Life [12]
I should have a badge for surviving the early National Service dentists. The appointments were I think two a year—they had school inspections —and my mum had to drag me screaming to them. She’d have to spend some hard-earned money to buy me something afterwards, because every time I went there was sheer hell. No mercy. “Shut up, kid.” The red rubber apron, like an Edgar Allan Poe horror. They had those very rickety machines in those days, ’49, ’50, belt-drive drills, electric-chair straps to hold you down.
The dentist was an ex-army bloke. My teeth got ruined by it. I developed a fear of going to the dentist with, by the mid-’70s, visible consequences—a mouthful of blackened teeth. Gas is expensive, so you’d just get a whiff. And also they got more for an extraction than for a filling. So everything came out. They would just yank it out, with the smallest whiff of gas, and you’d wake up halfway through an extraction; seeing that red rubber hose, that mask, you felt like you were a bomber pilot, except you had no bomber. The red rubber mask and the man looming over you like Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man. It was the only time I saw the devil, as I imagined. I was dreaming, and I saw the three-pronged fork and he was laughing away, and I wake up and he’s going, “Stop squawking, boy. I’ve got another twenty to do today.” And all I got out of it was a dinky toy, a plastic gun.
After a time the town council gave us a flat over a greengrocer’s in a little row of shops in Chastilian Road, two bedrooms and a lounge —still there. Mick lived one street away, in Denver Road. Posh Town, we used to call it—the difference between detached and semidetached houses. It was a five-minute bike ride to Dartford Heath and only two streets away from my next school, the school Mick and I both went to, Wentworth Primary School.
I went back to Dartford to breathe the air not long ago. Nothing much had changed in Chastilian Road. The greengrocer’s is now a florist called the Darling Buds of Kent, whose proprietor came out with a framed photograph for me to sign, almost the moment I’d stepped onto the pavement. He behaved as if he was expecting me, the picture ready, as unsurprised as if I came every week, whereas I hadn’t been around there for thirty-five years. As I walked into our old house, I knew exactly the number of stairs. For the first time in fifty years I entered the room where I lived in that house, where the florist now lives. Tiny room, exactly the same, and Bert and Doris in the tiny room across a three-foot landing. I lived there from about 1949 to 1952.
Across the street there were the Co-op and the butcher’s—that’s where the dog bit me. My first dog bite. It was a vicious bugger, tied up outside. Finlays tobacconist was on the opposite corner. The post box was still in the same place, but there used to be a huge hole on Ashen Drive where a bomb dropped, which is now covered over. Mr. Steadman used to live next door. He had a TV and he used to open the curtains to let us kids watch. But my worst memory, the most painful that came back to me, standing in the little back garden, was the day of the rotten tomatoes. I’ve had some bad things happen, but this is still one of the worst days of my life. The greengrocer used to stack old fruit crates in the back garden, and a mate and I found all these far-gone tomatoes. We just squidged the whole packet up. We started having a rotten-tomato fight and we splashed them everywhere, tomatoes all over the place, including all over myself, my mate, the windows, the walls. We were outside, but we were bombing each other. “Take that, swine!” Rotten tomato in your face. And I went inside and my mum scared the shit out of me.
“I’ve called the man.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve called the man. He’s going to take you away, because you’re out of