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By Root 1092 0

the work, probably because I knew it would not last forever. My grandfather really was brilliant with his hands, and watching him plaster an entire wall in minutes was exhilarating. It turned out to be a valuable experience, even though it seemed he was being extra-tough on me, which I’m sure was because he wanted no suspicion of nepotism. I learned that he worked, and lived, from a very strong set of principles, which he tried to pass on to me. In those days, there were two schools of thought on a building site. The first was that you did as little as you could, but got away with it by making the foreman think you were really busy when you were in fact skiving. This seemed to be the norm. The second, as personified by Jack, was that you worked consistently to a rhythm and did a good job until you had finished it. He had no time for skivers, and so, to a certain extent, like me in later years, he was slightly unpopular and a bit of an outcast. His legacy to me was that I should always try to do my best, and always finish what I started.

All the time, I was working on my playing, sometimes almost driving my family mad with the repetitiveness of my practicing. I was addicted to music, and by now I also had a record collection. Listening to Chuck Berry, B. B. King, and Muddy Waters had turned me on in a big way to electric blues, and somehow I had managed to persuade my grandparents to buy me an electric guitar. This happened after I had been up to London to see Alexis Korner playing at the Marquee on Oxford Street, a jazz club that had occasional blues nights. Alexis had the first real R&B band in the country, with a fantastic harmonica player named Cyril Davies. Watching Alexis play for the first time made me think that there was no reason why an electric guitar shouldn’t be available to me.

Another good reason why I so desperately needed a new guitar was that my Washburn was broken beyond repair. Before I started working for Jack, Rose had decided to take me to visit my mum for a few days. She was then living on an air force base near Bremen, Germany, where her husband, Frank, or “Mac” as I called him, was stationed. She now had three children; a second daughter, Heather, was born in 1958. Almost as soon as I arrived, Mac told me that I would have to get my hair cut before I could go into the mess. I was horrified by this request, since my hair was not even particularly long by the standards of the day, but it seemed that the offensive part was that you couldn’t see the top of my ears. I looked to the younger generation, in the form of my three half siblings, for support, but found none there. One by one they came after me, too. I was adamant about not doing it, until Rose also joined their ranks, which broke my heart, because up until then she had always been my staunchest defender, whatever the situation. I gave in, but it made me very angry, as it seemed like I no longer had anyone on my side. They gave me a crew cut and I felt alone and humiliated.

I moped around a lot for the remainder of my stay, but things only got worse. One day I was sulking on my bed in the spare room when my half brother Brian came in and sat down on the bed without looking. He sat down right on top of my beloved Washburn guitar, which was lying there, and broke the neck clean in half. I could see immediately that it was beyond repair, and I was gutted. He was the sweetest kid, totally in awe of me, and it was an accident, but there and then I vowed internally that Pat and her entire family could go to hell. I didn’t lose my temper. I just withdrew. Not only had my identity been ripped away, but my most treasured possession had been destroyed. I went inside of myself and decided that from then on, I would trust nobody.

The electric guitar I chose was one I had had my eye on in the window of Bell’s, where we had got the Hoyer. It was the same guitar I had seen Alexis Korner playing, a double-cutaway semi-acoustic Kay, which at the time was quite an advanced instrument, although essentially, as I later learned, it was still only a copy of the