Life [17]
Or we’d go camping with tents, which is what Bert and Doris had always done. How to light the Primus; how to put the flysheet up, the groundsheet down. I’m with just Mum and Dad, and when I’d get there I’d look to see if there was anybody to hang with. And I’d get a bit wary, if I was the only one… and I’d get a bit jealous sometimes when I saw a family with four brothers and two sisters. But at the same time it makes you grow up. In that you’re basically exposed to the adult world unless you create your own. The imagination comes into play then, and also things to do by yourself. Like wanking. It was very intense when I did make friends. Sometimes I’d meet a great bunch of brothers or sisters in some other tent and I’d always be heartbroken when it was over, gone.
Their big thing, my parents, was Saturday and Sunday at the Bexley tennis club. It was an appendix to the Bexley Cricket Club. There was always this feeling at the tennis club, because of Bexley Cricket Club’s magnificent and beautiful nineteenth-century pavilion, that you were the poor cousin. You never got invited over to the cricket club. Unless it was pissing with rain, every weekend that was it—straight to the tennis club. I know more about Bexley than I do about Dartford. I would follow on the train after lunch with my cousin Kay and meet my parents there, every weekend. Most of the other people there were definitely on another strata, English class–wise, at that time. They had cars. We went on bikes. My job was to pick up the balls that went over the railway line at the cost of nearly getting electrocuted.
For companionship I kept pets. I had a cat and a mouse. It’s hard to believe that’s what I had—it may explain a little of what I am. A little white mouse, Gladys. I would bring her to school and have a chat in the French lesson when it got boring. I’d feed her my dinner and lunch, and I’d come home with a pocketful of mouse shit. Mouse shit doesn’t matter. It comes out in hardened pellets, there’s no pong involved, it’s not squidgy or anything like that. You just empty your pockets and out come these pellets. Gladys was true and trusted. She very rarely poked her head out of the pocket and exposed herself to instant death. But Doris had Gladys and my cat knocked off. She killed all my pets when I was a kid. She didn’t like animals; she’d threatened to do it and she did it. I put a note on her bedroom door, with a drawing of a cat, that said “Murderer.” I never forgave her for that. Doris’s reaction was the usual: “Shut up. Don’t be so soft. It was pissing all over the place.”
Doris’s job when I was growing up and almost from the time the machines were invented was washing-machine demonstrator—specifically a Hotpoint specialist—at the Co-op in Dartford High Street. She was very good at this; she was an artist at demonstrating how they worked. Doris had wanted to be an actress, to be on the stage, to dance. It ran in the family. I’d go in and stand amongst the crowd circled around her, watch her demonstrate how fantastic the new Hotpoint was. She didn’t have one herself; it took her ages to get her own. But she could make a real show out of how to load a Hotpoint. They didn’t even have running water. You had to fill them and empty them with a bucket. They were new things in those days, and people would say, “I’d love a machine to wash my clothes, but Jesus, it’s like rocket science to me.” And my mum’s job was to say, “No, it’s not. It’s this easy.” And when later on we were living skint and nasty in the peeling refuse bin of Edith Grove, before the Stones took off, we always had clean clothes because Doris would demonstrate them, iron them and send them back with her admirer, Bill, the taxi driver. Send them in the morning, back at night. Doris just needed dirty material. Can we provide, baby!
Years later Charlie Watts would spend day after day in Savile Row with his tailors, just feeling the quality, deciding which buttons to use. I couldn’t go there at all.