A Brief Synopsis
The true stories about me and my mates growing up in London.
Begins in the late sixty’s.
From around 6 to 26 years old.
Copyright 2019 by LS, all rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written consent from the author, except brief quotes for articles and reviews.
The Longer Synopsis
I started writing down funny things my children said and did in a diary, I did this so one day when they are much older I could show them what they said and did when they were kids. When I was writing down these funny and memorable events, I started reminiscing about my own childhood and younger adult self, then started to write down these memories in the back of the diary.
I thought it could be something additional for my kids to read. The reason I was doing this was because I didn’t take much notice of what my own parents told me about themselves and their antics. I wished I had asked more and listened to what my parents had to say about themselves, and what they got up to when they were kids and young adults. Thing is, they did tell me some funny stories that I do remember, but It’s too late to ask now, but at least what I can do is put pen to paper and write down my own memories and adventures.
My kids do ask me questions sometimes, like, how did we manage without mobile phones or the internet, what came before RFID bank cards. I tell them story’s about how hard it was to find a working telephone box that was piss and shit free, and how we collected the X rated business cards advertising various expert sexual engagements and consultations from these phone boxes, and the importance of having to be able to write letters, send cheques though the post, the existence of huge shopping catalogues, the value of having cash, and they laugh at me.
I told a friend what I was doing, and she asked me if she could have a look at the memoirs in the diary. She had told other friends and other people at work about it, and it made them reminisce and laugh. She said I bet other people would enjoy this read as much as she and other people did. And that I should make it into a book. I did, and so here it is…
Just some of the true uncensored and possibly incriminating stories of me and some mates growing up in London S.E.10, That I dare tell,
The following true stories about myself and some of my mates growing up in London starting in the late sixty’s from around 6 to 26 years old.
Contents…
CHAPTER 1: I’m a good boy, ask my Mum
CHAPTER 2: If the TV isn’t broke, don’t fix it
CHAPTER 3: Bombsite tours of London
CHAPTER 4: Toby’s a head
CHAPTER 5: All downhill from here
CHAPTER 6: Big fast Horny dog and some pretty flowers
CHAPTER 7: Coin Operated
CHAPTER 8: A Learning experience
CHAPTER 9: Angels and Strawberries
CHAPTER 10: Lead it be ours
CHAPTER 11: Neighbours fictious UFO
CHAPTER 12: Nailed It
CHAPTER 13: Party Balloons
CHAPTER 14: Big boys School
CHAPTER 15: Sometime later
CHAPTER 16: Schools still not out, Yet!
CHAPTER 17: Party Party
CHAPTER 18: Sick Lap dance
CHAPTER 19: A quick Introduction to BDSM
CHAPTER 20: Work and play at the same time
CHAPTER 21: I fall in love
In this book you’ll see all that I got,
I don’t make out to be something I'm not,
I don't need consent from anyone else,
All I can do is be true to myself,
CHAPTER 1:
I’M a good boy, ask my Mum
When I look back on my life, and the growing up, and all the things I got up to as a kid, with all the trouble I got into, I think that although I thought that I had a normal childhood, and I do realise now that compared with other kids that it had been very adventurous, mischievous and often a very dangerous one.
I realise now that from an early age we were all very street wise kids from south east London. We would often get a Red Rover Travel Pass for a few shillings each, then travel all over London from the age of six or seven on the red buses and underground trains (The Tube), sometimes coming home late, tired, and always very hungry.
We were never looking for trouble, but got into it often, never thinking of the consequences of some of the things my gang of friends got up to either.
I blame my mates, but the truth is that we were all as bad as each other. We all came from poor families, but this never really occurred to any of us, I thought my family was rich because we had carpet in our front room, although it was second hand and it only furnished the middle of the floor, the carpet had a wide margin around it, maybe one or two meters away from any wall.
I thought I was lucky though, I had a small mat on my cold lino covered bedroom floor that I could stand on during wintertime when I got out of bed in the morning, better than standing on ice cold lino like at my mates houses. I also thought I had loads of toys as well compared with my mates, but in realallity there were only a few.
I had an old leather lace up football, two action men (like a GI Joe) one had been a birthday present, and the other was second hand pink plastic naked from a junk market. But my favourite toy was a bent up and straightened out third hand and a bit rusty mechanical construction set called “Meccano”.
It was the school summer holidays, and it had been raining for a few days, so I had been to the local library and had got some books about medieval weapons that had been used during the Roman occupation of Britain.
The Trebuchet looked like it was easy to construct, so I decided to make one using my Meccano set. I thought Meccano would be a good choice to play with because it had never got me into trouble before, and I knew that if I got my dad’s saw and drill out from the shed in the back garden to make one from wood, that I would get told off, or possibly, and more likely, there would be an eventful trip to the local hospital involving me, an injury of some sort and blood.
Like the time I used a very sharp knife to make a raft called “Kon-Tiki” out of a press out balsa wood kit.
It was a cheap model kit of a raft I had seen made on TV program by a guy call “Thor Heyerdahl”, he was going to cross the Pacific Ocean on this raft to test a theory.
So, while putting this kit together I got pissed off breaking the small balsawood joints in the kit and resorted to using Dads Stanley knife to make clean cuts, but the Stanley knife slipped, and I cut my thumb badly. I told Mum, and she said, (without looking around at me)
ME: Mum! I cut my thumb!
MY MUM: Put your hand under the cold water tap in the kitchen for a while, till is stops, and we will put a plaster on it!
ME: Ok Mum!
So, with blood gushing out of my cut thumb I put my hand under the cold tap like I had been told to, but what she didn’t know is that I had been using Dad’s new very sharp Stanley knife instead of pressing out the parts in the kit with thumb and fingers. She had wondered why I was taking so long and came out to the kitchen to find out what was going on.
I had been using a white hand towel to cover the deep wound, when Mum saw the white hand towel looking very red, soaked in my blood, she pulled the towel back to have a look at my thumb and got a squirt of blood in her face. She tied the towel tight around my wrist, and we rushed out of our house and knocked on a neighbours door.
I was quickly taken to the hospital by our neighbour on his motorbike and sidecar. (That was fun!) I watched the doctor intently do his job on my thumb, and it was six painful stiches I have never forgotten. The big scar is still there to remind me of the event.
MUM: Did the stitches hurt?
ME: Yes, very much!
MUM: Well, this should teach you to be more careful in future!
But it never did.
Anyway, sharp knives and “Kon-Tiki” aside, I read the library book on medieval weapons and studied the pictures then made a copy of a Trebuchet from Meccano. I tested it in my bedroom using a lead fishing weight as a payload, the weight flew about 8 foot outwards and 6 foot into the air. I added an extra elastic band to it without first giving a test, then took the Trebuchet outside to demonstrate it on the pavement to the kids playing in the street. During the demonstration it threw the lead fishing weight though an upstairs window. The window was not ours.
Although I always blamed my mates for getting into trouble, they also blamed me, but as you have read, even my toys got me into trouble. My uncle gave me this well-used leather football when I was seven or eight, he had played semi-pro for Westham and Arsenal Football clubs.
I do wonder sometimes if that ball was ever one that had been kicked around on the hallowed turf of Arsenal or Westham during a proper match, I guess it had, it may had been worth a few pounds today? As kids we played football in the street, as there were few cars back then, around six cars and two motorbikes with sidecars in a street of 59 houses.
We played football in the summer until it got dark, or until a neighbour’s windows got broke. Annoyingly it was never me that kicked the ball that broke those windows back then, but it was me who had to go and knock on the door and get my football back from an angry neighbour. Eventually we got stopped from playing footy in the street, and we were made to go to the park to play football.
If we were playing football in the park and it rained the old leather football used to soak up the rain like a sponge, and mud got in the seams and the leather tie lace which held the blow-up rubber bladder inside the outer leather skin in place.
If you had ever headed this football previously in the rain and mud then you would know that you would have to duck or get out of its way if kicked in your direction, why? The first time this happened to me I had gone to head the ball into goal. My memory of this is in slow motion for some reason.
I saw the ball spinning end over end with water spraying off the lace, it had mud packed into the seams, and as I headed the ball I felt its heavy mud and waterlogged weight bury itself into my face, pushing my bottom lip and mouth downwards. I ended up with a black eye and bloody lip. It even had that much weight behind it that I ended up spinning head over heels then flat on my back. That day finished with a trip to hospital and two stitches inside my bottom lip. I did seem to go to hospital casualty a lot as a kid.
My two untroublesome harmless Action men got me into some innocent trouble at school one day. As a project my English teacher asked us (the class) to take home the schools English departments instamatic camera, and to take just one picture of our favourite toy and write an essay about it.
I decided to take a picture of my Action men doing exercises and getting fit before they engage the enemy like I had seen on a TV documentary.
I arranged them in a fitness pose and took a picture and as instructed I wrote my name with a black pen on the back. The picture was handed in to my English lesson teacher and I started writing an essay about it in class.
Later that day I was called to the principal’s office where my parents were sitting down in the area outside, they seemed to be waiting for me. They told me not to worry, it will get sorted out, but they did not divulge what the issue was. They went into the principal’s office shortly followed by my English teacher.
While I was outside I could hear some laughter, my parents walked outside with the principle and my English teacher apologising profusely, Mum and Dad looked at me and grinned. You see, I had decided to pose my action men as leap frogging over each other, since there was only one set of cloths between them I put the khaki trousers on the action man that was bending over, and the jacket top on the one leaping over the other.
I could not get the leaper to look like he was leaping, so I just stood him behind the other action man with his hands on the bent over action man’s hips. As I took the picture, ‘click’ the bent over action man’s trousers slipped down, I thought that will do, as I could only take one picture.
I guess you can get the idea of how the picture turned out. You see, the principle and my English teacher had not read my essay, but fortunately, my Dad had while he was waiting outside the principal’s office, and he brought it to the principle’s attention that in the essay the two army men were keeping fit by doing leapfrog exercises. I think Dad enjoyed telling the principle and my English teacher where they could stick the polaroid camera and take a picture.
Anyway, I was born at Saint Alfege’s Hospital in Greenwich on a Tuesday night at 9:31 PM. Mum is Italian on her side of the family, she worked part time in various unskilled jobs. She had been a cleaner, worked in a bakery, the local cinema kiosk where she sold cigarettes, sweets, ice cream and tickets for the films, and had various other jobs. Dad is British, he was a process worker for tunnel refineries, they made glucose from corn.
If you had ever lived in Greenwich and wondered what that bland smell of cooking oats was, well it was corn being cooked by the ton to convert it into glucose that my dad mixed, it was mostly sold to Mars for Mars bars and other sweets I was told, and sometimes he brought some home to put on my cornflakes.
Sometimes he exchanged a kilo bag or so of this sweet white powder with the guys from the factory next door, they made push up “freezer pops”, the sort that were in a clear plastic tubes that you froze at home. Our small fridge/freezer would be full of these during the summer, I was very popular handing these out on hot summer days after playing street football.
Can’t imagine what people would think these days if my dad was seen peddling these one kilo clear zip locked polythene bags full of white glucose powder in a pub!
He had been a lorry driver in World war two, driving the troops around and delivering tanks and supplies to the front line. When the war was over he became a lorry driver for a big timber merchant, but strangely we never owned a car? He had been a bit of a lad when he was younger, he told me about his first job when he got to be an apprentice cooper.
Coopers fixed and made wooden barrels for various trades that needed a container for holding fluids mostly, like beer, whisky, olive oil, etc.
He had only been there a day when he was introduced to a perk of the job. When a sprit’s barrel came in for repair like a whisky barrel, the coopers would then boil a kettle of water and pour this into the wooden barrel. It would be hidden away and left overnight; this would then draw out the whisky from the wood.
In the afternoon there would be enough for the workers to have a few shots each. The following day Dad was given his share, except at the age of 14 he wasn’t used to drinking whiskey, and he fell asleep in the hay used to pack the barrels. Dad was found sleeping the whiskey off by one of the managers who was on his way home that night. Dad was sacked, LOL.
My Dad and uncles had all been in the war, some had stories that they would share, some were quiet about what they did and what they had seen on the front line. There were 7 brothers and 7 sisters on both sides of my dad’s and mum’s family’s, so get togethers were fun.
Mum used to tell me stories about when she was a kid and growing up in Deptford. Mums dad, who was my Italian grandad came to the UK with two brothers and a sister. They had established a few barbers’ shops, and some fruit and veg shops as well in Deptford, Bermondsey and Rotherhithe.
One summers day my uncle Franko, who was my mums’ older brother had bought himself a bottle of coca cola to drink. There was never any pocket money or spending money to buy luxuries back then, and coke-cola was a luxury, so mum was envious. He was standing around with my mum who was playing hopscotch on the pavement outside their dad’s barber shop in Deptford. My mum was about seven or eight at the time.
He was making a big deal of the cold coca cola drink, saying how nice tasty and cool the drink was, and that he had spent all the money he had got from dad (My grandad) by sweeping the barbers floor of customers hair for the day.
He finished the drink and went inside the shop leaving my mum to continue playing hopscotch on the pavement, he then appeared back outside with a full bottle of coke. He said to my mum that he had bought two bottles of coke cola.
He offered my mum a drink from the bottle. He told her she needed to drink it quick to gain the benefit of the taste and coldness. She took the bottle and tipped it end up and glugged down the contents, she suddenly stops and profusely vomits. My uncle thought it was hilarious. He had re-filled the old coke cola bottle with vinegar.
CHAPTER 2:
If the TV isn’t broke, don’t fix it
We, like many other households had a monochrome TV, it was a medium sized 21-inch screen with rotary tuning for the two channels we had back then in London which were regional ITV (Thames TV) and the BBC.
There were bigger size TV’s, like the 27-inch model, but they were expensive to rent. No one I knew of owned a TV back then, everyone rented them from “Radio Rentals”, mainly because before TV’s had been invented, everybody had a radio, these were very often rented from a “Radio Rentals” high street shop. Radio Rentals seemed to have cornered the market with radios and people just stayed with them when TV’s came out.
Our TV often stopped working, Dad used to bang or thump the top and sides of the television if the picture reception got bad, this usually happened without fail during a live football match, and this just caused the TV’s delicate insides to go wrong. But that was never a problem if you rented your TV.
A TV engineer would come out the same day if you asked them to in the morning. One day in the afternoon after I had got home from school, a TV engineer turned up at our house to fix the set (TV set) because the bottom of the picture had shrunk to the middle of the screen, and people on the TV had oversized egg shaped heads, while I found this funny, Dad didn’t, since there was an important football match on TV the following evening he wanted to watch.
I watched the engineer unplug the TV and then remove the hardboard back, he then fiddled with these glass tubes inside the TV, he plugged the power lead plug back in and turned it on, the screen flickered into life then he fiddled about with a small electrical screwdriver on the circuit board until the picture was perfect.
I had watched this intently and made mental notes of this process. Next day when I got home from primary school (I was about six) and Mum was in the garden hanging out some washing, I decided to have a look in the back of the TV.
So, I turned the TV around like I had seen the TV engineer do, then he unplugged the set before taking off the TV’s back cover, so I did the same. I used the screwdriver from my Meccano set to get the small screws out of the back of the TV.
The first thing I noticed was a piece of paper stuck to the inside of the TV’s case with a little plan of the circuits and position and model numbers of the glass valves, so I make a drawing copy of it to keep.
I pulled all the valves out individually to see what was different between them as they all looked very similar. I then swapped two to see what would happen when I turned the TV on. The two valves glowed a weird violet and buzzed, there was a squeaky speaking sound coming from the loudspeaker but no picture on the screen.
I decided that it would be a good idea to stand well back and watch to see what would happen next. Then a small amount of grey swirling smoke appeared, not a lot at first, then a lot of grey smoke, then this largeish round thing started glowing hot, then red hot, then sparkles started flying out. I had better turn it off and put it back the way it was, I am now thinking.
I turned it off and let the TV cool for a while. I then pull out all the cooled down valves and line them up in size on the floor to compare them all.
Then Mum comes in. She is sniffing the smoke and looking at the dismantled TV set and bits on the floor. This is not good.
When Mum comes back down to earth from outer space, I explain to her that I have made a drawing and it was all going to be ok. She stands over me until the TV is all put back together. It was then turned on. I stood back a bit and held my breath just in case I had to make a quick exit from the expected explosion and flames.
It worked fine, and Dad got to see his football match that evening. The following weekend me and Mum went to visit my Auntie and uncle in Orpington. A lot of the area around her house was still open land then, and I used to play in the big fields behind her house usually chasing farm animals and coming back dirty and covered in cow shit I had slipped in.
This time I came back to an open back door (dirty and covered in cow shit as usual) and overheard them talking about my TV exploit, I walked in on the conversation and the chatting stopped amongst smiles, I was expecting crossed looks, so I was confused.
Next day was a normal school day with a quick run home in time to see the kid’s afternoon cartoons on TV. I switched on the TV and Mum gave me a glass of milk to drink.
MY MUM: There is a surprise for you in your bedroom,
ME: What is it?
MY MUM: Go see,
I ran to my bedroom and opened the door and looked around. Nothing there?
MY MUM: It’s behind the door!
I looked behind the door, and there it was, a small old Marconi TV in a polished wood cabinet.
MY MUM: We don’t want you taking the Radio rentals TV apart anymore, It’s not ours! This was Uncle and Aunties old television, it does not work, but you can take it apart if you want, don’t plug it in! Go to the library and ask for some books about fixing television sets,
ME: Thank you!
PS: I fiddled with it, then plugged it in. (Bang!) and then went to the library to get some books on TV repair.
CHAPTER 3:
Bombsite tours of London
All of the London council boroughs had been bombed during World War two, not one London borough escaped the carnage. A lot of these bombs that ended up in Greenwich were meant for the Royal Arsenal munition’s factory in Woolwich or other sites in London of significance.
But the bombs often fell in Greenwich, either they had missed their target on the way in, or the bombers just dumped their bombs on their way back to lighten their aircraft, so that they could pick up speed and get more height and fly away as quickly as they could back to German airfields. Many bombs fell on Greenwich this way, as they followed the route of the river Thames back.
V1’s and V2’s bombs also fell locally, On Saturda