Life Page 4
The heath was only a five-minute bike ride away. Dartford’s not a big place, and you could go out of it, out of town and out of mind, within a few minutes into that piece of Kentish scrub and woodland, like some medieval grove where one tested one’s biking skills. The glory bumps. You used to be able to drive your bike through these hills and deep craters under low trees, zoom about and fall over. What a great name, the glory bumps. I’ve had many since, but none as big as those. You could hang there all weekend.
In Dartford in those days, and maybe still, you turned one way to the west, and there was the city. But if you went east or south, you got deep country. You were aware you were right at the very edge. In those days, Dartford was a real peripheral suburb. It also had its own character; it still does. It didn’t feel part of London. You didn’t feel that you were a Londoner. I can’t quite remember any civic pride in Dartford when I was growing up. It was somewhere to get out of. I didn’t feel any nostalgia when I went back that day, except for one thing—the smell of the heath. That brought back more memories than anything else. I love the air of Sussex, where I live, to death, but there’s a certain mixture of stuff on Dartford Heath, a unique smell of gorse and heather that I don’t get anywhere else. The glory bumps had gone, or were grown over or weren’t as big as I thought they were, but walking through that bracken took me back.
London to me when I grew up was horse shit and coal smoke. For five or six years after the war there was more horse-drawn traffic in London than there was after the First World War. It was a pungent mixture, which I really miss. It was a sort of bed you lay in, sensory-wise. I’m going to try and market it for the older citizens. Remember this? London Pong.
London hasn’t changed that much to me except for the smell, and the fact you can now see how beautiful some of the buildings are, like the Natural History Museum, with the grime cleaned off and the blue tiles. Nothing looked like that then. The other thing was that the street belonged to you. I remember later on seeing pictures of Chichester High Street in the 1900s, and the only things in the street are kids playing ball and a horse and cart coming down the road. You just got out the way for the occasional vehicle.
When I was growing up, it was heavy fog almost all winter, and if you’ve got two or three miles to walk to get back home, it was the dogs that led you. Suddenly old Dodger would show up with a patch on his eye, and you could basically guide your way home by that. Sometimes the fog was so thick you couldn’t see a thing. And old Dodger would take you up and hand you over to some Labrador. Animals were in the street, something that’s disappeared. I would have got lost and died without some help from my canine friends.
When I was nine they gave us a council house in Temple Hill, in a wasteland. I was much happier in Chastilian Road. But Doris considered we were very lucky. “We’ve got a house” and all of that crap. OK, so you drag your arse to the other side of town. There was, of course, a serious housing crisis for a few years after the war. In Dartford many people were living in prefabs in Princes Road. Charlie Watts was still living in a prefab when I first met him in 1962—a whole section of the population had put down roots in these asbestos and tin-roof buildings, lovingly cared for them. There wasn’t much the British government could do after the war except try and clean up the mess, which you were part of. They glorified themselves in the process, of course. They called the streets of this new estate after themselves, the Labour Party elite, past and present—a little hastily in the latter category, maybe, given that they had been in power only six years before they were out again. They saw themselves as heroes of a working-class struggle—one of whose militants and party faithful was my own granddad Ernie Richards, who had, with my grandmother Eliza, more or less created the Walthamstow Labour Party.
The estate had been opened in 1947 by Clement Attlee, the postwar prime minister and Ernie’s friend, one of those who had a street named after him. His speech is preserved in the ether. “We want people to have places they will love; places in which they will be happy and where they will form a community and have a social life and a civic life.… Here in Dartford you are setting an example of how this should be done.”
“No, it wasn’t nice,” Doris would say. “It was rough.” It’s a lot rougher now. Parts of Temple Hill are no-go areas, real youth gang hell. It was still under construction when we moved in. There was a building shed on the corner, no trees, armies of rats. It looked like a moonscape. And even though it was ten minutes from the Dartford that I knew, the old Dartford, it sort of made me feel for a while, at that age, that I’d been transported to some sort of alien territory. I felt like I’d been moved to some other planet for at least a year or so before I could get to know a neighbor. But Mum and Dad loved the council house. I had no choice but to bite my tongue. As a semidetached goes, it was new and well built, but it wasn’t ours! I thought we deserved better. And it made me bitter. I thought of us as a noble family in exile. Pretentious! And I sometimes despised my parents for accepting their fate. That was then. I had no concept of what they’d been through.
Mick and I knew each other just because we happened to live very close, just a few doors away, with a bit of schooling thrown in. But then once we moved from near my school to the other side of town, I became “across the tracks.” You don’t see anybody; you’re not there. Mick had moved from Denver Road to Wilmington, a very nice suburb of Dartford, whereas I’m totally across town, across the tracks. The railway literally goes right through the center of town.
Temple Hill—the name was a bit grand. I never saw a temple all the time I was there, but the hill was the only real attraction for a kid. This was one very steep hill. And it’s amazing as a kid what you can do with a hill if you’re willing to risk life and limb. I remember I used to get my Buffalo Bill Wild West Annual and put it on a roller skate, width-wise, and then sit on it and just zoom down Temple Hill. Too bad if anything was in the way—you had no brakes. And at the end there was a road that you had to cross, which meant playing chicken with cars, not that there were many cars. But I can’t believe this hair-raising ride. I’d be sitting two inches or less off the ground, and God help the lady with the pram! I used to yell, “Look out! Pull over.” Never got stopped for doing it. You got away with things in those days.
I have one deep scar from that period. The flagstones, big heavy ones, were laid out beside the road, loose, not yet bedded in concrete. And of course thinking I was Superman, I just wanted, with a friend, to get one of them out of the way because it was ruining our football game. Memory is fiction, and an alternative fiction of that event is from my friend and playmate Sandra Hull, consulted all these years later. She remembers that I offered gallantly to move the flagstone for her because the gap was too wide for her to leap between them. She also remembers much blood as the flagstone dropped and squashed my finger and I raced to the sink indoors, where it flowed and flowed. And then there were stitches. The result over the years —mustn’t exaggerate—may well have affected my guitar playing, because it really flattened out the finger for pick work. It could have something to do with the sound. I’ve got this extra grip. Also, when I’m fingerpicking it gives me a bit more of a claw, because a chunk came out. So it’s flat and it’s also more pointed, which comes in handy occasionally. And the nail never grew back again properly, it’s sort of bent.
It was a long way back and forth to school, and to avoid the steep gradient of Temple Hill, I’d walk round the back, right around the hill. It was called the cinder path and it was level, but it meant walking around the back of the factories, past Burroughs Wellcome and Bowater paper mill, past an evil-smelling creek with all the green and yellow shit bubbling. Every chemical in the world had been poured into this creek, and it’s steaming, like hot sulfur springs. I held my breath and walked quicker. It really looked like something out of hell. At the front of the building there was a garden and a beautiful pond with swans floating about, which is where you learned about “more front than Harrods.”
I kept a notebook for songs and ideas on the last tour we did, while I was thinking about these memoirs. There’s an entry that reads, “A snapshot of Bert & Doris leapfrogging in the ’30s, I found in my gander bag. Tears to the eyes.” The pictures actually show them doing a kind of calisthenics—Bert doing handstands on Doris’s back, both of them doing cartwheels and tableaux, Bert particularly showing off his physique. Bert and Doris seemed, in those early photographs, to be having a wonderful time together, going camping, going to the sea, having so many friends. He was a real athlete. He was an Eagle Scout too, which is the highest you can get in scouting. He was a boxer, Irish boxer. Very physical, my dad. In that way I think I’ve inherited that thing of “Oh, come on, what do you mean you’re not feeling well?” The body, you take that for granted. Doesn’t matter what you do to it, it’s supposed to work. Forget about taking care of it. We have that constitution where it’s unforgivable for it to break down. I’ve stuck to it. “Oh, it’s just a bullet, just a flesh wound.”
Doris and I were close, and Bert was excluded in a way, simply because he wasn’t there half the time. Bert was a fucking hardworking man, silly sod, for twenty-odd quid a week, going up to Hammersmith to work for General Electric, where he was a foreman. He knew a lot about valves—the loading and transporting of them. You can say what you like about Bert, he wasn’t a man of ambition. I think because he grew up through the Depression, his idea of ambition was getting a job and holding on to it. He got up at 5:00, back home at 7:30, went to bed at 10:30, which gave him about three hours a day with me. He tried to make it up to me at weekends. I’d go to his tennis club with him or he’d take me up the heath and we’d play soccer a bit or we’d work our garden allotment. “Do this, do that.” “All right, Dad.” “Wheelbarrow, hoe this, weed this.” I liked to watch the way things grow and I knew my dad knew what he was on about. “We’ve got to get these spuds in now.” Just the basic stuff. “Nice runner beans this year.” He was pretty distant. There wasn’t time to be close, but I was quite happy. To me he was a great bloke; he was just me dad.
Being an only child forces you to invent your world. First you’re living in a house with two adults, and so certain bits of childhood will go by with you listening almost exclusively to adult conversation. And hearing all these problems about the insurance and the rent, I’ve got nobody to turn to. But any only child will tell you that. You can’t grab hold of a sister or a brother. You go out and make friends, but playtime stops when the sun goes down. And then the other side of that, with no brothers or sisters and no immediate cousins in the area—I’ve got loads of extended family, but they weren’t there—was how to make friends and who to make friends with. It becomes a very important, a vital part of existence when you’re that age.
Holidays were particularly intense from that point of view. We’d go to Beesands in Devon, where we used to have a caravan. It was next to a village called Hallsands, which had fallen into the sea, a ruined village, which was very interesting to a young kid. It was really Five Go Mad in Dorset. All these dilapidated houses, and half of them you can see under the water. These weird, romantic ruins right next door. Beesands was an old fishing village, right on the beach, where fishing boats were pulled up. To me when I was a kid, it was a great community because you got to know everybody within two or three days. Within four days I’m talking with a deep Devon burr and relishing being a local. I’d meet tourists: “Which way’s Kingbridge?” “Ooh, where ye be goin’?” Very Elizabethan turn of phrase, still talking very ancient English.
Or we’d go camping with tents, which is what Bert and Doris had always done. How to light the Primus; how to put the flysheet up, the groundsheet down. I’m with just Mum and Dad, and when I’d get there I’d look to see if there was anybody to hang with. And I’d get a bit wary, if I was the only one… and I’d get a bit jealous sometimes when I saw a family with four brothers and two sisters. But at the same time it makes you grow up. In that you’re basically exposed to the adult world unless you create your own. The imagination comes into play then, and also things to do by yourself. Like wanking. It was very intense when I did make friends. Sometimes I’d meet a great bunch of brothers or sisters in some other tent and I’d always be heartbroken when it was over, gone.
Their big thing, my parents, was Saturday and Sunday at the Bexley tennis club. It was an appendix to the Bexley Cricket Club. There was always this feeling at the tennis club, because of Bexley Cricket Club’s magnificent and beautiful nineteenth-century pavilion, that you were the poor cousin. You never got invited over to the cricket club. Unless it was pissing with rain, every weekend that was it—straight to the tennis club. I know more about Bexley than I do about Dartford. I would follow on the train after lunch with my cousin Kay and meet my parents there, every weekend. Most of the other people there were definitely on another strata, English class–wise, at that time. They had cars. We went on bikes. My job was to pick up the balls that went over the railway line at the cost of nearly getting electrocuted.
For companionship I kept pets. I had a cat and a mouse. It’s hard to believe that’s what I had—it may explain a little of what I am. A little white mouse, Gladys. I would bring her to school and have a chat in the French lesson when it got boring. I’d feed her my dinner and lunch, and I’d come home with a pocketful of mouse shit. Mouse shit doesn’t matter. It comes out in hardened pellets, there’s no pong involved, it’s not squidgy or anything like that. You just empty your pockets and out come these pellets. Gladys was true and trusted. She very rarely poked her head out of the pocket and exposed herself to instant death. But Doris had Gladys and my cat knocked off. She killed all my pets when I was a kid. She didn’t like animals; she’d threatened to do it and she did it. I put a note on her bedroom door, with a drawing of a cat, that said “Murderer.” I never forgave her for that. Doris’s reaction was the usual: “Shut up. Don’t be so soft. It was pissing all over the place.”
Doris’s job when I was growing up and almost from the time the machines were invented was washing-machine demonstrator—specifically a Hotpoint specialist—at the Co-op in Dartford High Street. She was very good at this; she was an artist at demonstrating how they worked. Doris had wanted to be an actress, to be on the stage, to dance. It ran in the family. I’d go in and stand amongst the crowd circled around her, watch her demonstrate how fantastic the new Hotpoint was. She didn’t have one herself; it took her ages to get her own. But she could make a real show out of how to load a Hotpoint. They didn’t even have running water. You had to fill them and empty them with a bucket. They were new things in those days, and people would say, “I’d love a machine to wash my clothes, but Jesus, it’s like rocket science to me.” And my mum’s job was to say, “No, it’s not. It’s this easy.” And when later on we were living skint and nasty in the peeling refuse bin of Edith Grove, before the Stones took off, we always had clean clothes because Doris would demonstrate them, iron them and send them back with her admirer, Bill, the taxi driver. Send them in the morning, back at night. Doris just needed dirty material. Can we provide, baby!
Years later Charlie Watts would spend day after day in Savile Row with his tailors, just feeling the quality, deciding which buttons to use. I couldn’t go there at all. Something to do with my mother, I think. She was always going into drapery stores looking for curtains. And I had no say in it. I’d just be parked on a chair or bench or shelf or something, and I’d watch Mum. She’s got what she wanted and they’re wrapping it up, and then, oh no! She suddenly turns round and sees something else she wants, pushing the man to the limit. At the cash-and-carry the money went through those tubes in a little canister. I used to sit there watching for hours while my mother decided what she couldn’t afford to buy. But what can you say about the first woman in your life? She was Mum. She sorted me out. She fed me. She was forever slicking my hair and straightening my clothes, in public. Humiliation. But it’s Mum. I didn’t realize until later that she was also my mate. She could
make me laugh. There was music all the time, and I do miss her so.
* * *
How my mum and dad got together is a miracle—something so random, the random of opposites, in their backgrounds and personalities. Bert’s family were stern, rigid socialists. His father, my grandfather Ernest G. Richards, known locally as Uncle Ernie, was not just a Labour Party stalwart. Ernie was up in arms for the working man, and when he started there was no Socialist movement, there was no Labour Party. Ernie and my grandmother Eliza were married in 1902, at the very beginning of the party—they had two MPs in 1900. And he won that part of London for Keir Hardie, the party’s founder. He would hold that fort for Keir come what may, day in, day out, canvassing and recruiting after the First World War. Walthamstow was fertile Labour territory then. It had taken in a big working-class exodus from the East End of London and a new rail commuter population—the political front line. Ernie was staunch in the real meaning of that word. No backing down, no retreat. Walthamstow became a Labour stronghold, a safe enough seat for Clement Attlee, the postwar Labour prime minister, who’d put Churchill out in 1945 and who was the MP for Walthamstow in the 1950s. He sent a message when Ernie died, calling him “the salt of the earth.” And they sang “The Red Flag” at his funeral, a song they have only just stopped singing at the Labour Party conferences. I’d never taken in the touchiness of the lyrics.