This Is 64

by Joseph Connolly

Genres: General Fiction; Humor & Satire; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

THE NEW NOVEL FROM THE BOLLINGER SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF ENGLAND'S LANE. 'There's a lot of brilliantly observed detail... it's very funny and very sharp' Michael Palin George is a fashion mad Beatles fan, selfish and cruel. Why his girlfriend Dorothy loves him is a mystery to her and to his best friend Sammy. When George callously chucks her he cannot anticipate that his life, post 1964, will never be the same. And forty-four years later, when George is sixty-four, rich and successful, his past will catch up with him and his family. 'Connolly unfolds a rich and compelling drama of life that is anything but everyday' Daily Mail ' It is Connolly's skill to get the reader to laugh at what should make you cry or at least wince' Times Literary Supplement

Release date: May 4, 2017

Publisher: RiverRun

Print pages: 448

Sample

A Memoir

A MEMOIR. YOU MIGHT CALL IT THAT. REALLY JUST A JUMBLE OF RANDOM AND TATTERED, MORE OR LESS IDLE AND INCONSEQUENTIAL LITTLE SCRAPS OF RECOLLECTION FROM THE JOYOUS AND LONG AGO PAST. NOW THAT TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY. AND I’M OLD.

Julie Christie. In an E-Type Jaguar. Red – it had to be red, the E-Type. And she, she would be all in white. Minidress, A-line – Biba, conceivably. Those long and shiny white boots by Courrèges. PVC, were they . . .? Amazing what lodges, the things you remember – words like Courrèges. So that was my absolute, my ultimate fantasy. That’s what I always wanted. Well – that certainly was always a primary, a motivating desire, anyway. Driving force. Because in truth, I wanted everything. Who didn’t? But there were so many people, all around me, who actually seemed to have it. They truly did seem to have everything: the cars, the clothes – the money, the glamour and all the dolly birds. Ah yes – the dolly birds. They didn’t at all mind it, being called that – loved it, actually. Badge of honour. Feather in your cap, being a bird. A mark, the tacit recognition of being slim and long-blonde-haired and fashionable and desirable – so why ever would they object to that? The best of them had pale pink lipstick, and sootily shadowed eyes. Nowadays, well – you daren’t open your mouth: women, I don’t know – they’re just on to you, all over you, whatever you say.

And it’s not that they were all that much older than I was, this glittering coterie of blessed and so groovy people who truly seemed to have it all. I’m not talking about red-faced fat cats with chauffeurs, cigars and mistresses – I’m talking about the young ones. Not Cliff Richard’s young ones, though – time, it had already moved on. Because it’s 64 I’m remembering, 1964. And I was nineteen years old. Kid, really. But young was the thing, well naturally – young was truly the only thing to be. We felt sorry for old people, middle-aged people – even people who can only have been in their thirties. And hated them too a bit, I think. Just for being there – just for not being young and cool and slim and desirable: they messed up the look. It’s hard to describe . . . and certainly it’s hard, beyond hard, to summon up the bubble of the sheer high feeling, the kick inside . . . but just to be young in London in 1964 was simply so very viscerally thrilling: the gorgeous smugness and the rippling joy, it made your heart sing out as it thrummed within you.

Golden age . . .? Well yeh, I suppose – and particularly if you were one of the anointed, one of those who had everything. I didn’t. I was never one of them. It’s not that I had nothing – I was by no means a hopeless case, I think that’s got to be more or less made clear. I was reasonably good-looking, or so I was told (and not just by my mother, but mainly, admittedly) – so hardly one of the beautiful people, but still. Thick and longish hair, skinny legs, not stupid – everything you need. I had a job, not much of a one. I had a room – I wasn’t still living with my parents, and that was a mercy, I can tell you. You’d understand if you’d ever met my parents. Well, Mum – she wasn’t too bad, I suppose. She did her best. No idea what she was feeling, most of the time: about anything she might have been going through. But Dad, oh my God. My children today – I say children: all grown-up, of course – they’re constantly telling me how out of touch I am, how increasingly intolerant, how I don’t understand even the very simplest element of technology (not true, any of that, but let it lie). My father, though – oh Jesus. Once, he put his foot through the television because the Rolling Stones were on: I’m telling you – it was as bad as that. He gaped with fury at the fizzy grey close-up of Mick Jagger’s lips, and his own were practically foaming. My mother, she was just looking down at the floor – she did that quite a lot. The noise of the exploding tele­vision, the scattered drizzle of dangerous shards, the buzzing and the smell of burning, all of it had been so absolutely start­ling that still I was just staring – open-mouthed, I should think, though none of this had actually frightened me. He did this sort of thing, my father – an otherwise highly introverted and mean man who hated ‘breaking a note’ – and this thing with the television, this was merely the most extreme example. He regretted it immediately, you could tell – Radio Rentals: he didn’t even own the bloody thing – but still, though . . . that was the moment when the blend of contempt and indifference that up till then was all I ever remember feeling for the man, deepened, and then hardened into an abiding hatred.

I didn’t go to university. A couple of my friends did, not that many actually, because whatever it was they wanted to go into – can’t remember, something dull: law, accountancy, whatever – it was expected and required. But nobody really felt they had to do it, not in those days: it was hardly the norm. Loads did for the sake of the grant, of course, and because the thought of actually working was just too bloody frightening, or else (in the light of the times) terminally depressing and very unswinging. But I must admit I considered it, I did consider it. I could have breezed into a redbrick, but anywhere decent, Oxford or Cambridge, would have been out of the question because one of the first things I had ditched was Latin, so I never got the O level, and that, back then, was non-negotiable. Can’t remember quite why I was so very down on Latin – simply didn’t get on with it. Like Milton, in English. Loved Chaucer – thought he was enormous fun – but Milton, oh dear me no. But in the end I just couldn’t face the thought of another pile of set books to plough through, the prospect of more exams. Now, of course, everyone ends up with a perfectly useless degree in, I don’t know – social studies, or some damn nonsense, from the University of Bogtown, and still they can’t get even the lousiest job, is what you’re reading in the papers. Whereas I, well – I walked right in. Didn’t take any time off after I left school – gap years, they hadn’t even been invented. So I just went straight into it, and suddenly I was earning a bit of money. It wasn’t a trendy job, though – I worked for the wholesale side of W. H. Smith’s: baling up bundles of newsprint, basically . . . writing out labels. So although it was great for nicking the odd free copy of Fabulous and Rave and the Melody Maker (which I far preferred to the New Musical Express because, I don’t know . . . it didn’t take itself quite so seriously) and of course Beatles Monthly, loved that . . . still the job was hardly what they now call ‘cutting-edge’. We didn’t say that then, cutting-edge. What did we say . . .? Don’t know. Cool, I suppose. One of the only words of that sort that seems to have survived. All the others – fab, gear, groovy, can’t remember but there were more – you have to mime ironic inverted commas if ever you use them, or people will look at you. Hip . . . hip is another one: hip, that seems to have come back into use just lately, but it doesn’t really mean any more, so far as I can make out, quite what it used to. Was an old jazz term, of course – before my time – but then it was all sort of, I don’t know . . . Hippy Hippy Shake, all that sort of thing. The song. Swinging Blue Jeans, pretty sure. Young men these days who seem to be described as hip, though . . . they don’t seem to have a lot of hair. Thin on top – or else they are very foolishly and deliberately razoring it to the bone. My God . . . when I was young, if you didn’t have hair, and plenty of it, you were dead in the water, really: no bird was going to look at you. I seem to have kept most of mine, anyway. White, of course – well, greyish mostly . . . but still it’s pretty thick, and I suppose I wear it longer than I ought to. Still it’s over my collar, covering the tops of my ears. A lot of men of my generation seem to be the same – similarly blessed, as it were – and the pop groups of the time as well: into their seventies, some of them – still packing out the world’s auditoria with the only music that ever really mattered a damn, and still their hair is swinging around them.

But the point I’m making – getting back to what I was doing, and everything – is that I wasn’t working for EMI in Abbey Road or even in Lord John or Take Six in Carnaby Street or in some nightclub or other like the Scotch of St James’s, or somewhere like that. Which I never went to, of course – but I read about it. All the pop and film stars went there, and I yearned to; didn’t even know where it was.

And the room, the bedsit I had, it couldn’t really ever be described as a ‘pad’. Not one of those glossy and miraculous penthouses – the palaces you see in all the films about the Sixties that somehow, although on paper perfectly accurate in the detail, still always somehow seem to get it so ridiculously wrong. So no – it wasn’t all acres of white leather sofas and coloured Perspex mobiles and G-Plan swivel chairs and a conversation pit and swirly orange wallpaper and a sunken bath and Julie Christie in those white Courrèges boots rolling about invitingly on a circular bed (and in that particular fantasy, that is all she was wearing, Julie: just the boots). It wasn’t in the King’s Road, is what I’m saying. It was in Kilburn, my room. I did what I could with it: various posters – Ursula Andress coming out of the sea in Dr No, Bond’s DB5 as well as an E-Type and a Mini Cooper and also that Lautrec thing for the Moulin Rouge and some other rather sinuous numbers by Beardsley and Mucha, although they might have come later – they were maybe a couple of years on, along with my Union Jack rubbish bin and that rather fusty old military jacket with only the one epaulette that I got for next to nothing in a market. Knocked up very rudimentary shelves with planks and bricks, like we all did. Loads of Penguins and Pans. One of the only good things about getting older was being able to afford hardbacks, which I always did prefer: no time at all for all this Kindle rubbish – you want to touch a book, you want to smell it. And orange light bulbs from Woolworth’s, they went quite a long way in setting the atmosphere if you were having a bird round, or something. I’d buy some dreadful wine – all wine was dreadful in those days, or at least the stuff I ever came into contact with (even at a wedding, the champagne was vile) – and a Vesta chicken chow mein which I’d do in the Baby Belling. I actually felt really rather sophisticated, if you can believe it. Like John Steed, or someone – whose clothes made me practically faint; mine were largely from C&A: you play the cards you’re dealt, right? I recall with particular affection a pair of bright blue elephant cord hipsters with enormous belt loops – not from C&A, those . . . some much smaller place in Oxford Street, as I recall, with a name that was something on the lines of Mr Man or Guy or something – and my extreme frustration at being unable to afford the bloody belt to go with them. Oh yes and Wall’s ice cream, we always finished off with that, after the Vesta mess – which was never right because that little fridge I had was just a joke. Even a tin of mandarin oranges, sometimes.

But the really great thing was that it was mine, that room, you see. I’d never before had a room that was mine and mine alone. Right up until I finally escaped the parental cavern, I was bunking up with my brother, Tom. He hated it too, of course – probably even more acutely than I did, being that much older than me. The whole place always smelled of Brylcreem, because dear old Tom, he was forever trying to get his hair to look like Elvis’s, because he was of that generation, that’s what he was into – but it always flopped down again over his brow, and it just drove him wild, when it did that. It was a tiny and pretty awful room, actually – stacked with lumber, not all of it ours – though never so profoundly worrying as my parents’ room at the end of the corridor: that was a stifling nightmare. I never went in there if I could possibly avoid it (why would I?) but it seemed to be made up of little more than candlewick and wallpaper and filmy curtains that kept out no sunlight and never quite met in the middle, with a smell of something musty as well as the sweet and acrid tang of Old Holborn. My mother, she hated him smoking in bed, the pig, but of course he never gave a flying fuck about anything she thought or wanted, nor anyone else. Already it was at the stage where I could barely stand being in the same room as him . . . but the thought of my poor little mother having actually to share that bed . . . and it was hardly bigger than a single: they would have lain there, like a couple of rank sardines. More than that I cannot think. There was a greenish quilt that had been charred during the war, I was always told, and my mother, she called it the counterpane. What really drove me crazy about the useless little space I was sharing with Tom though was that we had this perfectly fine bay-windowed front room – the best in the house, though admittedly that was hardly saying a great deal – and this was not just unused but actually locked. My mother went in there once a week on a Tuesday to Hoover the square of carpet, Mansion Wax the surrounding parquet, dust the clock which my father always said he was going to repair, ha bloody ha, and the pair of dark and maybe oak candlesticks on the beige and mottled tile fireplace that had never seen a fire . . . polish the silver-plated and ugly cylindrical biscuit barrel which we all knew had come to us from Auntie Joan, without ever having the remotest idea as to who in blue blazes Auntie Joan might actually have been. There was a three-piece suite with plastic covers so that it wouldn’t mark – though still I don’t think anyone had ever been allowed to sit on it. In the back room, which all of us infested nightly, because the rest of the house was generally freezing (the room with the lousy little Radio Rentals telly that didn’t even get ITV and you constantly had to fool around with the bloody useless aerial – all this before my most excellent father elected to kick the whole damn shooting match to absolute buggery), there was a sofa so very collapsed that it had long ago been shored up beneath with a length of plywood, which needless to say improved its comfort not a jot. Also in the front room was this lovely little cocktail cabinet, though – 1930s, I should think – and when you opened it, the top rose up and there was a chromium rack of swizzle sticks with differently coloured ends. The interior was pale figured veneer and pinkish mirror. The thought of there being a cocktail cabinet in our house, of course, was just so far beyond hilarious: a cocktail was about as likely as a mink coat for my mother. Or going to a restaurant. India Pale Ale and Haig were the nearest my father ever got: Harvey’s Bristol Cream for Christmas, and De Kuyper cherry brandy. The same sticky bottles for years and years and years, kept in the bottom of the sideboard alongside my mother’s wicker and gingham-lined sewing basket and the gardening shoes. I said to my father one time: look – we never use that front room, we never even open the door, it’s such a stupid waste. Why can’t I have it? Why do Tom and I have to be crammed into the box room when there’s all this space going begging . . .? He looked at me as if I were criminally deranged. The subject never came up again, and we all continued to never enter that room – except for my mother, on a Tuesday, to clean its perfect cleanness. I never did know what happened to that cocktail cabinet, though – the only decent piece of furniture we ever owned. Maybe that too had come to us from Auntie Joan, who was to say? Very fashionable these days, that sort of thing: worth a fortune, I shouldn’t wonder. Anyway: long gone now.

So the tatty little room in Kilburn was something of a step up – that’s the way I saw it, anyway. Didn’t have a car, obviously – let alone a bloody E-Type. And as to Julie Christie, well . . . but I did know a good few girls, quite briefly (it’s how they seemed to like it). I had by then what I suppose you’d call a sort of a proper girlfriend, Dorothy. She was okay. I maybe quite unfairly remember her as being just a little bit boring – but I don’t suppose that I was much of a riot either, in those days: I hardly bring the house down now. She was amenable enough though, Dorothy. Quite eager and willing, if you know what I’m saying. Pill – that did help things along. Her hair wasn’t very long but it was pale-ish without being blonde and she kept on tugging at it, I’m remembering now, and moaning about what she called her dreadful split ends. Like I cared. Thighs a bit chunky for the skirts she wore – but I didn’t blame her for that: girls, they had to wear them, miniskirts: they just had to. Never seemed to have much to say for herself – I thought at first that she was maybe not really that bright, little Dorothy, slow to catch on . . . but it wasn’t that, it wasn’t that at all – just terribly young and slightly shy, that’s all. And then, though, she became just a little bit too clingy. You know how they can get: she was trying to make me like all the largely spastic things that she was so devotedly into. Funny how one so easily falls back into the language of the time. Haven’t used that word for decades. (Try it today, and they’d string you up, shouldn’t wonder. Do you know: if some very able and high-profile person were just to let it slip out, the word spastic, he would be pilloried by the voluble po-faced self-righteous mob, and probably jobless by teatime.) I shouldn’t have stayed with her as long as I did, little Dorothy, but you sort of fall into a pattern, don’t you really? It just becomes easy.

I wanted to be a pop star. Who didn’t? Dreamed of my debut single shooting up the charts, and me in an Italian mohair suit rather self-consciously miming to it on Top of the Pops: that was new in 1964 – we were all so ridiculously excited when it first came on. And most of the groups – they were pretty much all our age, you see, so anything was possible. I wanted to be interviewed by Cathy McGowan on Ready, Steady, Go! Not Keith Fordyce, though: what was that fat and square old man doing on the programme anyway? Dorothy and I, we could never understand it. She had a thing about Mike somebody, the singer in The Dave Clark Five: we weren’t even slightly similar – I bore no resemblance at all to the singer in The Dave Clark Five, so it irked me, that. Can you believe it? Just so amazing even to recall such a thing. But look – I was nineteen, wasn’t I? That’s all. Kid, really. I watched all of those pop programmes. Who didn’t? There weren’t that many, actually – and radio, that was even worse. If it hadn’t been for Alan Freeman’s Pick of the Pops and Savile’s Travels on a Sunday, we would have been done for. Everyone went on about Radio Luxembourg, but it was hopeless, really – on my little transistor it was, anyway: more crackle than anything, no matter how much you were twiddling the dial. I eagerly fantasised about my first number one, which would be voted a hit on Juke Box Jury and given ‘foive’ by that funny little girl on Thank Your Lucky Stars. Janet, was she . . .? Janice . . .? Something. Extraordinary, though . . . all this ages-ago nonsense, and yet it seems as fresh – fresher, actually – than yesterday. I’ve become that cliché of an oldie, I suppose: can’t recollect where I was last Friday, and yet I can taste and inhale the dizzying aroma of such long distant youth. All that stuff about if you remember the Sixties, you just weren’t there – that what they say? Well maybe for the druggies – but that was never really my ‘bag’, as we used to call it. Otherwise it’s nonsense, isn’t it? The purest nonsense. Because me, well . . . I can hardly remember anything else.

And never mind The Dave Clark bloody Five – mindless stomping anyway – it was The Beatles, well of course it was. Oh my Lord – The Beatles, I just idolised them, really. Right from the word go. Who didn’t? From the very first time I heard ‘Please Please Me’, that was it: bang! I missed out on ‘Love Me Do’, the first single. Passed me by, somehow. But that very first time I heard ‘Please Please Me’ in a booth in Smith’s, I was gone. Bought it – 6s 8d, quite a lot of money in those days, and particularly if you were earning only six pounds fifteen a week, as I was. It’s funny how you never ever forget these figures: it’s like your first phone number. Mine was Primrose 5056 – that was later, though: that wasn’t in Kilburn. Had to use the box on the corner next to the pub, when I was still in Kilburn – or go downstairs and beg to use the one that the drunken Irish people had. My mobile number now, though – can’t remember that: I have to have it written down, or I couldn’t give it to anyone. Not that I do, very often – don’t want to be pestered. Two pounds eight-and-six went on rent, but the bus to work, that cost next to nothing in those days: not like now. Same with stamps – can’t bloody believe it: nearly fifteen shillings to post a letter . . .? Anna, my youngest, she tells me not to think like that because not only does it age me, but it’s stupid, and she’s probably right. But I got the LP With The Beatles that Christmas, thirty-two bob – major outlay, best money I ever spent. Played it to death – loved it, just loved it so much. I’ve got the original sleeve framed now, the mono one, moody black-and-white photo, you know it, and still I play the CD. Love it, just love it so much. Well all of their albums, of course – but at the time I’m harking back to, that was it, that was the one. Apart from the Please Please Me LP, of course, which I didn’t have. That was the one that Larkin, that poet Larkin went on about, wasn’t it? Their first LP. In 1963, when he says sex was invented, or something like that. People go on about Larkin, but I can’t see it. Same few quotes, and not much in any of them, so far as I’m concerned. Anyway – wasn’t true for me. That year, 63, I was still at school. 64 – that was the time: 64, that’s when it all started happening for me: that was the year when the Sixties just erupted.

I had a portable record player that weighed a bloody ton. They put a handle on anything in those days and called it portable. Wasn’t a Dansette – couldn’t afford a Dansette. Pye, I think it was. Yes – pretty sure it was a Pye. My mate Sammy – rich parents – he had a Grundig, and a matching tape recorder. He also had a Rickenbacker electric guitar exactly like John Lennon’s – couldn’t play a note: I doubt if he knew how to plug it in. So: did I want to be a Beatle? Well yeh – who didn’t? Wanted the jacket, the collarless jacket. Wanted the boots – Anello & Davide is what I had read they were. Whoever Anello and bloody Davide were – sounded like a circus act. Had the black knitted tie, though – that’s the nearest I got to their look. Tab-collar shirt came later – it was the colour of a lemon and I wore it for three days straight, washed it in the sink in my curtained-off kitchenette, dried it in front of the popping and stinky gas fire, and put it on again. Wanted a pink one as well, but I couldn’t afford it. Not a phrase you ever hear, nowadays. Can’t afford it . . .? Don’t make me laugh. Young people, they get whatever they want the second they want it with money they haven’t yet earned: normal now. And not just the young either – I know people of my own age who are in so way over their heads, splashing the cash like it’s water: don’t know how they sleep at night. Credit. It used to be called debt – a thing to be feared and ashamed of, and now it’s almost a bloody status symbol, the more they allow you to owe them. Just one of the very many things that have gone so very badly wrong with this bloody country. You want more . . .? I could be here all night. Immigration . . .? Don’t get me started. Anyway, what was I . . .? Oh yes: Beatles. Had a go at the hairstyle – complete joke. Did it myself with the only pair of scissors I owned, which were useless anyway – arching my eyebrows in Beatle-like surprise in front of this mottled little mirror . . . and when I had done my terrible worst and relaxed my face back down into normal, the jagged and raggedy result of all this well-intentioned hacking was halfway up my forehead and not right at all. I looked retarded: bloody awful mess – my very own lunatic fringe. One thing, though – up till then, I’d really hated my name. I always thought it was a drag, my name: sounded so square, so completely Victorian. But because of the Fab Four, suddenly it was wonderful to be called George: it was utterly cool. It was really only that that made me always say that George was my favourite Beatle (because you had to have one: it was a rule. Just as you could only like The Beatles or the Rolling Stones: that was another rule). So I made out that it was subtle and mysterious to have George as my favourite Beatle – the quiet one, the interesting one, the deep one: the dark horse, as he came to be known. He was probably none of those things – but who can ever know? It was John I liked really – who didn’t? I wanted to be him, John Lennon. It’s Paul I’m a huge fan of now, but back then it was John: loved him. Yeh I did. I couldn’t believe it, when he was killed. I remember some old bloke at the time – probably younger than I am now, though – and he said out loud and with enormous relish: ‘One down – three to go!’ I was sick, Just sick. And George, my namesake . . . when George went, I actually did even cry a bit. Amazed myself. But it was maybe for me – those tears, they were maybe for me. Because Beatles . . . dying. So wrong. They were youth – they were my boyhood. So Beatles dying . . . it wasn’t meant to be. Like getting old. When I was a kid, I thought there were four genders: boys, girls, old people and nuns. So . . . getting old: it wasn’t meant to be. Because how can you just change gender . . .?

I didn’t keep a diary – I wish I had. I was given the odd one for Christmas, but I never really used to write much in them. There was never anything to write. Just if I’d bought a Penguin or a new LP or something. Or if it rained. That was the sort of thing I noted down. Though I did turn out to be something of a thoroughly unsystematic hoarder. Never really cared to throw things away. I came across quite recently a dented old Roses tin that was full of all sorts of bits of junk – and how did I think to take that with me through, oh . . . must be six or seven changes of address? Ticket stubs – Odeon mostly, all from 1964 – book matches, tin badges . . . Uncle Holly from Selfridges Santa grotto, a Robertson’s Golly, the Ban the Bomb thing, one saying ‘I’m a Beatles Fan!’ Also folded up in there was a poem, or the beginning of one, anyway. I used to want to be a writer as well as a pop star. Bestselling novelist. Yeh – why not? I was young, remember? So anything was possible – that’s the way I think I was thinking. Astonishing, really. I mean, I did have a taste for reading – Waugh, Greene, Amis, Sartre, Orwell . . . went through a phase of Agatha Christie. I used to hide the Mickey Spillanes – though in truth he was probably my favourite. These days, I don’t read a bloody thing, not sure why: too damned idle. But I never had any real desire or talent for committing my own thoughts to paper – though now I do find I am rather more inclined in that direction: I jot things down like this. I think all I really wanted was to see my name and photograph on a book cover, together with a brilliant quote from the Sunday Times. To see someone reading my book (Penguin, for preference) on the Tube or on a bus – that would have been an unimaginable blast. A uniform collected edition in my bookcase. It would have impressed the birds: can’t imagine I was thinking any further than that. Anyway, this poem – I have it just here. Now where are my . . .? Oh – I’ve got them on. That happens quite a bit. Right, then – this poem:

Morning has broken.

Look – it’s all over the floor.

It happened before I had woken.

It just bloody well kicked in the door.

Is that good? Witty? Puerile? Christ knows. Rhymes, anyway – something, these days. Quite subversive, did I imagine it was? Maybe it was part of a lyric, I really couldn’t tell you – I have not the slightest memory of even having written it. I would say someone else had done it and given it to me, but that is definitely my handwriting: I was experimenting with turquoise Quink at the time. Still had my Parker from school: never really into Bics. I probably wanted to be a songwriter as well. I shouldn’t be at all surprised. Watch out Lennon–­McCartney . . .! Because look – I wanted everything, you see: all of it. Who didn’t?

As I say, I’d left school just the year before. Minor public school, is what they used to call the sort of rather obscure establishment I went to. Maybe still do. It still is chugging along – saw a mention of it in the paper not that long ago, though of course I have had no further contact w