Had I been born a century earlier, I suspect my parents would have bundled me off to climb up the insides of neighbourhood chimneys for a few farthings. Things then would have turned out much worse for me, as my mother’s guidance for childrearing was apparently forged by her half-dozen visits accompanying me to 1964’s ‘Mary Poppins’ at the Camberley Odeon. As Julie Andrews had seen nothing immoral about grubby children being pressganged into Dick van Dyke’s happy posse of sweeps, the film seemed to convince my mother that offspring were meant to be seen (working) rather than heard (playing).
Some kids embark upon a paper round once they have learnt to ride a bike. Others help out in the neighbourhood shop for pocket money. Visiting a mini-mart to pay your newspaper bill, you would rightly be surprised to find a child of single-digit age and less than three feet tall stocking shelves. Apparently not my parents! As soon as I could walk, my father was taking me with him in his ostentatious American car to survey local properties whose owners required renovations or extensions. Initially I was charged with holding the end of his long roll-out, wind-up tape measure at the far end of large rooms [see blog]. Before long, I was sketching out on paper the floorplan of buildings and noting their dimensions. Later on, I was calculating floor areas using the long multiplication my father had evidently failed to pay attention to before quitting his education aged fourteen from a Dickensian school he would show me on School Lane, just along from Ron Francis’ long-time photographic studio.
Thanks to an apprenticeship and ‘night school’, my father became a qualified quantity surveyor who passed as an architect by appending ‘AFS ARIBA’ to his name on business cards printed by Southwell Press [see blog]. In his school-hut office in the back garden behind our garage, my first administrative task was to maintain his professional periodicals such as ‘Architects Journal’ in strict date order. Soon he would teach me how to transfer Letraset from large sheets onto architectural drawings. I could calculate the relevant scale for plonking images of furniture, white goods and American-styled human figures onto the tracing paper plans masking-taped to his drawing board. If we did not have the necessary sheet, I would locate it within the huge, well-thumbed ring-bound Letraset catalogue and my father would then walk down to ‘Camberley Stationers’ on the High Street to buy it on account.
Whilst my father was self-employed at home, my mother worked as bookkeeper for a local garage 290 yards away that serviced vehicles, hired out a fleet of coaches and owned the town’s only petrol station on the busy A30 London Road. She would regularly bring her wide accounts ledgers home, set them out on our kitchen table alongside a paper-roll adding machine and require my services to help ‘balance the books’ and calculate the weekly payroll [see blog]. At my school, some classmates were still struggling with basic addition whilst I was already adept at calculating Income Tax and National Insurance deductions for a local company’s workforce.
After leaving school at sixteen without a Certificate, my mother had enrolled for some kind of local secretarial course which led to our home having a manual typewriter and shorthand texts. I taught myself to type and was soon faster and more accurate than my mother. If my parents had to fill out a form, I would type it for them. After my brother was born, his name had to be added to their passports alongside mine, so I typed the application form to be mailed to the Passport Office in Little Venice. When the passports were returned, I was so proud to see that the civil servants had merely cut out the paper on which I had typed my brother’s details and glued it onto a spare page. My handiwork!
Without realising what was happening, I became our family’s ‘administrator’ merely because I excelled at reading, writing and arithmetic. When there were Christmas cards to send to my father’s clients, it was my job to write addresses on dozens of envelopes. When there were letters to be sent to the Council, Inland Revenue or DHSS, I was tasked with typing them and their respective envelopes. After my parents gave me a ‘Kodak Instamatic 126’ camera for my birthday in 1964, I also became the family’s photographer, carefully sticking hundreds of square pics in a photo album and labelling them with precise dates, locations and names. (Decades later, my brother stole this treasured album from our mother’s home before emigrating [see blog], leaving me now without a single family photo, despite having been our family’s only photographer then.)
If I had been a teenager when pressganged into this family work, perhaps I could be accused of some collusion. But I was still under ten years old when all this happened. Other kids in my class went home to spend evenings playing worry-free games in their back gardens, while I returned home to yet another round of administrative tasks. My cleverness was being mercilessly exploited by two un-clever parents who had left school without an examination pass between them. I had no idea why I was clever. I often wondered whether I was truly the offspring of the adults I was being forced to live with. Had I been swapped, accidentally or deliberately, at birth? However, my birth certificate said I had been born at home. How was my DNA related to theirs? During my early years, I had a mop of blonde hair. But neither parent was blonde. I had blue eyes. But neither of my parents had blue eyes. Having watched 1960’s American sci-fi series screened on British television, I even pondered whether aliens had planted me with this suburban family. Was I the boy who fell to earth?
As the years progressed, my parents’ grip over my life tightened. At age eleven, having passed the compulsory ‘Eleven Plus’ exam, I was entitled to join the one grammar school in Camberley, adjacent to the infant/junior school I had attended for six years. Instead, my parents chose to send me to a grammar school twelve miles away at the opposite end of the county, the outcome of my father’s desire to impress a potential business partner [see blog]. I was not even consulted for my opinion before being condemned to spend hours travelling on public transport for the next seven years. I would never again see my many junior school friends.
After my father switched to renting a town centre office, I was additionally charged with calculating, typing and sending out client invoices, statements and reminders on his newly purchased ‘IBM 72’ electric typewriter. I was also required to spend days making photocopies and dyeline prints for my fathers’ clients in a darkened unventilated room, damaging my health irreparably [see blog]. When my father diversified into property speculation with a new business partner, my expertise in maths was required to figure out the potential profits of buying local businesses and redeveloping them with blocks of flats [see blog]. Though not yet a teenager, my calculations would determine whether projects worth millions could prove viable for my father’s latest business, which I had been required to name (‘IMIC Properties Limited’) even though I was still too young to be one of its directors. It was crazy.
The upside of all this work for my ‘family business’ was that, once their tasks were completed, my parents left me alone to pursue my own interests without interference. My mother could not be bothered to divert to Camberley’s only Post Office at the far end of the London Road from the town centre so, while she shopped, I would walk there and cash her fortnightly ‘Family Allowance’ vouchers from the booklet sent by the government. The postal staff knew me by sight because, from the time I could barely peer over their counter, I had been sending and receiving many more letters than my parents. My ‘pocket money’ comprised this useful cash that my mother would let me keep.
During childhood, I developed a wide range of interests that I maintained … until the fateful day in 1972 when my father deserted his family and abandoned his three children, leaving us to grow up in chaotic deprivation [see blog]. After that, I had neither the time nor the money to pursue anything beyond day-to-day survival. After that, I lived an even more isolated existence away from friends and extended family. These unwelcomed losses were initiated in 1968 when my parents relocated to a new housing estate on the edge of town. I was now three miles from my grandparents who, having lived next door almost my entire life, had generously provided the childrearing skills to which my parents seemed oblivious. I was now three miles away from the neighbourhood kids on our street with whom I had played regularly on the roads leading to Barossa Common [see blog]. I was now three miles away from the junior school I would attend for one further year which, until then, had been a short solo ride away on buses 1, 2 or 3c of the Aldershot & District Traction Company Limited. I now had no friends living within miles. I needed a lift to get to school.
In our home on Kings Ride, my parents had bought me a metal full-size pedal-powered go-kart with a handbrake that could travel so fast that it would have proven dangerous to meet a pedestrian on our narrow pavements. Instead, I would drive it along the road outside our house when there was little traffic around, pursued by my neighbourhood mates on their bikes. Sometimes a double decker bus would unexpectedly pass in the opposite direction and you could see the passengers stare out its windows in disbelief. My parents never told me not to play in the traffic and not once was I stopped or told off by passing adults.
My earliest hobby was ten-pin bowling. My parents’ plan since their marriage was to emigrate to Canada, despite knowing nobody there nor having visited the country [see blog]. That was the reason my brother and I were given what they believed were common North American names. That was why my father taught himself to ice skate by practising surreptitiously each winter on the frozen lake of the Sandhurst Royal Military Academy. That was why, every Saturday morning, my parents drove to the nearest bowling alley in Wokingham to practice, accompanied by me. I was tall for my age and soon became sufficiently accomplished to be asked to join Wokingham’s junior bowling team. Every Saturday morning, I would don my team bowling shirt and either compete at Wokingham or our team would be driven from there by coach to an away match at Heathrow, Brighton or one of the few towns that had a bowling alley. One birthday, my parents bought me my own bowling ball with my name engraved next to the finger holes and a ‘mod’ black and white bowling bag in which to carry it.
I became a manic stamp collector, initially steaming off the stamps on my family’s incoming mail and later visiting the regular Stampex exhibition in the Central Hall at Westminster. My weekly visits to the local library were useful to consult the Stanley Gibbons stamp catalogues in the reference section upstairs. Before long, I had saved enough pocket money to buy my own copies, along with a special stamp album that had spaces to mount every British stamp ever issued. I would write to a stamp dealer in Much Wenlock, enclosing a Postal Order bought from the Post Office to purchase all sorts of strange and wonderful stamps from countries around the world. Every occasion a new set of commemorative stamps was issued, I would traipse down to the Post Office, stick them on the associated special envelope and send it to myself as a ‘First Day Cover’. I even saved up to buy Britain’s first stamp, the 1840 ‘Penny Black’.
My maternal grandfather had sown the seeds of my fascination with the radio medium. I loved listening to music radio stations and discovered I could hear stations from all over Europe on an ordinary portable radio. In my early years, I would comb my parents’ and grandparents’ daily newspapers for any stories about radio, cut them out and stick them in a series of scrapbooks I maintained. Then I would enter every competition I heard announced on radio and, as my knowledge of popular music was good, send in postcard entries. I won quite a few contests on 'BBC Radio London' after it opened in 1970, usually with prizes of vinyl albums (such as the debut of the amazing group Batti Mamzelle). Despite my dozens of entries, I never won anything from national 'BBC Radio One' after its launch in 1967. However, I did win some albums (including ‘King Tubby Meets The Upsetter At The Grass Roots Of Dub’) from Tommy Vance’s Saturday ‘TV On Reggae’ show with Raymondo (alias Ray Edwards) on London’s 'Capital Radio' in the early 70’s.
I badgered my parents into buying me a Trio 9R59DS radio receiver so I could listen to more radio stations from further away on the shortwave band. Due to my fear of heights, I persuaded schoolfriend Jeremy Mitchell to climb trees at each end of our garden to hang as an antenna a long piece of copper wire I had bought from my grandfather in the ironmonger shop ‘Dolton Bournes & Dolton’ on the High Street, his workplace following the closure of Camberley’s timber yards [see blog]. I bought the thick annual ‘World Radio & Television Handbook’ so that I could find the address of every radio station I heard in order to write to them. I was sending off dozens of letters a month and receiving all sorts of packages in return – programme schedules, postcards, badges, playlists, magazines, books and pennants. The postman often was carrying so much mail to deliver to me alone that he would knock on our front door rather than try and fit it all in our wall-mounted post-box.
I subscribed to monthly Roneo-ed newsletters that shared information about distant radio stations that could be heard and I would send the editors my lists for publication of new ones I had heard recently. I even travelled by train on my own to a meeting organised by some of these radio fans (‘DX-ers’) held in Reading one weekend but, sat amongst men who were twice and three times my age, I was too intimidated to utter a word. However, my listening taught me to identify languages from around the world and to understand the geography of continents. I can still recall the names of many of the oddball radio stations I heard, such as Austria’s ‘Der Schulungssender des Österreichischen Bundesheeres’ on 6221kHz. I think this global knowledge was the reason I managed an ‘A’ grade for my Geography O-level. It also gave me motivation to one day visit some of the faraway places whose radio I had listened to and whose citizens I had corresponded with.
As well as being an enthusiastic radio listener, I was also interested in the technical aspects of the medium. One Christmas in the 1960’s, I asked my parents for a junior home electronic kit that taught me about resistors, capacitors, circuit boards and to build basic projects. A few years later, I would accompany my aforementioned school friend Jeremy on trips to ancient Edgware Road shops to buy second-hand electronic parts so that we could build our own valve-powered radio transmitter to launch an AM pirate radio station. We possessed some suitable circuit diagrams from hobby magazines and were inspired by weekend London pirate stations we had heard.
Starting with technical books held in the upstairs reference section of Camberley library, I studied the theories of how radio transmitters, receivers and antennas functioned and their practical applications. This led me to a correspondence course to take the ‘RAE’ radio amateur examination that would allow me to communicate on the airwaves with other radio ‘hams’. For a small charge, I was mailed study notes by post, learnt them, wrote answers to a set of questions and sent them back. If my responses were correct, I would be mailed the next unit of the course. It could be a rather laborious process at times, but there was nowhere locally I could undertake the necessary training to take this exam.
One of my less technical interests was launching helium-filled balloons from our back garden, attached to postcards asking the finder to write to me with the location it had landed. Most of these efforts disappeared without a trace but occasionally I would receive a card from somewhere in West Europe that one had reached, a few of whom I started writing to regularly as pen pals. I think it reflected my early notion that there must be a bigger world out there beyond the suburban town where my mother’s family had lived for generations. It was a symptom of my alienation from my parents and the quest for an existence that promised more than small-town living. I already felt I did not belong there and I was seeking somewhere else where I might feel more at home (“going where the weather suits my clothes”).
One of the properties my father had insisted I help him measure to prepare for some rebuilding work was the future Lakeside Country Club in Frimley Green to be launched in 1971. We met its owner, musician Bob Potter, to whom I explained my interest in learning music studio production. He also ran the Bob Potter Studio in nearby Mytchett and invited me to attend a forthcoming recording session there by jazz duo John Dankworth and Cleo Laine whom I had seen on television. Although I was not (yet) a fan of jazz, this seemed to be a great opportunity to understand the basics of music recording techniques. I enthusiastically accepted the invitation and looked forward to that visit.
I was a regular customer of the large toy shop on Princess Street where I saved up to buy Airfix plastic model kits and multiple little pots of Humbrol paint, taking them home to assemble whilst trying not to glue my fingers together. Aircraft models appealed most, perhaps because my parents occasionally took me to Heathrow Airport on weekends to stand on the open observation platform of the new Queen’s Building with a free map showing airline logos so that we could identify planes taking off and landing. I built and carefully painted a Fokker DR1, Harrier ‘Jump Jet’ and Gloster Whittle, adding the transfer markings provided with each kit. I was yet to travel on a plane so aircraft seemed exciting and other-worldly.
I had started buying soul and reggae records in 1969, initially from Dykes record shop on the corner of Park Street and Princess Street where a line of soundproofed listening booths along the right-hand wall permitted visitors to request from the shop assistant an audio preview of a single or album before deciding whether to purchase it. Within a few years, I was making Saturday solo trips to London to buy imported soul records unavailable in Camberley from Contempo Records on Hanway Street and imported reggae from the many stalls in and around Granville Arcade in Brixton [see blog]. Though my termly green cardboard train season ticket to commute to school only reached as far east as Egham [see blog], I would continue on the same line to Waterloo station, flash my pass hurriedly at the gate and then only have to pay the minimal Tube fares to travel around London. Sometimes I might go further to visit the many reggae shops in Harlesden or to Lord Koos’ outlet for hard-to-find releases.
In early 1972, My father impulsively booked a holiday in Jamaica for our whole family so I made plans to explore its reggae haunts I knew about while the rest of them would be lounging on the beach [see blog]. We had recently visited Spain for a short family holiday which had proven an unmitigated disaster [see blog] so I considered it more productive for me to set personal objectives to achieve on this holiday, putting as much distance as possible between me and my troublesome father.
A significant reason I had developed so many interests was because, throughout my years at infant and junior schools, no classmates lived anywhere near our home. As the eldest child, neither did I have siblings with whom to play. Then, for two years, my parents spent every weekend on the plot of land the opposite side of town where they were building their dream house. They took my younger brother with them but always left me at home alone the entire weekend. I was never bored as I had developed so many interests that I could pursue. I was perfectly happy in my own company, particularly as my parents demonstrated little interest in me even when they were present. If I wanted interaction, I would go next door and play dominoes for hours with my grandfather on his wooden dining table, notching up our scores with matchsticks on his ancient cribbage board.
Two subsequent events ruined this equilibrium in which I had existed during my early years. Firstly, the move to our new house on the edge of town two miles from Camberley town centre. Until then, I had been only a short unaccompanied walk away from the shops, municipal library and railway station. Now I needed a lift from my parents because the two bus routes 39b and 34a from our new location ran only hourly and two-hourly respectively during peak times. Neither was there a single shop near our new home.
Secondly, my father’s departure four years later left my mother without a car [see blog] or the resources initially to buy one. The impact was two-fold: I was stranded on an outlying housing estate without transport; and the money to support my interests was no longer available. I still visited the Post Office, though less regularly than before, as it was now three miles away instead of a brisk walk. I would cash the Family Allowance vouchers there but now the money had to be passed to my mother to support us because my father was deliberately denying his family any financial help.
It was not just the lack of money that changed my life going forward. Having unexpectedly had additional responsibilities as our family’s ‘eldest child’ thrust upon me, I could no longer find sufficient hours in the day to pursue my own interests. Until then, I had spent most of my childhood in my own company whilst my siblings were under the eye of one or other of my parents. From now on, because my mother was at work every weekday from morning ‘til night, I was left with my younger brother and sister whenever I was home from school. I had become the family babysitter, supervising a nine-year old and one-year old for hours on end. This was not how I had anticipated my teenage years would be spent from age thirteen to eighteen.
There was no gradual change in my life. In the weeks before my father left us, I was still busy with my own interests. Then, suddenly, everything had to be dropped. My go-kart was never used again. My bowling ball remained in its 1960's two-tone bag to this day, kept as a reminder of a now distant past when I once scored over 200 in a competition game. I was not given the chance to say farewell to my bowling team friends because I never returned to Wokingham bowling alley. My various stamp albums were placed in a large plastic shopping bag, never to be examined again. My plans to build a radio transmitter with school friend Jeremy came to nothing, as did our electronics buying trips to Edgware Road. Although I was close to completing the radio amateur correspondence course, I abruptly ended the monthly correspondence because now I would never have been able to afford the equipment even if I gained a licence.
Correspondence with overseas pen pals came to a sudden halt due to my lack of time. Bob Potter’s invitation to attend a recording session would never be fulfilled because my father now disowned me and was hellbent on doing everything he could to disrupt my future, despite my childhood having been spent working for his various businesses. I never again bought or assembled another Airfix model kit, let alone visited Camberley’s toy shop. Regular record-buying trips to London had to be curtailed because, without parental transport, buses from our home to the railway station were unreliable outside of weekday daytime hours. Besides, my pocket money had all but disappeared, sacrificed to more essential needs. My much-anticipated visit to Jamaica was scotched when my father changed the names on our family’s four tickets to that of his new mistress and unknown flunkies [see blog].
What activities was I left with? My radio listening continued because I already had the equipment and it was a free pastime. As a much-needed escape from my family responsibilities, at weekends I would sometimes stay up all night listening to faraway stations. I tried for months to receive a North American station on Medium Wave and my perseverance paid off during the early hours when I distinctly heard ‘CJON 930’ in St John’s, Newfoundland. Encouraged, I soon heard ‘Radio Demerara 760’ from British Guyana and ‘Radio Rebelde 670’ from Cuba. I knew even then that I wanted a career in radio.
I also continued my long running passion for music. I discovered that, instead of visiting London to buy reggae records, I could save money by writing directly to the UK record companies that issued them, claiming to be a record shop named ‘Channel One’ (copied from the recording studio I idolised in Maxfield Avenue, Kingston, Jamaica). Whereas in shops an album would cost £2.15, I could buy the same record ‘wholesale’ for a little over half that price. A typed letter and accompanying Postal Order proved sufficient to convince them to send me the desired albums, often accompanied by marketing materials, their catalogues, additional album sleeves and free promotional copies of singles. I was never asked difficult questions about my fake record shop bizarrely located on a suburban Camberley housing development.
There was no time then to think too deeply about these myriad changes to our family’s existence. We just had to cope with the way things were now. I never complained. It is only in retrospect that I understand how much of my youth was taken away from me by my parents. I never spoke to anyone at school about these changes or the responsibilities foisted upon me at such an early age. I tried to carry on as if everything was fine and that nothing significant had changed. But it had. I was no longer the youthful kid with diverse interests that I had been until now. I had been forced to become an adult though I was only just a teenager. Worse, I felt I would never have complete control over my destiny now that I was tied inextricably to my family’s immediate needs, but continuing into the longer term as well. My life had undergone significant change soon after the day in 1971 when my sister was born … a change that would unexpectedly impact my life from then on.
[to be continued…]
