Are you talking to me?: A Life Through the Movies. John Walsh

been hijacked by a Heinz sponsorship and were expected to turn out en masse in a beans-fuelled, march-and-sing advertisement. Both the prospect, and the sponsor, turned my stomach. I was happier being a non-competitive school swot.)

      If you were neither a Chelsea supporter nor a Scout, there were other opportunities to test your physical robustness in public. Like being casually whacked around the head by the school bullies, Lemmon and McGuire, as they passed you in the playground. Or being winded in the solar plexus by your friend Mick Hewitt, as you walked together to rugby practice in Coombe Lane – a moment that left me gasping, ‘Why did you do that?’, to which there was no answer, except, ‘Because you were there.’ Casual violence was in the air in those days, the first whiffs of national testosterone, perhaps, in the first generation to have survived both the war and the exhausting regimen of rationing.

      It seemed that you were always a heart-beat away from being punished by masters, duffed up in the locker rooms, chased across the playground by a Lord of the Flies posse of thugs who didn’t appreciate your smart-alec interventions in the classroom. And that was just at school in Wimbledon. At home in Battersea, where I hung out with the boys at the church, I watched with incredulity as, one by one, the members of the choir transferred their allegiance to rival street gangs. The sight of my one-time pal Gerard Kelly, a weedy falsetto who used to hit the high notes of ‘Faith of Our Fathers’ better than anyone else, newly kitted out in skinhead braces and steel-toed boots, swaggering down Battersea Rise arm in arm with a little girlfriend (both of them aged eleven) in her rat-tail hairdo, en route to a gang rumble in the Station Approach outside Clapham Junction, was both laughable and alarming. These guys meant business. Unlike the pretendy hard-cases at school, my angelic former choristers were looking to do some serious damage. Anybody was fair game. Even me.

      The Baxter Gang started to appear all over the place. (I never knew their real names, but the skinny oik in Lavender Sweep had borne a faint resemblance to Chris Baxter, a nice, inoffensive kid in my class at school, so Baxter became the generic name for everybody who was out to whack you in the face for no reason.) The worst time was in February 1964. It was another Saturday afternoon, and I was walking up St John’s Hill to the Granada cinema when someone behind me said, ‘Got the time, John?’ Thinking it must be a friend, I stopped, turned round, and found myself sandwiched between two teenagers. One was about fifteen, a standard-issue Battersea thicko, but his friend was older and nastier – maybe eighteen or nineteen – and clad in a skinny macintosh through which he was clearly freezing. He was unshaven and undernourished.

      ‘What?’ I said.

      ‘Just keep walking, John,’ said the thicko. ‘We just want a little chat.’

      What could I do? Since we were walking up the hill, it would be hard to run away up the steepening gradient. I didn’t fancy hurling myself into the traffic. As for turning round and running away down the hill, it never even occurred to me. You just don’t run away down a hill. We walked along, line abreast, in an awkward silence. Nobody tried to make conversation. Then one of them said, ‘How much money you got? Gimme all the money you got.’

      I actually laughed, rather bravely, at that point. ‘I’m only ten,’ I said. ‘I don’t have any money. How much money do you expect a ten-year-old schoolboy to have on a Saturday afternoon?’

      They didn’t argue the point, even though I was (they’d spotted) a future Rich Ponce. Instead: ‘Take off yer watch,’ said the unshaven one. ‘No I won’t,’ I said firmly.

      It was a good watch, with an electric-blue face. My mum had bought it for me. I’d picked it out myself from the window of Laucher’s Jewellery and Clocks emporium on the Queenstown Road, and accessorised it with a thick, metal-studded leather strap. It was a prized possession.

      ‘Take it off, or I’ll –’

      ‘No I bloody won’t,’ I said, astonished to hear myself swear. ‘Just push off.’

      The tall freezing youth brought up the pocket of his raincoat, through which poked something long and thin. It pointed at my stomach.