations of me, academically. Teachers assumed it was my destiny to fuck around and get in trouble, and so I did. It wasn’t like I felt they had it in for me, just that what they were teaching didn’t really have anything to do with me.
A couple of strange things happened to me just before we moved to Benbow Road which I forgot to tell you about. Anyone out there thinking this book has all been a bit Mary Poppins so far, well, this is where the David Lynch hits the fan.
Alongside the more celebrated landmarks of the Hammersmith area – the Odeon, the Palais, the flyover, the bridge, the Broadway – the local paedophile was another neighbourhood fixture. Every area has one (or usually a lot more than one, more’s the pity). I guess they have a range that they cover, the same way urban foxes do, and this one’s territory stretched all the way over to Shepherd’s Bush, which would become significant a few years later … so just file that away for the moment in the part of your memory marked ‘ominous facts’.
Once, and it was when I was still living in Riverside Gardens so I know I wasn’t more than six years old, this guy tried to lure me down into the underpass beneath the Hammersmith flyover. He didn’t do it with sweets or chocolates like it said he should in the ‘stranger danger’ adverts, but by tearing out pages from a lingerie catalogue and dropping them in front of me to leave a trail – like the fucking breadcrumbs in ‘Hansel and Gretel’.
The question I’ve asked myself a lot is: ‘How did he know this would work?’ You’ve got to bear in mind that I was living happily at my nan’s. Nothing bad had happened to me yet, and I had only just started school. Technically, I was still a pure and innocent kid. And yet somehow he knew that, if he did this, I would follow him. I think maybe some kids just give off more of a sexual energy than others, and they’re the ones who are vulnerable to predators. It’s like you’re marked in a way that only they can see.
For whatever reason, I was one of those kids. I should’ve been thinking, ‘Why’s that creepy guy tearing pages out of that magazine and laying them on the stairs?’ But instead of that, because I’m this prematurely sexual being, I’m interested. I can see exactly where this happened very clearly in my mind’s eye: it was the steps down under the Chiswick side of the flyover, the way you’d go if you were heading for the river. He was trying to draw me off my usual turf and away from safety.
I didn’t want to go with him, but I did want to get my hands on those pictures of birds which were getting me excited for reasons I didn’t understand. I followed him down the stairs and into the darkness to a point where – and I remember this very clearly – I could see the light behind him from the exit at the far end. It wasn’t a long tunnel, just under the road, but I could see him making his way up the stairs and I just thought, ‘Fuck this, I’m going home.’ For the time being at least I was going to stay on my own territory, which, I hardly need to add, was very much the right decision.
Another weird thing happened around then. Again we were still living with my nan, so things hadn’t really started to get dark yet. But one day I was playing around the squares with some other kids when this girl – not much older than me and I didn’t really know her – pulled her knickers down. Maybe things weren’t right in her own home or maybe this kind of exhibitionism is quite normal for some kids of six years old. I don’t know. One thing I’ll tell you for sure is that my reaction wasn’t the same as the other kids’. She pulled her knickers down and there was her little shitty arse. All the other kids kind of ran off laughing, but I just stood there staring at her. I was totally transfixed – it was just so fucking sexual. She never moved either. We didn’t touch each other, but I was standing there in a trance for so long that by the time I’d snapped out of if some cheeky little cunt had had the time to nick my bike.
Later on, when I was reflecting on my life and trying to work how the fuck I came to connect stealing with sexual feelings, this incident was obviously hard to get past. But that kind of stuff is really deep and once you get down there trying to figure things out you’ve got to be careful not to leap to the obvious conclusions. Therapists love to jump on something like this and say it’s the reason for everything, but life just isn’t that simple. One fucking chancer even suggested that maybe I nicked so much stuff over the years that followed because I was trying to make up for the loss of my bicycle!
There’s no shortage of evidence to go through for anyone trying to work out why I ended up the way I did. Another time I was on the swings in the playground at school in Flora Gardens and there were girls standing around laughing at me. Girls tended to like me because I was cute, even though I was quite shy around them until I discovered alcohol. But I was still definitely one of the cooler kids, so I wasn’t used to people taking the piss. I didn’t know why they were all laughing at me until I realised my cock was hanging out of my shorts. I got so ashamed and embarrassed because I didn’t know how to make them stop. Of course I’d find out in the end, but that wouldn’t be for a few years yet.
There’s one other incident of this kind I probably can’t get away without mentioning, even though I’d like to. But if I’m trying to be honest about my past, it’s got to be all or nothing. My mum was walking with me along the main street in Hammersmith. It felt late at night but maybe it was just early evening in the winter, as I was probably only seven or eight at the time. Either way, the shops were closed. But somewhere along King Street, my mum stopped by this lingerie store to look at the stuff in the window. Not really thinking about what she was doing, she gave the front door a push and found that they’d left it open when they went home. No one was in there and so all this stuff she couldn’t normally have afforded was free to a good home. She was really surprised and excited – I remember her saying, ‘Fuck me!’ – not your usual window shopping.
You don’t need to be that psychiatrist bird in The Sopranos to see that the combination of having my mum’s attention, her swearing, the lingerie in the window and the excitement of getting away with something might have had some kind of impact on my sexual development. But when it comes to those murky waters there’s a big pike in the fishpond that I’ve not got to yet.
Never mind the paedophile in the underpass, more often than not it’s the one who lives in the same house as you that you really need to worry about. At least, that was how it worked out in my case. We’d been in Benbow Road a few years by the time my stepdad fiddled with me. I must’ve been ten or eleven, because by then we’d moved upstairs to a slightly bigger flat in the same house that had an actual toilet and a bathroom. Technically we were going up in the world, but it didn’t feel that way.
My mum was in hospital when it happened. The way I remember it, she had a miscarriage and had to stay in hospital for a while afterwards. I’m not 100 per cent sure that’s what happened but that’s what I remember. I don’t know how long I was in the house on my own with him. Frances said she thought this was a time I was sent to a children’s home for a while, but if that did happen, it didn’t happen quick enough to save me from getting fucked with.
One night, Ron’s in bed in Benbow Road when he calls me in to see him. He doesn’t generally acknowledge my existence unless he absolutely has to, but when he does address me directly, there’s usually a bit of intimidation going on. So I wasn’t going to say no, even though I’d have had no reason to think anything good was going to come of it (and it fucking didn’t). Anyway, I’ve not been in the bedroom long before he starts bullying me into jerking him off. I’m only a kid. What do I fucking know? I haven’t got a clue what’s going on, but I’m there on my own with him and there doesn’t seem to be any other option other than to go along with what he wants. So that’s exactly what I do – fiddle with his cock until he cums, with him looming over me all the while telling me what I’ve got to do.
All I remember feeling immediately afterwards was a bit bewildered – just thinking, ‘That was … odd.’ But the consequences of what happened are still with me half a fucking century later. I never told anyone about it for years afterwards, and it feels quite strange putting this in a book even now. But knowing the damage all the confusion I felt did to me over the intervening years makes me want to do all I can to let anyone who’s been in a similar situation know they’re not alone.