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apparently, kept them secreted at the bottom of his fat fryer.

       CHAPTER THREE WE ARE THE BOYS AND GIRLS

      The year 1968 was one of revolution: Tariq Ali, striking a symbolic hue in his red mac, raging against Britain’s embattled blue line; Vanessa Redgrave, Joan Bakewell and a horde of angry young people storming the steps of the American embassy; students sitting-in and, at various points of confrontation around Britain, taking up arms and flowers. Change was in the air.My parents, however, were busy looking after us at the time, and anyway, we were all watching telly.

      The revolution never came to our street, although we heard the Beatles singing about it on the new Radio 1 station. My parents preferred the group’s earlier numbers and style, but anything was better than the band they considered to be dark and filthy miscreants—the Rolling Stones. I attempted a moment of pre-prepubescent rebellion around then and told my parents that the Stones were my favourite group, even though I had no idea what their music was like, my only record being a Pinky and Perky one that Aunt Lil had bought me.

      The hippy extravagances and their worship of all things floral and herbal were not to be seen on our impoverished side of the Essex Road, but as through that swinging door at the Clarence pub, the glimpses I managed were intimidating yet tantalising. Camden Passage, a narrow lane of antique shops, Italian restaurants and men walking poodles, was also home to a mini-commune. We sometimes passed through this Islington lane when going to the market, and one Saturday morning, on our way to buy cut-price cleaning goods, underwear or maybe a pie-and-mash lunch, I peered in through a window, into an orange-painted room hung with posters where a group of long-haired men and women lounged in strange, pantomime-like clothes. It’s hard to imagine now how shocking and exotic long hair looked on a man back then, but a divide was occurring between my parents’ generation and these new adults and, even at my age, I was aware of the tension. For people of my parents’ age, who’d lived through the war, it was a snub to their struggle; but the new generation was looking for their own identity, and their own battles to fight.

      The mods no longer frequented the pub, having split in two directions: the aspirational, better-off ones began making their own version of San Francisco somewhere in property-owning North London, growing their hair and collars, morphing with the middle classes, trading pasties for pÂtÉ, and finding an accent somewhere between the Harrow Road and Harrow School; the other half shaved their heads, shortened their britches and donned the braces and boots of an earlier generation of proletarian males, forming a tribe of symbolically deloused Roundheads.

      My father was a Labour man and my fifth birthday brought an extra reason for him to celebrate: Harold Wilson had brought Labour to power, albeit with a small majority. The anachronistic, Edwardian-styled gentlemen of politics, with their euphemistic cricketing metaphors, were making way for the ordinary man.Maybe even a bottle of brown ale was opened at 138 Rotherfield Street. Even so, Dad was part of an age that unquestionably toed the Establishment line and respected the institutions that ran the country; after all, they had witnessed and suffered the war in order to keep them. But the counterculture of Baby Boomers was here and beginning to affect everything. Anna Scher was part of that revolution, and in 1968 she began something that would change my life.

      Stephen Brassett led me to her. An angelic-looking ten-year-old with hair as white as a Midwich Cuckoo, he had recently lost his father, and his mother was now looking for her deceased husband at local seances.

      Stephen dipped his chip into a blob of brown sauce and blew on it. ‘You should come to my drama club. It’s on tomorrow.’ He folded the chip into his mouth.

      I was around at his for tea. On the settee his mother was skimming the latest edition of her Psychic News; in front of her, on the coffee table, a Ouija board held an upturned glass like a telephone on the hook.

      ‘Go on, Gary, why don’t you go with him?’ Like my mother, Mrs Brassett tactically disguised commands as questions. ‘Stephen likes it, don’t you, Stephen?’

      As with music, theatre was not a part of the Kemps’ culture and I have no memory of putting on any front-room performances for my parents. The only time we went to a show was to see the Black & White Minstrels one Christmas. Children’s drama schools tended to be the place of wealthier working-class kids whose parents could pay the fees. This often meant the progeny of the more successful villains—the Little Princess pushed up on to the kitchen table with guests forced to watch her singing songs from the shows, as Dad swallows back tears of pride, convincing himself, and Princess, that one day she will be a star, and thus creating a permanently dissatisfied social monster.

      The Anna Scher Children’s Theatre in Islington, to give it its full title, was different. First, it was a club, not a school, and second, there wasn’t any singing or dancing, although some of the parents were probably villains. Stephen had gone to her drama classes when she’d first started teaching in his annoyingly long-trouser-wearing school, Ecclesbourne, Rotherfield’s rival primary and the home of our tormentors. Now, at the end of ’69, owing to high demand, she’d moved to the community centre in Bentham Court and, given its proximity to me, it seemed churlish not to have a look. In any case, I was a little frightened by the kind of people Mrs Brassett could talk to through her board.

      The following afternoon, without telling my parents where I was going, I left the house and crossed the street. The community centre in the middle of the estate’s central open space was an unloved, soulless, two storey brick building. On entering I made my way up its wide stairs and past its communal washroom and notices for judo meetings and women’s groups. A girl’s voice reverberated from the hall above. She seemed to be in an argument with another girl.Maybe this was a bad time to go in but, reaching the hall, I peered through its glazed double doors.

      At the near end of the room, on either side, chairs were stacked into small uneven towers and stood like sentinels, while in the far half of the room about twenty kids, mostly a year or so older than me, sat in a loose semicircle facing the other way. In the two seats directly in front of me I could see the backs of a woman and a man, blonde and dark respectively. Everyone was watching two girls argue at the end of the hall, one sitting on a sofa, the other standing with arms folded. Behind them were boxes and hats spread on a large table; a small mobile bus stop stood to one side, and a red-and-cream Dansette record player was perched on a small stage. The attractive standing girl furiously shouted something at the fat seated one and with a spin stormed off to the edge of the room. The fat girl stared after her, then turned her head sharply and looked at the woman, who immediately started to clap. The kids quickly followed her lead and relaxed in their seats. I took the opportunity to push open the heavy door and walked in.

      I had the self-conscious awareness of the outsider as I stood in the open space, committed to the moment between piles of watching chairs. No one had seen me enter but, thankfully, I spotted Stephen sitting among the group and willed him to notice me. He did, and, smiling, crossed and spoke to the woman. I felt the room grow silent and slowly turn its focus upon me. Outside I heard boys playing football. Maybe I should have been with them.

      The woman stood. She was young.

      ‘Hello, Gary,’ she said, ‘it’s lovely to meet you. I’m Anna Scher.’

      Her beaming face and the lightly tongued Ts of her Irish accent rapidly melted me into the semicircle of people and, with a fragrant hand upon my shoulder, she introduced me as though I were the answer to all their problems, the missing piece to their puzzle, the most important person to ever enter the room. This was her skill and it made me stay for the next eight years.

      Anna Scher was a diminutive, twenty-three-year-old Irish Jew from Cork. Coming to England at fifteen, she found her desire to be an actress squashed by her authoritarian father and, as a compromise, she went into drama teaching. Her long, blonde hair, plump mouth and honeyed complexion were made all the more striking by her fierce control of some of the wildest kids from the borough. She managed to exert this power while dressed in miniskirt and suede boots. I fell in love with her.

      The man sitting next

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