betting shop. In the pub, there was always the risk of bumping into one of the teachers who regularly drank in there, even when they had lessons that afternoon. I can’t say I blamed them. If I had to teach me, I’d have been drinking as well.
I didn’t have many friends at school. I met Simon and Robert when I was around twelve. They were both in another class, in another house, but we hit it off. They were mates and we got chatting one time in the playground. They were both Chelsea fans but I didn’t hold it against them. Robert had a nose almost as immense as mine but no one said anything to him about it because he was already over six feet tall. He was taller than everyone in the class and most of the teachers. He was the tallest person I’d ever met. I used to go round his house. He lived with his sister and his parents in semi-detached middle class splendour (to me) in the posh part of Hendon. They were all very tall as well. I was impressed. His house had a drive. It had central heating. It was always warm. His mum was very proper but she was sweet with me. She’d make me food and listen indulgently while I chattered away.
Simon was also a couple of inches taller than me, and he was way more confident in his opinions. He was, and still is, one of the funniest mates I’ve got. It’s ever so slightly annoying how quick he is sometimes.
Simon lived in Edgware in a flat with his mum, Carole, and his sister, Jackie. They didn’t have much more money than we did but their flat was more comfortable than ours. Carole was glamorous. She laughed at all my jokes and made me food. I loved going round there.
Later on in life, Simon was the first of my mates to have a car. He was also the one who organised most of the things we did together. The only reason we had a football team was because he used to ring round. I don’t think we thanked him enough. Every friendship group needs a Simon.
In our final year, Simon and I often decided to forgo the delights of double religious knowledge and some cock-and-bull story about plagues or floods and wander down to the centre of Camden instead. We spent half an hour browsing in the Doctor Martens shop by the station. In a side street, there was a film crew shooting an episode of Minder; I was a big fan. Arthur Daley was a truly brilliant character and there was something great about watching a TV show and recognising locations. There was a crowd of twenty or so people watching it happening, most of them pensioners with nothing better to do. Dennis Waterman and George Cole were discussing the forthcoming scene with a guy who I presumed was the director. He was talking animatedly about what he wanted while the crew waited patiently. It was a nice day so no one seemed to mind.
At some point, the director strode purposefully back behind the camera, put on his headphones and said ‘quiet please’. A hush descended. He then shouted, ‘Action’ and the scene began. Ten seconds after it began, an old lady in the crowd said, ‘’Ere, it’s Richard Burton innit?’
On one of our many afternoons off, we were browsing in the record shop and we came upon the In The City album. Simon told me I should listen to The Jam. He looked serious and he was very insistent but no matter how enthusiastic someone is, it’s hard to convey what a band sounds like without you hearing them. I said I’d check them out, but I guess I never got round to it until John Peel played them on his show. Then the penny dropped.
When Simon wasn’t available for midweek post-lunch trips out of school, I would go to the pictures on my own at my local cinema in Hendon Central. One time, I went to see Eraserhead. My teenage brain was nowhere near ready for the surreality of David Lynch. At one point, I started laughing at a dead chicken dancing on a stage. The man in front of me tutted loudly presumably because the film was making a serious point I’d failed to grasp. Forty years later, I still don’t understand what the fuck that point might have been. I also saw Capricorn One, a film about a shadowy government agency that faked the Mars Landings. I was getting a decent education but not in core curriculum subjects. I went to see Rocky and ran all the way back home from the cinema shadow boxing. For a moment, I contemplated a career in boxing. I mentioned it to my grandmother. She started laughing and said that my nose was too much of a target. She was right.
There wasn’t much I engaged with at school but I liked PE. I never bunked off for that. I was physically capable, no mean achievement in a Jewish school where some of the kids could barely walk ten yards without feeling faint. I was a very fast runner, something that had come in handy when I was trying to escape the attentions of the Holloway boys. I ended up running the one hundred metres for my school house along with a boy called Adrian Grant. Adrian was the most accident prone boy in the school. He had a briefcase that regularly fell open for no reason; once it did so at the top of the staircase and spilled its entire contents five floors down the stairwell. I can still hear his plaintive ‘Oh no!’ as it happened. In Chemistry, if he was handed a Bunsen burner, we’d all step back a couple of paces. He’d catch his blazer on a door and rip the pocket. If he was using a compass, it would end up in his leg. He once wet himself in class.
We lined up at the start of the race, the gun went and we hared down the track. When I crossed the line, I turned round to see where he’d finished. Adrian and another boy were having a fight halfway down the track and the games teachers were running towards them to break things up. One of Adrian’s plimsolls had come off halfway through the race, he’d stumbled and taken down the boy next to him. I wish I’d seen it happen.
I never learnt to swim, though. I was following a long tradition of Jewish non-swimming. There’s not a lot of call for swimming ability when you’re wandering about in the desert for forty years. Even when we did get to the seaside, we’d only go in when God had parted the waves. My ancestors really didn’t like swimming. As a child, the water was not my friend. I had hundreds of swimming lessons but it never took. Sometimes, it was the teachers. Mr Duncan, my angry PE teacher*4 standing on the side of a pool shouting ‘Swim for goodness’ sake, swim’ was seen as a viable teaching method. Whereas one can’t imagine a driving instructor standing on the pavement shouting at a learner passing by ‘Drive for goodness’ sake, drive!’
Both my parents and my sister being non-swimmers didn’t help. Their abject terror of any water above chest height may have affected my ability to relax in the water. I was OK splashing about in the shallows but anything above my waist and I started getting the shakes. If a tsunami had hit West Hendon, our family almost certainly wouldn’t have made it.
All of the above does make it odd that Mr Duncan, for reasons only known to him, chose me to race for Weitzman House in the school swimming gala. I suggested to him that perhaps there might be people who could actually swim who were more suitable for the race. But Mr Duncan, like most PE teachers I’ve met, was not a listener. So it came to pass that I found myself lining up in the middle lane of the school swimming pool for the twenty-five-metre front crawl. Not only could I not swim, I couldn’t dive in either. I was, as you can imagine, terrified.
The whistle went, I shut my eyes, belly flopped into the water and started thrashing my way across the pool. Luckily, we started in the shallow end and every so often, I was able to stop thrashing, stand on the bottom of the pool, take a breath and then push off for another five metres of thrash. But at some point, I knew that I’d be in the deep end and putting my feet down wouldn’t be an option. About halfway along, I stopped, felt my tip toes hit the bottom, took a big gulp of air and then resolved to thrash until I touched a wall. Which is what I did. It felt like it took forever but I finally felt the comforting edge of the swimming pool. When I came up for air and looked either side of me, I was a bit puzzled to find that none of the other swimmers appeared to have finished. I thought I’d won. I looked up and there was Mr Duncan.
‘What the fuck are you doing you fucking idiot?’ he said.
I didn’t understand the question.
‘Why are you over here you moron?’ he asked and it was then that I properly looked around and realised that I’d swum in a semi-circle, across all the other lanes and was on the side of the pool. The only good thing was that I was so slow, the other swimmers were well past me by the time I veered across their lane.
‘Sorry sir,’ I said. I was just glad to be alive.
I wasn’t chosen for the swimming