a caravan park on the Isle of Wight to await my birth.
My original birth certificate from Newport Hospital has an anonymous handwritten dash in the box marked ‘father’ which has bothered me over my life a good deal more than any piece of punctuation ever bothered Lynne Truss. Before long, Dot and I were moving on to Aldgate, Barking, Ryde on the island again, back to Barking, Horndon on the Hill, back to Barking yet again before eventually settling in the quiet dormitory town of Stanford Le Hope in 1970, pausing only for her to reconnect with her college boyfriend Bob Jupitus who, much to my joy, manfully took on the job of being my stepfather in 1968, after which, as far as we were all concerned, he became Dad. Apart from our brief sojourn back on the Isle of Wight, it did seem that for some reason Mum always liked to stay close to the A13. I’m not sure why she felt the need to do this, unless her freewheeling gypsy spirit dictated that she should never live more than a mile from a main arterial road. On reflection that’s one of the many ways that Mum differed from George W. Bush, in that she has always maintained a well-thought-out exit strategy.
The first home that I clearly remember was the Brewery Tap, a huge pub located on Ripple Road in Barking, Essex. For the development of interpersonal family relationships, living in a busy working pub is something of a double-edged sword. The environment is absurdly hectic. Every day, dozens of staff would come and go, huge brewery lorries would arrive, groaning with crates and barrels of fizzy Ind Coope keg beer, then between noon and midnight hundreds of strangers would come into what I considered my home to drink, bicker, laugh, chat, cry, flirt, dance, vomit and fight with each other, mercifully not in their own homes. Despite the fact that I considered such behaviour not a little rude, it took place without interruption and regular as clockwork seven nights a week, fifty-two weeks a year.
The king and queen of this boozy monarchy were my maternal grandparents Sid and Edie Swann. Sid was a tall, broad, prepossessing man with bad feet and a spectacular line in malapropisms (he once memorably described Mum’s Mini Metro as a ‘hunchback’). The family feared him, the punters adored him, and the brewery revered him. He was a publican with the golden touch, able to turn dodgy pubs round over the space of a few months. Wherever he found himself, he always managed to remain onside with the local constabulary and villains alike. He was never so crass as to try and play them off against each other, he was simply savvy enough to make sure the two groups were never in on the same night. The peace was maintained, and by keeping a foot in both camps he had two places to turn if there was ever any trouble.
Regardless of who he was talking to at the bar, he had the knack of making them feel like they were his sole confidant. He would mutter things whilst pulling pints and they would gently smile and nod, thinking that only they had been vouchsafed the most precious of landlordly secrets. Then he would take their money, share a conspiratorial wink with them, and the hapless drinker would wander off, laden with light ales but now feeling part of Sid’s select inner circle. As soon as they were out of earshot, he’d tell the next bloke exactly the same stuff in the same way and another acolyte would be born. He was hardly Machiavelli, but he knew the kind of simple things that made people feel good.
My grandmother Edie was a very different kettle of fish, a chain-smoking, chain-knitting, passive-aggressive Essex matriarch, controlling the comings and goings of the family with almost military precision. One of her shrewdest moves was to only tell Sid what he absolutely needed to know about what was going on with the family outside of the pub. A great example of this spectacular ability to control the flow of family information was the first time he heard about my mother’s pregnancy. Mum had returned to Barking carrying a new addition to the Swann clan. She marched into the lounge without a word, then I was matter of factly thrust into my grandfather’s arms by Mum with the words, ‘This is your new grandson.’ Then she went downstairs for a drink. Nothing dissipates a sense of anger quite as quickly as a two-week-old baby.
Generally Nan had a quick temper, but when she was out from under Granddad’s shadow she became more breezy and outgoing. To the general public during opening hours they were a sparkling double act like George Burns and Gracie Allen, each working their own areas of the bar with a slick grace and minimum of effort. Jokes and lively banter would fill the air. But once the doors were bolted shut, the bar had been wiped clean and they trudged upstairs, the knowing smiles and conspiratorial winks were turned off and the day-to-day business of making other people’s lives pleasurable was somewhat perversely put on hold for the members of their own family.
One of the afternoon golden rules for us at the Brewery Tap was never to wake Sid up when he was having his nap. It made for an unusual upbringing. I saw two extreme sides of my family members, a lively public façade and a sullen private one. Even as a small child I realised that the public faces were a lot more fun to be around, which is why I hung around downstairs as often as I could get away with it…
To have the run of a large pub outside of opening hours is not unlike having a wardrobe with Narnia in the back of it. Your home is located over the top of a big, scary place where you weren’t really supposed to go. Behind the bars themselves was a dense tangle of pipes, wires, pumps and bottles, which I was only allowed near when I was helping the head barman, Jock, with the daily rigmarole of bottling up. After seeing off a bowl of porridge, I’d leg it downstairs and Jock would take me down into the huge dank cellar. To this day occasionally when I’m in a pub, I’ll catch a whiff of that combination of the odour of stale beer and damp mortar and I’m back down that old staircase. Jock would consult his pencilled list, then point me towards various crates and ask me to fetch ‘baby’ bottles of tonic or bitter lemon, as he humped the weighty crates of light and brown ale up the stairs. I’ve often counted myself lucky that I was able to enjoy the early knockings of my childhood at a time before Saturday morning children’s television started the profitable business of distracting young people from the world around them.
Mum and I shared a bedroom on the first floor that was directly above the cavernous saloon bar at the front of the building. The bedroom windows looked out over the street with Barking Broadway just to the left. I can dimly recall being awoken by screams, shouting and the smashing of glass on a fairly regular basis, which would usually be followed by a short lull in proceedings before the familiar blare of the approaching police sirens. Then I would stare up at the ceiling bathed in the contrasting orange glow of street illumination and the blue strobe of the police lights. Being short, I mercifully couldn’t get high enough to see down on to the pavement immediately below the window. What I could see was the staggering participants being held up against the street railings for their own good. The real victims of these incidents remained mercifully out of view.
I never found such violent events frightening or disturbing; the most they brought out in me was idle curiosity. The noises were completely foreign to me, so my innocent young mind couldn’t fill in the ghastly images they represented. Conversely I found domestic arguments completely terrifying. My family were unashamed screamers when it came to their own petty rows, which they didn’t seem to mind tearing through with a wide-eyed four-year-old in the room. The legacy of this family quirk is that to this day I find it impossible to handle confrontation directly and tend to react either with glib responses or with incandescent rage. You’ve gotta love genetics.
We shared our room with an impressive wooden radiogram. Ninety per cent of the time I used it to listen to Sterling Holloway retelling the story of The Jungle Book on the Disney LP that we bought after seeing the film. As it was the only album in the bedroom for two years, it got a fair hammering. But eventually even I’d had enough of ‘I’m the King of the Swingers’. And this is how my inquisitive little hands eventually found their way to the tuner.
There are fewer sounds more seductive than the multifarious looping swooshes, crackles, squeaks, hisses and whistles of a radio being tuned in. It’s like a form of music in and of itself. I soon realised that the slower I turned the ridged ivory and gold plastic dial the more stuff I could hear. This was the first place I ever listened to the sound of a foreign voice. Without leaving my bedroom, I opened a door on another world. Overlapping stations would phase in and out with each other depending on their signal strength. You’d slide past a German bloke talking about who knows what, which would slowly give way to the sound of Doris Day or BBC news or the Russian weather forecast. Having no idea what all these strange sounds signified