| Childhood Memories What's your first memory from childhood? To tell the truth I can't remember much of anything; about the only thing that jogs my memory is the few early pictures of me as a crazy bald-headed baby scratching my grandmother. I looked like a young Telly Savalas. I was a good baby; always laughing; never crying, my mother says. I was a giddy kid. All the pictures of me show me smiling so I must've been a happy toddler. Surreal memories they are. I was born at a hospital in Hertfordshire, don't bother looking for it though. When I went back to Britain in 2001 I went looking for the hospital but discovered it had been condemned and torn down. Sad for me. I don't know what I wanted to see, I guess I'd have liked to have seen a statue but I don't think anyone really cared. The hospital is now a grocery store. Great. My hospital ward was in the bulk foods section...interesting. I was born in Hertfordshire, raised in Bedfordshire and went on trips to Buckinghamshire so I was a true Three Counties boy. So we lived on Dallow Road in Luton, UK . Dallow Road was rough and got rougher. Today 20% of people who live there are on benefits. Luton was the big city you had to go to if you wanted to buy anything useful. We used to go to the Arndale Centre to do our shopping. I remember three things about that mall; they had an Argus, I couldn't drink a whole can of Coke and there used to be IRA bomb scares so we'd have to evacuate. Luton was and is an interesting place. The local football club, Luton Town F.C. were crap. Strange because Luton has a bit of money. Dallow Road, where I grew up, was right next to Kenilworth Road (where Luton played). Hooligans used to run down our street and break people's windows. It was pretty rough in the 70's. There were a lot of riots, bombs and union strikes. I remember the older kids bragging that they had impaled golf balls with nails, spray painted them black, and threw them at the police at night. I said to myself "Hey Mario take it easy!". It was a nutty time, a bit like that last comment because my name isn't Mario. I went to a pre-school at age three and I don't remember any of that either. I do remember playing bells. They were the kind you hear at xmas. I remember they had beds but I didn't stay there. That's about it. At age four I started going to school at Whitefields in Luton in Bedfordshire. It was near Bramblewood, at least I though it was. We lived at 6 Redgrave Gardens in Luton in a small but comfortable house. We had a large back garden so it was a fun place to grow up. I had a gang on the street but the kids were much older. The gang was headed by a kid named Nigel. He had quite a lot of issues. Most of the kids were good but he was always up to no good. He used to steal letters from neighbours letter boxes. Then he'd open them up and write rude things inside and put them back in the letter boxes. He used to steal a lot too. It was a pretty f-cked up situation. I didn't really like him but he liked to hang out with me. It's an on-running theme I had back then; I hated bullies, but they always wanted to be friends with me. The good side is that you didn't get the sh-t kicked out of you though. Nigel had a sister. She was the closest thing I had to a girlfriend back then. She was a really nice girl, a good friend and pretty too. We were inseperable, but Nigel always wanted to hang out with us. Finally he'd leave and we'd hang out and talk. It was like two adults chatting instead of two children chatting. Nicky and Nigel both had some major household issues. Their father was probably a well-meaning bloke but when he lost his temper hell broke loose. His wife June would end up with black eyes now and then and sometimes a busted lip. Certainly it was an awful situation for a family to be in. Nicky was sad a lot because of it all, so I'd always try and give her a pep talk and tell her that things were gonna be okay. I remember one day she came over with stiches in her eyebrow and I tried not to notice, my mother asked Nicky what had happened and she replied that her dad had been "throwing pots and pans...". Onto more pleasant memories, we were very close and she was my best friend and I'd love to see how's she's doing these days. We didn't have big wheels back then so, following in the footsteps of local farmers, I rode around the neighbourhood on a tractor. It was mechanical but it had pedals. I used to ride it everywhere. It was huge! It had a black body and huge red wheels. I was styling on my tractor and me and Nicky would ride around the 'hood. She had an orange piece of sh_t with tiny wheels but it was good enough to get around! My parents were into playing badminton in those days. The 1970's were a strange time. My father used to work all the time so we didn't see him that much so we were excited to hang out with him on the weekends. He wore some pretty dodgy kit back then. Flared jeans with holes in the knees and dicey shirts. Very hip in a non-hip sorta way. My mother was rocking the seventies outfits and worked part time at the local pub The Bedfordshire Yeoman. I got to hang out with her in the pub on weekends and she poured me all you can drink Cokes. An excellent time. I loved the darkness and smell of stale ale. Its a memory that still conjours when I drink Coke. It would explain why today I love going to pubs. At some point, Keith came along. I don't remember when but one day I sort of noticed he was living with us. He was the cutest kid. Eating berries from the bushes in the garden. He was a pretty cool addition to our family. We used to experience "power cuts" all the time. I spent most of my youth in the dark. The labour unions would always be on strike and we'd lose our electricity. The drill was always the same. The power would go out as we were watching the telly, my mother would bump into things trying to find a torch (US flashlight) then finally turn it on but the batteries would be dead. So she'd break out the candles. That was the end of the night, walking upstairs by candlelight because the TV wasn't coming on for the next ten hours. WHITEFIELDS LOWER SCHOOL My life took a turn for the worse when my parents enrolled me in public school. I suppose I was excited and all that crap but the bottom line is I didn't want to go. I think I had a fear of being abandoned. I was very shy in those days so I was always worried about not having anyone to play with etc. I actually remember trying to put a brave face on the whole situation and not show my folks that I was nervous about starting school. They probably couldn't wait to ship me off. They were taking photos of me in my uniform. I looked like a prat. Plus I had some serious quirks like licking my lips all the time. My lips were always chapped...I had quite a few eccentricities. You can see in my school photograph how chapped my lips were. Why the f-ck did I do that so much? No idea. My mother told me in later years that she thought I was going to be a very average kid and not particularly intelligent. She said she thought I'd be a blue collar worker. I think she thought I was a little bit slow but she wouldn't admit that. I've always found that intriguing. So at Whitefields I don't remember any of the kids but I wasn't too depressed about school so I must've had a few friends. I learnt to read and write there, or did I learn that before? I remember doodling a lot. School was actually pretty fun at that age. Mrs. Logan was my teacher and I remember it was around the same time that the movie Logan's Run came out. She didn't really have any impact on me so she must not have been mean. I remember Lisa Baker was in my class and when I transferred to the Mary Bassett School of Pale Young Boys & Girls. I also remember this big girl named Grace. There were a few cute girls in the school as I remember. My parents have a picture of the end-of-year school dance and I'm dancing with one of the better looking girls. Yeah! Hate the game don't hate the player as they say. Note that I was the only kid dancing with his shirt untucked. Getting the girls and looking scruffy. The story of my life... MY NEW HOOD At the end of the year my parents bought a house 139 Harrow Road, Leighton Buzzard. I was almost six years old. The house was new and the back garden was huge. When it was being built we stopped by late one night. My parents went inside and left me in the car. I saw a bright red eye of a bull staring at me from the window. It was very dark and it started scaring me. I got pretty upset but I think it was probably just the reflection of the brake light in the window. I was a skittish kid early on. So this new house was cool. Within time we became friends with the neighbours and the kids in the hood. I suppose you could say we had a gang. It had no formal name or leadership; it was an anarcho-commune style setup. The elders of the tribe tended to be looked up at. The older kids were Darren Beavis and David Blackburn. They were the capos of the gang. Blackburn was probably the leader. We were quite a few years younger than them, which makes quite a difference at that age. We played typical games and had masculine contests exhibiting our guts and bravado. Most of the Olympic style events centered around BMX's. Most of us had these heavy, iron-clad bikes made my Raleigh. I had the bicycle equivalent of an M1A1 Abrams tank. It was called a Grifter. Nick, my neighbour, had the second biggest bike, the Striker. Keith had the BMX prototype, the Boxer. Everyone had one of these three bikes. Most had the Grifter. They were tough bikes. They were designed to survive car crashes. Extremely heavy though, more like motorbikes with no motors. We used to have wheelie contests on the street Blackburn and Beavis could do a wheelie for approx. 1/8 mile. I was always too scared about falling off backwards and cracking my head open. I never got much further than a few feet. I was absolute crap in hindsight but I was just a cautious kid I guess. We used to play this game called 321-Out. Essentially the same as hide and seek, 321out comprised of the seeker, who had to count to 100 then come looking for you. You'd be hiding in the most obscure places because we lived on a new home estate and there was always construction and building equipment around. We'd hide in unfinished houses etc. The goal was to get back to the lamp post before the seeker and shout 321-out. The seeker wouldn't usually stray too far from the post so it made for an interesting game. One time Blackburn, Gregan, Pual Blackburn and myself were hiding in the attic of a newly built house. Nick was "looking" for us and got to the house and started climbing up the ladder! We knew were had been compromised and that would get back down the ladder, back to the post and then call us out. We hauled ass thru the attic, running on the rafters, then scurrying down the ladder; all of us except for Gregan. His silly ass was running thru the attic and instead of putting his feet on the rafters, he was running on the drywall ceiling. It didn't take a physicist to understand what the dire consequences were. We were down the ladder, halfway down the stairs when Gregan covered in white dust comes crashing thru the ceiling and down the stairs. He missed us by a whisker. It was about the craziest f-cking thing I've ever seen. All the more amazing is that he didn't sustain any massive injuries. He looked sort of dazed and we got him to his feet. The game was probably over so we had to take care of an injured comrade. Crazy day that was! We used to get up to all kinds of sh_t. Typical kid stuff. At Halloween one year we went trick or treating door-to-door. This older guy with a beard wouldn't give us any tuck so one of the gang [name withheld for security reasons...it wasn't me!] lit some fireworks and tossed them into the poor sods letterbox. We ran like hell to a safe vantage point and watched the ensuing explosion. There was a flash and a serious of booms, then we saw the curtains catch fire. I was scared as hell and we all started walking away, the next thing I heard was "WHICH ONE OF YOU DID THAT???" The guy was standing a few feet behind us and he was livid. We ran for our lives, to be caught would be a fate worse than death. We all scattered in different directions which was a damn smart thing to do. It must have been our collective primitive reflexes to spread apart and make the hunter's job more difficult. Finally we lost him. I was worried he'd recognize me for weeks after that. The most fun I had as a kid was building canals in the mud. I didn't own a pair of tennis shoes until I was ten. Unheard of in the US, but in Bedfordshire (an agricultural hub) not unusual. I used to wear wellington boots all the time, except for school. We lived on a building site and it rained alot. Building sites are very muddy places and there were tons of tire tracks from the heavy equipment. The muddy tracks would fill with rainwater and I would start linking them and building my canals. I used to spend hour upon hour linking the tracks and creating my own Grand Union canals. It's one of my most vivid memories of childhood. SMASHING THINGS We were vandals. We were kids. We loved to smash things. Living on a building site was always a dangerous prospect. The danger led to excitement. We were a very young group of kids and we led our lives in our little gang trying to avoid the punks and skins gangs in our hood. The punks were headed by tanya. She was like a mother to all the street gangs. At age seven, eight, nine we all looked up to her for protection from her gang. She was a real late 70's punk. Dyed hair, ripped jeans etc. She kinda looked after us and saved us from being beaten to death a few times for destroying punk forts. My mother was friendly with her. My mother was a real estate agent and was the only realtor in town who would help Tanya buy a house. They became friendly, but they didn't hang out. This earned my friends and I instant credibility and protection. We were untouchable. Before this we were terrorized if we were on their turf. They took my buddy Nick and forced him to climb the ladder down into the sewer, as he was terrified and descending they put the manhole cover back and stood on it. Nick was trapped in complete darkness, in a cold, rushing sewer hanging onto a ladder about 10 feet from death. He was screaming so loud we could hear his voice reverberating throughout the sewer system on the street. If other punks or skins messed with us we actually had some clout, which we used to full effect in Richmond Rd. I will elaborate. Do you remember Action Man? Or the old large GI Joe figures? Well my brother Keith was minding his own business playing war with the Action Man figures and their combat vehicles at the far reaches of our neighbourhood. All of a sudden an older kid, poor and a bit of a bully, took Keith's Action Man and his Tank and wandered off back to Richmond Rd. (a council estate). Poor old Keith. He was depressed and came home and told my dad. My dad, the righteous sort of fella he is, insisted that we get it back. All Keith knew is that the kids name was 'Rigby'. The next thing I remember was my father asking the neighbourhood kids who this 'Rigby' was and got the answer that he was a bully who lived on Richmond Rd. Bad news for Rigby. My dad was very pissed off and so Keith, Me and him went storming up to Richmond Rd. Along the way we were joined by most of the kids from our hood and also Carver and Mumfy (two punks). Rigby's dad answered the door, he was a big biker type fella. My dad told him what happened and he grabbed Rigby, gave Keith back his Action Man stuff then Rigby's dad kicked the shit out of him in front of us. We were a real mob. Two brightly coloured punks, an angry hippie and about twenty street kids. Rigby didn't come back to our hood ever again. Most children wear there influences on their sleeves. As they mature, resist though they might, they become clones of their parents. THEORY #1 If you're parents vote Republican, chances are you'll do the same. You are a completely blank hard drive onto which they install software they feel suitable. I am a clone of my parents. At the end of the day I vote like them etc. My father, in retrospect, was and is a great man. Here's a guy who grew up poor working class and elevated himself to the corporate executive level, has a great marriage and two good kids. About the worst thing you could say about him was his wardrobe (1972-1991). During this time frame he wore some pretty illegal stuff. His favorite combination was dark blue bell-bottomed Wranglers with holes in the knees and an old dress shirt, black cotton with thin plaid stripes. I suppose he could excuse it by saying it was the Seventies, but it lasted until the early 90's. It's funny to recollect all the things he used to wear. The jeans were a mainstay for decades but he would mix it up with the shirts, jumpers, socks and shocking footwear choices. I have pictures of him wearing his trusty cream-coloured wool jumper and jeans, that was very hip in an anti-hip sort of way. That's how I remember my dad. Him wearing these clothes, me wearing navy blue dungarees standing in back of the house in Stotfold with him pushing me and Keith around in the wheelbarrow or bouncing the ball on the top of my head. I used to love that! I don't know why. I would insist on it. I was an odd kid. Actually asking my father to repeatedly bounce my red kickball off the top of my head for hours. I have a few pictures of this, they're probably the happiest memories I have of being a child. It was really cool to hang out with my dad 'cause I didn't get to see him much. He worked a lot. But he worked a lot to give us a better life so I can't fault him for that. Richmond Diagnosis: I have many happy memories of those times. jcbs keys nick sewer ben forts canal building boxes war beavis stings MARY BASSETT LOWER SCHOOL This is where my life story hots up. My mother packed me off for my first day of school and I was nervous. I was worried that the other kids wouldn't want to play with me. My mother sat me down and heard me out then gave me a little pep talk, handed me my lunch box, and so I started my first day at Mary Bassett. I don't remember too much about that day but my mother said she watched me walking around the playground in my little duffle coat and then noticed me hanging out with the other kids. I suppose I was worried about not being accepted. I was pretty shy at that age and I think I've always been an introvert who overcompensates and acts like an extrovert. My new school was Mary Bassett which was founded for the children of the Society of Friends also known as Quakers. Who was Mary Bassett? My first year at Mary Bassett I was in 2J. 2J was the second year taught by Mrs. Jones. She was an old lady but relatively simple and nice. I remember she had these very old hands. I remember seeing the huge veins running over the top of her hands. She seemed like a good teacher and she wasn't too strict as I recall. We did lots of wierd projects like putting celery in jars of ink and watching the ink run up the celery turning it blue. We would go outside find a leaf then cover it in blue and mount it on a piece of cardboard, basically laminating leaves. I'm not sure what we were suppose to be learning from all this but it was pretty cool. One day this red headed girl named Abigail was sitting in hger seat and started peeing herself. There was a huge puddle underneath her. I thought "what the fuck is wrong with these people??". The teacher explained to us that if we needed to go to the bathroom we should just go. I thought "shit...do you really need to tell us?" Evidently not everyone understood because it happened again. I remember there was a huge situation because one of the bad kids put silly putty in some girls hair. They had to cut it out. It was overblown out of proportion but that never happened again. That was a weird memory. After the summer break, I moved into the third year at Mary Bassett. This was one of the more productive years I have ever had. It fostered a love of learning, and an interest in Mathematics, English, History, Geography and Egyptology. It was a fantastic year for so many reasons. Mrs. Pantling was the teacher. She was another older lady, firm but kind. She thought the world of me and I really liked her. The class had about 25 pupils of which she had four children sit at the "head table" (an honour). The four kids represented the smartest four of the class. I was one of them, and so to was my best friends Nick and Steve. I was the first child to learn his times tables and she was pretty impressed. I had so many gold stars next to my name I felt like General Patton. While the class all worked on similar projects, she had our group working at a more advanced level. It really made me break out of my shyness and made me feel respected by my peers and made more far more confident. As a kid it means a lot to be told that you're special, you're intelligent etc. We worked on all types of cool projects. One project was studying and reading Robinson Crusoe. We did all types of stuff. We dipped our bear feet into yellow acrylic paint and made footprints on white paper so they would look like the footprints Robinson found in the sand days before he discovered Man Friday. We spent several weeks studying Ancient Egypt. That was cool stuff. We went outside and built and 150 ft. tall pyramid out of solid blocks of limestone. Local reporters came and took pictures of it. We did it without the use of cranes. We killed one of our classmates and after an ornate funeral procession we buried him deep inside our pyramid. His parents filed a missing persons report but they never found him. This is a closely guarded secret so keep quiet about it. 3P (3rd year - Mrs. Pantling) was an excellent time and did a lot to build my confidence and imagination. After our afternoon milkbreak we would have two options, play house or have the teacher read. We would mix it up a lot, but I always liked it when Brenda would read to us. She had this thick book about this kid who climbed the tree behind his house and got into all types of new and exciting worlds and adventures. I wish I could read it now but I have no idea what it was called. It was cool though, just endlessly passing our time listening to fantastic escapades of some kid, up above the clouds, climbing higher and higher up this tree. It was a cool concept and helped expand the minds of the kids. Playtime was the best part of the day. I was always a little apprehensive about going to school, especially Sunday nights, but when I was at school playtime made it a bit easier. I was a pretty shy kid but once I started making friends I kinda broke out of my shell. There were playground cliques even back then. I was lucky enough to be in the cool group. We got to hang out with the cool girls. It made life a lot more fun. We used to play kiss chase with the girls and follow them into the girls bathrooms and hang out with them. The teachers and landladies used to go bezerk but they let us get away with a lot. My friends were terrific. There were about eight of us and we were all best mates, as we say in England. Joseph Feeley was lots of fun. He was always up for mucking about and larking around. We played marbles and matchbox cars. Simon Agutter was another cool kid. Everyone thought we were brothers. We were born on the same day and the same year so it was a weird cosmic coincidence I guess. He was the best athlete out of the bunch. Nicky Smith "Deano" as we called him (I have no idea why) was the coolest. He would flirt with the girls and they really liked him. We were all basically his wingmen. The coolest girl in the school, Lisa Baker, naturally gravitated towards him and they started going out. This meant they would hang out in the playground, just the two of them, once a week. Silly, but that's how you learn I guess. I had the fortune to see Deano and Joe in '94 on a trip across Europe with Miller. It was good to see them again. Toby Lynch was another good friend, he was the crazy one. Always getting into trouble and making us laugh. He was always up to something naughty. He was a cool customer. Sadly, he went to Gilbert Inglefield and most of us went to Brooklands so we lost touch with him. He was the life of the party back then so it would be interesting to see how his life worked out. I picture him as a shock jock or DJ on Capitol Radio. Nick Carter-Brown was my neighbour and best friend growing up but we were in different classes a lot so I didn't see him that much at Mary Bassett. We would hang out on the weekends and pull birds. Well, actually we'd just go to Pages Park and play on the swings and roundabout. Colin Adams was another mate. A bit of an introvert his mum used to substitute teach occasionally. He was into collecting fossils, so I would trade him some for old coins. He was a good kid but a bit of a straight arrow and I don't remember getting into too much trouble with him. Didn't see him again after Mary Bassett. Finally, there was Chris Walker. I think he lived in America for a while, but not sure about that. He was a good guy and was pretty quiet. He was an integral gang member but was one of the ones who was always in the background. He was a good friend and I think he's the one who threw the marble through the window. So this was our gang (Sarge, Walker, Toby, Deano, Feeley, Aggy etc.) By the time our last year rolled around we were all pretty close. Funny, when I was just typing "close" it came out as "clods". Maybe clods was more accurate. There were some weird kids in the playground at playtime. One kid John Paul Something and his smaller buddy used to always play this spaceship game. There was a brickwall all around the playground and there was a bit that jutted out and John Paul and his mate used to pretend it was a control panel to a spaceship there were commanding. In retrospect it seems pretty cool, but it would get old after a while. There were out there in any weather playing the "spaceship" game. Now they're probably involved in the space program or Professors of Applied Mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge. John Paul was one weird dude. He was the envy of our 4th year class because he made a SeaLink ferry out of cereal boxes. He even painted it to look like the real thing. We were all working on our own crap forms of projects using boxes and paper mache. Almost everyone gave up on theirs and just helped John Paul paint his. It was slammed out. As close to the SeaLink ferry as three boxes of Cornflakes could be. I think most of us we working on making piggy banks. The premise was you inflated a regular balloon, tied off the end, then cover it in paper mache. After a few days it was supposed to set and you could cut a slit into the hardened paper mache and form a coin slot. Yeah, that's how it was supposed to work. The paper mache was dry so I took the exacta knife and started to cut when bang, the fucking thing exploded. There laid my project in paper and rubber fragments. A rather ignominious end but that was okay, I got to help John Paul on his project. Half of us had our pigs blow up so I think the project was an exercise in coping with failure rather than an exercise in creation. Anyway back to the playground. We had this great game called 'Stoney'. Stoney was where a few kids would sit on a bench and one of the bench kids was the chaser. The main kid would walk by each kid and put his hand into their open hand and either drop a stone in it or move to the next person to drop the stone. Once someone had the stone they had to run across the playground to the other side while being chased at top speed by the chaser. You could say the game was pointless but we'd love playing it. Another favourite was 'Circle Tig'. Tig in England is like Tag in the USA. I can't really remember how the game was played but the premise was like American dodgeball where you had kids wing tennis balls at you. I was pretty good at this. The bit I remember vividly was walking around the playground arm-in-arm with the other kids recruiting for the game by shouting in unison "who wants to play...circle tig...boom boom boom...circle tig boom boom boom". That was about as much fun as the game. Other childrens games included marbles...where I won a pound note for hitting Joseph Feeley's marble from the furthest circle. The legend grew to the point where some people said I broke his marble in half but I don't remember that happening. As I said before marbles were fun but almost got banned after the big kids started just taking the smaller kids' marbles away without winning them first. Things got worse when Chris Walker threw a marble across the playground and through a window. Moronic because we were terrified of the repecusions. We were marble conisieurs. Each type of marble had a name and a value. Ball bearings were worth a ton, chinas were next, then barons, then big ones then regular ones. We had other toy based games, Matchbox cars was fun. We'd see how fast we could get them to go, then they'd disappear into the drain; lost in a primordial ooze of an ancient sewage system. You didn't want your car back after it'd been swimming in that shit. Springtime was one of my favourite school memories. There were four highlights: swimming, football, rounders and playtime. We'll start with the worst one. We had a swimming pool at Mary Bassett. It was not heated. It doesn't get particularly warm during spring in England. These factors, when combined, made for a fucking freezing swimming pool. It was so fucking cold and had zero chance of ever warming up. I'd like to meet the sadist who thought the pool was a good idea. It was so cold that the second you entered the water it felt like someone ripped open your belly with an icicle. I remember kids getting out and having blue lips. The parents didn't know how cold it was and neither did the teachers as they never swam with us...I wonder why. It was cold, I imagine like taking a dip in the Lake Baikal. I can't verbalize how it felt to jump in. We would get out as soon as they'd let us and just sand and shiver. The only positive is that it toughened us up and it created camaradarie. So the swimming pool was cold and now its time for warmer memories. Football. Football was run by the head master who was an Ipswich fan. The headmaster was an odd, pedantic bloke with very few fingers. Nice. And we had to take orders from him. He wasn't too bad really but he played the role of headmaster to a tee. He was a stern autocrat and his pedantic nature drove us up the wall. One day we put on all our football gear and went out to play some footy and he asked Nick and question. Nick responded "Yep!" Mr. Burrows didn't like it if you said "yep" so football was cancelled. Moronic. At least he could've made Nick run some laps. That's the silly shit I remember that makes me lean towards thinking of Mr. Burrows as an arsehole. He was a relic of a bygone era. No more corporal punishment so kids today should be happy. So the headmaster ruined my football career right? Right...let's move on. Rounders was a fun game we'd only play once or twice in the Spring. Basically baseball except that the pitcher could get you out if they knocked over the obelisk behind you. That was a fun game. Even the teachers would have a go. I would say that I was always fairly good at these games but never at the top. This kid Roy (I only remember his name because he used to write "ROY" in pencil on his shirt collars) was the best. Playtime in the Spring and early Summer was excellent. I had so much fun. The fellas would organize a huge game of cowboys and indians. It would be thirty on thirty. Me and my pals were always cowboys, we used to call ourselves the 7th Cavalry. We would act like generals and stay in the back and send the first wave forward to attack the indians. Even John Paul and the nerdy kids played...they were always indians. Most of the kids wanted to be cowboys so the indians used to be outnumbered then slaughtered. After the first wave of cowboys had softened up the indians we swept in with a cavalry charge to finish them off. The field would dry out in the sun and get quite dusty so as the kids attacked each other there would be huge clouds of dust, adding to the atmosphere. The indians would be screaming out their indian noises and half the kids would eventually die and lay motionless on the ground. It was quite an homage to Custer and Sitting Bull. While we were off fighting the epic battles the girls would sit on the grass and make daisy chains. We'd be worn out and come and sit down with the girls and they'd put the daisy chains around our necks. It was all so innocent and cute in retrospect. These are some of my happiest memories. ;) After 3P I entered 4S. 4S was the 4th year taught by Mrs. Shepherd. Mrs. Shepherd was pretty cool because she didn't hit us and she didn't have a mean streak. She could and would discipline us, but for the most part she was pretty warmhearted. The class was taught in the annex. The annex was a separate classroom in the typical English flowering gardens. It was a wonderful place to be in the spring and summer. We would watch the birds and draw them and describe their shapes, colours and songs. We had chaffinches, blue tits, green finches, thrushes, starlings, sparrows etc. Mrs. Shepherd had an allegoric name. We were always working on projects outside. We were plants and flowers. We had worm farms. She was basically an old hippy, in love with nature. We even made our own bread, butter and crest and made sandwiches a few weeks later from everything we had grown. What a wonderful and fulfilling experience it was. It wasn't all work though. Occasionally we got to play non-stop cricket. The game would end when Aggy hut the ball onto the roof of the classroom. Mrs. Shepherd also liked us to sing. She subscribed to the BBC and got cassettes of sing along folk songs from Egland, Ireland and a few international ones. Some of these songs had been around since the 1700's. I didn't like the calypso songs and didn't enjoy 'Brennan on the Moor', but 'Patrick on the Railroad' and 'Rudey Ranno' were pretty cool. 'Patrick on the Railroad' was about some Irish bloke who laid down train tracks across North America. The best bit was the chorus "igga mi urray i ree ay" etc. Most of these were English folk songs and most of these were silly little ditties but we sang a lot and some of the kids even enjoyed them. It was in the class that I became the first kid to learn and recite all my times tables. They thought of me as a little mathematic prodigy because half the kids couldn't get past the four and five times tables. I remember feeling good because the kids respected me and so did the teacher. I amde her pretty happy and she kept putting stars by my name. I had so many stars next to my name that they ran off the edge of the chart. I was a good kid back then;-) I liked to impress the teacher and liked to be acknowledged. I've pretty much always been like that. The classroom was located in such a wonderful sunny area. There were always birds and bees buzzing around, flowers in bloom, daisies growing wild. The buildings were just so old. I think the school dated back to the 1700's and we all used to be afraid of the "Ghost in the Bathroom" . Legend has it that there was a hole in the ceiling near the toilets and if you went to close to it the blue hand of a ghost would grab you and hoist you up in the roof. we were fucking terrified of that. The thought of a ghost's hand, a blue ghost's hand, scared the shit out of us. Still, kids had to go to the bogs (toilets) so you had to get in and out in a hurry. OUR NEIGHBOURHOOD - HARROW ROAD - The Bulding Site Our neighbourhood was really cool. One of the most fun things we did was on weekends. One of the kids discovered the thrill and excitement of zooming down a steep grassy cliff in a cardboard box. You would each bring a large box to the top of the cliff, jump in it and the box would instantly start careening down the grassy hill at a tremendous rate of speed. At the last minute you had to dive free or you went over the edge of the cliff. You wouldn't have died if you went over the edge but it was a sheer 10 foot drop flat into a huge natural sandpit. Going off the edge meant you were hitting the ground so hard it would knock the piss out of you. Or knock the wind out of you. In any case, unless you were Darren Beavis, you toughed it out and kept going until dusk. It was so much fun coasting down that hill. The element of danger (diving before the cliff) made it all worthwhile. War was great fun. We would go into the hills, the same ones we would ride boxes down, and each of us had a realistic looking rifle or machine gun. In America we would have got killed by the cops but since the fuzz don't carry guns in the U.K. we were never concerned. The game evolved so far that eventually we had great 10 on 10 battles in the hills. There were actual foxholes burrowed into the side of the cliffs so you could hide in them then crawl out into no man's land and start shooting. The most vivid memory I have of this is the time Darren Beavis was in a foxhole that was apparently shared by a bees nest. The bees objected to Darren's presence so, in a collective effort, they swarmed his ass and stung him a few times. We knew something was amiss when we heard his first bone rattling scream. He screamed so fucking loud that has dad heard him from a mile away. His dad worked nights and slept during the day but evidently he was awakened by the scream, knew it was Darren, drove down the street and picked his ass up. Incredible but true. Living on a building site was the best place for a kid to grow up. It was arguably the most dangerous place but if you survived all the dangers you had a tremendous amount of fun. We had a pretty hard gang and if you wanted in you had to be initiated. Initiation was no joke because you had to go in a JCB and we would smash it with mudballs and rocks. There were plenty of other dangers on the building site. We would pour petrol and hydraulic fluid everywhere and make fires. Highly combustable fires. We would turn on the cement mixers and play with them. It was Danger Central. It was chaos. Kids were always trying to top each other and become legends. Mumfy started a JCB and drove it into a fucking house. He actually got the huge metal beast going forward but couldn't make it stop and ploughed into a newly built house. That will make you a legend. We would take strips of rubber and burn them and start waving them around. It was fun until I spilled boiling hot tar over my hand. Man that hurt. The fucked up thing was you couldn't tell your parents what had happened or they would've slapped you silly for playing with danger. My parents were actually pretty cool and let us stay out and play while the other kids' had to go home for supper. Our only form of transport back then, as I mentioned before, were bikes. Not BMX's. There was a hierarchy of cool bikes all made by Raliegh. The Grifter was like a Russian T-72 tank. It was indestructable and made from one large chunk of metal. The Striker wasn't as popular but it was half cool. People didn't take the piss if you had one, they concentrated on laughing at the kids with the Boxer. The Boxer was small but tough. It was made for the smaller kids but because it was light we used to use it for jumping off ramps. I think the reason I'm not a daredevil is because one time, when no one was around, I tried to jump the bike off a ramp. It ended badly. Because I was so fucking cautious, I didn't have much speed when I hit the ramp so I just nose dived off the end of the ramp and landed face first into the handlebars then the dirt. It knocked the piss out of me, so I never got into doing "bike stunts". Bikes that resembled tanks than anything else. Heavy but durable. Ideal for the mud and construction areas. I had a few near death experiences on my bike. I was peddling like crazy gathering up some serious speed when I lost concentartion trying to avoid a car and rear ended a stationary car. I remember it vividly. I hit the car hard, flew over the car in the air and landed on all fours. My bike was fucked and the car owner came running out of his house...probably to help me...but I took of running. I was hurting pretty bad but managed to limp away at a high rate of speed to safety. I went back to get my bike that night and had to carry it home. Never told my folks about that one either. I think it's best they didn't hear about that. Come to think of it, I didn't have much luck on bikes, because I few weeks later I came around a corner and surprised this guy and his dog. His dog didn't like being surprised so he bit me. Bastardo. That bite turned purple and bled a lot. So what did I do? What do you think I did? I jumped back on my bike and rode to freedom. I didn't make a big deal out of it, I just sorta limped for a few days. Parents never knew about that one either. MY NEW HOOD At the end of the year my parents bought a house 139 Harrow Road, Leighton Buzzard. I was almost six years old. The house was new and the back garden was huge. When it was being built we stopped by late one night. My parents went inside and left me in the car. I saw a bright red eye of a bull staring at me from the window. It was very dark and it started scaring me. I got pretty upset but I think it was probably just the reflection of the brake light in the window. I was a skittish kid early on. So this new house was cool. Within time we became friends with the neighbours and the kids in the hood. I suppose you could say we had a gang. It had no formal name or leadership; it was an anarcho-commune style setup. The elders of the tribe tended to be looked up at. The older kids were Darren Beavis and David Blackburn. They were the capos of the gang. Blackburn was probably the leader. We were quite a few years younger than them, which makes quite a difference at that age. We played typical games and had masculine contests exhibiting our guts and bravado. Most of the Olympic style events centered around BMX's. Most of us had these heavy, iron-clad bikes made my Raleigh. I had the bicycle equivalent of an M1A1 Abrams tank. It was called a Grifter. Nick, my neighbour, had the second biggest bike, the Striker. Keith had the BMX prototype, the Boxer. Everyone had one of these three bikes. Most had the Grifter. They were tough bikes. They were designed to survive car crashes. Extremely heavy though, more like motorbikes with no motors. We used to have wheelie contests on the street Blackburn and Beavis could do a wheelie for approx. 1/8 mile. I was always too scared about falling off backwards and cracking my head open. I never got much further than a few feet. I was absolute crap in hindsight but I was just a cautious kid I guess. We used to play this game called 321-Out. Essentially the same as hide and seek, 321out comprised of the seeker, who had to count to 100 then come looking for you. You'd be hiding in the most obscure places because we lived on a new home estate and there was always construction and building equipment around. We'd hide in unfinished houses etc. The goal was to get back to the lamp post before the seeker and shout 321-out. The seeker wouldn't usually stray too far from the post so it made for an interesting game. One time Blackburn, Gregan, Pual Blackburn and myself were hiding in the attic of a newly built house. Nick was "looking" for us and got to the house and started climbing up the ladder! We knew were had been compromised and that would get back down the ladder, back to the post and then call us out. We hauled ass thru the attic, running on the rafters, then scurrying down the ladder; all of us except for Gregan. His silly ass was running thru the attic and instead of putting his feet on the rafters, he was running on the drywall ceiling. It didn't take a physicist to understand what the dire consequences were. We were down the ladder, halfway down the stairs when Gregan covered in white dust comes crashing thru the ceiling and down the stairs. He missed us by a whisker. It was about the craziest f-cking thing I've ever seen. All the more amazing is that he didn't sustain any massive injuries. He looked sort of dazed and we got him to his feet. The game was probably over so we had to take care of an injured comrade. Crazy day that was! We used to get up to all kinds of sh_t. Typical kid stuff. At Halloween one year we went trick or treating door-to-door. This older guy with a beard wouldn't give us any tuck so one of the gang [name withheld for security reasons...it wasn't me!] lit some fireworks and tossed them into the poor sods letterbox. We ran like hell to a safe vantage point and watched the ensuing explosion. There was a flash and a serious of booms, then we saw the curtains catch fire. I was scared as hell and we all started walking away, the next thing I heard was "WHICH ONE OF YOU DID THAT???" The guy was standing a few feet behind us and he was livid. We ran for our lives, to be caught would be a fate worse than death. We all scattered in different directions which was a damn smart thing to do. It must have been our collective primitive reflexes to spread apart and make the hunter's job more difficult. Finally we lost him. I was worried he'd recognize me for weeks after that. The most fun I had as a kid was building canals in the mud. I didn't own a pair of tennis shoes until I was ten. Unheard of in the US, but in Bedfordshire (an agricultural hub) not unusual. I used to wear wellington boots all the time, except for school. We lived on a building site and it rained alot. Building sites are very muddy places and there were tons of tire tracks from the heavy equipment. The muddy tracks would fill with rainwater and I would start linking them and building my canals. I used to spend hour upon hour linking the tracks and creating my own Grand Union canals. It's one of my most vivid memories of childhood. SMASHING THINGS We were vandals. We were kids. We loved to smash things. Living on a building site was always a dangerous prospect. The danger led to excitement. We were a very young group of kids and we led our lives in our little gang trying to avoid the punks and skins gangs in our hood. The punks were headed by tanya. She was like a mother to all the street gangs. At age seven, eight, nine we all looked up to her for protection from her gang. She was a real late 70's punk. Dyed hair, ripped jeans etc. She kinda looked after us and saved us from being beaten to death a few times for destroying punk forts. My mother was friendly with her. My mother was a real estate agent and was the only realtor in town who would help Tanya buy a house. They became friendly, but they didn't hang out. This earned my friends and I instant credibility and protection. We were untouchable. Before this we were terrorized if we were on their turf. They took my buddy Nick and forced him to climb the ladder down into the sewer, as he was terrified and descending they put the manhole cover back and stood on it. Nick was trapped in complete darkness, in a cold, rushing sewer hanging onto a ladder about 10 feet from death. He was screaming so loud we could hear his voice reverberating throughout the sewer system on the street. If other punks or skins messed with us we actually had some clout, which we used to full effect in Richmond Rd. I will elaborate. Do you remember Action Man? Or the old large GI Joe figures? Well my brother Keith was minding his own business playing war with the Action Man figures and their combat vehicles at the far reaches of our neighbourhood. All of a sudden an older kid, poor and a bit of a bully, took Keith's Action Man and his Tank and wandered off back to Richmond Rd. (a council estate). Poor old Keith. He was depressed and came home and told my dad. My dad, the righteous sort of fella he is, insisted that we get it back. All Keith knew is that the kids name was 'Rigby'. The next thing I remember was my father asking the neighbourhood kids who this 'Rigby' was and got the answer that he was a bully who lived on Richmond Rd. Bad news for Rigby. My dad was very pissed off and so Keith, Me and him went storming up to Richmond Rd. Along the way we were joined by most of the kids from our hood and also Carver and Mumfy (two punks). Rigby's dad answered the door, he was a big biker type fella. My dad told him what happened and he grabbed Rigby, gave Keith back his Action Man stuff then Rigby's dad kicked the shit out of him in front of us. We were a real mob. Two brightly coloured punks, an angry hippie and about twenty street kids. Rigby didn't come back to our hood ever again. GOING TO THE SEASIDE In England we call 'the beach' 'the seaside' it is also important to note that it is the 'Sea side" not that other tropical locale 'Teeside'. Whatever you do don't confuse either with Tyneside...it's a dump, no offense to Geordies but I'd rather live in Bogside. I'm about to commit suey side. So wer called it the sea side but the beach sounds cooler. The beach sounds like a cool hang out for attractive suntanned Americans. The seaside isn't really like the beach. It sort of a socialist torture ritual for pale white Englishmen, women and kids. We didn't go to the seaside all that often. It was a once-a-year thing. Let me set the scene. We lived in the land-locked county of Bedfordshire. 40 miles north of London. Very early Saturday morning my parents would load up the company car with 'seaside items' (towels, umbrella, blankets, Chap Stick, fire logs, Gore Tex jackets, maps and rain gear) and then Pops would carry Keith and I, wrapped in comforters, from the bed to the backseat of the car. Keith's head would be resting on the car door behind Pops, I was on the other side. We'd set off for Clacton, Walton-on-the-Naze or Cornwall and lay there half asleep listening to my dad's tapes of Steeleye Span, Fleetwood Mac, Abba, Barclay James Harvest occasionally interrupted by my dad losing his wick because we'd taken a wrong turn. We'd get to the seaside and back the car into the parking spot, I suppose we did this in case we needed to leave in a hurry? It would be May and my mother would be dressing us up warm because the wind would rip right through you. My memories are somewhat hazy in terms of what we did all day, but as best as I can recall we'd get on the rocks and gravel (beach) put the towels down and hope the sun would come out from behind the clouds. Invariably the sky was overcast and although it may not have been raining the grey clouds were ominus in the distance. I remember peeling off my clothes and just wearing my swimming trunks I'd venture across the gravel and shells into the sea. I was pretty daring in those days, and I was the only one on the 'beach' brave enough to go for a swim. I'd dip my toes in the waves and the water would be fucking freezing. Almost like dipping your toes in liquid nitrogen...it was so cold. One time, I just ran at full speed into the ocean and after being fully submerged in the cold dark water I felt something sharp tear through the sole of my bare foot. I pulled my foot out of the water and saw a nice sharp piece of green glass stuck in my foot. I pulled it out and almost passed out when I saw the blood gushing and felt the throbbing. I stopped for a second and thought "this fucking sucks", but I was English so I probably thought "oh bugger". I limped back to the Arctic basecamp my parents had arranged on the beach and sat and bled. I think that was the last time I went in the North Sea. I just remember the water being so dark and dirty, with a slight oil slick drifting above the waves. Man, if you go to England skip the seaside. UPDATE: Based on some recent research I think the gravel beach, glass and dark water was somewhere in Devon or Cornwall so I apologize for any confusion. Clacton was very cold and dark when I was there but I'm an old man so my memories are hazy. Clacton in the sun looks pretty nice actually, so maybe it wasn't quite so bad. The good part is my parents cared enough to get us out of the house and to the ocean. It got a lot better as you will see when my parents bought a place on the Costa Del Sol in Spain. GOING TO WORK WITH POP ON SATURDAYS On Saturday mornings when my mother starting working at Denson's (the estate agency) Pop would take us to work with him. I remember going to Rickmansworth and it taking forever to get there. The best part of the drive was the scenery. Just cutting through the countryside in the company car, waiting at the humpback bridge; it was a pleasant tour of the Home Counties (Bedfordshire/Hertfordshire). We'd get to work and Pop would set us up as best he could. He'd get up tons of paper and pens and we'd sit and draw for hours. Keith was more imaginative in his compositions; drawing robots and pre-cursor Robotech mecha. My drawing usually involved a stick man and a thousand deaths. I used to like to draw traps and dungeons including spikes and flames. I guess that was kinda odd, but then we're all odd. What did you draw? After drawing we'd make 99 xerox copies of some drawing. I got more fun, Pop would start going on a tour of the factory floor dominated by huge system and computer hardware stacks. There were modems laying around which was impressive for the late 70's. I think of Pop as an early computer pioneer. He spent a lot of time working with them. Me and Keith got to like going to work after a while. We could make hot chocolate and play in the dumpsters. All quite fun. When Pop moved to Caxton Way, Watford we were really in for a treat. CASE (Computers and System Engineering) had a new building in Watford equipped with a full bar and snooker tables. We hit the jackpot. Like Jack Pott from the Isle of Man. We shot pool all day and had lots of Cokes and Scotch Eggs. It was money. Then 'round 1pm we'd go out for lunch in the city centre. We used to go to this one American style place that did fried chicken and fish, fries etc. We'd chow down on the scrumps (the burnt batter bits in the bottom of the box). Excellent! Huckleberry's. Watford FC was right around the corner from another of the buildings. We'd kick the football around outside and hear the fans chanting 100 yards away as Watford thrashed Grimsby 6-1. We used to play so many fun games at work. Pop would be working hard on some system problem and we'd be left to our own devices. Things got real fun when we started bringing our SLR's to work. We started begging our parents to buy us army surplus stuff. We were the shit. We were like the SAS Juniors. We'd both have on camo trousers, Royal Marine jumpers and now we were carrying models of the British Army rifle 'the SLR'. It was cool. Uncle Colin was in the army and we thought he was the coolest, so it kinda went from there. So we'd play war in the hedgerows behind work, then "clear" the building SAS style to rescue 'hostages' and kill 'terrorists'. All very fun. We even developed a game called 'Surveillance'. One of us was the security guard and we'd sit at the actual security guards station watching all the closed circuit television cameras watching the outside of the building. The 'infiltrator' had to go outside and make a complete trip around the building without being seen. I remember climbing over the lorry drop off point and when I made it back to base Keith said he saw me but at first he just thought it was a spider crawling on the camera lens. Family Trips Family trips were a much anticipated event for our family. Before we ever started going to Spain we started going to Scotland. We'd head up to Kirkpatrick Durham in Dumfries & Galloway in the Scottish lowlands. We would leave first thing on a Saturday, around 5am. My dad would walk into me and my brother's rooms and scoop us up, wrapped in a comforter, and deliver us to the car. We would be awake but it would feel so good to be wrapped in the comforter and be in the cold car. The car would already be loaded up and my dad would start driving while my mum would be panicing whether she had left the iron or stove on. She was a worrier. I think that's where I got that from. As we started driving towards the A1 (a pre-cursor to the M1 motorway) I would see all the orange street lights pass by above. About 45 minutes into the trip Pops would throw in a tape. We only ever seemed to listen to two tapes. The first tape had Steeleye Span's Storm Force Ten (1977). On the other side was Barclay James Harvest's Gone to Earth (1977). Span was usually the first side to get played, so I would drift off to sleep with the sounds of old English folk songs complete with accordians, guitars and elaborate vocal harmonies. To block out the dawn light I would coccoon myself within my covers. Then I would fall asleep. I would wake up around Telford or if we took the M1 by Brum (Birmingham). By now, Span had ended and we were listening to Barclay James Harvest. The album was mellow from start to finish with some nice harmonies throughout. I would slip in and out of consciousness. Heading up the A1 or M6 we would begin going throught the Lake District. This was the land f the Romantic poets like Keats, Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth. I never understood how they could right such uplifting and bright poems when they lived in a wet overcast dark brooding climate. It was always foggy and and overcast as we sped through. I suppose if you grow up in that environment you get used to it but it tended to depress me. I'd get car sick by this point and we'd have to pull over so I could vomit. It was a glorious ride up in many ways. Although the weather was grim, it was cool driving past crumbling castles and watching lambs playing on the moors. It had a gothic feel to it. In many ways things in Northumberland and Cumbria haven't changed much since the Dark Ages. The setting was made more sinister by the black smoke from burning cows on pyres. There used to be lots of foot and mouth outbreaks up North. Medieval. Changing the topic slightly, we used to stop once on the way up to get petrol, piddle and get a bite to eat. Our favourite rest stop was The Little Chef, I'll give them a plug because I liked the food and the lollipops. They used to have kids meals but me and Keith were to cool for that. We'd order the adult size meals and eat the whole thing. We could eat. It was rare we got to go to a restaurant, so we wouldn't fuck about. Their food was the bomb. I'd fill in the guestbook, Pop would fill up with petrol and then we were off again. Pop would put in the next tape... SCOTLAND, Land of the Picts, Caledonia One of my best memories of being a kid was sleeping in the back seat of the car. We were so small then it was like a bed. It would be great travelling a couple of hundred miles an hour, listening to Barclay James Harvest and occasionally popping your head above the covers to see the clouds overhead go whizzing by. Approaching the Scottish border was a big deal to my family. Pop had this tradition of always being the first one into Scotland. Basically he was in the drivers seat and he would put his hand on the windshield and announce he was the first one into Scotland. The next year we went to Scotland me and Keith were ready. We played it cool but we were pretty competetive. Each one of us wanted to be the first into Scotland. A second before we saw the sign and actually crossed into Scotland me and Keith jumped forward into the front of the car with arms outstretched towards the windshield, to claim out 'title'. Pop apparently wasn't playing this time...he wasn't even thinking about it. All he knew is that we unexpectedly jumped into the front of the car with arms flailing! It shocked the shit out of him and he lost control of the car. He was pretty pissed off. We were just playing the game, but we almost crashed the car. Next year we let Dad win... Riding in the back of the car was smooth. We would tour around England crossing over rivers and passing crumbling castles. One time we were headed out to Cornwall and on the back roads me and Keith got into it. I had specific guidelines I had to enforce regarding Keith's compliance with staying on his side of the car. When he fell asleep and leaned into my space he was taught the price of defiance. We would start throwing punches, then Pop would reach back and try to smack us. As soon as he started that we knocked it off. Then one day I got creative. Keith crossed into my airspace and I got so mad I threw his shirt out the window. Funny I thought. Pop saw it shoot behind the car in the rear view mirror. I thought it was hilarious, until he pulled the car over. Not good. I think he watched out for Keith a lot, but then I was usually the aggressor. Anyway, these antics went on until our 20's. Once we crossed the border into Scotland the skies got greyer. The sun stuggled to poke its head out from behind the dark grey clouds. There was always something medieval about it. When the sun did shine through there were brilliant rays of light illuminating the pastoral landscapes. Heaven. Scottish countryside is truly beautiful. We would wind our way down the A75 to the A76, possibly stopping at the Little Chef in Annan or Lockerbie. If we didn't stop there then we would drive straight through to Dumfries, the home of Robert Burns. The River Dee runs through central Dumfries and at the city center there is a small dam that lets the water cascade over it. It looks to be in pretty bad shape. We would get fish and chips and a savaloy from the chippy then go back to the river and feed the seagulls. Eventually after an arduous journey through the Pennines and lowland Scotland we would arrive at Kirkpatrick Durham in Dumfries & Galloway. This tiny hamlet is our ancestral home. Located a few miles from Castle Douglas, Kirkpatrick Durham affords the weary traveller peace an quiet. The village itself is completely surrounded by farm and grazing land. Boundary lines are marked by craggy walls of slate. Good pig country. No, not really. Lots of black face sheep and Galloway cattle. Scotland was a fun place to spend your summer holidays. On the southern coast we always had warm weather. Dumfries & Galloway don't subscribe to the Scottish weather system, they pay extra to get Spanish weather in the summer. Some of the highlights include rock climbing at Kipford, watching Grandad gamble 10 pence pieces away at the pubs, Sandyhills, Rockliffe, Lochview, The Haugh of Urr, Gatehouse of Fleet, the pubs in Castle Douglas. The only lowpoint of these trips was the annual shop for clothes at the BHS in Ayr. So that was summer in Scotland and when it ended we were back to school in Britain. Slang was what all the cool kids used. Considering my parents were upper middle class and both had Hertfordshire accents, they frowned on the use of slang. They wanted us to sound educated and polite. Most of my mates were lower middle class. Most of their parents didn't own their homes; they lived on council estates. My parents liked my mates but didn't want me to sound like them. It was rather interesting. Although all the kids I hung around with were from Bedfordshire, every one of them spoke well around their parents, but spoke cockney around their mates. Upon reflection, it seems bizarre but in some ways normal. I suppose it's similar to today. Suburban white kids adopted hip hop and hoodie wear. In any case, if you wanted to be "cool" you dropped your "H's" and said "I'm goin on 'oliday, then to the 'ospital to buy to packets of fags and firty free black jacks". It was madness. We were 30 miles from London but everyone wanted to sound like an Eastender. It was about this time when a man called Joey Deacon came along and forever changed the childhood's of thousands of British kids. Joey Deacon was a famous man who wrote a book. Not a very interesting book, but a book nonetheless. Quite an accomplishment for a retarded man stricken with Cerebal Palsy and confined to a wheelchair. He could barely speak. Back then, people like Joey were called "Spastics". Spastics. That one word changed England forever. A television show called Blue Peter made a big deal out of helping the spastics and unfortunately most younger people in Britain , who had never seen a spaztic before, found their chance to have some fun. Overnight, it became "cool" to call people who got on your nerves "spastics". The word has a funny ring to it...maybe that was part of it. The word became a derogatory term for anyone you didn't like. Even your mates would call each other spastics. Poor Joey Deacon became the butt of every joke. Kids would do "spastic impressions" (usually slapping the backs of their hands together, droooling, making retarded sounds, and trying to bite their shoulders. It was wholesale lunacy. Then it evolved. In a cruel twist of fate instead of burning out, people evolved from calling each other spastics...to calling each other Joey Deacon, Joeys, Deacons, Spasmos etc. I guess the lesson is...don't let spastics write books? TELEVISION We watched a lot of television. A lot of television. We were the first generation to chain watch. As soon as one programme ended we jumped to the next channel. We used to always say that we didn't like He-Man but we watched it all the time. It go so bad that we could name hundreds of He-Man figures and went so far as to make a game out of it that later developed into 'Categories'. Categories is a fun game to play when you're bored. Someone thinks of a category like brands of toothpaste and you take turns naming a brand of toothpaste. If you repeat a brand that has already been named...you're out. I remember in the very early 1980's CARS Pops had so many cars in those days. Every year he would get a new company car. In England it's almost expected but in America it's almost unheard of. Before I was born my father had a car he was very proud of. It was a Humber Sceptre Mk. ?, no idea of the year. I will post the name of each car and if you click on the name it should take you to a page showing a photo similar to it, the links are colour-coordinated: Humber Sceptre I never got to wheel around with Pop in this car because he had to sell it when I was born. From things he's said in the past I think he really liked that car. It looks a little antiquated now, but I can relate. Green Van - The first vehicle I remember was the big green van. It was basically a green metal shell with no windows on the side. More like a work van than one for a family. I don't really remember much about it but I think I recall Pops driving it and the stick shift fell apart while we were driving. Either that or the steering wheel came off in his hands as we turned a corner on some country roads. Ford Escort - I don't remember too much about this car. I sure as hell was purple though. It was a funny looking car, resembling a purple box with wheels. I remember being at the petrol station and somehow the keys got locked inside the car. The car was running and my parents were in a panic. This bloke walked over to us with the keys from his same year Escort and said we should try to open our door with his key. We were dubious but once that key hit the lock, the door popped open. Incredible: 1974 Ford Escorts have universal keys... Vauxhall - Don't really remember this one either. We had it when we lived in Luton, so I was about 5. Nice car from what I do remember. Ford Cortina 4DR - We had this in Harrow Road. Cortina's were the rage in the 70's. A bit like the American Chevy Impala. The police used them. Deceptively fast. Ford Cortina Estate - As the family got bigger Pop bought a station wagon. The estate version of the Cortina; it was still pretty quick. More spacious. Lots of space in the back to take a kip. Ford Capri - I was about 9 when Pop got this car. It was the closest thing to a sports car we had growing up. It was pretty compact but it could really move. It had an ignominius end. It got stolen, stripped by thieves and left in a cornfield to rust. Cavalier CD - Cavaliers and Sierras were all the rage in the early 80's. There was a certain snobbery attached to the CD version. There were all sorts of different classes of Cavaliers so we were always on the lookout for inferior versions. Fast and reliable. FOOTBALL Football has always seemed to play a big part in my life. I remember watching the 1978 World Cup at home as a kid but I wasn't that into it, mostly because England failed to qualify for that one. 1982 was a better year. England won a bunch of games and even know they didn't lose a game, they were eliminated. I need that logic explained to me. 1986 was even better. It was the first World Cup me and Keith watched in the States. We were living in the little apartment and we were getting pretty worked up. '86 came to a point when England were paired up with Argentina in the quarterfinals. After kicking the shit out of the Argies in the Falklands we were looking forward to the match-up. England were playing and then Maradona punched the ball with his hand into the goal. An obvious foul, for which he should've been red carded and sent off. Instead the stupid fuck of a referee decided to let the goal stand. Maradona is the biggest piece of shit on this Earth. From now on I will refer to him as "cheating fucking slime". So after cheating fucking slime tricked the referee, Argentina was up an ill-deserved 1-0. Cheating fucking slime scored another goal later in the game and despite Lineker's goal we were out of the 1986 World Cup. Gutting. Gutting. The good news is...I've been promoted!...........you're still thinking about the bad news aren't you? Hail David Brent. 1990 was a year that changed our lives. We had our England shirts and we were really excited about our chances to win the World Cup in Italia '90. It was a good bonding experience for my brother and I. We rarely like the same teams in anything. In footy I liked Liverpool and he liked Aston Villa. How do you explain that to people? Villa is in Birmingham, and Liverpool is on the Mersey. Not the most cosmopolitan of clubs but that's how it works in life. So Italia 90 was a chance for England to shine. We had Waddle, Lineker, Psycho (Stuart Pearce) and Gazza (Paul Gascoigne) and an ancient Shilts (Peter Shilton) in goal. We were teenagers and we were deluded. We thought for sure that England would win it all. There was NO WAY we could lose to Cameroon, Holland, Germany etc. The first match was a sloppy affair between England and Ireland. Ireland had been shit for years but through some wrangling the Irish FA decided to let "anyone with an Irish grandparent" play for Ireland. They built a dream team out of Liverpool players. Whelan, Staunton, Houghton & Aldridge were all Liverpool players. then they added Bonner, McCarthy, Townsend and Niall Quinn. The team was on par with England, except that it lacked any creative element. Within minutes of the kickoff Lineker scored. Great goal too. I think Waddle put the ball in to him. A picture worth framing. Sadly, an Evertonian, Sheedy scored to level the match and it finshed 1-1. Disappointing but perhaps fair. Then we had the Dutch. Holland were 1988 Eurpean Champions but their side was in a fucking shambles. They had great talent (Gullitt, Van Basten, Rijkaard) but the players didn't like one another. Things were so bad that certain players wouldn't pass each other the ball. Great I thought. Let's get in their and exploit them. Before the match a reporter asked England defender Terry Butcher about his thoughts and he said he was more worried about his wife's VISA card than he was about the forwards from Hollland. I know how that feels. We had recently lost to Holland and now we needed to pay them back for the 3-1 drubbing in '88. England played very well. A few close calls, but we had the better of the play. In the dying seconds, England were awarded a free kick.....and scored! Only to have the ref wave off the goal??? Why? What the fuck for? I don't think we ever got a good explanation of that. It finished 0-0 By this time every team in the group had two ties. Four teams were level on points. We HAD to beat Egypt, after all...they're shit. Then we found out they weren't shit...they were good. They were reigning African cxhampions. Things were getting worse for England. Because of our hooligans we were exiled to play our matches in Sardinia. I remember watching the riots on RAI (Italian TV). Part of me said "No. Stop! We'll get kicked out of the World Cup!" the other part of me (Bobby) said "Yeaaaaah! Throw bottles at the Italian fans and beat down the coppers. What a fucking mess. So, getting back to Egypt, we speaked out a 1-0 win and proceeded to celebrate like we'd won the whole fucking thing! We were into the second round of the World Cup and didn't it feel good? We were drawn against a lackluster Belgian team featuring two stars (Pred'homme and Scifo). Waddle played well but we were being run ragged by Scifo and his ball skills. He twice hit the post. To England's credit...we scored a goal through the mighty Liverpool winger John Barnes only to have it called back! Dubious refereeing again. The match went into extra time and about ten seconds before the game went to penalty kicks England won a free kick. Gazza looked back to the bench, then kicked the ball into the |
 |