The Beach Boys’ disillusionment paralleled the demise of my mother’s North American dream : 1934-2021 : Barbara Ann Goddard, Camberley

 My mother had aspired to the ‘American Dream’ for decades. Like millions of others after the War, she believed that “every person has the freedom and opportunity to succeed and attain a better life” and has the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" [Wikipedia]. What was unusual was that my mother had been born into a British working-class family in a small town (population 16,477) thirty miles west of London … and had never visited America.

Maybe her enthusiasm had been stirred as a pre-teen when she would cycle a mile from home up the steep hill of College Ride to the prisoner of war camp for captured Germans on Old Dean Common. During most of the War, this site had served as a training camp for exiled French Resistance fighters, occasionally visited by General Charles de Gaulle, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Lady Churchill (who spoke perfect French). Then, between 1944 and 1945, its Nissen huts were turned over to war prisoners whom mischievous local kids would taunt through its perimeter fence.

My mother recalled regularly chatting with “American soldiers” guarding the ‘Old Dean Common Camp’ who were more likely to have been members of the Number 2 Canadian Special Infantry Battalion stationed there. Its troops marched past her front garden in huge numbers to join a parade along Camberley High Street, past the greengrocer where her mother was employed [see blog], to hear a welcome address by the town’s "mayor" (more likely the chairman of Frimley & Camberley Urban District Council) during Canada’s Thanksgiving week in 1945. Off-duty Canadians would frequent the town’s coffee bars and pubs, mixing with locals until this camp was demolished after the War to make way for new ‘overspill’ public housing. Eerily, amidst the resultant sprawling Old Dean Estate’s 2,000-odd homes, the former camp’s documented co-ordinates [Ordnance Survey National Grid reference SU 884 617] are those of the semi-detached house in which I would be born the following decade.

These early exchanges with foreigners fuelled my mother’s desire to travel and explore the world beyond Camberley. After leaving school in 1950, she planned to study agriculture in Denmark, inspired by her father’s knowledge of plants and flowers shared whilst they spent hours toiling on the family allotment off Barossa Road and their back garden’s vegetable patch. However, her mother refused to let her go abroad. She asked her parents for a mailed subscription to ‘LIFE’ magazine, perhaps as a result of one of the Canadians having given her an issue. Her parents agreed. Living in a home without television, LIFE’s remarkable photographic essays offered her a unique window into a colourful world far beyond the dull suburban existence she had lived until then.

The outdoor ‘Blue Pool’ on London Road was the one place in Camberley where young people could hang out and meet without parental chaperones [see blog]. My mother having been a keen swimmer, it was beside the water’s edge that she met her tall, dark and handsome husband-to-be one summer. Together, they shared a love of all things American, whether watching movies at the local cinema, listening to the new rock’n’roll music or poring over the pages of LIFE. Before long, they hatched a plan to marry and emigrate to Canada, despite knowing little about the country. It would be the escape from British suburbia that my mother desired. It would be the escape from a violent father that my father longed for.

In the summer of 1951, my mother visited the ‘Festival of Britain’ at London’s newly built South Bank complex, one of ten million paying attendees to view exhibits that “helped reshape British arts, crafts and design for a generation” and were intended “to give the British public a sense of recovery and progress after the devastation of the Second World War” [Wikipedia]. The impression it made on her was so significant that she would still talk glowingly about the event decades later. For the rest of her life, she subscribed to ‘modernism’, whether it was buying the latest household gadgets, cooking new convenience foods or pursuing contemporary fashion trends. All it needed was for my mother to spot an advertisement for some new product or design for her to rush out and buy it!

However, the young couple’s plan for the 1950’s had to be postponed due to world events. Though the War had ended a decade earlier, my father was conscripted into the British Army and sent to the Suez Canal. Despite no experience, he was assigned to drive trucks long distances across desert roads, then demobbed two years later with a UK Driving Licence without necessitating a test. It stirred in him a passion for driving at excessive speeds, subsequently with occasional predictable outcomes.

The 1950’s were years of continuing austerity, wartime rationing only ending in 1954. The decade started with my mother working in a chocolate factory [see blog] and my father serving an apprenticeship [see blog]. On his return from Egypt, they married, despite the disapproval of my maternal grandfather, and had their first child. The decade ended with them evicted from their council house for unpaid rent arrears [see blog]. Their plan to emigrate to Canada had to be put on hold.

The 1960’s were kinder to their ambitions. The decade started with my mother working as bookkeeper for a nearby garage group [see blog] and my father launching his own quantity surveyor business from home [see blog]. Following intervention by my maternal grandfather, they now owned their own house (with a 1% Midland Bank mortgage) and car [see blog]. My mother passed her driving test and gave up smoking. My father wore a suit to meet clients, styling himself on Darren from the American TV series ‘Bewitched’, and began marketing himself as an ‘architect’ [see blog]. Their incomes began to offer opportunities to indulge their shared love of the North American lifestyle and modernism, even before their planned move to Canada.

My father bought a succession of American cars, saloon cars then station wagons after the birth of their second child and my mother’s purchase of a huge Saint Bernard dog [see blog]. Those cars, particularly the pink American Motors ‘Rambler 770’, were a rare sight in Camberley and attracted attention whenever they drove out. We had one of the town’s first colour televisions [see blog], a huge pink American fridge [see blog], a knocked through living/dining room in our semi-detached two up/two down house [see blog], a reel-to-reel tape recorder [see blog], a salon-style hairdryer, an infrared sunray lamp, a ‘slimming machine’ and a knitting machine, amongst other gadgets. They gave their two children North American names to better integrate them into Canadian life [see blog]. My mother watched all the American daytime soaps (including ‘Peyton Place’, ‘The Doctors’ and ‘Doctor Kildare’). My father took me to American-style weekend drag racing events launched in 1964 at nearby Blackbushe Airfield.

Religion was absent in our household. My mother, along with millions of other young adults, found the ‘hope’ she sought in the form of America’s Kennedy family. When John F Kennedy was elected American president in 1960, it was welcomed across the globe as a revolutionary change to the old war-torn world order, promising the dawn of a new exciting age. The Kennedys were young, they were good looking, they were stylish, they were smart and they made statements in a direct and passionate way about the issues of the day. They spoke about ‘the future’ and made it sound an exciting place where opportunities would flourish for ordinary people, social inequalities would be eradicated, and new technologies would radically change people’s everyday lives for the better. To my mother, this was the kind of life she craved. The Kennedys offered her ‘hope’ that such a modern life could be possible for her … and her children.

Kennedy as President heralded a golden age for LIFE as, unlike previous incumbents, he understood totally the need to project an ‘image’, opening his professional and private life to the media. Almost every issue of the magazine was filled with remarkably candid photos of him, his stylish wife Jacqueline, his brothers and their children living what seemed like the ‘perfect life’, jet-setting around the world whilst wearing the latest fashions. My mother loved these photographs of the Kennedys, sometimes tearing out pages that showed Jacqueline’s latest outfits which she longed to wear herself. She wanted a life like theirs.

Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 shocked the entire world. In its aftermath, my mother bought a huge gold coin, larger and heavier than the crown coin of the time, embossed with Kennedy’s portrait on one side and words in tribute to him on the other. She kept it on its own in a small white jewellery box and often took it out to explain to me who the Kennedys were and why they were so significant, not just to her but to people like us across the world. I was in awe of the impact this faraway American family had on my suburban mother’s optimistic worldview.

Although she continued to renew her annual subscription to LIFE, after 1963 there was an emerging sadness that partially erased some of my mother’s ‘hope’, compounded by the assassinations of Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr in 1968 plus the horrors of the escalating Vietnam war shown nightly on TV news. These world events were reflected in the increasingly dark, scary pages of LIFE whose recent issues now became less well-thumbed, stacked in a corner of my mother’s bedroom, rather than on the coffee table downstairs. The times were changing again, both for the world at large and for my mother.

Sometime between 1964 and 1966, my parents abandoned their long-held plan to emigrate to Canada. I never knew why. Instead, they were going to build a futuristic American-style home in Camberley, designed by my father with all mod cons [see blog]. Having watched them indulge so many North American enthusiasms during the previous decade, it was a shock to suddenly learn that we were destined to stay in Camberley. My brother and I had been saddled with American-sounding names that, for the rest of our lives, we would have to spell out to British customer service staff [see blog]. While my father was busy exploiting new earning opportunities with his increasingly dodgy business partners [see blog], I noticed my mother’s dreams for her family’s future start to wither.

In June 1970, my mother purchased a vinyl album entitled ‘The Beach Boys’ that she believed was the group’s latest release. She was disappointed. It was a UK-only ‘Music for Pleasure’ discount compilation [MFP 1382] of older album tracks without a ‘hit single’ in sight. This California group embodied the 1960’s American Dream my parents had coveted. Between 1964 and 1967, the Beach Boys’ most popular songs had played on offshore pirate station ‘Big L’ whose American-style format was my parent’s radio choice at home and in the car. The themes of the group’s tunes – girls, cars, the sea, surfing, drag racing and music – echoed my parents’ preoccupations of the era. That very summer, my mother and I had stood frozen on the windswept beach of Newquay, watching my father struggle to stay upright on a hired surfboard being pummelled by massive waves.

I persevered with my mother’s album purchase and, amongst the early 1960’s cliched surfing tunes, discovered some more recent recordings that fascinated me. The production on 1968’s ‘How She Boogalooed It’ rejected the group’s close harmony sound in favour of a rough lead vocal and a fast rhythm track that would not have sounded out of place later in an Austin Powers movie. The section where the rhythm stops, to be replaced initially by a tinny handclap sound, then resumes with a bass-heavy harpsichord-type solo was pure genius (a foretaste of treble/bass reggae dub mixes the following decade). The “sock it to me” end line coincided with the segment of the ‘Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In’ TV show using that phrase that had launched the same year.

I was blown away by ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)’ from 1966 and it remains one of my favourite love songs. At a time when pop music was mostly novelty, my twelve-year-old self found its lyrics romantically appealing, having been raised in a household where physical contact had been noticeably absent:

“Don't talk, take my hand and let me hear your heart beat
Being here with you feels so right
We could live forever tonight
Let's not think about tomorrow
Don’t talk, put your head on my shoulder”

Inspired by this song, I could daydream about an adult life living by the California ocean, shared with a blonde California girl and a baby daughter named Scheherazade. Later, the appearance of Farrah Fawcett living in a San Diego beach home in 1975’s TV series ‘Harry O’ reinforced this teenage fantasy. These Beach Boy songs, along with 1968’s gorgeous ‘Anna Lee The Healer’ also on the album, convinced me there was more music worth exploring than the group’s poppy hit singles. I enrolled as a young fan.

On Thursday 17 December 1970, I accompanied my mother on the train from Camberley to London. She was clutching a ‘Fine Fare’ supermarket plastic bag containing the Beach Boys’ latest gatefold album release ‘Sunflower’ [Stateside SSLA 8251] she had bought. We were on our way to the group’s one-off charity concert at the Royal Albert Hall. This was the first music concert I ever attended. I carried my Kodak ‘Instamatic 126’ camera but it proved pointless taking photos from our seats up in the gods when the musicians were so distant. My mother had hoped to ask the group to autograph her album, not seeming to have anticipated that a 5,000-seat venue would have strict security protocols. In the next day’s papers, Princess Margaret had been photographed meeting the group backstage. It had been a great experience that whetted my appetite for live music (my next concert was to be James Brown at the same venue).

Ten months later, my mother gave birth to her third child [see blog]. Not long after that, everything changed. Forever. In 1972, my middle-aged father deserted our family to elope with a neighbour, recent teenage bride Suzie Anthony, who looked as if she had stepped out of a Beach Boys song [see blog]. They moved into a private estate in an expensive, exclusive part of Surrey [see blog]. My mother and her three children were left to survive alone in the custom designed house that should have realised what remained of my parents’ North American Dream [see blog].

My mother’s focus necessarily shifted from personal interests to the urgent upkeep of her family. She no longer had any time for the Beach Boys, or much anything else beyond day-to-day money pressures. I persisted. I found the group’s 1971 album ‘Surf’s Up’ [Stateside SSL 10313] patchy but loved the reflective mood of the title track and its ambiguous lyrics:

“A choke of grief, heart hardened, I
Beyond belief, a broken man
Too tough to cry
Surf’s up, aboard a tidal wave”

In retrospect, I think this song touched me because I had shed no tears following my father’s sudden departure and because I felt our family life had just been hit by a tsunami. I interpreted ‘surf’s up’ to mean that whatever had gone before was now over. It was like ‘time’s up’. The clock on my life had been unexpectedly stopped and then restarted, recent events having thrown me into a different existence [see blog].

The album’s other impressive song ‘Disney Girls (1957)’ more transparently articulated nostalgia for earlier, more innocent times. It was about maturing in the 1970’s, about the receding American Dream that had been so successfully propagated in 1960’s Beach Boys recordings. Until then, every Beach Boys album cover had featured photos of its happy, smiling group members. This record’s dark, brooding cover painting was based on the 1894 sculpture ‘End of the Trail’ by James Earle Fraser of a weary Native American carrying a spear and riding a tired horse, portraying “the suffering and exhaustion of people driven from their native lands” [Wikipedia]. The perpetually youthful girls, the surf, the cars, the ‘fun fun fun’ were nowhere to be found:

“All my life I spent the night
With dreams of you
And the warmth I missed
And for the things I wished
They're all coming true
I've got my love to give
And a place to live
Guess I'm gonna stay
It'd be a peaceful life
With a forever wife
And a kid someday”

I connected with this song because, although I had only just entered my teenage years, our desperate family circumstances demanded my life change drastically [see blog]. As the eldest child in a one-parent family, my responsibilities now had to be directed to supporting my mother and my one-year-old sister whose father had abandoned her. I was losing what should have been my childhood and forced into adulthood, sacrificing my own ambitions for a family that was receiving little practical help from elsewhere.

I must have been one of the fifty people who bought the 1972 album ‘American Spring’ [United Artists UAS 29363] recorded by Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s wife Marilyn and her sister who, in the 1960’s, had been members of girl group ‘The Honeys’ that Brian had written for and produced. I loved this new one-off project that, like ‘Surf’s Up’, included nostalgic glances at earlier, innocent times in songs like 1946’s ‘Tennessee Waltz’; 1961’s ‘Mama Said’; and 1963’s ‘Thinkin’ ‘Bout You Baby’ (written by Brian) and ‘Everybody’. The sadness evident in the previous year’s ‘Surf’s Up’ album was present in the 1969 songs ‘This Whole World’ (written by Brian) and ‘Forever’ (written by his brother Dennis Wilson), the latter’s lyrics mourning love savoured then interrupted:

“Let the love I have for you
Live in your heart and be forever
I've been so happy loving you
So I've gone away
But not forever
Gonna love you any old way
Forever”

Within weeks of Marilyn’s marriage to Brian in 1964, he had experienced a nervous breakdown, followed by drug use that strained their relationship. They finally divorced in 1979. The Beach Boys’ crash to earth from the innocent 1960’s to the harsh reality of the 1970’s echoed my family’s transformation during the same period. Things would never go back to the way they were. Instead of an evening out together at a music concert in London, my mother now asked me to accompany her to divorce drama ‘Kramer Versus Kramer’ at the local cinema. Our ‘happy families’ life was over. It was all about lawyers and law courts now.

During those 1970’s, I would sneak into my mother’s bedroom when she was out and take out her commemorative John F Kennedy gold coin from the drawer where it now lay untouched. I would sit cross-legged on her bedroom carpet and ponder the hope my mother had harboured during the 1960’s for a world that embraced the values the Kennedy family had extolled and the aspirations she had so often shared with me when a small child. Now, my father had been breaking into our home while we were out and stolen most of my mother’s cherished jewellery collection built up over many years. I too had lost treasured possessions to him [see blog]. Both of us were losing the ‘hope’ for the future my mother had fostered in my young self.

Decades later, after vinyl records were superseded by compact discs, I offered my mother to record songs by some of her favourite artists from the 1960’s and 1970’s onto CDR’s that were easier for her to handle. She accepted the offer for several artists she had loved. Would she want a compilation of her favourite tracks by the Beach Boys? She declined. I could sense it might be too great a reminder of a long-gone era when life had never seemed so good, now so far in the past that perhaps it might have been just a dream or have happened to somebody else entirely.

Since my mother’s death in 2021, I have belatedly curated a Beach Boys playlist on Spotify of their recordings between 1964 and 1973. Now, however, whenever it plays ‘Surf’s Up’, ‘Disney Girls (1957)’, or the wistful ‘Caroline, No’ about a couple’s relationship imploding, I weep a little. Partly because these are great songs. Partly for my mother and the dreams she had had that were destroyed. And partly for myself and the fall-out I endured from a family that disintegrated.

A eulogy to my mother, whom I loved dearly and hated to see so downtrodden from some poor life choices [see blog], would adapt words spoken at Robert F Kennedy’s funeral. The Kennedys had hugely inspired her hopes and dreams in a bygone era during which I was blessed to witness my mother so youthful, so beautiful, so optimistic and so full of the joys of life:

“My mother need not be idealised or enlarged in death
Beyond what she was in life
To be remembered simply as a good and decent woman
Who saw wrong and tried to right it
Saw suffering and tried to heal it
Saw war and tried to stop it.”

POSTSCRIPT:

Due to COVID travel restrictions, I was prevented from visiting my mother during the months preceding her death and from attending her funeral. This blog entry includes excerpts from her life I recalled and had wished to be included in the service. The accompanying photo was taken aged 17 on the steps of the South Bank at the Festival of Britain. The LIFE magazine covers/pages are photos of my mother’s subscription copies.

The day my world stood still [part three] : 7 October 1971 : Calvin Close, Camberley

 “At the age of thirteen I thought I was carrying the weight of the whole world on my shoulders …”

‘Patches’ had become a surprise number two UK hit single for blind southern soul singer Clarence Carter at the end of 1970 (written by General Johnson whose group ‘Chairmen Of The Board’ had just had a number three UK hit single with their wonderful debut ‘Give Me Just A Little More Time’). In the lyrics, ‘Patches’ is the thirteen-year-old son of a poor American farmer who, on his deathbed, pleaded:

“Patches, I'm depending on you, son
To pull the family through
My son, it's all left up to you”

‘Patches’ was one of my mother’s favourite records of that period. At the time, I could never understand why because, to my young ears, it was an over-sentimental, over-American rural fantasy and not a patch on Bobbie Gentry’s enthralling and mysterious ‘Ode To Billie Joe’ family tragedy from 1967. Whenever ‘Patches’ was heard on ‘BBC Radio 1’, my mother would stop whatever she was doing and listen intently to the lyrics. Why did this song mean so much to her?

A little over a year after ‘Patches’, unexpectedly I was to become that thirteen-year-old carrying the weight of the whole world on his shoulders. However, rather than my father dying surrounded by his loving family, mine had sordidly run off with a girl only a few years older than me, scarcely to be seen again. From that day, though neither parent instructed me as such, it seemed to be left to me “to pull the family through”. My father’s new mission was to wreak vengeance on our family in every which way, disowning us whilst stealing possessions we valued [see blog]. My mother fell into a resigned malaise that lasted the remainder of her life [see blog]. I felt only relief my father had left, a better outcome than observing my mother cower from his violence. Fortunately, he had never touched me, my knowledge having proven too valuable to his businesses [see blog].

Hearing the lyrics of ‘Patches’, had my mother anticipated the inevitable dissolution of her marriage and the consequential demands on me, her eldest son? Her husband had been cheating on her since the 1950’s and, now that his business ventures were finally generating significant ‘cash’ profits, he felt justified in unilaterally indulging juvenile desires unaffordable until now. In 1970, he had proudly shown me his impulse purchase of one of the first handheld electronic calculators, whose £100 price tag infuriated my pregnant mother. In 1971, he had changed his recent American Motors ‘Javelin’ sports car unnecessarily for a newer, more powerful ‘AMX’ model [see blog], a totally impractical upgrade for a three-child family. He had been behaving like a kid in a sweetshop as he approached forty. And then he was gone.

During the preceding years, I had already taken on a role as our family’s administrator, typing correspondence, posting letters, opening and filing incoming mail. Our financial management – paying the bills, writing cheques – had rested with my father. In retrospect, I am never sure if it was coincidence that my parents had trained me in administrative skills from an early age, or whether my mother had foreseen that I would have to become the family’s ‘Patches’, required to steer our family away from administrative and financial oblivion. Although it was she who had taught me financial skills, her husband’s departure paralysed her into inaction, clinging to a hope that he would someday return and restore our family’s equilibrium, or at least take care of family finances once again.

We should all have been living in Canada by now. For more than a decade, my parents had planned to emigrate there. In 1962, they had visited Canada House in Trafalgar Square and come away with a huge, colour fold-out wall map of the country (that I still have). In those days, neither visa nor migration papers were necessary. You could simply book seats on a plane or boat and be welcomed as a newcomer to the great Dominions. Unexpectedly, during the two years following my brother’s birth in late 1963, my parents abandoned this long-held plan. No explanation was offered me. All their preparations for a North American lifestyle – me and my brother’s names [see blog], our succession of American cars, my father’s ice skating [see blog], our weekly ten-pin bowling [see blog], our American music, our American kitchen appliances [see blog] – came to nothing, never to be mentioned again. I was disappointed.

In 1965, my father discovered for sale an empty plot of land on the other side of Camberley that might be purchased at a discount. The owner of one of Camberley’s huge Edwardian mansions, ‘Old Knowles’ on Upper Chobham Road, had divided the far reaches of their estate into small plots, each sufficient for one family house to be built. However, ‘Plot 7’ remained unsold due to its odd shape and access problems. A new ‘Calvin Close’ cul-de-sac had been constructed to reach these new properties and building work had already progressed on some sold plots. Plot 7 comprised a long narrow upward-sloping driveway, barely wide enough for a car, that ended in a flat square-ish plateau. However, for some crazy reason, the new electricity sub-station serving the street’s houses had been built at road level slap bang on the driveway, preventing any vehicle access.

I visited the plot with my parents, us having to squeeze past the sub-station’s wooden fence and clamber up to the plot. It was clear that, though Old Knowles had retained a huge perfectly manicured rear garden, the plots up for sale beyond had been left as wilderness for years. It was a jungle. My parents were unaware that this land had once held an industrial gravel pit. Each plot had apparently been drawn on a map without consideration about what might be on or under the ground. In Plot 7, we found the end of an old concrete ornamental pond, though its substantive part stretched onto an adjacent plot. There was no back fence to the big house (the right-hand edge of Plot 7), just a line of thick high rhododendrons that you could push through, tempting you to march across their perfect garden.

The rear of the plot was marked by an ancient sunken alleyway wide enough for a horse and cart, the dug-out soil having been piled up on either side and planted with thick bushes that grew into a canopy of foliage, making the path invisible from beyond. It stretched in a perfect straight line southeast from Upper Chobham Road 600 yards to a neighbouring estate, ‘Toad Hall’ (formerly ‘Edgemoor’), and then diverted with a 90-degree turn southwest to ‘Eastlea Court’ estate (formerly ‘The Firs’) on Chobham Road. Perhaps this overlarge ditch had marked the western limit of the 300 acres of heathland purchased in 1860 by Swiss botanist Augustus Mongredien to build a silk farm named ‘Heatherside’ that soon failed, the land defaulting to mortgage lender Sir Gabriel Goldney of Chippenham. A century later, ‘Goldney Road’ was the unmade, potholed rough access road necessary to enter our cul-de-sec and the new Heatherside housing development beyond, then under construction by housebuilder Bovis that had acquired most of Goldney’s land.

I failed to understand how the wilderness of Plot 7 could be transformed into a home for our family. It was full of insects, spiders and creepy-crawlies that terrified me. For the next two years, I elected to spend weekends at home alone [see blog] whilst my parents spent every daylight hour at Plot 7 to clear the site and house build. My father petitioned the Electricity Board to relocate its problematic sub-station to adjacent land not yet built upon and, following a long wait, his request was approved and executed, allowing vehicles to reach the site for the first time. My father made a sign on a sample floor tile saying ‘Plot 7’ in white Letraset and nailed it to the fir tree on the left of the driveway at street level. To save money, my parents did as much of the building work as they could, employing specialists only for tasks that needed heavy equipment or trade skills.

My father was an admirer of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s modernist buildings and seized the opportunity to build a similarly novel property in Camberley. Having executed so many renovations and extensions for clients, this would be his first opportunity to design an entire house to his own specifications. Perhaps he was inspired by a photo-feature in his beloved ‘Architects Journal’ of the 1959 ‘Rossdale House’ on Hendon Road in London, since many of its features were replicated in our home – a carport instead of a garage, exposed dark purple brickwork inside and out, floor-to-ceiling glass sliding doors, an adjoining pond/pool and a white oval dining table and chairs (as seen in ‘2001’). Though the London house comprised two storeys built on stilts, ours was limited to one floor by the land deeds, the owners of stately Old Knowles not wishing to look out their back windows and sight the top of our modest home beyond their perfectly kept garden.

My father designed his house in the shape of the letter ‘H’, the right sidebar comprising three bedrooms, the left a long, open living/dining room and, within the crossbar, the kitchen, bathroom, WC, coat cupboard and heating/hot water system. The majority of the ‘walls’ were floor-to-ceiling glass, enabling sightlines from outside straight through both wings of the house. The roof was flat concrete, supported by the bare brickwork between the glass windows. The bathroom included a separate bath and enclosed shower cubical, unusual in that era. The bathroom mirror was a huge sheet of thin aluminium foil stretched over a frame ordered from the US. Instead of a letterbox in the front door, there was an American-style upright post-box on the wall alongside the two-vehicle carport, much to the confusion of postmen/women who had walked up our long driveway. Instead of a front door key, embedded in the wood was a press-button combination lock ordered from the US. Opening the front door from outside, you were confronted with a huge floor-to-ceiling clear Perspex window that overlooked an exterior pond at the rear. The heating system was underfloor gas air, also ordered from the US. The living room thermostat was manufactured by Honeywell, ordered from the US. The kitchen sink included a waste disposal unit, ordered from the US. In the garden was constructed a greenhouse that resembled the top half of a clear glass sphere.

The house was initially designed to be completely open-plan, with internal doors only for the bedrooms, bathroom and WC. However, British building regulations necessitated the addition of fire doors to separate the kitchen from the bedrooms, as well as from the living/dining room. Frustrated by these rules, my father installed a ridiculously expensive kitchen door constructed entirely of thick, frosted glass, an unnecessary appendage that we never closed in all the time we lived there. Essentially, my father had built a ‘showhouse’, permitting his potential architectural clients to view a real-world example of futuristic living that might have been commonplace in California but was rarely seen in suburban Surrey. I loved living in the house, though its purpose echoed the earlier building of the Rossdale House as a marketing exercise for architect Geoffry Powell’s practice ‘Chamberlain, Powell & Bon’.

Our new futuristic home was not without its problems. The mostly glass exterior made birds believe they could fly at speed straight through the house during daylight, only to ‘thud’ against the glass window and be found dead, requiring regular burials in our garden. Leaving a glass sliding door open meant the occasional squirrel would enter, then panic and race around the floor inside the house, banging against the glass windows until we could usher it back outside. The deafening roar of low-flying test flights by Concorde from nearby Farnborough Royal Aircraft Establishment would rattle the huge glass windows, worrying us they might shatter. At night, our house lights would attract foxes, whose two red eyes would appear out of the darkness at a living room window, staring at us sat within like a horror movie. My mother purchased yards of thick, olive-green patterned material from Liberty that I helped her measure, cut, line, pleat, add curtain heading tape and hang in front of the eight expanses of glass window. The house being located some distance from the road, it felt as if we were living in countryside since neighbouring properties were not visible from our windows, a major change from our previous home fronting a bus route near Camberley town centre.

The red standalone enamel hooded fireplace mounted on a large inch-thick black slate square in the living room looked impressive but, when there was the slightest wind outside, smoke from a lit fire would blow back down the iron chimney and fill the living room. In summer, sunlight on the glass windows heated up the rooms terribly, particularly when the house was closed up. Conversely, in winter, the absence of insulation and the bare brickwork made the house cold, particularly the bedrooms that all faced northwards, while the open-plan design made it impossible to retain heat in one part of the house. Only a few years later (after my father had left), the heating system failed completely and, despite my repair efforts [see blog], we lived in an unheated house for years thereafter. The house’s legacy was that much of its equipment purchased from the United States could not be serviced or repaired in Britain, rendering those amenities defunct.

The inspiration for our home unexpectedly appeared in my music listening. Having bought the Simon & Garfunkel album 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' in 1970 from 'Dykes' record shop in Camberley [see blog], I was surprised to hear the Paul Simon composition 'So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright' dedicated to this American architect who had died in 1959. My father had regularly shown me articles about Wright in architectural magazines and glossy American coffee-table books bought on trips to London, filled with his modernist building designs. In distant Camberley, it turned out he was not the only one inspired by Wright:

"Architects may come and architects may go
And never change your point of view.
When I run dry
I stop awhile and think of you."

During the first years in our new home, I was given new responsibilities. My father insisted I regularly clean his preposterous American sports car in and out, afterwards spending hours polishing its bodywork inch by inch, a task I really hated. I was charged with mowing the grass lawns on three flanks of the house with a newfangled 'Flymo' lawnmower (‘It’s a lot less bovver with a hover’), after my mother’s attempt nearly electrocuted her when she rolled over and sliced its electric cable. For some reason, I was also the one who had to light the living room fireplace in winter, struggling with matches, firelighters and bits of damp wood. After initially continuing to share a bedroom with my younger brother, one year later my parents moved me into the house’s third bedroom, the first time I had occupied a room of my own. Despite the unwelcomed isolation from friends and my much-loved maternal grandparents, life proved enjoyable.

This stasis did not last long. My parents had spent two years building their ‘dream home’ and then four years living in it when my father deserted his wife and children [see blog]. My mother was left with a millstone property, raising alone three children in a now unheated home that she could ill afford to maintain or repair. Her dream had become a nightmare. Each of the house’s five sets of glass sliding doors were locked with a key, one each of which my father kept. The front door could only be opened with a number combination which my father knew. Securing the house from my newly vengeful father proved impossible. When we were all out, he would walk in and steal whatever he wanted, including parts of my precious vinyl record collection for which I would never forgive him [see blog]. Every summer, my mother’s sister Pam would generously pay for our one-parent family to stay somewhere in Britain, but I would never again accompany my mother and two siblings on holiday as I had to stay home alone to guard it from my father [see blog].

The most immediate impact of my father’s departure was my education. Three years earlier, when my parents decided to send me to a secondary school the other end of the county [see blog], they had promised to give me a lift every school day to Camberley railway station to catch the 8.10 train. Arriving back at Camberley station at 5pm, I would walk to my father’s town centre office and cadge a lift home. That was then. Now that my parents’ promise was in tatters, I had to be the first to rise at 6.30, make breakfast, then walk out to the Prior Road bus stop just after 7 to catch the irregular bus to the town centre and await the 8.10 train. Now, arriving back in Camberley at 5pm meant a wait until 5.40 for the next 39B bus that would deliver me home after 6. Outside of winter, if the weather was fine and I was not carrying too many books, I would choose to walk the two miles home, though it meant a trudge to the top of Church Hill, down Crawley Hill, across the M3 interchange, a walk up Prior Road, then finally down Goldney Road. I could arrive home shortly before 6, but often exhausted.

To avoid such long days, I asked my mother to sign a letter I had typed to my school, asking if I could be let out ten minutes early at the end of the day, as I could arrive home a full hour earlier by catching the 4pm train from Egham. The school reluctantly agreed though, in practice, it proved impossible to enact because teachers of the final afternoon lesson set the day’s homework during their final minutes, to be handed in the following day. It was Hobson’s Choice: get home early or fail my homework. The school office had already become suspicious of my home circumstances. At the end of one term, my regular school report booklet failed to arrive home by post. On enquiring, I was informed that my father had phoned, asking for it to be sent to his new address. I had to explain repeatedly that I did not live with my father and that he took no interest in my life, before I could persuade staff reluctantly to change back the address. How could I admit that most of my father’s stories were lies?

There were reasons for needing to reach home from school at a sensible hour, none of which I wanted to explain to my school. Every weekday, teachers set two subjects of homework that had to be submitted the next school day. They seemed to imagine students reached home within minutes after the school bell, joined their family for formal dinner, then one or other of their parents helped them complete their schoolwork. In my case, nothing could be further from the reality. Neither of my parents ever assisted with my homework because they lacked the knowledge or skills. Instead, once I reached home, my most urgent ‘home work’ now was to administer my mother’s perilous circumstances.

I had multiple uncharted waters to navigate. Our mortgage lender. The municipality’s property ‘rates’. Southern Water. Southern Gas. Southern Electricity. The Post Office telephone service. Buildings insurance. Contents insurance. Car insurance. Service contracts. Inland Revenue. Midland Bank. Until then, all household bills had been paid by my father. I had to contact these agencies by typing letters in my mother’s name and setting up new payment plans, urgently where outstanding balances had accrued due to my father’s abrupt cancellations. I had to field regular ‘red reminders’ and threatening court summonses. Once my mother had signed this correspondence, I would carry it to school and post it in my lunch hour at Egham Post Office. I created a set of labelled folders at home to track all the documents, filing carbon copies of letters I had typed (rediscovered intact four decades later during house clearance following my mother’s death).

At the same time, I had to respond to my father’s resort to the legal system to harass us. He filed a case for regular access to his one-year-old daughter, despite having tried to prevent her birth and never having shown an interest in the upbringing of his children. Farnham Court ordered my mother to permit him to take my sister one weekend a month, seemingly oblivious that neither he nor his teenage mistress knew the slightest about baby care. Those weekends were particularly fraught in our home when my mother would fret terribly that her husband might disappear with her daughter merely to spite her. Eventually, my father bored of this antagonistic routine, spurning further contact with his daughter for the remainder of his life.

I now diverted my school lunchtimes to the upstairs reference section of Egham public library, reading dusty law books to understand our family’s rights in the face of my father’s legal onslaught. He was well aware that he had left my mother without sufficient funds to fight his actions, requiring me to fill out forms for ‘Legal Aid’ and attach the requisite proof of our dire financial situation. I had to apply to Surrey County Council to support my education, most urgently for the expensive termly railway season ticket necessary for travel to school, as well as subsidies to buy my school uniform and entitlement to free school meals [see blog]. Until my mother could find employment, having not worked since my sister’s birth the previous year, I had to apply for social security benefits from the government DHSS agency. My mother’s change of status proved difficult to document when we were unaware of my father’s new address as he had ended direct communication with us.

To represent her in court, my mother hired local solicitor Neale Turk whose office on Kings Ride had recently opened. I accompanied her to their initial meeting and explained our family’s situation with reference to the legal statutes I had read and photocopied at Egham library. While my mother would attend follow-up meetings, she said Turk instructed her not to invite me again. Unfortunately, my mother’s outcomes from a succession of Farnham court appearances, none of which I was permitted to attend, proved not particularly positive. Only later did we discover that my father had at some time been a client of Turk. Mmmmm.

Court orders requiring my father to make maintenance payments to my mother for her and his children were ignored. It was left to me to phone the Clerk to Farnham court from home once a fortnight to ask why we had still not received his overdue funds, me having to fib to the school that I had some medical or dental appointment. I heard every excuse under the sun relayed by the Clerk. Eventually, once my father’s arrears had accumulated to astronomical amounts, he disappeared. He never did pay what he owed us. Only later did we discover he was an illegal immigrant in the United States, the place he had sought to emulate so much in his architectural work [see blog].

Before he fled, his design legacy was left for all to see on Calvin Close, not only in our house but also at the far end of the cul-de-sac. His ‘showhouse’ had brought him a commission to design a group of identical houses around the bottom of our road. Quite how the municipal planning committee approved his plans I never fathomed, as they were designed in the style of Swiss chalets with steep pitched roofs, completely out of character with surrounding homes. Whenever I happened to pass them, I felt ashamed of my association. Decades later, most of those monstrosities were demolished and replaced with orthodox houses. 

In 2004, visiting my mother in the tiny house she now occupied in a town near Camberley, she showed me estate agent sale particulars for a property about which she had enquired, having seen it advertised in the local paper. It was our former home in Calvin Close. She told me she was thinking of arranging a viewing. I was horrified. No no no! Even after all the terrible things that had happened in her life, she still imagined she could resume her ‘happy family’ years between 1968 and 1972 by living in that house again. Mercifully, the £340,000 price tag was way beyond her means. I never did find out if she ignored my pleas to stay well away.

My parents’ now rather post-modern home was demolished after planning permission was approved in 2011 for a conventional, two-storey house to replace it. Their decision not to emigrate to Canada had had disastrous consequences. Their dream of a ‘new start’ there had turned to dust: my father an illegal immigrant on the run and my mother impoverished for the remainder of her life.

[to be continued…]

POSTSCRIPT:

Nearly two decades after our Calvin Close house had been built, another Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired house was constructed in Camberley at 11 Crawley Hill, an address I had walked past hundreds of times on my way home from school via the railway station. Built between 1981 and 1984, initially named ‘Rhododendron’ but later renamed ‘Betterwords’, it was designed by architect David Elgin Dodge (of the American ‘Dodge’ car dynasty) for owner Firoz Mehta, an “industrial consultant” who had lived in Camberley since 1972 and “had always wanted to be an architect”. By remarkable coincidence, in late 1985 I happened to work briefly in this house and experienced an eerie familiarity with my childhood home that, by then, had been consigned to memory. This later property attracted considerable press coverage for its retro-1960’s stylings (“It is the only house of its kind in Europe”, Mehta proudly told ‘The Camberley News’), including in the national 'Daily Telegraph'. It now apparently fulfils three Surrey Heath Borough Council criteria that make it a “significance of heritage asset”, whereas my father’s genuine contemporary 1960’s modernist design, built one mile away, had attracted zero public attention … perhaps because he had not been a 'real' architect [see blog].

The day my world stood still [part two] : 7 October 1971 : Kings Ride, Camberley

 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.

[continued at part three]