a fight halfway down the track and the games teachers were running towards them to break things up. One of Adrian’s plimsolls had come off halfway through the race, he’d stumbled and taken down the boy next to him. I wish I’d seen it happen.
I never learnt to swim, though. I was following a long tradition of Jewish non-swimming. There’s not a lot of call for swimming ability when you’re wandering about in the desert for forty years. Even when we did get to the seaside, we’d only go in when God had parted the waves. My ancestors really didn’t like swimming. As a child, the water was not my friend. I had hundreds of swimming lessons but it never took. Sometimes, it was the teachers. Mr Duncan, my angry PE teacher*4 standing on the side of a pool shouting ‘Swim for goodness’ sake, swim’ was seen as a viable teaching method. Whereas one can’t imagine a driving instructor standing on the pavement shouting at a learner passing by ‘Drive for goodness’ sake, drive!’
Both my parents and my sister being non-swimmers didn’t help. Their abject terror of any water above chest height may have affected my ability to relax in the water. I was OK splashing about in the shallows but anything above my waist and I started getting the shakes. If a tsunami had hit West Hendon, our family almost certainly wouldn’t have made it.
All of the above does make it odd that Mr Duncan, for reasons only known to him, chose me to race for Weitzman House in the school swimming gala. I suggested to him that perhaps there might be people who could actually swim who were more suitable for the race. But Mr Duncan, like most PE teachers I’ve met, was not a listener. So it came to pass that I found myself lining up in the middle lane of the school swimming pool for the twenty-five-metre front crawl. Not only could I not swim, I couldn’t dive in either. I was, as you can imagine, terrified.
The whistle went, I shut my eyes, belly flopped into the water and started thrashing my way across the pool. Luckily, we started in the shallow end and every so often, I was able to stop thrashing, stand on the bottom of the pool, take a breath and then push off for another five metres of thrash. But at some point, I knew that I’d be in the deep end and putting my feet down wouldn’t be an option. About halfway along, I stopped, felt my tip toes hit the bottom, took a big gulp of air and then resolved to thrash until I touched a wall. Which is what I did. It felt like it took forever but I finally felt the comforting edge of the swimming pool. When I came up for air and looked either side of me, I was a bit puzzled to find that none of the other swimmers appeared to have finished. I thought I’d won. I looked up and there was Mr Duncan.
‘What the fuck are you doing you fucking idiot?’ he said.
I didn’t understand the question.
‘Why are you over here you moron?’ he asked and it was then that I properly looked around and realised that I’d swum in a semi-circle, across all the other lanes and was on the side of the pool. The only good thing was that I was so slow, the other swimmers were well past me by the time I veered across their lane.
‘Sorry sir,’ I said. I was just glad to be alive.
I wasn’t chosen for the swimming team again. But Mr Duncan had to do something with me, so during the next swimming gala, he got me to help out with the timings. I was much happier on the side of the pool watching Miss Honeyman get the kids lined up for the start. I tried not to stare at her legs too much but it was distracting. So much so that I missed the start of the senior boys one hundred metre front crawl final. I only pressed the stopwatch around halfway into the race. Stephen Franks won the race and Mr Duncan came running over holding his clipboard.
‘Time?’ he barked.
I knew that Stephen had taken longer than twenty eight seconds to swim one hundred metres. I quickly guessed a time.
‘Fifty six seconds’.
Mr Duncan duly noted it down. He looked impressed. He had every right to be so. It was only six seconds outside the world record. Slightly surprising for a fourth former at a comprehensive in Camden.
In 1978, a few years after I joined JFS, The Jam released ‘David Watts’ on what was then known as a double A-side single with ‘“A” Bomb in Wardour Street’. Aside from being insanely catchy, I also found it funny. I wasn’t what you’d call a star pupil and I was under no illusions that I could’ve been in any way like David Watts. The school team was unlikely to have me as their captain, I wasn’t going to pass all my exams and I had no expectation of being made head boy. I didn’t know any of the girls in the neighbourhood and even if I had done, none of them would’ve been the least bit interested in me.
This was another example of The Jam introducing me to other bands. It wasn’t like today, where sophisticated algorithms on Spotify or iTunes will see you listening to one band and suggest that you might fancy listening to something similar. In the 1970s, unless you had older siblings or parents who might take an interest, you had to find out for yourself.
I remember buying this single. It had the coolest cover I’d ever seen with arrows pointing in two different directions. When I took the single out and had a look, I wondered ‘Who is Ray Davies?’ This led me to The Kinks and ‘Waterloo Sunset’ and ‘Apeman’ and a hundred other tunes. In turn, they led me to Small Faces and hearing that keyboard intro on ‘Tin Soldier’ (Paul’s favourite track on Desert Island Discs). Because of Paul Weller, I’ve been listening to that song for forty years. It’s very much appreciated.
My parents, focused as they were on their own needs and desires, took very little interest in my schooling. My dad left school at fourteen, my mum at fifteen, so they had very few expectations about what education could achieve. My mother got me up and out of the house in the morning, and after that I was on my own. She’d read my school reports, tut at regular intervals and then hand them back to me without a word. As for my dad, I don’t think I had a single conversation with him about school. He went to work before I left and came back after I’d got home so he had absolutely no idea what I was up to all day. I think he knew that I went to school but I could’ve spent my days BASE jumping off tall buildings and he’d have been none the wiser.
If my children were half an hour late in the mornings, we’d get phone calls from the school secretary asking politely about their whereabouts. After an hour, the calls would be less polite. If they missed a whole morning and we hadn’t notified them, the authorities would be involved. Whereas if I didn’t turn up to school on a Monday, the chances of my parents hearing about it in the same week were minuscule. I think I could’ve left school at fifteen and it’s possible no one would’ve noticed. I wish I’d tested the theory.
The only time my mother really got involved in my school life was when I was suspended. It happened twice. The first time, I was involved in a fight with a girl in the fifth form. I was in Year Seven (eleven years old) and I was on the small side. She was fifteen and she was the biggest girl in school. She scared the living daylights out of everyone, including the teachers. I was walking down the corridor one afternoon when I saw her coming towards me carrying a big pile of books. I found this surprising. She didn’t strike me as a reader. She dropped one of the books and tried, without success, to pick it up without letting go of the others. I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible but she caught my eye.
‘Oy. Come here. Hold these,’ she said. It wasn’t a request.
I took hold of the books. She bent down to pick up the other book and I was confronted with the biggest arse I’d ever seen on a living human. It was too tempting. For reasons I still don’t entirely understand, I kicked it very hard and she went sprawling across the corridor. There was a boy standing opposite me and I can still remember the look of utter amazement on his face as he watched what I did. I didn’t wait around for her to get
