The Living Years (4 page)

It was my sister Nicky who got me into Cliff.

My parents weren’t really musical although my father loved theatre and musical hall. At home I would often see him watching
The Good Old Days
with Leonard Sachs and pretending to conduct along to the songs. But they didn’t own any records (having moved around so much while Dad was in the Navy, they didn’t have many possessions generally), so the gramophone in our house was in Nicky’s bedroom. Which always bugged me.

Nicky mainly listened to Tommy Steele and Elvis – ballad Elvis – which didn’t get me going. It was only when I heard ‘Move It’ by Cliff and the Shadows – that wild, guitar-based sound – that I got a real body-charge of excitement. And then there was Cliff himself: his sharp suits, his quiffed-back hair, his moves . . . with that raw sound as well, he had it all.

My first gig, which I persuaded my parents to take me to, was Cliff and the Shadows at the Apollo in Manchester. A few days before, I would manage to buy some Brylcreem and just as we were getting ready to leave I greased my hair into some sort of quiff so that I could look as cool as Cliff did. My mother didn’t think I looked very cool at all, marched me upstairs and stuck my head under the tap.

Funnily enough, it didn’t dampen the experience. Cliff was wearing a white jacket and black shirt and was as good as I’d hoped, although the idea that I could do what he was doing never occurred to me: he was so grown up and beyond my world.

As well as the sound, it was the shape of the guitar that appealed to me. I’d seen pictures of a red Hofner with double cutaways and I liked the symmetry of it. This meant that my first guitar – a cheap nylon-stringed acoustic – was a bit of a disappointment. As was Bert Weedon’s manual
Play in a Day
, mainly because that was what I was expecting to do. And I didn’t. The book had a picture of Bert on the cover wearing a suit and holding a jazz guitar but by page three he’d lost me.

I wasn’t entirely put off: I could still practise posturing with a record on. At Far Hills there weren’t any mirrors that worked properly. Nicky had a dressing table mirror that angled but if I wanted it to stay where it got me looking good, I had to wedge it into position with a book. Worse, I could only go into Nicky’s room if she wasn’t there. But when we went down to stay at Morris Lodge there was a huge old, dark wooden wardrobe with two full-length mirrors on the doors. I spent quite a lot of time in front of them.

Dad must have taken pity on me at this point because he decided to send me for some lessons with a guitar teacher in Bramhall. Education and learning in any form was something that he considered worthwhile. Unfortunately, as far as I was concerned, this wasn’t much better than Bert Weedon. I didn’t want to learn about scales and notation from a guy in a tweed sports jacket: I wanted to learn songs. I stopped going after a couple of weeks, which I’m sure upset Dad.

The thing about being a guitarist – even a not-very-good one – was that it automatically made you stand out at The Leas. Everyone else played the piano or the recorder.

My first live performance was at a school assembly in my third year where I performed a solo version of ‘Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore’. (The bill also included ‘Dry Bones – A Negro Spiritual’ and ended up with the school song, ‘Deo Parere Libertas’.)

I was in the school choir but my voice wasn’t great and, to make matters worse, my guitar, which a master had tuned for me, had been knocked over by some idiot just before I went on stage. It remained painfully out of tune for the whole performance. I wasn’t an outgoing guy but luckily I was too young to be fazed. I battled on regardless and then, feeling flushed with success, decided to form a band.

There were five of us in the Chesters, although only two of us could play instruments: me and Dimitri Griliopoulis. He was a drummer so it was a no-brainer that we’d bond instantly but I don’t think we minded that the others were only along for the ride. The main thing was being able to say you were
in
a band – we all understood that. Playing something was not the point.

The thinking behind our name was that The Leas was fifteen minutes from Liverpool, which was the place where everything was kicking off musically. The Liverpools didn’t sound very good, though, so we decided to go for the Chesters, Chester being the nearest city that worked.

We’d hold our rehearsals in the main hall and every so often the music teacher would insist that we let some flautist or recorder player join in, which didn’t help with our image – although neither did the cricket jumpers that Dimitri and I wore in our promotional photos. During one school holiday, in desperation, we persuaded Nicky to pose with us. She looked like she should be in a band, which was more than you could say about Dimitri and me.

Dimitri and I wrote a couple of songs together – ‘We used to be so happy / We said one day we’d mar-ry’ – but I didn’t blame Dimitri when he started moonlighting with The Leas’ other band, the Echoes. I was too busy learning to play my new electric guitar to mind.

It probably wasn’t the greatest look, having Mum with me in the guitar shop. She was wearing a tweed skirt and a headscarf, but then again, I was wearing shorts and Start-rite sandals. Mum always dressed me smartly and also kept a brush in her handbag, which she’d whip out to do my hair before we went anywhere.

I hadn’t got a clue what kind of guitar I wanted and the shop itself was a bit overpowering. I was a bit too intimidated by the coolness of the instruments hanging on the walls to look around. The guy could have sold us anything he wanted, which is exactly what he did. I left with a Fender jazz guitar which had strings about quarter of an inch off the fretboard: the last kind of thing you’d want to get if you were a beginner. I also ended up with a Selmer Little Giant amp – impressive name, teeny little thing. It was only about a foot by a foot-and-a-half. The fact that I would need an amplifier had never occurred to me before that day. Newspapers at the time were full of cartoons of long-haired guys playing electric guitars in their bedrooms while their parents – usually their fathers – screwed up their eyes in agony, and the guitars would always be plugged straight into the mains socket. That seemed fair enough to me.

Just seeing my light blonde guitar lying in its crushed green-velvet lined case was exciting. As soon as we got back to Far Hills I rushed up to my bedroom and started strumming away in a very unmusical fashion. Even to me the sound seemed loud – beautifully loud – but I can’t imagine what it must have been like for my father: amplified music was such a complete unknown for his generation.

On my father’s side there was a link to the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (my great-great grandmother was sister to Shelley’s mother) and so I think my mother expected me to have an artistic streak. ‘Darling,’ she’d say, ‘it’s in the blood: Shelley’s line!’ But Dad, although he never put the brakes on me, must have been worried – not least about our house. Every time I started playing he’d stride round the house and start tapping the walls. He thought I was shaking the cement out of the brickwork (as I might have been, slightly). He never said anything to me though – and, needless to say, our house never did fall down.

* * *

As well as Dimitri, I had also made friends with a boy called David Sandford at The Leas. David came from Ireland and in my last term I was invited to go over and stay with him. It was the first time I had ever flown and David Sandford’s father, who was a turkey farmer in Strangford, picked me up at Belfast airport in his beaten-up old Land Rover.

I suppose Mr Sandford thought he’d make the most of the opportunity because David and I were put to work feeding his turkeys and helping with the harvest. There were some other older boys there too and we all stayed in a caravan on our own behind the barn. It was free labour for David’s dad but freedom for me: I was twelve and felt very grown up.

By this point I’d smoked the odd Player’s No. 6 but for those ten days I could (and did) smoke as much as I wanted. I also found that the cider the older boys were drinking was bearable. Growing up I had always aspired to my parents’ sherry at Christmas. I wasn’t interested in their gin and tonics and gin and vermouths. Sherry was the one that appealed to me: that lovely colour. Then one year they gave me a glass and I discovered that it was disgusting, although of course I couldn’t say that to them. ‘Mm! Lovely!’ I said, forcing it down. Cider was definitely an improvement.

The only real downside of the whole trip was that the caravan was just yards away from 17,000 turkeys. I still get a lingering whiff of ammonia in my nostrils at the very thought of Strangford. What with that and the sherry, Christmas dinner hasn’t been the same since.

Bar a few incidents at prep school and this rather heady Irish holiday I was a rather well-behaved boy. My father had always impressed on me the importance of politeness, trust and honour, and I felt that these were among the things for which he’d fought the war. In 1941 his ship,
Excellent
, had returned to Portsmouth for a refit the day after the first big blitz and he’d been appalled to see ‘the smoking ruins of our home port’:

I went ashore for a look and had a rather disproportionate flash of anger at the damage done to the pubs where we had spent many rather cheerful hours and whence we had taken out the barmaids after closing time for a spot of dancing at the local Assembly Rooms (known generally by the less decorous name of the Arse and Belly Rooms). It seemed so spiteful and un-gentlemanly to bash a man’s pub – rather like smashing his golf clubs or damaging his children’s bicycles.

The ethos of The Leas was clearly one that my father approved of because when I left the school in July 1964 he wrote to the headmaster:

We are glad that Michael has acquitted himself as a Leasian by achieving reasonable distinction in the fields of games and the social life of the school, by becoming a house prefect and by passing satisfactorily into Charterhouse.

We are also glad that Michael has been able to be with you for these vital early years, subject to the examples and influences that make up the school’s personality.

It is not easy, these days, to find an environment founded on the basic simple virtues and cemented by a forthright religious life. Such things tend to be regarded by the self-styled progressives as corny and old hat but one would respect their views the more did they but offer adequate alternatives.

Sent with the letter was also ‘a small contribution to the organ fund. I think this appropriate as Michael has done his bit over the last six years in helping to wear the old one out!’ It was true, I had.

I don’t know if Dad really thought I had passed ‘satisfactorily’ into Charterhouse. Situated in Surrey, it was one of the top public schools in the country and had fees to match. In my last term at The Leas my father entered me for a naval scholarship that would have covered the cost of my time there. It was decided on the basis of an interview and things appeared to be going well – I seemed to be impressing the four medalled members of naval top brass sitting across the room. But then one of them asked if I had read any naval histories.

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I’ve read lots.’

‘Really? Which ones?’

Silence.

With that my scholarship was history too.

‘The guitar,’ said Mr Chare, ‘is a symbol of the revolution. And there’ll be no revolution starting in my house, on my watch.’ And he banged his fists down on his desk.

Chare (pronounced ‘Char’) was my Charterhouse housemaster and my nemesis. His eyebrows were about an inch long and stuck out as far as his chin and he walked around with steel tips on his heels so that you hear him coming like some sort of Nazi commander. He spoke through his teeth, too. All the boys were frightened of him but he particularly had it in for me. He thought that the youth revolution was going to start in his house and that I was going to be the instigator.

* * *

Charterhouse had been founded in 1611 and got stuck somewhere in Dickensian times. Boys were assigned to one of eleven houses, some of which had been modernized, but not mine (of course). Lockites was a dump. The loos were outside – you’d have to dash through the rain and snow in winter. I can still picture the trails of slipper prints. The house itself had been built up too close to the hill behind so it was always dark and damp. When I think back to my prep school days, there’s a feeling of space about the memories: the links golf course and beyond that the sea and Hilbre Island, where once a term you’d go for the day and get crabs out of rock pools. When I think about Charterhouse, the memories are all grey and black.

The first one or two years at Charterhouse were spent in dorms. You then moved on to ‘cubes’ – basically ceiling-less hospital cubicles – which at least allowed semi-privacy when masturbating. Only in the final year did you get a study bedroom, by which time you were too broken to appreciate it.

There were endless archaic rules and regulations on everything from how long your hair could be (it couldn’t) to how many jacket buttons you had to have done up. Everybody spoke the school slang. Work was called ‘hash’ so classrooms were ‘hashrooms’ and terms were ‘quarters’ (Oration, Long and Cricket; Long was the shortest, obviously). And then there was fagging: the good old British public school tradition whereby older boys terrorize younger ones while masters look on fondly, remembering their own youth.

I was fag to a guy called Tony Lorenz, who was known as Bubbles because he was small and round. In later life, Bubbles would become a successful London estate agent. He wasn’t terrible to me: I was his skivvy but it didn’t generally go beyond fetching him a bit of toast or taking his stuff to the washing room. However, the fags weren’t just answerable to the boy to whom they’d been allotted. If a prefect called ‘fag’, all of you had to go chasing after them. You had to run – no dawdling – but the trick was to go missing on the way. That was where the outside lavatories came in useful. I passed quite a lot of time there.