Sweet Temptation

Sweet Temptation

In 1971, the year I turned fourteen, my mother's yearning to escape the confines of our pebble  dashed three bedroom semi-detached house in anonymous Raynes Park SW20, and house the bargain Victorian furniture —the polished mahogany dining room table and chairs, for instance — she had been sourcing over the preceding few years at local antique shops and auction houses, in what she  accurately considered the more élite environs of Wimbledon Common or Village SW19, was to see fruition. Knowing my parents had been viewing houses in the neighbouring, and posher —at least up the Hill — postal district, some friends of my mother's, on coming round for dinner, tipped them off about a house in Dora Road, Wimbledon Park, whose owners they knew wanted a quick sale, and if possible a cash buyer. It was a four bedroom house with beautiful front and back gardens, containing a hundred and fifty rose bushes —documented in my poem '150 Rose Bushes' in my Wimbledon sequence —and the vendors wanted something unbelievable like seven thousand pounds for it, a ridiculous snip even in the early 70s. To this day, my father believes there must have been something suspect about it, but there wasn't from our end: my parents could raise the money and my uncle on my father's side, a successful partner in a completely straight West End firm of solicitors, acted for them in the purchase. We moved in the summer holidays, when I was just immersing myself in my earliest vice after nicotine, that of gambling on the horses. I had therefore nipped into Smith & Cane (Turf Accountants) in Raynes Park while the removal van was being loaded that day and put some bets on. I remember it being quite a grey day for midsummer. When we got to our new home in our white, two door Triumph Herald, registration UYN34F, the removal men were there waiting. In the course of them beginning by offloading a few of the smaller things that had been loaded last, as you do, I got the removal men to get my single bed and my desk chair — on which I am sat writing this — into my new bedroom overlooking the garden at the rear. Plus our portable 16" screen black and white television set. It was early afternoon by now, and I quickly got the TV plugged in, played about with the plug-in aerial, and got a good enough picture to watch the racing. [I forget the exact date but it must have been a high profile meeting to have been televised, so at that time of year probably the Eclipse meeting at nearby Sandown Park, or maybe the Ebor meeting at York.] Suffice to say that my parents were not best pleased at the delay in the removal procedure incurred by the removal lads noticing and being impressed that I had the racing on, and keeping on popping into my new room to check it.

We had some interesting neighbours in our new street: up the road was a television producer called Ben Rea, who was at the time producing the BBC police drama Softly Softly, and whose glamorous wife Angela used to come and babysit my younger brother, and hang out chatting about pop music with me whilst doing so, just at the time that glamorous women were starting to interest me. [Of little consequence is the fact that Softly Softly starred the actor Stratford Johns, who lived locally in Merton Park — near the old B-movie film studios, appropriately enough — whose daughter Frith was the first girl I ever had a kiss and cuddle with at a youth club dance.] Almost opposite the Reas at the top of the road lived a man named Johnny Placquet, a small time villain who owned a living flame fire shop in the town centre. Johnny was famed locally for when ordering a pre-dinner drink, asking for 'a pair o' teeth', and his wife, like Angela, was proper glam' and fetching, driving a Volvo P90 like The Saint on TV. Sadly they were not really my parents' sort of people, so she never came to babysit my little brother or hang out with me. A few doors down the road from us lived a well-to-do Bolivian family, a banker called Billy — well he was 'something' in the city at any rate — and his wife Yolanda, a stunning Latino with trademark long dark lustrous hair like Evita or Frida Kahlo with her plaits undone. They had a son and daughter a few years younger than me, both enrolled at local public schools, the son at my school, KCS, and the daughter at Wimbledon High School. Yolanda used to say that her family were part of a revolutionary party back home, and would alternate between positions in government with attendant luxury, and spells in prison when the revolution went the wrong way – all very Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Anyway, when in Wimbledon, Billy and Yolanda were more fond of house parties than political ones, although always quite low key. At one of which  parties a couple of years later, my parents told me the following day, they had been introduced to a mysterious man, taciturn with a hint of flamboyance, who had not stayed long, but after whose departure, Billy had 'let slip' was Carlos the Jackal, the infamous revolutionary. 

We now skip to the New Year of 1978, when I had retreated back home to my parents out of necessity for a few weeks; I was just about treading water in the wonderful world of punk rock, but kept surfacing and spluttering for air in the heroin addiction stakes. That New Year's Eve, Billy and Yolanda threw a party to which I was also invited. I was junk sick and shivering that day, but knew the drink would flow down the road, so at least I could hopefully get drunk enough both to take my mind off it and get a few hours sleep. My mother too looked very glamorous that night in a long black velvet skirt, although noticeably tipsy and well on the way to being noticeably drunk, swaying when she danced and flirting with other gentlemen guests. The combination of my feeling for my dad because of this, and my withdrawals, meant that I wasn't thinking straight, nor was I to think straight until the penny dropped many years later, as you will see.

Whilst plying his guests with wine, gin and tonics, champagne etc., Billy himself drank only mugs of tea with at least a quadruple vodka in each time, plus he kept disappearing upstairs to his little den, which I observed out of the corner of my eye, albeit with the penny still firmly stuck in the slot. Midnight came, as it generally does after 23.59pm; I think we had a champagne toast but no Auld Lang Syne, thank fuck. A little while afterwards, there was a ring on the bell, and Billy ushered into the front room, where I was sitting more quietly with just a couple of other guests —swerving the gaiety and music, drinking in morose contemplation, — a tall handsome black man with an equally tall (partly due to her porn star heels) and stunning black girlfriend, who looked like she'd just floated off the winner's podium at a beauty pageant. After getting them drinks, Billy introduced the guy to me as a fellow musician, none other than the great David Ruffin of The Temptations, brother to Jimmy. Shortly after, David left his girlfriend with her legs that went up to her hips flashing through the slit in her skirt, and disappeared upstairs with Billy for a while. When they descended, David Ruffin and his girlfriend soon left — I expect they had a driver outside and went onto Tramps or somewhere. Around 4am we went home to our house four doors up the road and, as luck would have it, while I was trying to force a boiled egg down for breakfast about midday, our 'phone rang, and it was Bill Major to tell me that I'd missed out the previous evening as, just before midnight the door of our local pub, The Hand-in-Hand on Wimbledon Common, had opened and a mutual friend had arrived with some bags of not half bad gear; however Bill, bless him, had saved a bag and was ringing to say we could share it. No-one got to say Jack Robinson, or anything else, before I had shouldered my Raglan camelhair Crombie and was hoofing it round to Bill's in Kingston Road — a half hour walk if you ran, as they say. Somewhere at the back of my chilly mind, that penny was still wedged in its slot.

David Ruffin's death in 1991, following overdosing in a crack house in Philly, passed me by at the time, and it was only on reading about it some years later, that it finally dawned on me what a famous soul singer and his model girlfriend were doing making a quick NYE guest appearance at a low key and outwardly sedate house party in Wimbledon Park. Just think, if that penny hadn't stuck, the Major and I could have been having a crystal speedball that New Year's afternoon.