Start It Up

Start It Up

I think I’m probably more of an ‘in medias res’ man, than a ‘to begin at the beginning’ one, but just for once I shall endeavour to start at the start. 'They' say, or was it Sherlock Holmes said: 'always expect the unexpected', but my dad didn’t until my mum was. My father was and is an Oxford Modern Languages scholar, and my mother was a society girl from Sydney, besotted with an archetypal Oxbridge Englishman. He in turn was equally in love with her.

I only found out I was ‘unexpected’ by chance when I was just coming up to my eighteenth birthday and working as a legal clerk, fishing about sometimes in the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, then in the Kingsway. As I was already well set on going off the rails, it was like a red rag or a green light or both, but we’ll come back to that. My two grandmothers, both of whom I trusted and was inordinately fond of, informed me when I confided in them, that I was very much wanted. My mother, seven years older than my father, was posh Aussie through and through and must have been much in love to have suffered damp, cold, smog, and the smell of fried or over-boiled food, which she refused to cook or consume. They had some rooms in Summertown in Oxford; it was the summer of 1957 and my father had not so much flunked his finals at Teddy Hall, as got a 2:2 when he was destined for a first, because he had other things, i.e. me, on his mind.

Soon after my birth my father got a job teaching French and German at Bushey Grammar School and we moved to a house in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, which belonged to my paternal grandmother, following my father’s parents having bought it as a self-evacuating wartime sanctuary. It was, and still is, at the end of the Metropolitan line, so the first thing Sherlock Holmes would have found, if he’d hit the trail at Baker Street and then fallen asleep after a night on the pipe (in both senses) would have been me, or at least the nearest station to my house. Please note that Sherlock Holmes is fictional, unlike any events you read about here, although there's quite a lot of not expecting the unexpected.

In Amersham our neighbours on one side were a family called Padgham. The father, Charles, made and played keyboard instruments, such as clavichords, in the garden shed, and they had a son and daughter a couple of years older than me. The son, Hugh, went on to produce Genesis and, bizarrely, features in one of the bits in American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis, where the author uses the literary trick of diverting from extreme horror by bringing in something mundane, to accentuate the horror when we return to it, and talks about Genesis.

At Sunnyside, the name of the house at 16 Woodside Close, and the only residence I've ever had with a name, we were quite not poor but basic, and we had a horsehair sofa, which the stuffing was escaping from, and I remember my mother making a joke about it being all horse and no hair. We also had a lodger called Laszlo, a Hungarian refugee, whose appearance I cannot recollect at all, but possibly my first awareness of global goings on was when my dad told me about 1956, and how Laszlo and his family had been listening to Radio Free Europe until they announced they’d have to go off air as the Russian tanks were rolling down the street. I recalled this in the 90s when my friend Simon Tickner married his gorgeous Hungarian girlfriend called Wendala at Brixton Registry Office, and our mutual friend Roger Patron not only successfully hired a tank to take them to the registry office but also inveigled the police into closing Brixton’s one way system. It was an expansive and expensive gesture, but no-one had quite thought it through. Roger told me how it was only when Wendala’s parents arrived from Hungary on the eve of the wedding, that it dawned on him they were exactly the age to have witnessed the events of ‘56, and sure enough...

Not much else occurred in Amersham, other than my Australian grandfather sending the money for me to have a shiny new red and blue tricycle, and I remember excitedly but nervously awaiting the trunk call where I heard his voice the one and only time, and got, or was instructed, to thank him. He was a successful Sydney accountant, and a prominent occupant of the 19th hole at his golf club to the point of dipsomania, and came according to my late brother’s genealogical research from impeccable convict stock, an ancestor having been a Jewish jeweller in the City of London, who was transported after a forgery conviction. He died the following year, leaving my mum a bit of money and lots of addictive genes, if there are such things. The money helped us buy a house in Raynes Park, on the outer edge of South-West London in early 1961, after my dad got a better job at King’s College School, Wimbledon. As for the addictive genes, you will hear quite a lot more about them, whether there are such things or not. 

To complete the Australian maternal grandparents, my mum’s mum, Nell, came over to England to live, following not so much her husband’s death, but more their divorce. In fact, she might have already been here when he died. She is the gentile element on the maternal side making me three quarters Jewish but definitely not Jewish. She came from a Liverpool Irish family called Cooney, who emigrated in the 1860s from a Liverpool that was nearly as starving as Ireland, and landed in Melbourne, slap bang in the middle of the Ballarat Gold Rush, so happy days. My gran Nell arrived in England just in time to accompany me up to London on the train when we moved, my parents having gone in advance to wait for the removal van, as you do. I don’t remember the view from the window or the stations but I remember it being just me and her and my beloved bunny Barrington, whom I’ve had since the day I was born, sitting on the seat next to me. At 131 Grand Drive, the 1930s pebble-dashed semi that was our new abode, we were still quite but not poor, but now my mum had limited funds of her own and Ideas! So instead of a horse hair sofa losing its stuffing, we had a Victorian sofa, newly upholstered in gold velvet, on which we were only allowed to sit when we had guests.