To this day I can’t see a fat kid in shorts without wanting to rush over and give what comfort I can. To tell him it won’t always be like this.
So the twin clubs that made up Ray’s social life were a bit of an eye-opener for me. I tried to fit my sense of how they worked into my scanty picture of the world. The sixties had only been over for five years, it had been the sixties for most of my life, and the word that came to my mind as I looked up from my book, on one of those early Saturday nights, was commune. This must be what a commune was. All for one. And one for all.
Weekdays were different. Ray wanted me out of the house by nine o’clock, and he didn’t want me back till six. It wasn’t that the routine suited me especially badly, but it certainly nipped in the bud any idea that the flat at Cardinals Paddock was my home. Home is a place you can go whenever you want. Isleworth and Mum and Dad’s was home. And somehow I knew from the start that living by Ray’s rules wasn’t a test. Or if it was a test, it was a test that would never be over, and I’d just have to keep on proving myself for ever. Whatever I did, there would never be any question of me being given a key.
In the mornings Ray marched me downstairs and opened the front door to let me out. One day early in my stay I noticed there was mail on the mat and I bent down to pick it up. Ray didn’t say anything to discourage me, he simply trod on the little pile of letters as a way of telling me to keep my hands to myself. He was always very direct. He wouldn’t tell you something if he could simply show you.
In my memory his every footfall had a metallic echo — there were heel plates on his bike boots to reduce wear. From time to time he must have gone barefoot, maybe he was even barefoot when he trod on the mail to declare it out of bounds. Maybe it’s a false memory that supplies the crunching boot, descending so finally on something that was none of my business.
My first job, as you’d expect, had been helping out in the chemist’s during school holidays. I even enjoyed it. It was only a few years since Mum and Dad’s shop sold sweets from big glass jars. Sometimes when I was working there I’d close my eyes and think I could still smell them, the acid drops and the liquorice. I’d think I could reach out my hand and touch the big jars.
At primary school I’d said that I lived in a sweet shop, and when my classmates wanted to come to tea, either because they believed me or because they didn’t, I said my parents had been killed. Run over by a lorry while they crossed the road at a dangerous place. Which made my class sympathetic for a day and mocking after that.
Dad wasn’t a very businesslike businessman. It was a full year after decimalization that he gave in to Mum’s urgings and got a decimal till. Till then he must have thought that the new currency was no more than a fad, and shillings and pence would come back again once everyone had tired of the outlandish new coins. It was like county names. Technically Middlesex had stopped existing a couple of years before, and now everything was part of Greater London. But everyone just kept on putting Middlesex on letters, and ignoring postcodes, which had come in a little earlier.
So I suppose Dad’s rebellion against decimalization was part of a larger thing. We would do the sums in our heads, pressing down any key of the old pre-electric till to make the money drawer shoot out. People could still do mental arithmetic then, not feeling faint when more than two numbers need to be added up, helpless without a calculator.
In the 1970s, a family chemist’s was still a viable business. The supermarkets hadn’t really started to syphon off the toiletry trade, and the pharmacy side of things offered a service they didn’t even try to match. It’s absurd to think how restricted our stock was, looking back: some posh perfume for Christmas and people who’d forgotten their wives’ birthdays, a couple of brands of shampoo. There just wasn’t the range then, and people wouldn’t be conditioner conscious for years to come. Dentists had only just stopped telling people to brush from side to side, and now it was the heyday of up-and-down. We hadn’t been told to brush in one direction only yet, away from the gum, let alone to brush in little circles.
Everything was old-fashioned, though of course that didn’t occur to me then. It was what I knew. When people came into the shop, a primitive mechanism made a bell ring, with a click that was almost louder than the ding it produced. The shop had only the most basic security: a household lock on the front door, another one on the pharmacy storeroom. It didn’t occur to us in Isleworth at the time that people might want to break in and steal drugs to use or sell. But then I remember the time when Kaolin & Morphine, which you bought over the counter, still had plenty of morphine in it, so anybody who seriously wanted to be stupefied didn’t need to try very hard.
This was before specialised shops for developing film. Everyone took their snaps to the chemist’s. Anything quicker than a week counted as an Express Service and called for extra paperwork. Hardly anyone asked for it, and if they did we’d wonder why. Why would people want their holiday snaps back in such a hurry? More than likely it was just swank and showing off. A way of making out that you were important people and everything about you was urgent, even your holidays.
I’d have been happy to go on working in the chemist’s, but Dad wasn’t happy to have me there. At first I thought it was because he’d be embarrassed to have me sell condoms to a customer. We had a few customers who bought Durex, and one who must have been allergic to latex, since we kept the special lambskin ones in stock for him. But eventually I realised that Dad was even embarrassed to serve those customers himself, when I was in the shop.
By the time I met Ray I was a trainee gardener for the Council, working mainly in Lampton Park over in Hounslow, a bus ride away from home and no great distance from Hampton. Isleworth is only a hop skip and a jump from Kew Gardens, but I’d never set my sights that high. I’m just not cut out for it. The big league.
People who’ve done a little weekend digging and mowing always think it would be great to be a gardener for a living. All that fresh air. I suppose it might be more satisfying nowadays — ideas about what makes a good park have moved on, though these days of course all the work is put out to private tender, so someone like me would never get a crack at it.
In those days there were no wild areas in parks. Everything was regimented and symmetry was all the trend. You might spend days planting begonias in perfectly regular lines and rows, though if you like flowers you probably don’t like straight lines. If you were mowing the bowling green you wouldn’t expect the work to be anything but repetitive, but everything seemed to be like that.
We trainees worked under a Mr Jarvis — Mikey behind his back. We thought of him as a terrible old ponce, though I suppose he was only in his late thirties, younger than I am now, and he was more pathetic than anything else. He was easy to make fun of, having hair growing out of his ears and nostrils, and I can’t say I was above the temptation to play along with the others. There were poofter jokes too which I didn’t have the courage to challenge or take the sting out of. Well, you don’t when you’re eighteen, do you? If it wasn’t him it would certainly be me. The other trainees made no end of fun of me when my hairstyle changed. My new look was a bit drastic.