bag falling from the sky. That would have been an unfortunate way to go and very likely the end of a promising career in teaching. We all looked at Mr Waterman. Personally, I have never been so scared in my life. No one said a thing. ‘Oh Shit!’ he said and then without warning, ran out of the room. We waited. It was strange. Was the lesson over?
After a minute or two, he ran back in carrying a battered looking case. He was out of breath. He looked at us and said, ‘That was my fucking bag.’ The laughter kept going for a good five minutes. What a man.
Now anyone who, even by mistake, was prepared to throw his own bag out of a fifth floor window, was certainly not going to tolerate Nazis outside the school gate. He was livid. Being a history teacher, he was perhaps even more acutely aware than the rest of us of the cultural significance of sieg heiling at a Jewish school. He was ranting at them.
‘Fuck off, you Nazi wankers!’ he shouted. One didn’t hear a teacher swear that often.
They just laughed at him.
‘There are black kids doing Nazi salutes,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘How the fuck can you have black Nazis?’ It was a fair question.
‘Fuck this,’ he said and ran off. He came back a few moments later armed with a cricket bat, opened the gate and ran straight for them.
‘Come on lads,’ he said. ‘Let’s give the bastards what for.’
This whole episode had taken a turn I wasn’t expecting. I’d been hitting a tennis ball against a wall so I kept hold of my tennis racquet and followed him out. I’m not sure it would’ve been much use in a fight even though I had a decent forehand. But it didn’t matter. The Holloway boys took one look at this wild eyed, cricket bat waving, moustachioed Welshman and ran. It was glorious. They tried once or twice more after that but their hearts weren’t in it. I wish he’d done it earlier on. One by-product was that any lessons he took after that were incredibly well behaved.
Not that I attended lessons that much. I just thought that most of what they were teaching me was nonsense. I wasn’t interested in glaciers or the function of the pituitary gland.*3 By the last year at school, I used to take regular afternoons off. I’d walk purposefully along the corridor like I was rushing to get to my first lesson after lunch. And then when everyone was inside their respective classrooms, I’d scarper. The caretaker often saw me leaving but he never tried to stop me. He nodded imperceptibly, giving me a look that suggested that he thought it showed initiative. Although he might have been thinking that with my attitude, I may end up as a school caretaker.
I’d take a desultory wander round the shops of Brecknock Road. There wasn’t a lot to see unless you liked hardware stores, bookmakers and takeaways. Some of the more grown-up-looking kids would hide their blazers in their bags and venture into the pub or the betting shop. In the pub, there was always the risk of bumping into one of the teachers who regularly drank in there, even when they had lessons that afternoon. I can’t say I blamed them. If I had to teach me, I’d have been drinking as well.
I didn’t have many friends at school. I met Simon and Robert when I was around twelve. They were both in another class, in another house, but we hit it off. They were mates and we got chatting one time in the playground. They were both Chelsea fans but I didn’t hold it against them. Robert had a nose almost as immense as mine but no one said anything to him about it because he was already over six feet tall. He was taller than everyone in the class and most of the teachers. He was the tallest person I’d ever met. I used to go round his house. He lived with his sister and his parents in semi-detached middle class splendour (to me) in the posh part of Hendon. They were all very tall as well. I was impressed. His house had a drive. It had central heating. It was always warm. His mum was very proper but she was sweet with me. She’d make me food and listen indulgently while I chattered away.
Simon was also a couple of inches taller than me, and he was way more confident in his opinions. He was, and still is, one of the funniest mates I’ve got. It’s ever so slightly annoying how quick he is sometimes.
Simon lived in Edgware in a flat with his mum, Carole, and his sister, Jackie. They didn’t have much more money than we did but their flat was more comfortable than ours. Carole was glamorous. She laughed at all my jokes and made me food. I loved going round there.
Later on in life, Simon was the first of my mates to have a car. He was also the one who organised most of the things we did together. The only reason we had a football team was because he used to ring round. I don’t think we thanked him enough. Every friendship group needs a Simon.
In our final year, Simon and I often decided to forgo the delights of double religious knowledge and some cock-and-bull story about plagues or floods and wander down to the centre of Camden instead. We spent half an hour browsing in the Doctor Martens shop by the station. In a side street, there was a film crew shooting an episode of Minder; I was a big fan. Arthur Daley was a truly brilliant character and there was something great about watching a TV show and recognising locations. There was a crowd of twenty or so people watching it happening, most of them pensioners with nothing better to do. Dennis Waterman and George Cole were discussing the forthcoming scene with a guy who I presumed was the director. He was talking animatedly about what he wanted while the crew waited patiently. It was a nice day so no one seemed to mind.
At some point, the director strode purposefully back behind the camera, put on his headphones and said ‘quiet please’. A hush descended. He then shouted, ‘Action’ and the scene began. Ten seconds after it began, an old lady in the crowd said, ‘’Ere, it’s Richard Burton innit?’
On one of our many afternoons off, we were browsing in the record shop and we came upon the In The City album. Simon told me I should listen to The Jam. He looked serious and he was very insistent but no matter how enthusiastic someone is, it’s hard to convey what a band sounds like without you hearing them. I said I’d check them out, but I guess I never got round to it until John Peel played them on his show. Then the penny dropped.
When Simon wasn’t available for midweek post-lunch trips out of school, I would go to the pictures on my own at my local cinema in Hendon Central. One time, I went to see Eraserhead. My teenage brain was nowhere near ready for the surreality of David Lynch. At one point, I started laughing at a dead chicken dancing on a stage. The man in front of me tutted loudly presumably because the film was making a serious point I’d failed to grasp. Forty years later, I still don’t understand what the fuck that point might have been. I also saw Capricorn One, a film about a shadowy government agency that faked the Mars Landings. I was getting a decent education but not in core curriculum subjects. I went to see Rocky and ran all the way back home from the cinema shadow boxing. For a moment, I contemplated a career in boxing. I mentioned it to my grandmother. She started laughing and said that my nose was too much of a target. She was right.
There wasn’t much I engaged with at school but I liked PE. I never bunked off for that. I was physically capable, no mean achievement in a Jewish school where some of the kids could barely walk ten yards without feeling faint. I was a very fast runner, something that had come in handy when I was trying to escape the attentions of the Holloway boys. I ended up running the one hundred metres for my school house along with a boy called Adrian Grant. Adrian was the most accident prone boy in the school. He had a briefcase that regularly fell open for no reason; once it did so at the top of the staircase and spilled its entire contents five floors down the stairwell. I can still hear his plaintive ‘Oh no!’ as it happened. In Chemistry, if he was handed a Bunsen burner, we’d all step back a couple of paces. He’d catch his blazer on a door and rip the pocket. If he was using a compass, it would end up in his leg. He once wet himself in class.
We lined up at the start
