Life [29]
The only time I pulled rank was when my scouting career came to an end. I had a new recruit, and he was such a prick, he couldn’t get along with anybody. And it was like “I’ve got an elite patrol here and I’ve got to take this bum in? I’m not here to wipe snot. Why’d you dump him on me?” He did something, and I just gave him a whack. Bang, you cunt. Next thing I know I’m up before the disciplinary board. On the carpet. “Officers do not slap” and all that bullshit.
I was in my hotel room in Saint Petersburg, on tour with the Stones, when I found myself watching the ceremony commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Boy Scouts. It was at Brownsea Island, where Baden-Powell started his first camp. All alone in my room, I stood up, made the three-fingered salute and said, “Patrol leader, Beaver Patrol, Seventh Dartford Scouts, sir.” I felt I had to report.
I had summer jobs to while away the time, usually working behind the counter in various stores, or loading sugar. I don’t recommend that. In the back of a supermarket. It comes in great big bags, and sugar cuts you up like a motherfucker and it’s sticky. You do a day’s loading of sugar and you’re humping it on your shoulder and you’re bleeding. And then you package it. It should have been enough to put me off the stuff, but it never did. Before sugar, I did butter. Today you go in the shop and look at that nice little square, but the butter used to come in huge blocks. We used to chop it up and wrap it up there in the back of the shop. You were taught how to do the double fold, and the correct weight, and to put it on the shelf and go, “Doesn’t it look nice?” Meanwhile there are rats running around the back, and all kinds of shit.
I had another job around that time, early teens. I did the bakery, the bread round at weekends, which was really an eye-opener at that age, thirteen, fourteen. We collected the money. There were two guys and a little electric car, and on Saturday and Sunday it’s me with them trying to screw the money out. And I realized I was there as an extra, a lookout, while they say, “Mrs. X… it’s been two weeks now.” Sometimes I’d sit in the truck, freezing cold and waiting, and then after twenty minutes the baker would come out red faced and doing his flies up. I started slowly to realize how things were paid for. And then there were certain old ladies who were obviously so bored, the highlight of their week was being visited by the bread men. And they’d serve the cakes they’d bought from us, have a nice cup of tea, sit around and chat, and you realize you’ve been there a bloody hour and it’s going to be dark before you finish the round. In the winter I looked forward to them, because it was kind of like Arsenic and Old Lace, these old ladies living in a totally different world.
While I was practicing my knots I wasn’t noticing—in fact I didn’t piece it together until years later—some swift moves Doris was making. Around 1957, Doris took up with Bill, now Richards, my stepfather. He married Doris in 1998, after living with her since 1963. He was in his twenties and she was in her forties. I just remember that Bill was always there. He was a taxi driver, and he was always driving us about, always willing to take on anything that involved driving. He even drove us on holiday, me, Mum and Dad. I was too young to know what the relationship was. Bill to me was just like Uncle Bill. I didn’t know what Bert thought and I still don’t know. I thought Bill was Bert’s friend, a friend of the family.
He just turned up and he had a car. That’s partly what did it for Doris, back in 1957. Bill had first met her and me in 1947, when he lived opposite us in Chastilian Road, working in the Co-op. Then he joined a firm of taxi drivers and didn’t reappear until Doris came out of Dartford station one day and saw him. Or, as Doris told it, “I only knew him from living opposite him, and he was at the cab one day, and I came off the station