From Deptford to Antarctica E-Book

Pete Wilkinson

• Herausgeber: Fledgling Press
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 1074

Beschreibung

Pete Wilkinson grew up in Deptford, south London, in the 50s. Somehow he got to grammar school and was spat out of the education system in 1962 with a few GCE 'O' levels and no idea of what to do with his life. The 60s rock 'n' roll scene, motor scooters and free love offered a mild distraction but, as a general malcontent, he drifted from job to job, uncertain of where life would take him. He was feisty, easy to provoke and had a fierce sense of what decency and justice should look like, qualities which found their natural home when he finally found - unlike U2, a band which would ultimately provide the justification for his jaundiced view of environmentalists - what he was looking for. Pete helped establish Friends of the Earth, leaving after suffering three years of the classism which prevented his natural campaigning flair to flourish, and then joined Greenpeace UK. He was a co-founding member and became a central figure in the UK's embryonic green movement. His friendship with the charismatic father of the modern Greenpeace phenomenon, the late David Fraser McTaggart, and his naturally strategic mind helped Wilkinson to the highest positions in the organisation from where he ran what one journalist called 'some of the most important and successful environmental campaigns of the 80s'. And they were campaigns that he and his colleagues won: radioactive waste dumping at sea, whaling, Canadian sealing, the Orkey seal cull, captive cetaceans, the fur industry, Sellafield: no company or industry was too big for Greenpeace to take on. Even Antarctica. After finally falling foul of the growing Greenpeace hierarchy, Wilkinson was despatched by Greenpeace to Antarctica where, over six consecutive seasons, their campaign succeeded in protecting the entire continent from exploitation for 50 years. This is Wilkinson's story told in his own gritty style and containing his unabridged Antarctic diaries which build into a fascinating insight into the Greenpeace world as it was, but as it is no more. Includes many campaign photographs.

Leseprobe

FROM DEPTFORD

TO

ANTARCTICA

– THE LONG WAY HOME –

An autobiography by Pete Wilkinson

For

Gaye Wilkinson,

Emily May Wilkinson and

Amy Rose Wilkinson

My loves, my life and my light

Preamble

This book started life when I decided to transcribe the diaries I had kept during each of the Greenpeace Antarctic expeditions in which I was involved between the years of 1985 and 1992. After the death of my mother in 2004 I realised that I had little to hand on to my children, born in 1996 and 2000, to give them a sense of family, lineage, history or continuity. The previously transcribed diaries became the body of work around which the book was built: I decided it would be helpful to preface the diaries with an explanation of how I came to be in the Antarctic. That exercise in itself demanded a fuller explanation of events which occupied the UK branch of the organisation which had sent me to the ends of the earth and how I came to have been selected to lead the expeditions. The incongruity of a former south-London lorry driver leading Antarctic expeditions itself demanded a look even further back into my past: at my family, its working class roots and my own path through childhood, school, adolescence, the 60s and the world of revolutionary events in those momentous years which sowed the seeds from which grew the counter-culture that today is such a familiar and comfortable part of the political furniture.

Then I decided that, having begun at the very beginning, I should at least try to end the book as close as I could to the present. The book soon became a tome which recorded my life from Deptford roots to Antarctica and then back again to the post-Greenpeace world which I now inhabit, and in which I still try to keep alive the flame of environmental activism at which we were passably successful in the 80s. That tome has been edited many times into the book before you now. It was written for my children, but I trust a much wider audience will find in engaging and insightful. If it does nothing else, I hope it gives the reader a smile or two.

It is strange how the years pass like the flickering of a film at the back of your head and how things that were present and immediate recede through the intervention of time between the event and the new ‘now’. After a few days, the memories remain vibrant, fresh and vivid; after a few months, they wane a little and eventually merge into the general bank of memories which form the past and which arrive, unbeckoned, or which have to be specially excavated. At least, that’s how I imagine things to be, but I still have memories which keep me awake at night, which come to me in three-dimensional, stand-out, in-your-face reality, which sweep away mere trifles such as sleep and which cast me back 30 years. Often, I’m back, having agreed to go on ‘one last’ Antarctic trip and I wake after various nocturnal escapades involving the crazy, loveable people with whom I worked, full of anxiety, excitement and uncertainty about the ‘trip’ ahead: can I really go through another three months of ship-based freneticism, sea-sickness and ennui? Will my constitution be able to withstand the onslaught of emotional highs and lows which inevitably accompany such an enterprise which will take us to the other side of the world and then a further 2000 miles across the unpredictable Southern Ocean to what was known for centuries as Terra Incognita – the unknown land? These feelings are as real to me now as they were 30 years ago.

Well, I did those trips in 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990 and 1992 and I did them voluntarily while apparently sane. They formed a period of my life which stands out like a beacon of not only successful campaigning – we forced the Antarctic Treaty nations to agree to a mining ban for 50 years and a World Park status for an entire continent – but also of personal satisfaction in that I met and worked with people who remain lifelong friends, despite the fact that they are mostly dotted all over the world and we meet only on rare occasions. It was also, for a working class boy from Deptford, the pinnacle of a life into which I fell years previously, thanks to my old card-playing mentor, travel companion and all-round rock-solid friend John Morton, when I read the Environmental Handbook he casually tossed to me across the room.

The circumstances which led me to the steps of an aircraft on a cold October day in 1985, bound for New Zealand and the Antarctic, were extraordinary enough and as I sat on that plane on the Heathrow tarmac preparing for the next chapter in this roller-coaster ride to unfold, I looked back on a period which saw my rise and fall within an organisation to which I gave my heart and soul only to be sidelined as the new, post-Rainbow-Warrior-sinking organisation emerged from its awkward and ungainly carapace into the gaudy creature of notoriety, celebrity and wealth. Just as Blair’s New Labour turned an honourable extension of working class hegemony into a parody of the Tories, so Greenpeace seems to have transformed itself into a troupe of theatrical activists, undertaking heroic demonstrations parading as direct actions which to me appear devoid of imagination and barren of vision and inspiration. This is my interpretation of the organisation as I see it today. It may be a jaundiced, even an erroneous view. But this impression is likely to be the same as that of the average member of the public, who does perhaps register the actions Greenpeace undertakes but has no real yardstick by which to gauge what their policies are, what they are attempting to achieve and, crucially, how successful or otherwise they are at their job. I am left with a sadness that such power and influence as Greenpeace once had pretentions to wield and which it aspired to over the last twenty years can have been frittered away, that the legacy handed on to those who came after the Warrior sinking could apparently be so casually thrown to the winds. My mum was a good touchstone of what ordinary people thought of things. Not long before she died, she asked me, ‘That Green-whatever-it-was you started years ago with that American (she was referring to McTaggart who was in fact Canadian), has it packed up? You never hear of it any more do you?’

On a rare bus trip to the West End of London to participate in the London Schools Games, circa 1957. . .

We kids crammed against the window of the number 188 bus as it turned into the Strand. There! THERE!! It was true! Allcock and Nobles. There is a shop called Allcock and Nobles! If ever eleven year-olds needed something by which to recall their childhood in later years, it was a shop named after the unmentionables of a boy’s undercarriage. Thanks you Messrs Allcock and Nobles for having the wit or the innocence to go into business together.

Introduction

Bulge babies – the generation of lucky gits

The political and social background to the decade which gave rise to the plethora of what might be termed modern pressure and splinter groups began, for most of those involved, in the post-war years of the 50s and 60s. To this day, I find it hard to believe that when I was born in 1946, Europe was still in ruins, Hitler had only been dead for little more than a year and the task of rebuilding Britain, let alone the rest of Europe and the far-flung reaches of the world, had not even begun. The radioactive fall-out from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was still circling the planet in the jet-stream.

But something else had begun even before minds were turned to regeneration: the arms race. The bomb which has been credited with forcing Japan to capitulate became the prize which transformed one-time allies, embracing each other across the battlefield, into post-war belligerents, hungry for the ability to annihilate each other and the rest of the world in the process.

‘Babyboomers’ as we’re called – reflecting the boom there was in births within a year of the second world war ending and the troops coming home to welcoming wives – have lived, and do live, with war; from Suez to Iraq, from Afghanistan to Libya and we continue to pursue foreign policies which invite an Anglophobia, surely be the most burdensome legacy we leave our children’s children. But ‘boomers’, while rightly envied for living lives in which most never donned a uniform or took up arms in anger, were nonetheless subjected to a form of psychological terror from the belief that WW3 was inevitable.

I can’t recall a day between the ages of 12 and 25 that I did not spend at least some time thinking about, talking about or fretting about the prevailing political situation which we had inherited at the end of the war and which had festered over 15 years or so, to a point where we all lived with the possibility of being fried to death at any point of the day or night. Every news bulletin was heavy with threat, every international incident riven with anxiety. This culminated in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 when the world held its collective breath as Soviet ships laden with missiles headed for Cuba and what seemed to be an unavoidable and cataclysmic confrontation with the USA which would surely trigger Armageddon.

As the radioactive fallout from the two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 was still settling over that fated country, project scientist Kenneth Tomkins Bainbridge’s words to Robert Oppenheimer, often referred to as the ‘father of the bomb’, on seeing the El Alamo test a few months before were already prophetic. As he watched the mushroom cloud billow a mile into the sky over the test site in the Nevada desert minutes after the flash of nuclear fusion that was ‘brighter than a thousand suns’, he reportedly said, ‘Now we’re all sonsofbitches’. We had opened Pandora’s nuclear box and within five years of the bomb dropping, 40% of the Hiroshima population, around 350,000 at the time of the blast – mostly women and children – were dead: either incinerated on the spot to a point where only a dark smudge on the pavement recorded their existence, buried under rubble of the buildings literally blown down in the nuclear blast, asphyxiated by the absence of air the blast created or dying more slowly – some within minutes, some within weeks, months of even years – from the radiation exposure from the bomb.

Not content with these horrific results and eager to ‘test’ the impact of a plutonium bomb, especially in an area where the effects of reflected blast could be assessed, the American authorities dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, nestling in the bowl of a group of hills, with equally devastating effects. Twenty-five percent of the 270,000 people in Nagasaki on that fateful morning were dead within a year. Articles I have read suggest that the Japanese were suing for peace from as early as 1943, two years before the bombs were dropped, yet the justification for dropping these bombs in order to ‘hasten the end of the war’ and saving the lives of thousands of US and allied troops, remains.

In the decade that followed, the UK, the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and China all developed the nuclear bomb. In order to test these weapons, the UK, with limited and crowded land space, relied, until the 1991 ban on the US test ranges in the Nevada Desert, having previously detonated more than twenty devices in the atmosphere over Australian territory and Pacific islands, sometimes removing voiceless and helpless indigenous peoples in advance of the tests which have left an uncertain radiological legacy in these areas. The Soviets tested at Novaya Zemlya and soon China joined the nuclear club. It is estimated that something approaching 2,000 nuclear weapons tests have been conducted globally since 1945. Key to the nuclear arms race which dominated and menaced life in the 60s and 70s was a plant with which I was to become intimately familiar in later years – Windscale – which produced the plutonium required for the nuclear weapons, either directly from the original Windscale ‘piles’ or, subsequently, from the chemical treatment of the waste nuclear fuel from the first generation of nuclear plants the UK built called ‘Magnox’, a name taken from the fuel which was clad in magnesium oxide.

The nuclear age was with us in all its force and within 20 years of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, France, India, Pakistan and others, with varying degrees of success, used the ‘peaceful development of nuclear technology’ umbrella to hide the unseemly race towards nuclear arms. Over 500 nuclear tests were conducted in the atmosphere: we still register the radioactive fallout they created to this day.

This was the political and environmental backdrop which characterised my life and the lives of my contemporaries. As a teenager in the early 60s, the world was an infinitely dangerous and nightmarish place of unworldly contradictions. On the one hand, London was the ‘swinging capital city’ where all the barriers and stiff attitudes of the 40s and 50s were being dismantled in a sea of liberalism and hedonism. Music was revolutionary, style and fashion outlandish, cultural shackles were enthusiastically thrown aside. At the same time we were four minutes away from violent immolation, a contradiction which was utterly and implausibly bizarre. Perhaps the latter drove the former – perhaps we were so close to the edge that we really did believe, subconsciously or not – that anything went.

This book, then, is an attempt to recall events in my early childhood which capture the mood of the 50s, through adolescence and into the ‘never had it so good’ times and the ‘free love’, music and pill-popping days of the Wilson Labour government; my working life and how it was in the 60s and how I ‘found’ the embryonic environmental movement and began to learn the language of ‘ecology’

(US early billboard – ‘Ecology? Look it up. You’re in it.’)

My journey is one that took a working class boy from Deptford, through a series of chance meetings, helping hands and circumstances often beyond his control, to a life of derring-do as one of the first practitioners of peaceful direct action in defence of the natural world, culminating in seven unforgettable voyages to the Antarctic. As if that was not enough, I then found my true love in Gaye Jerrom and started a family, being blessed with two wonderful daughters, Emily May and Amy Rose, at an age when I really thought such joy from a family had passed me by, and I went on to rediscover my campaigning flair and verve as the nuclear industry once again threatened to re-establish itself. And throughout, my desire to bring together commercial viability and environmental sustainability, an aspiration seared into my head through the sheer delight, romanticism and peace I found from being at sea, never left me. Attempts to realise that desire led me into all sorts of adventures. I am still living that life as I attempt to complete my life’s journey which has taken me from Deptford to Antarctica, the long, sometimes lonely but never dull, way home.

Chapter 1

Deptford – playground of the poor

The name Deptford is a corruption of ‘Deep ford’. At one time, the river Ravensbourne could be forded at the point where the settlement which later became Deptford stands today. Deptford is steeped in history. It was here that Henry VIII built his ships and established his dockyard, here that Samuel Pepys lived, where diarist and town planner John Evelyn lived for a time and here that Sir Walter Raleigh draped his cape across a puddle to save Elizabeth I’s dainty feet from getting wet. Technically, I am a Bermondsey boy as the district boundary between Deptford and neighbouring Bermondsey went through our prefab at a point which put the back bedroom, in which I was delivered, in the latter’s jurisdiction, but in the territorial disputes which followed between these neighbouring boroughs, I was proud to be a Deptford boy.

We lived at 40 Chilton Grove, a pre-fabricated, square box of a dwelling on one level, made largely of asbestos. It was modest but functional, and thousands were erected as temporary homes for returning soldiers, sailors and airmen. Best of all, it had a garden – just a square of grass, but enough space to kick a ball around, hang out the washing on the line and for Dad to build a small shed. Our ‘temporary’ residency at 40 Chilton Grove lasted 11 years, but they were very happy and memorable years for me. I lived a free and easy life and from an early age, enjoyed the company of lots of kids like me, immersing ourselves in the freedom of the still-bombed out environment around us and the absence of motor cars which allowed us to play street games uninterrupted until the early evening.

I was born shortly before two am on the 21st November 1946 – on the cusp, as my mother would later inform me. Not a good start. As a ‘cusper’, I’d more likely than not be ‘awkward’; pulled hither and thither by two potentially conflicting star signs, not knowing if I was Arthur or Martha much of the time, in the parlance of the day.

My father, Sidney George Wilkinson, normally a gentle and considerate man, was prevented by a visiting nurse from throwing me – at the age of about three months – through a window, since, apparently, I had spent my entire brief life screaming incessantly. After a year of this purgatory my parents took me to the doctor for the umpteenth time. He advised that I was in perfect health and that my screaming was a result of ‘sheer, unadulterated temper’. According to family mythology, I was named Pete as it formed a catchy couplet – Prefab Pete.

Childhood in Chilton Grove was a very happy time. It was a round of days and late nights spent ‘scouring out’ for anything combustible with which to fuel our fires, building ‘camps’ from corrugated iron and chasing each other around playing potentially violent ‘cowboys and Indians’. We would regularly raid the gardens of our neighbours to dig up spuds, skewer them on any old piece of wire and then poke them into the heart of the fire, dragging them out once thoroughly charred and burnt to break open the blackened skin and gorge on the hot, fluffy potato. As night drew in, the calls of our mothers would drift over the bombed-site. ‘Bobbbblllles!’ came Nell Killick’s yodel to her youngest, Gordon, who for some reason was always known as Bobbles or Bothells. One by one, we would drift off to our homes, promising to be at the dump again the following evening.

Gordon was my age and we would hang out together. He was as hard as nails and on one particular occasion when he had sliced his hand open very badly on a shard of glass, my father dressed it for him since Gordon’s parents had left him in our charge for the day. Gordon, only five, didn’t flinch as my father poured a liberal dose of antiseptic into the cut and watched as my father pressed the edges of the cut together and bound his hand in swathes of bandage.

We kids led liberal lives and were constantly ‘out’; over the bombed site, around the flats across the road, down ‘the Georges’ as we called it (St George’s Wharf), climbing trees or exploring the mysteries of the power station up the road. Knocks and bruises were common. My brother suffered most. He would regularly come home with a gashed foot or hand, black eyes and bruises on various parts of his body. He once had a sparrow fly into his knee cap as he ran around the corner of a building in the opposite direction to the hapless bird. He almost lost his life when he jumped from a tree and a nail which workmen had hammered into the tree to serve as a coat hanger ripped his scrotum.

My collection of injuries ran to cuts and grazes mostly. At Deptford Park primary school however, a kid called Geoffrey Bond decided that it would be a wheeze to set me swinging back and forth on the equipment in the gymnasium and I lost my grip, fell three feet and broke my arm. Mother worked in a bakery at the time, at the Red Lion, the junction which connected Evelyn Street and Lower Road. I was carried into the shop whereupon Mum, on seeing it was me bundled in a blanket, threw the change she was just about to hand to a customer up in the air and rushed to gather me up.

It is strange the things we recollect: of that incident, I distinctly remember the nurse cutting my shirt away from my arm and I also recall, with some embarrassment, that I asked her if I would ‘be in the papers’. While I languished in hospital, Geoffrey Bond’s mortified father attempted to make amends for his son’s stupidity by lavishing presents of Dinky toys on me. In a very short space of time, I had a collection to be proud of. Had I kept them, I would be a wealthy man today.

Mum – Minnie Amy Edith Wilkinson, née Cremore – was a frustrated music hall star. She played piano – left hand ‘vamping’ and right hand picking out the tune, and sang in a passably good voice. She was a vivacious person, always up for a laugh, quick to make a remark, guarded or not, outspoken and opinionated, with a heart of gold. Mum told us kids stories to make your hair stand on end of her young days in ‘the flats’ down Adolphus Street in the days when her mum and dad – Minnie Frances Cremore (née Hodge) and George Cremore – would join other couples, after a few bevvies, outside the Cricketers pub in Lower Road to indulge in stand up, drunken fights, often with their spouses.

She told us of the time when Nan – Mum’s mum – finally took on the woman who ruled the street like some brooding colossus and intimidated most of the families living there. Nan saw the only pair of bed sheets she possessed flapping on the clothesline of this woman who was leaning on the fence, just daring anyone to challenge her about her ill-gotten gains, surrounded by her equally aggressive brood. Apparently, Nan came into the house, rolled up her sleeves and curled her (then) long hair into a bun at the back of her head and pinned it up. As she strode purposefully towards the door, the kids asked, ‘Where are you going, Mum?’

‘You’ll see.’

She walked down the road followed by her own kids and a growing entourage of neighbours. She walked up to the woman and without so much as a challenge, laid into her. She got her sheets back and never had any trouble from her again. During WWII, Nan would always be the first into bomb-damaged buildings after an air raid. She told us herself how she found a man, trapped by the rubble of a collapsed building, still alive after two days but ‘half-eaten alive by rats’.

Most old people died at home in those days, and my Nan would be the ‘layer outer’ of the dead bodies in the flats, making them presentable; dressing them in a clean shirt and perhaps a threadbare suit or putting a dress on the women. Mum would tell us of the poverty which dogged their lives: Nan would soft-boil an egg, break it in a saucer and scrape yoke and albumen across half a slice of toast on each of the plates for the five kids – Mum’s sisters, Emmy, Beatty and Ivy and her only brother, the youngest, George, – with the words, ‘There, now you can tell your mates you’ve ‘ad eggs for ya tea.’

Nan would tell us about how it was possible to make a small amount of money go an awfully long way in the ‘old days’. She swore that in the 30s and 40s, it was possible to go to the pictures, have a pint, a bag of chips, get the bus home and still have change from half a crown Her stories of childhood hardship were eagerly devoured by us kids, especially the one about the bed bugs and the fleas which infested many of the slum areas in which her mother and ‘Granny ‘odge’, grew up. She would tell us how the walls of the room in which they slept (it could not be dignified with the title of bedroom) literally undulated as bugs moved around under the wallpaper. To stop the bugs crawling into the bed, Gran would stand each bed leg in a saucepan filled with water, across which the bugs would be reluctant to venture, and move the bed into the middle of the room. The bugs would then climb the wall, move across the ceiling and drop onto the bed to feed from the blood of the sleeping kids, packed five to the bed.

Pawn shops were a lifeline to many working class poor in the 30s and 40s and I recall going to get Dad’s one and only suit out of the pawnbrokers on a Friday so that he could wear it for a family function on the weekend, only to return it again on Monday morning in exchange for a few bob with which to boost the meagre weekly allowance Mum had to feed us.

Mum’s stories of the war were as rare as those from Dad, but she did confide that the war years were times of great bonhomie and closeness with neighbours and strangers alike, punctuated by times of unbearable terror. Community spirit blossomed in the face of a common enemy. But the scares and the close shaves were real. A rogue German fighter plane strafed the houses along the road which follows the avenue through Greenwich Park up to General Wolfe’s statue (the bullet holes and gouges can still be seen on the plinth today), along Creek Road, into Evelyn Street and onto Lower Road and the docks. Aunt Beatty took a bullet in the heel as this maniac fired indiscriminately on fleeing civilians.

Nan was stoical and abrupt; often purposely distracted by way of ensuring she wouldn’t be drawn into a conversation in which she would have to offer an opinion that would invariably be at odds with other views. She feigned ignorance but was in fact very astute and sharp. She suffered husband George’s presence with studied indifference. It was always rumoured, mentioned in hushed whispers and truncated sentences (so typical of the working class when the last few words of a sensitive sentence are silently mouthed), that granddad George Cremore was not the kindest husband in the world. I remember very little of him. He died when I was still very young and had suffered a stroke which left him virtually incapacitated, unable to speak apart from a few elementary words and paralysed down the left side of his body. Thrombosis set in, requiring both legs to be amputated, one below the knee and the other at the calf.

It was again rumoured, although I saw no direct evidence of it, that Nan used Granddad’s incapacity to wreak her revenge for years of being treated unfairly, and would taunt and tease Granddad mercilessly. But whatever her actions were to her husband, she was a fine Nan to me and looked after me well when Mum was at work; scrubbing my face with a cold, wet flannel in the mornings, masking my protestations with a song.

She was coarse on the outside but soft as a pudding on the inside and would do anything for you, especially me, her youngest grandson at the time. But her carefully cultivated lack of social skills was something to behold. She burped every five minutes or so, whether she needed to or not, exaggerating the noise with an artificial continuation of the expelling of air which made it surreal, an apology or an ‘excuse me’ never entering her head. She would deliberately mispronounce names in a sort of weird homage to Mrs Malaprop: ‘sirstifamakit’ was her way of saying ‘certificate’ and ‘hospital’ sounded suspiciously like ‘horse’s piddle’.

She was a past mistress at swearing and could out-profane any man, although she would be outraged if you dared accuse her of having a foul mouth. I recall one stiflingly hot summer’s day, sitting in her flat with the doors wide open in the vain hope of creating a cooling draught when two six year olds were heard at the bottom of the staircase to Nan’s floor, effing and blinding like a couple of argumentative old men. Nan’s face was a picture of outraged embarrassment.

‘Would you just listen to that language? Where do they get it from? Wait till I . . .’ With that, she was up and heading for the door from where she shouted, ‘Oi! You little bastards! Stop that fucking disgusting language. Gern! Fuck off!’

I will always regret the fact that I never took the time to write down some of the stories Nan told me about her childhood. She died in the mid 60s at about 75 years of age so she would have been born around 1885, and she had always lived in south London. As a kid she would travel to Downham – in those days that was the countryside and that, to her and her family, was the equivalent of going from Deptford to the Lakes today. It was a journey and an adventure and took two to three days to complete by foot and bus. Although I do have faint recollections of ‘Granny Hodge’: my mum’s grandmother, sitting propped up in bed in Aunt Maud’s apartment in Douglas Way, halfway up Deptford High Street, George and ‘Frarn’ were the furthest back in time my sphere of domesticity took me in real terms, but Dad’s mum and dad were another story altogether.

I never knew Dad’s parents because both died when Dad himself was a boy. Dad never spoke of them, mainly because his own recollections of them were few and faltering, but also because, in my opinion, he was a shy and retiring boy who had grown into a kindly but reserved man. He was only a lad – 12 or so – when his parents died which perhaps goes some way to explaining his sometimes painful reticence. As legend has it, his father died during WWI and his mother, Flossie, died of a broken heart a year later. I have one treasured picture of Dad as a baby with his parents. His mother was beautiful and purportedly from more well-heeled roots than Dad was driven to after their deaths. But Dad’s side of the family was always a mystery to me.

Dad was brought up by Aunt Anne and Uncle Herb, his real aunt and uncle and therefore my great aunt and uncle. Dad’s cousin, Lilly , always had a large entourage of people around her, whose relationship to me I never really understood. Chief among them was a couple, Iris and Jack. Jack was always smartly dressed in a dark blazer and slacks with cravat under an open-necked shirt and Iris wore flouncy, full dresses and was always immaculately coiffured. There was a younger sister called Pauline as well, more ungainly and what I considered ‘ordinary’ and approachable. Jack and Iris were always ‘looking down their noses’ at us with an air of social superiority, giving credibility to the rumour of Dad’s better-off origins. Mum was a good-looking woman and according to family legend, Jack made a pass at her during one Christmas party. Dad fronted him and apparently a fight ensued. The visits to Dad’s side of the family for the traditional Christmas gathering abruptly ceased and the families grew apart.

Mum did a variety of jobs to keep the money trickling into the household. One of the most bizarre would entail her bringing home a heavy sack from a company which had set itself up in one of the arches formed by the railway viaduct running from New Cross to the centre of London, known as the 500 Arches. The sack was full of unfinished handles – door knobs – fancy ones that you get on wardrobes and drawers in bedrooms. They emerged from the mould with the cavities still encumbered by defiant pieces of metal and our communal job was to file away the excess metal to leave the handle clear and defined. Mum received a pittance for this work – £1 per hundred handles filed and ‘made good’. It was a job which had us all sitting around in the evenings filing away as Mum and Dad sang their favourite songs: I’ll be seeing you, Apple Blossom Time, Always and the one that always – even today – has me filling up, The Folks Who Live on the Hill.

The earliest job I recall her having was as a case-maker, a skill she learned during the war when she was employed making ammunition boxes. She could knock a six-inch nail into a piece of wood with four blows: a skill which she employed to great effect at a funfair we visited in Southend where the challenge was six blows of the hammer to sink a four inch nail up to the shaft, an accomplishment which most men failed to achieve. Mum won many prizes from a clearly agitated showman before he paid her off with a giant teddy bear and told her to ‘sod off’.

The last job she had was as a cleaner in a police station during which time she seriously injured her arm when it was caught between two swing doors. She never sought nor received compensation and over the years her arm deteriorated to the point where she was increasingly unable to use it. Mum was the ever-present constant in my life and I adored her, although perhaps I never expressed that adoration as fully or as regularly as I should. In fact, in the last few years of her life, she confided to my wife that she never felt as though she knew the real Pete, a statement which fills me with remorse at my inability to redress that view now that she is dead.

My brother Brian, five years my senior, figured large in my life until he left home to marry when I was but a slip of a lad of 14 or so. But in the early days his presence was something of a dominating influence, particularly as we shared a bedroom, an arrangement which neither of us welcomed. I can’t say that we were close: we naturally played together when we were very young, but soon the five year gap between us began to show. I can’t remember much about it but as I got older, I would, I’m informed, insist on tagging along with Brian’s gang of friends, threatening to grass him up to Mum about their illicit visits to the docks ‘down town’ unless I was either taken along or adequately bribed.

Brian took to sleepwalking when he was around the age of 10 and, as part of his nocturnal repertoire would piddle in the most unlikely of places. His perambulations would sometimes take him unerringly to the foot of Mother and Father’s bed where he would stand in silence, sleeping eyes wide open, until usually Mother would wake to see him standing silently before her. At this point, she was known to elbow Dad awake with, ‘Sid! Sid! Wake up. It’s here again.’ Dad would reply as he dragged himself out of bed, ‘What do you mean, ‘it’. He’s your son, for crissake!’

Brian and I slept in the same bedroom. In winter, we used coats of all shapes and sizes as substitutes for extra blankets. Being five years my senior, he would read horror comics avidly while that sort of material scared the life out of me. Worse still, some of the comics he read came with a set of cardboard glasses with one red, cellulose lens in one side and a blue one in the other. Somehow, this brought about a 3-D effect when looking at these particular comics. I remember one day he had been reading a particularly scary comic about the ‘Wolf Men’ who abducted children and ate them. This particular night, as we were asleep, the Wolf Men came to get Brian. At some ungodly hour of the morning, with a shaft of moonlight falling across Brian’s bed, I was woken by him sitting bolt upright in bed, staring eyes widened as he opened his mouth to scream. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as he let out the most unearthly scream and shouted, ‘The Wolf Men are coming to get me!! Aaaaaggggghhhhhh!’

I screamed, the dog went berserk, my father arrived in his y-fronts at our bedroom door, his sparse hair akimbo, minus his false teeth. Mother, convinced that we were all about to be murdered in our beds, was screaming too, as she lay in bed with the covers pulled over her head. The pandemonium was something to behold.

As we grew older, Brian and I argued constantly. Despite the provocation, Dad never hit us and I only ever remember him once losing his temper to the point where he swore, when he just lost it with our constant bickering. Despite the antipathy which existed between us on a daily basis, my brother and I got on well at an academic level and we were drawn closer when I began attending his grammar school and found myself in urgent need of his protection against those in the school who insisted in justifying mindless violence against little ones like me by calling it ‘traditional fagging’, as though we were still occupying the pages of Tom Brown’s School Days. In truth, they were just bullies and cowards and we made them pay for it on one or two spectacular occasions, more of which later.

Chapter 2

Chavvies, glocks and bewers

‘Wire in, Nell!’ Mum would shout to Nell Killick across the garden fence as the latter beat shit out of her one carpet with a broom as it hung over the clothes line in the garden. Nell would shout back something unintelligible without looking up and without taking the fag from her mouth. The Killicks next door were rough and ready but no-one messed with them and, by proximity, nor with us. While the glocks and the bewers maintained an uneasy truce, the same was not true of the chavvies.

Kids can be cruel to each other and we were no exception to that generalisation. Our games of cowboys and Indians which we played with great vigour, and into which we injected as much realism as possible, (including the rescuing of the token white girl tied to a totem pole) seemed the more believable as we swooped and ‘whooped’ over the undulating terrain of the bombed site which we kids referred to as the ‘debris’, but while we happily thus indulged ourselves, petty jealousies and grudges were ever present. It always seemed important to keep one of the gang on the ‘outside’. We needed a butt for our pettiness, a boy whom we could ridicule and pillory, the more to make us feel like part of the crowd. That unfortunate child was David Price.

I think the reason he fell foul of the rest of us was that his mother and father had a ‘nice’ prefab and gave the impression of considering themselves a cut above the rest of the families in Chilton Grove. They were the first to buy a TV and the first to own a car. Poor David’s reward was to be shunned at every opportunity, to be jibed at and to be excluded, when we could avoid him, from our games and schemes. This feud developed into a personal antipathy between us to the point where, one fine Sunday morning, it was time to have it out with him. He was the identified enemy of the gang and I was deputised, through the unspoken language of eight year olds, to front up for the group. Somehow the entire street got to know of the impending fight. Even my mother came along to witness her son’s first blooding. As I walked towards his house, neighbours hung over their garden fences offering advice and egging me on.

He emerged with his mother and walked to the fence. We stood face to face and I was a little surprised at his bravado. I mumbled a justification as to why I was about to punch his lights out, when from behind his back he produced a hammer with which he belted me over the head. Fortunately, his mother had had the sense to arm him only with a toffee hammer, so the blow was relatively light and did little damage, except to my self-esteem. I collapsed in a heap of aggrieved, blubbering shock at the thought that he could have been so well prepared and I so naive. The inevitable happened. My mother and his mother had the fight and I was led home to perpetual ignominy. The incident was the talk of the street for a week.

Such occasional run-ins notwithstanding, we had a wonderful time as kids. Street games of British Bulldog, tin-tan-tommy, knock down ginger, cricket, football and bike racing around a chalked track on the tarmac kept us in bruises and trouble for weeks.

Tin-tan-tommy involved the assigning of one person to be ‘it’ (the process of deciding who would be ‘it’ was carried out by performing a round of ‘scissors, paper, stone’), and that person would be required to retrieve a tin can thrown by another member of the gang, by walking backwards while the rest of the crowd ‘scattered out’, as we called it. The object was to get from your chosen hiding place back to the base without being spotted, or before the child who was ‘it’ had the chance to rap the can on the chalked base point and shout, ‘Tin-tan-tommy I see Billy Hawkins running towards me!/behind the hedge next to Mrs Jones’!/hiding behind the tree in front of number 6!’ Arguments about the accuracy of the call would engage us well into the evening.

The favourite game among the tougher kids was British Bulldog in which one person, out of twenty or so and selected by a complicated round of knock-out ‘scissors, paper, stone’, would be the sole defender of a chalked line while the other kids would charge him, only being ‘safe’ when the base line was reached. The sole defender of the line had to stop at least one assailant by dragging down, tripping, tackling or generally clobbering them. Thereupon, there would be two defenders of the line for the next assault. This process would continue until there would be perhaps only two kids left to make an assault on the line, now defended by fifteen or more bruised and thoroughly excited kids. If you were unfortunate enough to be one of the last to be caught, the prospect of running at a line of whooping, mass-hysterical eight to ten year olds was daunting. The effects of the thumping you received would last a week.

On the bombed site next to our prefabs, we built ‘ghost camps’ and charged the younger kids a penny to be scared, although in truth, our attempts to exploit this market failed when the quality of horror was reduced to the laughable. Billy Hawkins would sit in one corner of the hut we had constructed from sheets of corrugated iron and asbestos and then covered in turf. He would hold a torch under his chin which shone upwards onto his grimacing and, supposedly, horrifically contorted face. Geoffrey Bond would lie in another corner making ghostly sounds and on the way out, the kids were subjected to the horrors of grass suspended from a cross-timber tickling their faces. Most kids emerged from our ghost camp in hysterics of laughter, but we made our penny a head and invariably saved this income for fireworks on November 5th. We would bury penny bangers in the squares of butter we had encouraged one of the lads to steal from his dad’s shop and watch as the explosion scattered butter all over the debris as we hid behind convenient mounds of earth.

Gyp, our dog, was a big part of my childhood. He was a mongrel which Mum had brought home one day from a friend’s house as her family circumstances would no longer allow her to keep a pet. Gyp landed on his feet and with us lived the life of Riley. No amount of barricading could keep him confined to the house or the garden and after every attempt at fencing him in had failed, my father gave into Gyp’s ingenuity and allowed him to roam free. Gyp would wake up in the morning to breakfast, stretch luxuriously as he contemplated another day out on the razz and slip away for the day.

He would return during the late afternoon, more often than not with a few war-wounds, hungry, thirsty and very evidently glad to be home. After slaking his thirst and satisfying his hunger, he would invariably nuzzle his way behind my father’s back as he sat in the easy chair while we listened to the radio, and sleep the evening away. Despite his freedom, Gyp would go wild with excitement if anyone of us went within a yard of the cupboard in which his leash was kept as it heralded a ‘proper walk’, and Gyp would behave himself perfectly on the leash, apparently proud of the fact that we cared enough about him to take him with us on the occasional outing.

His freedom, however, caused us grief. He was notorious around the shops of the Red Lion shopping area. Johnny Best, the butcher, told us quite openly that if he caught Gyp, he would ‘put him on the chopping block with no regrets’ because Gyp had stolen so much meat from his shop. My grandmother lived in perpetual fear of meeting Gyp on her travels. On one particular occasion, she was trying to cross the road at the busy Red Lion junction and was waiting for the policeman on point duty to hold up the traffic (no traffic lights in those days) when she saw Gyp calmly trotting down Lower Road, right in the middle of the tram lines. Behind him, the tram driver rang his bell furiously but fruitlessly to scare Gyp away and behind the tram was a royal traffic jam of fuming cars and lorries. Gyp espied Granny and broke into a gallop. He leapt at my grandmother, covering her with sloppy licks, his tail going nineteen to the dozen. The irate policeman, trying to control the traffic chaos Gyp had caused, turned to my gran, ‘Your dog, madam?’

‘Never seen him in my life before officer’, said Nan, without missing a beat. ‘Gert ya, bust’d dog. Gern. Get away!’

Gyp’s eyesight began to fail. He began following me to school, sticking to me like a shadow, never losing sight of me in his myopia. He would look at me with heart-rending pathos as I told him to go home. He was approaching the time for his last walk up the road and I’ll never forget watching my brother walking Gyp to the vet’s, unaware of his fate and proudly trotting beside Brian on the end of the leash which he had so seldom worn. Brian wore his favourite black and white flecked jacket for the occasion.

Deptford, as in all areas of London at the time, teemed with wildlife. In the summer, we kids would delight in collecting Death’s Head hawkmoth caterpillars from the swathes of purple, swaying weeds to be found all over the bombed-site and putting them into a collection of glass jars to watch them pupate. The moth state of these amazing insects was a joy to behold. My favourite, common in the 50s in London, was the Privet Hawk moth which is the most delicate shade of pink and surely the most streamlined and beautiful of all the moths.

The shed at the back of our prefab was home to my collection of insects throughout the summer months and, on occasion, to waif and stray kittens which I persuaded Mum to let me keep. Insects, moths, caterpillars, beetles, butterflies were everywhere in 1950s London which had not yet had its bombed sites concreted over, nor seen high rise blocks of offices and flats puncturing the skyline.

Dad was an amateur entomologist and would collect beetles and bugs, staking them out after a spell in the killing jar, opening wing cases and displaying the wings which I was surprised to find nearly all beetles possess. He had a collection of live stick insects which fascinated him and scared the life out of Mum. His pride and joy was a Goliath Beetle which he bought in a glass case, already ‘presented’, when he was in the West End for some reason or other. It must have been six inches long and had claws on the end of each three inch long leg which themselves must have been half an inch long. Over the years this amazing specimen was handed around the family and eventually I gave it to my cousin Graham and it has since been lost to the world.

Dad was a skilled engraver, undergoing a long and intensive apprenticeship, whose career was interrupted terminally by the war. On his return he worked on the railways for a time, but then got a break with my uncle’s firm, United Glass Bottles (UGB), which used to nestle next to the Millwall football ground, the (old) Den, in Cold Blow Lane, just off the Old Kent Road. He employed his skills engraving the moulds for specialist glass containers.

I remember his proudest day when he brought home the first glass jar of ‘Three Bears Honey’ produced from the mould he had engraved. He was particularly pleased as his boss had considered the job of engraving metal with the reverse image of three bears impossible. After 28 years of loyal work with United Glass, he was fired at the age of 54. His skills were no longer required as increasing mass production and automation took hold of British industry.

He finished his working days putting vacuum cleaners together for £28 a week in Orpington and then working as a pipe fitter for a west London brewery. Despite the callous way in which he was treated throughout his working life, Dad retained a ‘forelock-tugging’ attitude to his employers: he was conscientious to a fault and while he was the most quiescent of workers, if he did believe that an injustice had been done, he would ponder long and hard over his position and then, but only rarely, would he throw his full weight behind a particular course of action.

I recall him striking on only one or two occasions and once committed, he would be the most ardent of supporters of the cause. Both Mother and Father were the epitome of working class conscientiousness, never once ‘poncing on the state’, and fiercely proud of their ability to pay their own way. When Dad came home from work on Friday evening, he would immediately hand Mum her packet of Kensitas cigarettes, put some chocolate on the mantelshelf for the weekend and then go to his money box in his bedroom which had several labelled divisions. Into each he would put the exact amount required to pay for insurance, holiday savings, rent, school clothes for us kids and other requirements, leaving him with his ‘spending money’ of a couple of quid for the week.

On more than one occasion, before Dad got home on a Friday night, Mum would be seen frantically replacing money she had found it necessary to borrow from Dad’s money box to make ends meet during the week. In later years, I would urge them to fight back against a system which shackled them to a life barely rising above the poverty level and which cowed them into reverence for the bosses, the political system which forsook them and for the Royal family whom most of the working classes perversely revered. Surely the most inappropriate and ironic of all working class icons.

It is true, however, that Mum had a healthy disregard for royalty: every time she saw a picture of or a news item referring to the late Queen Mother, she would remark, in her coarsest working class accent, ‘Gern you old cow! Seventy years a scrounger and still taking our money!’

I can’t honestly recall a bad day in my childhood. Every year, from as early as I can remember, Dad would save up enough money to hire a car and we would set off on holiday at 4 o’clock in the morning, bundling blankets and sleepy kids into the back of the car, along with thermos flasks of tea and a handful of pre-rolled Old Holborn fags for Dad. He would chuck the suitcases in the boot and drive off through the silent London streets, en route for the West Country and Brean Sands. We stayed at the Three Acres Caravan site at Brean, just south of Brean Down. Caravanning was a real adventure for us kids and the lighting of the mantle around the calor-gas lights produced sights and – in particular, smells – which stay with me today.

Dad would allow Brian and me to drive the car on the endless stretches of sand at Brean, and swimming in its gently shelving waters was a delight. Invariably, we kids would end up outside the local pub with a coke and a bag of crisps while the adults imbibed, but the annual holiday was a real treat. In those days when health and safety were virtually unheard of, Dad would hire a car with a sun roof and Brian and I would spend most of the time as Dad drove along country roads, standing on the seats with our heads out of the sunroof, singing our hearts out and occasionally spitting out flies which inevitably found their way into our open mouths. In fact, singing was something Mum and Dad did a lot of and it was a pastime which made driving the long distances in slow cars something of a joy rather than a bore. Not that all the cars Dad hired were slow. I recall him hiring an Austin Atlantic convertible one year. So while we were anything but rich, somehow Mum and Dad scraped together enough money to give us a decent week off every year and with it, a wealth of fond memories.

Despite the fact that I object strongly to the way in which we celebrate Christmas since it represents what I can only describe as an orgy of consumerism (in which I happily and hypocritically indulge when it comes to spoiling the children), the festive season in the fifties held nothing but delights for me. Presents, naturally, brought joy to us kids, but Christmas was a time when we would set up camp for three days in my aunt Lil’s house in Brixton. She and Uncle Tom lived with Carol and Graham, their daughter and son, in a ‘tied’ house.

In later years, after the death of Uncle Herb who was ‘Dad’ to my father, Aunt Annie, Herb’s wife, also later lived with Tom and Lil. Tom was a chauffeur to Lord Vesty, the butcher magnate, and lived in a house attached to an enormous garage in which Lord Vesty’s collection of cars was housed, on the corner of Mayall Road in Brixton. For years – certainly most of the 50s – we held parties there, to which our extended family came, many of whom I didn’t know, many of whom, I’m sure, were no more a part of the family than was the guy who lived next door. But the parties became legendary in the street and in family folklore.

Uncle Tom had a Grundig tape-to-tape recorder which was state of the art in those days and as likely as not came off the ‘back of a lorry’. We would let the tape run all Christmas night throughout the party, recording our antics and singing. First to rise the next day would have the job of running the tapes backwards and playing them, the better to encourage us to party again on Boxing Day. Mum and Tom would take turns on the piano to knock out songs which seemed to have the same melody and which could only be distinguished, one from the other, by Mum shouting out the words. Only then did we know that she had changed songs from Roll out the Barrel to Lambeth Walk. Both Mum and Tom would end the evening – morning by the time it was winding down – with plasters taped to blistered fingers as they crashed the keys and kept us dancing and singing.

My enduring memory of these years is of thirty or forty people in Aunt Lil’s front room singing the ‘Okey Cokey at full volume and knees-ing up to the point where the light fixing was swinging and the floorboards were bending beneath the weight of the Wilkinson/Cobdens, collectively lost in the pursuit of a good time. And after lights out, us kids would creep up the stairs to watch the Christmas spectacle of Lil and Tom lying in bed, asleep but engaged in their individual night antics. Tom would hum hymns beneath his breath. Lil would have her hands above her head, hands and fingers agitated in a bizarre dance, the purpose of which only she knew.

There was a dark side to these events and one I mention reluctantly. While our annual family celebrations were anticipated with great joy, they held some fear for me. Rumour has it that Mum and Dad had wanted their second child to be a girl. Instead, they got me. Perhaps – and I’m sorry Mum, if you’re reading this from wherever you might be – there was a subconscious desire in Mum to live out her fantasy of having a daughter and to experiment with the idea at Aunt Lil’s parties, when she would insist that I dressed as a girl and – particularly galling – as if that wasn’t enough embarrassment for an eight year old – ‘flutter my eyes’, at which all involved would roar with laughter.

‘Do your eyes, boy!’ Mum would command. And I would duly oblige while cringing with embarrassment which I hid well enough, I hope.

I am sure that this mild form of abuse, this forced and mostly false (on my part) enjoyment in which I had to pretend to engage, gave me a lifelong aversion to staged family activities revolving around alcohol, parties and family gatherings. It is an aversion which my wife has suffered for the duration of our relationship. She comes from a large East End family which lives and dies by the regular family ‘get-together’ – far too regular for me – at which this form of required enjoyment, ‘fun to order’, is standard. Don’t get me wrong, I love a party, but I like to party on my own terms, to sing when I want to sing, dance when I want to dance and sit quietly when I want to sit quietly. This is not an option at most family gatherings and my antipathy towards them has deep and very long roots.