LITMIR.BIZ

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been filled in it’s like the street has got false teeth.

      Not all the memories prompted by seeing my old primary school again are happy ones. Quite early on in my time there I got six of the best across the arse for throwing stones up in the air. OK, one came down and hit another kid on the head, but he wasn’t badly hurt, and it was obviously an accident. The headmaster wasn’t having any of it though, and he gave me a caning I can still remember to this day. I was absolutely terrified to tell my mum and dad, and the fact that the weals only came to light because my mum was bathing me shows you how young I was.

      She asked what had happened so I had to tell her. When my dad found out he went round to the school to hear the headmaster’s side of the story. He sat down calmly and listened to his explanation, then when the teacher had finished talking he said, ‘So let me get this straight. My boy is five years old, and you’ve given him six hard wallops across the arse for something he didn’t even mean to do?’

      I’m not exactly sure what happened next but the impression I got was it was something along the lines of my dad forcing the teacher’s head down onto the desk and trying to shove his cane down his throat. Either way, the headmaster never looked at me again, which was a result as far as I was concerned. I did get caned a few times over the years, and sometimes I deserved it, but that one was a fucking liberty.

      When you’re five or six years old, the boundaries of your world are very clearly defined. Going somewhere in the car was fine, but if I ever walked further than the school, it was like you were Christopher Columbus and didn’t know if you were going to fall off the edge of the world.

      Apart from Sunday trips over to Hackney to see Maud and Toffy, the main excursion we used to go on would be out of London to see Nanny Rich, Reg Hallett, Auntie Olive and Uncle Len in Shoeburyness. Those drives along the old Southend road seemed to go on forever, and there were three trips which particularly stuck in my mind.

      My dad had an old Austin van. If we were all going to squeeze into it, I usually ended up sitting over the engine, between the passenger seat and the driver, which was not so great in the summer. But in the winter I’d be the only one who was warm, especially while the van was lacking a back window, as happened for a while after it got smashed. One time we were driving east in thick snow when the car broke down near the Halfway House pub. Obviously you couldn’t just call the AA on your mobile in those days and there wasn’t a heater you could put on in the car, so we were absolutely freezing.

      I can’t actually remember who rescued us on that occasion, but another time we didn’t make it all the way to Nanny Rich’s house was when we hit a Labrador which ran out in front of us. The dog flew up in the air and came down in the road with a horrible smack, then just got up, shook itself and ran away, apparently none the worse for the impact. We were alright too – just a bit shocked – but my dad’s van was not so lucky. The front of it was severely smashed to pieces and there was steam coming out of the radiator, so we had to wait till someone we didn’t know stopped to help us. When this guy found out what had happened, he ended up giving me, Mum and Laura a lift all the way back to Plaistow.

      That wouldn’t happen now – apart from anything else, a woman would be frightened of taking their kids in a car with a stranger – but the geezer genuinely wanted to help and there was a different mentality in those days. I’m not saying there weren’t evil fuckers about, because there were, but everyone wasn’t so primed by the media always to be thinking about the worst thing that could possibly happen. We didn’t have that same fear factor we do now everyone’s got Sky News.

      In my memory, that change in people’s thinking wasn’t something that happened gradually. It happened more or less overnight when everyone found out about the Moors Murders. I’m not saying children hadn’t been taken away and killed before, but it wasn’t something people ever really thought about until Brady and Hindley put it in their heads. In a way, taking away that freedom for parents and children to live without fear was another crime that they committed. Even though it happened all the way up north in the hills outside Manchester, it was such a horrific case and it scared everyone so much that it might as well have happened just up the road. When we got up the next morning after it had been on the news, the streets of East London were empty. A lot of the old freedoms that we used to enjoy had gone out of the window overnight. I must have been eight at the time.

      It was a dangerous old road, that one out to Southend. The third – and most dramatic – of the incidents I remember from those drives was the time we drove past a big car crash. There were police everywhere, and as we approached what appeared to be a fair amount of carnage, my mum said, ‘Don’t look.’ Obviously that’s the worst thing you can say to a kid – it’s right up there with ‘Never play with matches’. So by the time we drew level with the scene of the accident, Laura and I both had our faces glued to the window.

      I’ve never forgotten what happened next. Things kind of went into slow motion, as they always seem to at moments of crisis. I suppose it’s your body’s way of protecting you – the adrenaline speeds up your brain, so whatever else is happening seems to slow down in comparison, which (in theory at least) gives you more time to respond. That’s why when we’ve seen something really horrible, we usually remember every unfolding detail, because it’s like we’ve recorded it so fast that when we try to play it back at normal speed it comes to us in slow motion. Anyway, as we drove past the wrecked car, the back door swung open and a body fell out. I hoped she wasn’t dead, but the absent look in that woman’s eyes has stayed with me ever since, and there was someone else in the car who looked in a bad way too.

      As I’m describing this, I’m realising that it sounds quite like the car-crash sequence in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, and probably loads of other films as well. When something shocking’s happened to someone and they say it was ‘like being in a film’, they usually mean it was out of the ordinary. But the reason things happen the way they do on the screen is because a lot of people have got together and done their best to create the illusion of what it actually would be like. So it’s no wonder we use those kinds of scenes as a way of understanding reality and distancing ourselves from it at the same time.

      I’ve had similar experiences several times since, of being a witness to really bad things happening. I’m not saying I see dead people like the little boy in The Sixth Sense (although I did look a bit like him as a kid), but knowing what death is does change you as a person. And I can understand what they say about people who see a lot of it – whether they be soldiers or doctors, policemen or undertakers – finding that their emotional responses start to close down. We use the word ‘deadened’ for a reason.

      It’s the same with me and violence, which I’ve seen a fair amount of over the years. I’ve never liked it – and I’ve liked it less and less as I’ve grown older – but it doesn’t shock me either. I don’t see it happen and think, ‘Oh, what was that?’ I know exactly what it is, and, to a certain extent, I understand it.

      CHAPTER 4

      THE ODEON, EAST HAM

      When we first arrived there, in the late fifties, Plaistow was in Essex, which used to reach as far into London as Stratford. But from the day they changed all the boundaries around (1 April 1965, and I think we know who the April Fools were – us), the Essex border got pushed back to Ilford, and Plaistow was bundled up with East and West Ham to become part of the Frankenstein London borough of Newham. Why? What did they want to go and do that for?

      Essex is one of the great counties of England. You just have to say the name to know what sense it makes: Wessex was to the west and Essex is to the east, with Middlesex somewhere in the middle. But some soppy cunt who sits in a council office somewhere has a bright idea, and all of a sudden something which has worked very well for hundreds of years has got to change, just so he or she can pat themselves on the back for inventing ‘Newham’.

      Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve always been really interested in the mythology of East London – the kind of stories which might or might not be true, but which help to define the character of the place either way. One of my mum and dad’s best friends was a Merchant Navy man who we called Uncle Tony.

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