may not have made it to my eighteenth birthday. West Hendon was a brisk forty minute walk to Hasmonean, but our religious beliefs, never strong to begin with, dissipated through the 1970s and so my parents opted for me to take the bus, train and bus journey to Camden. It was one of the few decisions they made that I agreed with.
Camden was not the entertainment hub that it’s become in the last twenty-five years. Like most of Britain in the late 1970s, there was an air of sleazy decay about the area. The market was vaguely trendy, but this was before enterprising hippies started flying off to India and coming back with cheap trinkets they could sell for 1,000% mark-up to unsuspecting tourists. Mainly because there were very few tourists.
The residents were a motley collection of Londoners. There were four men who lived in the streets around the underground station entrance. We would’ve called them tramps, which at that time described a very particular type of person. (Although there are a lot more homeless people now than there ever used to be, one sees very few 1970s ‘tramps’ any more but they were a regular feature of London life back then.) Men (and it was always men) with matted hair, wearing clothes that they’d not taken off for several years and giving off an odour that would stop a train. Which presumably was why they weren’t allowed on the platform. They didn’t even beg. Most people wouldn’t (and because of the smell, couldn’t) go anywhere near them. I have no idea how they fed themselves but they didn’t seem to be emaciated so they must have been eating. Although it might have been the eight layers of old newspapers they used to keep themselves warm. For amusement, they used to drink heavily and bark – actually bark, like big Alsatian dogs – at schoolchildren as we walked past them. You’ve got to have a hobby. I guess when people look back to days gone by and talk about having to make our own entertainment, this is what they mean.
I never mentioned it to my mother. She may well have regretted sending me to JFS if she knew I’d have to run the gauntlet of barking tramps. The first time it happened, I almost wet myself. The tramps’ barks were very realistic. I honestly felt like I was about to be attacked by an enormous and incredibly malodorous Alsatian. They laughed their hearty tramp laughs and from then on, I was fair game. It happened so often, I was crossing the road to avoid them.
*
Our school was next door to Camden School for Girls, a grammar school that was slowly transitioning into a comprehensive. It was full of impossibly tall and willowy middle class girls with double-barrelled surnames and first names like Vanessa or Chloe or Virginia. They all had cheekbones and good teeth and looked healthy and well-bred and no doubt took part in eventing competitions at weekends. They looked upon us, running around in our playground, with our outsize noses and Coke-bottle glasses, as the aristocracy look upon people who do manual labour. They paid us absolutely no attention whatsoever.*2
Further up the road was Holloway Boys School, a famously tough inner city comprehensive whose alumni include one Charlie George, bad boy striker for Arsenal and one of my earliest heroes. The Holloway boys were a fearsome lot. One imagines that their school reunions would have been decimated by enforced absences due to the actions of the criminal justice system. As well as terrorising any kids who had the temerity to walk past their school just because they happened to live near Holloway, their regular lunchtime entertainment was to wander down the road to our school, stand in the street where we could see them and make gas noises and Nazi salutes. Even writing this sentence is shocking to me. Nowadays, I could see it happening perhaps once or twice before the authorities got wind of what was going on and firmly put a stop to it. This abuse went on for years. It probably went on longer than the Second World War. It happened so often, I think it became part of the curriculum.
‘What have you got today?’
‘Geography, chemistry and double anti-semitism.’
We didn’t take it completely lying down. There used to be abuse flying back and forth across the fence and the teachers would shoo us over to the other side of the playground. They should probably then have had a word with the hooligans, but they were more terrified of them than we were. Except for our history teacher, Mr Waterman. He was already a legend after one fantastic incident during one of his lessons. We were in a classroom on the fifth floor of the main building. He crashed in. He was not in a good mood.
‘Sit down everyone.’
We sat down.
‘I’m going to turn round,’ he said in his distinctive Welsh accent. ‘If I turn back and there is a bag left on the desk, I’m going to chuck it out of the window.’ He then turned round.
Now all teachers have their own eccentricities. Some detest chewing, others cannot stand even the merest hint of talking in class. PE teachers don’t like children. Mr Waterman was famous for having an irrational revulsion for anyone who kept their bag on their desk, so even though we were five floors up, we thought he actually might do something that crazy. We cleared our remaining stray bags from our desks.
He turned back, saw a bag on a desk and stared at us.
‘Whose bag is this?’
No one answered. There was a heavy silence in the air. He picked it up and without a moment’s hesitation threw it out of the window. I did wonder whether an unsuspecting child was taking his last breath before being killed by a bag falling from the sky. That would have been an unfortunate way to go and very likely the end of a promising career in teaching. We all looked at Mr Waterman. Personally, I have never been so scared in my life. No one said a thing. ‘Oh Shit!’ he said and then without warning, ran out of the room. We waited. It was strange. Was the lesson over?
After a minute or two, he ran back in carrying a battered looking case. He was out of breath. He looked at us and said, ‘That was my fucking bag.’ The laughter kept going for a good five minutes. What a man.
Now anyone who, even by mistake, was prepared to throw his own bag out of a fifth floor window, was certainly not going to tolerate Nazis outside the school gate. He was livid. Being a history teacher, he was perhaps even more acutely aware than the rest of us of the cultural significance of sieg heiling at a Jewish school. He was ranting at them.
‘Fuck off, you Nazi wankers!’ he shouted. One didn’t hear a teacher swear that often.
They just laughed at him.
‘There are black kids doing Nazi salutes,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘How the fuck can you have black Nazis?’ It was a fair question.
‘Fuck this,’ he said and ran off. He came back a few moments later armed with a cricket bat, opened the gate and ran straight for them.
‘Come on lads,’ he said. ‘Let’s give the bastards what for.’
This whole episode had taken a turn I wasn’t expecting. I’d been hitting a tennis ball against a wall so I kept hold of my tennis racquet and followed him out. I’m not sure it would’ve been much use in a fight even though I had a decent forehand. But it didn’t matter. The Holloway boys took one look at this wild eyed, cricket bat waving, moustachioed Welshman and ran. It was glorious. They tried once or twice more after that but their hearts weren’t in it. I wish he’d done it earlier on. One by-product was that any lessons he took after that were incredibly well behaved.
Not that I attended lessons that much. I just thought that most of what they were teaching me was nonsense. I wasn’t interested in glaciers or the function of the pituitary gland.*3 By the last year at school, I used to take regular afternoons off. I’d walk purposefully along the corridor like I was rushing to get to my first lesson after lunch. And then when everyone was inside their respective classrooms, I’d scarper. The caretaker often saw me leaving but he never tried to stop me. He nodded imperceptibly, giving me a look that suggested that he thought it showed initiative. Although he might have been thinking that with my attitude, I may end up as a school caretaker.
I’d take a desultory wander round the shops of Brecknock Road. There wasn’t a lot to see unless you liked hardware stores, bookmakers and takeaways.