Art, Basketball and Wine
by Lee Cooper
To my grandmother, who gave me the inspiration,
To my loving wife, Annette, who truly showed me the way,
And my daughter Isabel who will hopefully carry the memories...
To my loving wife, Annette, who truly showed me the way,
And my daughter Isabel who will hopefully carry the memories...
'If love was for what I sought, then you have given me more than I ever knew existed...'
“In the midway of this our mortal life, I found myself in a gloomy wood, astray, gone from the path direct and even to tell, that forest, how robust and rough its growth, which to remember only, my dismay renews, in bitterness not far from death. Yet to disclose of what there good befell, all else will I relate discovered there.”
Dante - The Divine Comedy
Introduction
2003
I open the shutters to an immense blue sky and the bright sunlight warms my face. Already the birds have begun their morning chorus and the deep green countryside fills my view. Fields of glistening, silvery olive trees sweep down into the valley below. Rows of precisely manicured vineyards cover the hills, interspersed with tall, pointed cypress trees and forests of maritime pine, oak and chestnut. Small stone farmhouses are dotted about the landscape and in the far distance a five hundred year old castle sits proudly, taking in the same wondrous scene as me.
“How clever of you to think of moving to Italy” someone told us. Actually, the Chianti hills in Tuscany are the setting and it’s not as though we’re the first people ever to think of moving here. I look at it as though I’m finally coming home. After all my grandmother was from Naples, so I can claim that a very small part of this beautiful country is in my blood. I’m not saying that our lives are necessary determined before we’re born, but for me, the Italian connection did have a strong bearing on my motivation for eventually succumbing to this magical country. Although putting up with thirty years of bad English weather may have had something to do with it! As you might tell, my wife and I are very happy here.
However the story of how and why I came to be here is a long one. To begin it I’d like to go back to 1924...
My grandmother was born on January 8th in Castellammare-Di-Stabia, a large, infamous, coastal town in Italy about thirty kilometres south of Naples. She came from a very poor family with four brothers, Mario, Giuseppe, Charlie and Raffaele and three sisters, Tina, Anna and her, Giulia. Her Father died, tragically after a devastating flood that hit Naples. He was protecting a company warehouse and was beaten to death by looters. This meant Giulia’s mother had to bring up seven children by herself. She actually gave birth to eleven children, Gaetano in 1913, who died of an illness called croup when he was only five and three more daughters, Anna in 1908, Teresa in 1911 and another Giulia in 1922, who all died within the first few years of life. Those were difficult times between the two world wars. Things were so difficult in fact, that Giulia, my grandmother was sent to a convent for several years to be looked after by the local nuns. Eventually she returned to the family, a family where all the children chipped in to help. Their mother took several jobs to support the children as well as doing all the domestic chores. Years later, Giulia and her sister Tina still talked about some of the stories of how they managed to survive and of their strong, proud and intelligent mother. The seven children were very special themselves all living well into their eighties and beyond. All except for Raffaele, who died in his fifties from a brain tumour. He was an enigmatic character, one of those rare people who everybody talks about with a smile of great affection, many years later. How lucky we are to meet such people.
My grandmother met my Grandfather, Ken towards the end of the second world war. He was from Byers Green, Durham in the north east of England, kind of a poor equivalent of southern Italy. He was with the Royal Air Force and was stationed at various allied air bases in Cairo, Jerusalem and eventually in Giulia’s hometown of Castellammare, where they met at a local dance. My granddad would love to have settled in Italy, he tried to get work there and nearly succeeded in Turin, but that was a million miles from Naples and a million miles from her family. Like me he was a real Italophile, it was his dream to retire to Italy, a dream he sadly never fulfilled. I guess in my moving to Italy, part of me was fulfilling his dream.
After a fairytale wedding in Castellammare, like many southern Italians, they made the move to England. England was a country with a few more opportunities than Italy after the war, as the Italian economy was crippled with paying hefty war reparations. They moved in with Ken’s parents who, by now had moved south and owned a small-holding in Sidlesham near Chichester in West Sussex. It was tough for a young Neapolitan girl acclimatising to marriage and life in a new country. Everything was different, the language, the weather and the food. Imagine an Italian finding Spaghetti available only in tins, with Heinz tomato sauce! The close proximity and suffocating attention of Ken’s mother proved too much and eventually they moved out to their own cottage in Mill Lane where they gave birth to their first daughter, my mum, Jane. At this point Giulia's sister, Tina came over from Italy, at first to help with the young family, but she would eventually stay, marry, have a family of her own and make her life in England too... Giulia would have some moral support and the two sisters would forge an inseparable bond together. Giulia and Ken then moved to Manhood Lane, in Sidlesham, where their second daughter, Lisa was born. before deciding to switch towns to Worthing, first to High Street where their third daughter, Fiorella was born and then finally settling in Normandy Road. Years later I would go back with Giulia, Ken and my mother and visit their old haunts in Sidlesham and reminisce about days gone by.
The town of choice was Worthing, another sleepy seaside town on the south coast in Sussex, made famous by Oscar Wilde in his play, 'The Importance of being Earnest'. The father of Jack, having a first class ticket to Worthing in his pocket. In fact Wilde also wrote 'An Ideal Husband' while staying in Worthing. It’s glory days as a fashionable resort of the day-tripping London set had all but faded by the 1950’s and what was left was an unassuming, down-at-heel town with a population of retiring pensioners, nursing homes outnumbering discotheques by ten to one!
It was in Worthing that my Father’s parents also lived. Not quite as exotic as the Naples side of my family. Arthur and Pat, with their two boys, John and Michael, my father. They were typical southerners, nice, good people, hardworking, shy, reserved, but rather overshadowed by the volatile, passionate Italian side of my family. However they were good grandparents, although Pat did tend to show some favouritism to her other son’s family as her daughter-in-law, Janet lost her mother at a young age. This wasn’t really a problem for me and in time my relationship did become closer with my ‘nan’.
My parents met...
Part 1
The Childhood Years
(1968-1986)
“When I turn back to look upon those years that flying by have scattered all my thoughts, I’m startled and feel so very naked. Life runs away and never rests a moment and death runs after it with a mighty stride. Anticipation and memory weigh down present things and things from the past. My days swifter than a fawn have fled.”
Petrarch - The Canzoniere
Chapter 1
Tarring Road/Kipling Avenue
1968 was a year of change. The 'swinging sixties' were drawing to a close and the 'psychedelic', flower power 70's were beginning. Flared trousers, platform shoes, floral patterns and colours in every shade of brown were the order of the day. Man was orbiting the earth, as David Bowie sang, 'in a little tin can' and would soon be walking on the moon. Revolution was in full flow, as the youth of Paris were voicing their opinions in street demonstrations that would spill out to Prague and the rest of Europe. America was at war with Vietnam, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were being assassinated and Marvin Gaye was the singing the soundtrack of the era 'What's going on?'
At 22.30 on Christmas eve I was born. Lee Jason Cooper, missing the traditional Christmas day birthday card and present from the mayor by one and a half hours. The nurses apparently took pity on my mother and rallied round to get me a gift. Of course being born on Christmas eve meant I was destined to ever get only one present a year, a birthday/Christmas combo if you will! And with a name like 'Lee Cooper', the oldest Jeans manufacturer in Europe, was guaranteed to get a laugh from or bring a smile to some people every time I introduced myself.
My memories of childhood were generally positive. Our first house was a three-bedroomed terraced house on the busy Tarring road, number 98. My mother quickly gave birth to her second child, my sister, Rita, who was born June 1970. Lee and Rita. We were named after two characters from the popular American soap opera, Peyton Place, starring Ryan O'Neal and Mia Farrow. In 1971 we moved to a quieter area in Goring and a fairly new house in Kipling Avenue, number 139, this is where these earliest memories come from...
Drama started early on in life for me. When I was three years old I was having a party with some friends and we were dancing to 'Bungalow Bill' by the Beatles. I can't remember the accident, but I do have memories of being stitched up at Worthing hospital afterwards. I must have slipped and fell through an internal glass door, cutting my forehead and slashing my upper lip. You can just imagine the blood and panic as a neighbour, Helen Hill/Bartlett was called in to rush me to hospital.
Every so often my mum tells people how her little blonde toddler said to her, “If I die, mummy, then you can have another little boy.” What I didn't know, was that she was pregnant again with her next child, a boy! Of course I survived the multiple stitching, amidst screams of agony, but I looked a real state for the next two years.
My accident was rather overshadowed by the birth of my mum's third child, my brother, Carl. He was born mentally retarded, although he looked like a normal child, but we wouldn't discover this for a few more years...
The one thing that really saved me from a life of torment was a chance meeting with a woman on the street. She took one look at my face and said to my mum, “You know you can have something done about that.” That something turned out to be plastic surgery. To this day I don't know why the hospital in Worthing hadn't suggested that too! Anyway I was checked into the Royal Victoria hospital in East Grinstead for a week and my face was transformed. Even though a scar is visible, it has never been a problem for me, although a few year's ago an elderly woman came up to me and said, “What's the matter with your face then?” Honestly, some people...
My brother Alan was born the following year, 1974 and our family was complete. Four children separated by six years. As you can imagine it was quite a mad house! I was the protective older brother, Rita the sweet, moody only girl, Carl the special needs child and finally Alan, the youngest and for who growing up was probably the most difficult.
Kipling Avenue was a nice home and despite my early accident, I have fairly good memories there. This was the early 70's, Rita and me would play in the neighbourhood with the local kids, one boy I remember, Stephen Ralph Justin, who was our age and became a good friend. A new row of shops had just been built on the Strand main road at Boxgrove and I used to climb over some garage walls to buy sweets. Our Italian grandma would come round every Wednesday and bring us these awful 'caramac' chocolate bars.
At the weekends Rita or I used to go and stay with my grandma, or her sister, my great auntie Tina, with Tina it was like having an extra grandma. She and her husband, Michael lived in Halewick lane in Sompting with their two boys, Frank and David. They would take us out for the day and buy us loads of sweets, it was great! David was training to be a pastry chef and Frank was a carpenter. Frank was also into fishing, he made his own nets and even built a boat! We would go to the seaside in Lancing and hang out. They both had motorbikes and played amateur football, those were great times!
When it was our turn to stay at grandma's, my granddad would pick us up on the Friday afternoon and we would go with them on their cleaning job to the main Barclays bank in Chapel road Worthing. We would play hide 'n seek, table tennis and darts while they cleaned! On the Saturday their youngest daughter, our auntie Fiorella would take us somewhere fun for the day and later to one of her jobs. This was the mid 70's and she was into amongst other things American soul music and groups such as The Jacksons, Heatwave, Earth Wind and Fire and Kool and the Gang. This is probably where I got some of my musical taste from. On the Sunday we would go to St. Mary's Catholic church, as my grandmother, being Italian was naturally a Catholic. My granddad had converted and my mother brought us up as Catholic too, although my dad never converted. For this reason we went to English Martyrs Catholic school. I was christened as a Catholic and took my first holy communion and even became an altar boy for a while at St Michael's church in Hayling Rise. The Priest was Father Harry, he seemed quite pleasant. Years later we heard he had run off with a married woman! We would only go for the last half hour to take communion and then the rest of our family would meet up at grandma's house for Sunday lunch.
Sunday lunch at my grandma's... now there was an institution! You could say it was a typical Italian style occasion, she would cook for between ten and twenty people every Sunday! And of course I learnt all my best recipes from her. Three and four course meals with the most incredible pasta sauce that nobody else could master. Sherry and red wine flowed freely and afterwards we all flaked out on the sofa for a couple of hours until tea time! In the summer we would all go on these incredible picnics to various locations in Sussex, like Goring seafront, George's Lane in West Chiltington, Whiteways Lodge near Arundel, Stanmer park in Brighton and Hotham park in Bognor where my great granddad lived. We would sometimes visit him too, he had a piano which we would try to play and would make us tea. We would stop at the windmill pub in Angmering on the way home. For the picnics we would go carrying bags ladened with mountains of food and we would play football, rounders and go on long walks in the woods. These were wonderful times and contiinued for some thirty years. It wasn't until the death of my granddad in 2000 that the Sunday traditions finally came to an end.
Christmas was just the same. One year my family would all pile round my grandma's house, Tina's the next and my Nan's the year after! All on a three-year cycle. For my mum and dad it was a source of constant irritation, but for us kids it was a great adventure. Loading up the car with blankets and pyjamas, bedding down in various bedrooms and living rooms. On T.V. there were always great films, family favourites included, The Italian Job, The Great Escape, The Sound of Music and The Wizard of Oz and disaster films like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. Every year we would always watch Tarzan with Johnny Weismuller and laugh along to the Marx Brothers. There was also midnight mass, huge banquets and coming down on Christmas morning to huge piles of up to thirty presents! A Tonka truck, Leeds football kit, a tracksuit, Scalextrics and Bontempi organ were among some of my most memorable presents.
Chapter 2
Italy
It is from my earliest childhood that I have memories of visiting Italy. I actually first went in September 1969 when I was nine months old. These were the days before cheap flights and we travelled by ferry and overnight train through France and on to Naples. My nan accompanied us and apparently there was a bug going round and everyone apart from me was sick on the boat, I had a strong stomach even back then! I have some photos of me crawling around the amphitheatre in Pompeii, somewhere I would revisit several times as an adult. We went again in 1972 when I was three years old, this time with Rita.
We also went as a family in 1975 and this is probably where my memories come from. This time we went by plane from Heathrow to Capodichino airport in Naples. We stayed at my auntie Anna's house in via Coppola, which was apparently part of the red light district in Castellammare. It was in a large apartment block that was eventually damaged in the Irpinia earthquake of 1980. My memories of the house and area are quite vivid. In the morning we would walk to the bakery and buy bread rolls, ham and mozerella for the day and the shop keepers in the 'Tabachi' would always give us children a few sweets they kept on the counter. I loved the salami and black coffee and was already crawling out of my cot and stealing them from 'zia' Anna's larder on our first visit when I was ten months old! We would visit countless relatives and be welcomed by tables ladened with copious amounts of food, food that we had never eaten in England...
On day trips we were all bundled into tiny Fiat 500 cars and driven to Pompeii to visit the ruins or the royal palace and gardens at Casserta, Sorrento and the magical island of Capri, where we would go off the beaten track and play in a garden with stone lions that I could never find when I returned as an adult. These days would be followed by gargantuan meals. Anna and my zio Mimi had two children, Emilia and Antonio who were a similar age to my mum and there were other uncles and aunties and cousins. Most notably my grandma's brother Raffaele and his son Franco who was a real anglophile. He was a trainee architect and had sung in his own pop group called 'the Lovers', singing Beatles covers.
The seafront in Castellammare was always packed in the evenings for the customary 'passegiata' stroll. They had a park with children's bicycles and of course hundreds of scooters. One evening my sister Rita got lost among the crowds, which caused a real panic. The ice cream and granita were far better than anything we had in England, we were very lucky to be enjoying all this when most English people were holidaying in rainy old Bognor Regis, Skegness or Blackpool!
In between these visits my auntie Lisa got married to Derek at St. Mary's Catholic church in Worthing and I was on page boy duties. We spent days out as a young family to places like Chessington zoo, Hampton Court Palace and Eastbourne, we didn't have a car in those days so our mum made use of special train ticket offers to ensure we didn't miss out.
Chapter 3
English Martyrs
At four years and nine months old I started Primary school, we didn't usually go to nursery schools in those days. It was a relatively happy time for me, at least the memory of it was. English Martyrs was a Catholic school that had only just been built the previous year. The classes were mixed ages and we had the chance to begin the history of the school. I enjoyed the lessons and quickly made lots of friends. Years later I met a former teacher, Miss Collins, who was the sister of the 'Shirley Valentine' actress Pauline Collins and she said I was quite naughty. I have to say I do remember sitting outside the headmistress, Miss Wall's office on more than one occasion! I think it was more a case of boyish enthusiasm than naughtiness though.
Those were the days of playing fields, which have now mostly been sold off and houses built on, kiss chase, British bulldog, pom pom 123, collecting football cards with the little pink bubble gum inside and then Panini stickers, of horrible school dinners always with custard. The teachers were real characters. One of my favourites was Mr Waddington, the sports teacher. He favoured rugby over football, but nurtured my passion for sports in general. I was to play for the school football and rugby teams under him and in my last year he was instrumental in borrowing some high jump equipment from neighbouring George Pringle school and I first discovered my extraordinary leaping ability! Mr Prentice, who I impressed with my times tables and Miss Shield with her high pitched screeching shooooooosh voice! We went on various school trips too. Some I can remember were to London to the old Wembley stadium, where we got to hold the F.A.cup and the Commonwealth Institute. With Mrs Argent to Wembley arena to see Olga Korbut in the Champions All gymnastics tournament and local places like Woods mill.
I started good friendships at English Martyrs, some carried on into my high school and some I lost touch with. Martin Hagues, Sean Neal, Dermot Mcglaughlin, Nigel Hughes, Richard Iago, Joanna Martello, Jenny Arksey, William Randell and Dominic Morrey to name but a few. I went to some memorable birthday parties, most notably at Jenny Arksey's and Dermot Mclaughlin's where we went to the cinema to see 'Thank god it's Friday'. One birthday party I had at my house the boys ran riot and it was the last birthday party I ever had! The photo I took in my last year with Miss Bond would be remembered by some of the pupils many, many years later...
Of course the early to mid seventies weren't all fun. The Conservative government in England under Ted Heath, combined with the worldwide energy crisis and subsequent miner's strikes brought the country to its knees. The three day working week and electricity shortage meant we were huddled together in cold, dark winters round candlelit tables, but for us kids it was an adventure. In 1974 the government fell and Labour took control under Harold Wilson who improved things slightly and then under James Callaghan, unemployment and inflation rose and the strikes came back, we were no better off.
Rita joined me at English Martyrs and in one of my last years the school put on its first major concert production, Oliver. We both had parts and I was even understudy to Fagin! My one and only acting experience. Rita's daughter was to take up that mantle many years later. I was more really into art then, competing with other students in poster competitions at school, at home I especially enjoyed drawing birds.
In those days going to restaurants wasn't popular in England, but I got my first taste of some real quality food. My parents took us up to London to the theatre to see the musical 'Annie'. We also went for a meal at a place called 'Ben's of Westminister'. There was our family and my grandma and grandad. It obviously made an impression on me as I can still remember the experience to this day. It was downstairs and very elegant. We all had starters. My mum and me had paté and my dad had whitebait fish. The main course was a roast, but the gravy had a slight bacony flavour, I thought it was wonderful. The show was good too! We went up to London on day trips on other occasions too. I have some photos of a visit to Madame Tussauds taken with The Beatles, Muhammed Ali, Elvis and Pele.
Chapter 4
Highdown Avenue
After the birth of Alan in 1974, our house in Kipling avenue had become too small and in 1976 we moved into a four bedroom house in Highdown Avenue, a more up-market street than Kipling avenue. The road was in the Thomas A Beckett area of Worthing and while ours was a four bedroomed semi-detached house there were some rather large detached houses in this street. We actually bought the house off my dad's brother John for a good price as it was in a bit of a bad state of repair. There were four downstairs rooms, as well as a garden that looked like a bomb had hit it! My uncle John was a bit of a property speculator and would buy and sell houses like they were going out of fashion! John and my auntie Janet had three children, Gary, Sharon and Donna, but we only really ever saw them at Christmas at my Nan's house.
My dad had also changed jobs, from working at a lense making factory, Marylebone optical company, to Beechams pharmaceuticals. He was to stay there for the rest of his working life, until taking voluntary retirement in his mid-fifties. He worked a lot of night shifts, overtime and also did some taxi driving for a company called Dial-a-car, to be able to afford having four children. As children we never really appreciated the many sacrifices our parents made to bring us up. My mum in between having four children, worked part time at Kayser Bonder as a machinist, Tesco on the provisions counter and at Beechams as a 'prick tester'! The pricks being needles of course...
England in 1976 was memorable for being the hottest summer on record in British history and would set a precedent for summers to come. There was a water shortage and invasion of ladybirds, we would spend whole days at the Lido open air swimming pool on the sea front in Worthing and maybe even have the odd dip in the sea, it was that hot! I was 7 and Rita 6. We would play outside in the street with the neighbourhood kids. Next door lived Julie and Richard Nichols, who we quickly made friends with. Their parents had been divorced and they lived with their mother, who was a nasty piece of work and their step-father, Terry. He used to call everyone 'cock' so we called him 'the old cock'! They were a few years older than us, Julie was quite pretty and Richard rather camp. We had a lot of fun cycling our bikes everywhere, especially over the 'humps' in Rectory road and the woods at Hill Barn. I even had my first kiss with Julie! I contacted her years later through facebook and she couldn't even remember me! Obviously these times made more of an impression on me than her.
Another friend I can recall was an older guy called Wade Winton who lived in Chantry road. We played football in Tarring high school, he was an Arsenal fan. I liked Leeds united. They were one of the top teams in the early 70's and Lee – Leeds... it was an easy choice! They had some great players then, Don Revie the manager, Allan 'sniffer' Clarke, Peter Lorrimer, Frankie and Eddie Grey and Billy Bremner... inspiring a generation of kids, including me!
On TV there were only two channels, BBC and ITV and although there were many children's programmes on offer, some of our favourites being, the Banana splits, Crackerjack, Why don't you, Multi Coloured Swap Shop, Blue Peter, Hong Kong Phooey, Take Hart, Rentaghost and the Tomorrow People, my programme of choice was the adult programme, 'Crown Court', although it didn't encourage an interest in a career in Law! I liked the idea of becoming an Architect. We all enjoyed John Cleese in Fawlty Towers, Patrick McGoohan psychological drama series The Prisoner and the very un-politically correct 'Mind your Language'.
My dad used to take us to the local library in Worthing and I loved books on nature and adventure books. Enid Blyton's much maligned Famous Five and Mallory Towers were some of our favourites.
Julie and Richard soon moved away up north and we never saw them again. And so new friends replaced old ones. Across the road lived Jeremy Arnold and his hillbilly brother Duncan and kooky sister Marianne. Jeremy got me into cricket, those were the great Botham test matches against Australia and the West Indies. We played Subbuteo in his house and tennis in the street. There was also Nazi sympathiser, Henry Nichols, who would stand on the road in his big army boots holding a live WWII hand grenade! He later went on to be an antiques dealer. There was a nursery school on the corner of Highdown and Highfield road, run by an older couple, one summer their pretty young Canadian granddaughter was staying with them, all the boys fancied her and we christened her 'titty'... for obvious reasons!
1977 was jubilee year, which meant street parties and jubilee parties everywhere and Highdown Avenue was no exception. I remember another jubilee party too at dad's work, Beechams. Round the corner in Highfield road lived an very fat, old widow called Mrs Tanty. All the neighbourhood children would visit her regularly as she showered us all with sweets! Her house was a complete mess, but that added to the charm. Another guy who gave out free sweets was a Middle Eastern man we would see on our way to school, who said he was a Sultan of Oman, he seemed genuine enough to take sweets from and we're still alive today to tell the tale! There was a large park on the Tarring road, called Durrington Rec even though it wasn't really in Durrington. We would spend many hours there playing. There were swings, roundabout and a slide there and two full size football pitches where I spent many days honing my football skills. There was also a large pavilion and we would climb on the roof. Unfortunately the most memorable thing that happened there was one day when Carl was hassling some older boys and one of them pulled a knife out. He threw it at Carl and it hit him just above the eye. There was blood everywhere, we rushed him to the petrol station shop and the attendant refused to call an ambulance. We ran home and my mum's friend Sheila drove him to hospital. Luckily it didn't hit him in the eye and he was stitched up. The police caught the guy who did it, who we never found the name of and Carl received some money as compensation.
At that time we didn't have a car so a school friend's mother used to drive us to school, after that we would walk down Rectory road from Thomas A' Beckett to English Martyrs school and then I got a Purple/Pink racing bike and became the first pupil to cycle to school! As the years went by, more bicycles appeared as other kids rode to school too. I joined the St. John's ambulance after school club and went with a girl called Tracey Lidbetter. She was the daughter of one of mum's friends Jane. Mum had two best friends who she kept in contact with her whole life, Jane Lidbetter/Morris and Sheila Lehane, who lived with us for a while as a lodger, playing Elvis Presley and Neil Diamond at full volume! I would always buy a packet of barbecue flavoured hula hoops on the way to the club and my love affair with crisps was born! There was a corner sweet shop at Thomas A' Beckett where we would always visit as soon as we got our pocket money... 70's sweets were the best! Fruit salad, black jacks, halfpenny chews, sherbet dip, flying saucers, curly wurlys, space dust and in the summer those long ice pops.
About this time, we decided that something had to be done about our house. The decision was made to knock down two of the internal walls, thereby creating two enormous rooms, a kitchen/diner and lounge/living room. It was a successful if messy operation involving lots of dust, some RSJs and a lot of work. The next step was to transform the kitchen into some futuristic/rustic affair involving black units, a cool breakfast bar style table, an orange mixer sink and terracotta brown wall tiles. All completed to a very high standard. My cousin Frank then built this incredible pine slatted ceiling including several spot lights, centre strip light and a big bowl lamp that you could pull up and down. There were only two problems. The first was my dad tried to do the floor tiles himself and it went horribly wrong, as some parts sank, leaving several cracked tiles. The other problem was the dining room part was never finished. These two things were to become a bone of contention between my parents. It was a shame because it was very nearly a perfect job and us kids enjoyed it anyway!
The late 70's was the disco era. and the emergence of the big Hollywood blockbuster films. In those days we would queue up round Worthing's Odeon cinema for hours to get in to see them, 1975's Jaws, 1977's Star Wars and Close Encounters, 1978's Superman and Grease which I actually saw seven times at the cinema! A personal favourite was a film that my auntie Lisa took us to see, 'Escape and Return to Witch mountain'. My parents would drop my sister, Rita and me to the Saturday morning pictures at the Odeon, one of our favourite cartoons was 'Chico the rainmaker'.
In 1979, at only ten years old, I bought my first single record, which was the slightly hillbilly twinged Dave Edmunds 'Girls Talk', which interestingly enough was written by Elvis Costello. In 1979 I also bought my first Album, the Bee Gees greatest hits, after hearing the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever, without realising that Barry Gibb was aping those great black falsetto American singers. When I stayed at my auntie Tina's I would play some of my cousin Frank's older Bee Gees records and one of my favourites became 1975's 'It's time for love' by the Chi-Lites, who would in turn inspire the Bee Gees new sound, paving the way for the disco invasion. My auntie Fiorella gave me her old music centre. So I could now play my own records, cassettes and listen to the radio, rather than tamper with my dad's stereo. My dad was into high quality hi-fi equipment and bought separate amplifier, record deck, cassette deck and these incredibly large speakers and I would sometimes play his Saturday night fever or Hair soundtracks and the Electric light Orchestra records at a very high volume, obviously when he was at work!
Chapter 5
Chatsmore
The 1970's gave way to the 1980's and the first notable event was Britain's first female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher winning 1979's general election. She came to symbolize Britain's change from a mining and working class society, to a new city based financial prosperity as caricatured by spitting image and Harry Enfield's 'loadsamoney'. The 1980's were epitomized by the rubiks cube puzzle, the filofax, Dallas, shoulder pads, big hair, jade, cerise and electric blue. Sylvester Stallone's Rocky was everybody's hero. Madonna and Michael Jackson were the mega-popstars. The world was obsessed with the nuclear threat. The AIDS virus was ready to decimate the population. MTV and Sky tv were born. In 1980 John Lennon was assassinated and the world was shocked as it had been sixteen years earlier with the assassination of John F Kennedy.
The beginning of a new decade brought a change of schools for me. As we had been brought up Catholic, the choice was Chatsmore Catholic high school. It was in Goring-by-sea and seemed like quite a trek for us as we lived in Highdown Avenue. In fact it was only two and a half miles away! By this time my dad could finally afford a car, but my mum didn't drive. He'd had cars before he was married, big American cars with huge engines were his passion. When he was dating my mum though he had a three-wheeled Bond. His first car this time round was a little white Austin 1100 that he bought off my uncle Michael. Eventually it would be replaced by an enormous brown Zephyr and then a really cool blue Triumph 2.5 Pi.
For my first year at Chatsmore we were put in completely mixed level classes and my form teacher was the geography teacher, Miss Timpson, who later married and became Mrs Boyce. She played tennis and would later become my cousin David's mixed doubles partner. She taught us tennis as well as geography on two very uneven grass courts. I quickly became 'the teacher's pet' along with another boy, Giles Brandon. We became friends and developed a very healthy competitive friendship, each one trying to outdo the other. We lost contact after leaving school, but met up 27 years later. He had married, moved to live in Luxembourg and had two daughters.
I soaked up all the new subjects that first year. Geography, History, Art, P.E. and Classical studies, which I found fascinating and where my love of all things Greek and Roman began. Also I was introduced to a new sport that would become a big part of my future, Basketball. The school hall had two fixed rings and as well as during lessons I would play at lunchtime and after school. I made the school team and as well as football, rugby, cricket, tennis and athletics teams. I would play for all these school teams, which would mean competing against other schools after regular school lessons. As our school was relatively small (about 550 pupils an all, or 110 per year) it meant we were never that successful, although one year we did win a cricket tournament up in Ardingly.
As well as friends from English Martyrs I made new friends at Chatsmore and in my first two years formed a group that would stay together through high school. Giles Brandon, Anthony Chasteauneuf, Jan Wojyck, Robert Hayes, Grant Goodman, David Leitch, Joanna Martello, Georgina Horsefield, etc.
At break times we would sit on the playing field chatting. The boys wore stay pressed trousers and button down shirts. The rubik's cube was all the craze, I first came across it at a friend of the families house, these two large sisters Rosemary and Annette. We all had a go and struggled to get all the colours on one side. It would be a few years until I had mastered it. I managed to find a little book on how to do it and would eventually amaze my friends. Tuesdays we would bring in our little radios and listen to the top 40 pop charts. Music continued to become a big part of my life. The two-tone and Ska revival caught my attention, I bought vinyl albums by The Beat, Madness, The Specials and Bad Manners. I was obsessed with the black and white checks and would wear black loafers or some ten hole Doctor Martin boots and a black harrington jacket and covered it with ska badges. I also wore a black pork pie hat with a white band to complete my 'rude boy' look. One of my favourite songs by the Beat got me interested in reggae. I heard UB40's 'One in Ten' album and and became a big fan. I listened to radio one shows hosted by Lenny Henry, a reggae programme on a Sunday evening called 'from Mento to Lover's Rock - A history of Jamaican music' hosted by Linton Kwesi Johnson and later Robbie Vincent's Jazz Funk show and started to go to music concerts usually at the Top Rank Sweet in Brighton. I'm not sure how I managed to get in, or how at 12/13 my parents let me go to Brighton on the train, but the early 80's anything was possible and I never got into any trouble. My first concert was to see UB40 at the Brighton centre. Their 'Labour of Love' album had just come out and they were supported by Jamaican singer, Winston Reedy, This was closely followed by other reggae concerts, like Clint Eastwood and General Saint and Yellowman. We occasionally went to Brighton with my mum, Brighton was much cooler than Worthing, they had a small ice skating rink that we went to a few times and the shops were better. Mum bought our clothes here and they had a 'Ravel' shoe shop where she bought me a really cool pair of dark teal loafers.
At the end of my first year at Chatsmore we had the customary sports day and school disco. I won the high jump competition breaking the school record, something I would do in every subsequent year, not a bad effort considering I wasn't particularly tall! At the disco I remember dancing with 21 different girls! What a stud! Don't worry though my success in that area wasn't to last.
For our summer holiday we stayed with one of my mum's old friends, Christine who had moved to Branston in Lincolnshire, married and had about a million kids (six I think). I'm not quite sure how we managed to fit in their house, but there wasn't enough milk to go round and for breakfast we had corn flakes and watered down condensed milk, it was one of the most disgusting things I can ever remember eating. It was fun playing with them though and seeing the local area, we must have visited Lincoln Cathedral too. Unfortunately I lost my wallet on that holiday, but found it on top of the car sun visor on the way home. I did have a bit of a habit of losing things and my mum would remind me of an especially valuable 22 carat gold necklace that my auntie Anna in Italy had bought me. Christine and her extensive family would come and visit us in Worthing the following winter. When they saw the sea, they ripped their clothes off and plunged into the freezing water, apparently they had never seen the sea before.
One holiday that we didn't go on was in 1977/78 to Paris. My parents had been invited to a wedding of a Vietnamese friend, Taan and went for the weekend. They would leave us four kids in the capable hands of Andrea Blenkinsop, the only notable event while they were away enjoying the Eiffel Tower, The Champs Elysee and a slap up wedding, was a three person handstand against the wall. Rita first, then me and then Andrea, who came crashing down on us, leaving Rita with a broken arm! Suffice to say we never saw her again...
In the early eighties my cousins Frank and David got married. Frank to his best friend Robert's sister Liz. Liz was very young at the time and their marriage didn't last. Robert and his father were tragically killed while working as on the railway. I had spent many weekends with Frank, Robert and Malcom at their house, at Brooklands and on Lancing beach. It was a very sad episode. David got married to Linda and my sister Rita and cousin Joanna were bridesmaids. My auntie Fiorella was also married soon after, she had been going out with a guy called Adrian, but that didn't work out and then she met Michael, who already had two sons from a previous marriage. They were married and Michael's two nieces who I knew from Chatsmore, Joanne and Lorraine were bridesmaids along with my cousins Joanna and Jaime.
My great granddad died in 1982. My mum wanted Rita and me to go to the funeral in Bognor. We took the morning off school and the plan was for my grandma and granddad to pick us up on the corner of the Littlehampon and Chantry roads. They weren't too happy about us coming, but my mum insisted. We got ready and made sure we were there waiting on time. They never turned up and drove on to Bognor without us, claiming we weren't there. If we hadn't been there then why didn't they drive round to the house? We would never know and we missed the funeral. My mum never forgave them.
I generally would cycle to school. My little purple and pink racer had been replaced with a new Raleigh Bomber, a kind of 'pre-mountain bike' bicycle. One day our class was going on a school trip and I was a bit late. All the class were gathered on the bridge over Goring station. I pulled a massive wheelie and my peddle snapped off! Going down in folklore as one of my most embarrassing moments ever...
In my third and fourth year things went slightly pear shaped. I got in with the wrong crowd in Highdown Avenue. Jeremy introduced me to a guy called Rowan Palmer. His mother was a Morman and very strict. I think this caused him to rebel. He stole stuff and smoked. I hung out with him and tried smoking and joined in the stealing as well. One infamous occasion was when we went down the town in Worthing on a stealing spree. We stole these fountain pens from Smiths the stationers. We ended up in the Viking coffee bar in Anne Street with our takings, Earth Wind and Fire's 'Let's Groove' was playing on the juke box. I must have bragged about it at school, because one of my friends, William Randall told his father, who then phoned my parents. I was made to take the pens back to Smiths and hand them in. This seemed to work as my brief career as a felon came to an abrupt end! On another occasion my parents had gone out for the evening and left me in charge. Rowan came round and drank half of my dad's home made beer barrel! He got terribly drunk and vomited on our sofa. We had a seance and our home made ouija board spelt out my brother Alan's name! No childhood would be complete without a few skeletons...
In our house we had four bedrooms. One for my mum and dad, one for Carl and Alan and the other two for Rita and me. At first I had the larger room at the end of the house, but then Rita wanted it and so I moved into the smaller one. I had the idea of getting cousin Frank to build a bed with a wardrobe, drawers and desk underneath, it was really cool. I also had this amazing 'Empire Strikes back' wallpaper put up, although it was mostly covered up by all the pop posters I was beginning to put up from my 'Smash Hits' magazine. Of course Top of the Pops was a big hit in the 80's and we would watch it every Wednesday evening, together with a new programme that parents hated but kids loved, Grange Hill. I bought some of those old roller skates with the metal frames that you could strap round normal shoes. I would skate up and down Highdown avenue until I could even skate backwards.
Another kid that moved into Highdown avenue was Steven Kefford. His parents were divorced and he lived with his rather oppressive mother, step father and sister Tracey, who later changed her name to Jerry, as in Jerry Hall. Steven was a result of the 'Dr. Spock' method of bringing up children. Dr. Spock was a 1940's pediatrician who was accused of encouraging a generation of juvenile delinquents, parents letting their children do whatever they wanted without setting any kind of rules or limits. So whereas if I did something wrong my mother grounded me or gave me some other kind of punishment, Steven's mother let him get away with anything and in fact actively encouraged him to develop his own standards and thereby deal with the results... who knows what method proved more effective! Anyway he was quite cool. He went to Broadwater Manor school, which was private, was well spoken and a lot of fun. He fancied himself as a new romantic. This was a new kind of music gaining popularity in the early 80's. I wasn't that into the new romantics, apart from OMD (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark) I even joined their fan club, receiving lots of photos of the group.
Steven was a big David Bowie fan and used to paint a white stripe across his face like the then popular singer Adam Ant. In fact my auntie Fiorella nicknamed him 'Adam Ant'. We would get up in the middle of the night, climb out of our windows and chat for hours. He had a very powerful stereo and played Bob Marley's Babylon by bus album and the War of the Worlds soundtrack at full volume out of his open window, Richard Burton never sounded so good. He liked Ska too, but by 1982 the Ska revival was all but over. The Specials had disbanded and three members reformed a new band, The Fun Boy Three. They made a few records with all-girl group Bananarama. I really liked them and tried to dress like Terry Hall. I bought myself a pink striped granddad shirt from Brighton, some burgundy stay pressed trousers and white moccasins. I even had a pineapple style haircut, which was shaved at the back and sides and left long on top so I could gel it up all spikey.
Near Highdown Avenue was High Street Tarring, this was one of the prettiest and oldest roads in Worthing. There was a little barbershop with an ancient barber, Bill Berry was his name. He would shuffle round his chair performing the only cut he knew, the crew cut. I only went there occasionally, but my poor brothers Carl and Alan were subjected to him many times. West Tarring boys club was also on the High street and in my second year at Chatsmore I joined. I was the youngest boy there and I was bullied a bit, especially by one kid who called me 'frog face'! Fortunately they had a football team, which I joined. We trained during the week and had matches at the weekend. I played in goal. Our first match was against Wick. We lost 14-1 and as the goalkeeper it was a humiliating start. We did get better and towards the end of the season we played Wick again and actually won 4-1, there's persistence for you! One Halloween they had a disco and Rita and me borrowed some costumes from my auntie Lisa and Uncle Derek. Rita went as a witch and I went as the devil! Our costumes must have impressed as we both won a prize for best dressed, Rita won a 12' single, Errol Dunlkey's reggae hit, 'Ok Fred' and me Shalamar's 'Take that to the bank'. I was still winning the end of year high jump competition on sports day and breaking the school record in the process and so high joined the local athletics club, the Worthing Harriers at the Durrington Sports centre. We mainly just did training and I never really competed with them.
In the early eighties there was a new kind of 'alternative' comedy making its way from the clubs to TV. It had its roots in 1978's 'Not the Nine O'clock News' series and in 1982 we were introduced to Peter Richardson's outrageous Comic Strip and The Young Ones. There were a couple of black comedy programmes I really liked too, No Problem and Frontline. Rowan Atkinson's Blackadder was another favourite. American comedy was also popular in the early eighties, with the Cosby Show, Taxi and Cheers being some of our favourites. We also loved watching the popular singing, dancing series Fame and comedy detective show, Moonlighting.
The early eighties didn't quite match the seventies for blockbuster films, but there were some smaller cult films which we enjoyed especially on the eighties new format, the video recorder. The Goonies, Electric Dreams, The Never Ending Story, The Princess Bride, Better off Dead, Big Man on Campus and I'm Gonna' git you Sucka' were some of my personal favourites.
My interest in watching football had somewhat waned in the early eighties, but was revived by the famous World Cup of 1982. Of course after England's famous win in 1966, which I unfortunately wasn't born to witness, the English national team suffered a fall from grace and up to this day hadn't even made a final, whereas Italy's fortunes were on the up and with a team largely made up of players from Turin giants, Juventus, won a classic World cup in style, beating Brazil and Germany on the way. My allegiances changed and I began to follow the fortunes of Italian football a bit more.
At school I was getting more into Basketball though and becoming interested in another sport/hobby - breakdancing. I was friends with a guy at school called Donald Mcleod. He wore a cool Sergio Tacchini tracksuit and these funky puma trainers. We would hang out at his house and he had a breakdancing video, it looked amazing and we got some old linoleum and tried it out ourselves. Obviously it was not that easy, but we had a go. Donald was friends with a black kid called Carl and he was getting into breakdancing too. We would take our lino and Carl's ghetto blaster (rather large stereo) and go busking in the town centre. At school we would practise our moves at lunchtime on the smooth parquet floor in the school hall. Breakdancing was part of the whole Hip-Hop culture that came over from America and was very popular in England in the early eighties. We would cover our school books in graffitti art and I even painted a mural in Donald's wall! I bought my own Sergio Tacchini tracksuit from Brighton, ordered some puma trainers from Broadwater Sports and equipped them with very thick laces (bought from the Bentals haberdashery department!) We even went to see the legendary Afrika Bambaata at the Top Rank in Brighton, it was a very exciting time. The films 'Breakdance' and 'Beat Street' epitomized the whole Hip-Hop culture for us. My breakdancing career culminated in the wedding of my mum's friend Jane Lidbetter. She had divorced her first husband, John and was marrying new husband Stan. At their reception I performed a breakdancing solo to rapturous applause, before moving onto the next craze...
For our summer holiday that year we went to Cornwall. The Zephyr was loaded up with all our clothes and mum, dad and us four kids began the epic 8-hour, 300 mile journey to our destination, Marazion. It would turn out to be one of our most memorable family holidays. The typical English summer holiday. The weather wasn't particularly that good, in fact when we visited the beautiful, sandy beach at St. Ives the rain came down and we escaped under macs and umbrellas, you wouldn't have expected anything else really. If the 70's were memorable for its endless, hot summers, the 80's certainly redressed the balance! We visited all the other famous sights, had our photo taken at Land's end and the Lizard point, made the trek across the causeway and up St. Michael's mount, bought shells in Penzance and generally had a fun time. If one holiday summed up our carefree youth, that was it.
Chapter 6
The 'Truth'
Around 1979 my mum was going through a nervous breakdown. The pressure of bringing up four children and a deteriorating relationship with my father drove her to serious depression. At 34 years old she wanted a bit more fun and excitement. She had rushed into marriage at 18 partly to escape oppressive parents, youth had passed her by and she saw no future with my dad. Although he was a good, hardworking man, he worked nights for many years which couldn't have been good for the marriage. They had a holiday in Cornwall to try and revive their marriage and mum also went on holiday to Naples to stay with her family, but those two holidays were not enough to save the marriage.
Ironically enough it was my Catholic grandmother who introduced her to a local Italian woman around 1981, called Francesca Guanieri. Unbeknown to her Francesca was a Jehovah's Witness. If my grandma had known this in hindsight, she probably wouldn't have introduced her and subsequently my life would have no doubt taken a completely different course. Would it have been better? Would it have been worse? I will never know, but when all is said and done ultimately I would meet my future wife this way, so I can't say I regret what happened...
When my grandmother realised Francesca was a Witness, she threatened to first kill Francesca and then herself! She eventually settled on sprinkling some Holy Water round our house. My grandfather also threatened to come round with his air rifle! Anyway, Francesca called round and left her a little blue book called 'The truth that leads to everlasting life'. With a title like that you know this was going to be some serious stuff! Even though the Witnesses are a minor sect in a sea of major world religions this book was listed in the 1990 Guiness book of records as the best selling non- profit making book of all time, having been read by over 100 million people. My mum read the book twice and was convinced the Witnesses were the true religion, she was a lapsed Catholic, after not coming to terms with the Catholic view on contraception. Ironically as she was to find out later, the Witnesse frowned on divorce, so she would find herself in an even more complicated situation. Francesca brought Bob Tebbit, a local congregation elder with her and started a weekly bible study with her. She began to attend weekly meetings at their Kingdom Hall in South street Tarring. She took Rita, Carl and Alan along with her, I wasn't interested at first. In the summer they attended the district convention, a large gathering of Witnesses at the national Rugby ground at Twickenham. I stayed at home and cooked them dinner for when they returned. I really started to become interested in cooking around that time. We had this big, old blue cookery book and I would pour over it for hours. The first meal I attempted was rather ambitious to say the least. For starter I cooked Spaghetti Carbonara, even though in the early eighties in England you couldn't buy pancetta or parmesan! I'm not sure how it turned out. For main course I cooked paella with huge giant prawns and chicken and turmeric to turn the rice yellow.
I was thirteen when I got my first job, a paper round. At first I would do it on my bomber bicycle and then I bought some decent leather roller boots complete with 'sim street snake' wheels, these were very expensive, soft and extremely fast. After my bomber, I had my eye on something a bit faster and saw in a new Raleigh brochure the 'Road Ace'. It had my name on it. We had to order it from the local Raleigh shop. It cost £431 and I paid a bit each week for it. This bike was a bit special. It had a lightweight Reynolds 531 frame. Mavic GP4 low profile quick release wheels with tyres that you had to glue onto the wheels. Platform pedals that needed special shoes, concealed brake levers and fitted with Shimano 600 dura ace components and 'para' pull brakes. No one else had a bike like this in Worthing. When I took it to school I was the envy of all the boys and I would walk round with my quick release front wheel!
I inevitably became curious about what my mum was doing and one day she explained to me a talk she had heard that was a prophecy from the Bible book of Daniel and they had interpreted it as symbolizing the succession of world powers. As I was interested in History I found it fascinating. At the Catholic church we only looked at the new Testament and the life of Jesus, so this was something different. I went along to a local bible study group on the Tuesday evening, that turned out to be only round the corner in Highfield road. It was the home of Mick and Joyce Hanson, a very kind couple. They had a rather good looking daughter about my age, Beverly and there was another pretty girl, Jenny Simms there too. Bob Tebbit conducted the meeting and there was another querky couple there too, David and Joy Masters. The book they were studying along with the bible was called 'Man's salvation out of world distress close at hand' an extremely complicated interpretation of the bible book of Ezekiel. The irony is that the book was written in 1975 and 38 years later that 'end' was still close at hand! Everyone was very friendly and even if the subject matter was beyond the comprehension of a fourteen year old, the two girls were reason enough for continuing to attend.
At the same time this was happening we also came in contact with a very unusual guy. Several years earlier Rita and I had been going to a local Catholic church in High street Tarring. It was actually a house run by nuns. On our walk there we would often see these two Italian boys walking to the church on the other side of the road. We never spoke to them even though theirs was the same destination as ours. So it came as a bit of a surprise when a few years later the older one turned up on our doorstep with a school friend!
He announced his name to us, Stefano Cucinotta and that he too went to Chatsmore. my mum answered the door and Rita and me spoke to him. He explained that he was starting a dating agency at school and wanted to know if Rita, who had just started Chatsmore and was only a 12-year-old in her first year there, was interested in joining up. What we didn't know then was that it was a ploy for Stefano to be introduced to one of Rita's friends, Lesley Sparrow, who he fancied! He was in the fifth year at the time, he and his geeky friends were having trouble dating girls in their own year and came up with this scam... And that's how we came to know Stef. He came round several more times and as we were going to Witness meetings we started talking to him about this. He was into heavy metal, Hawkwind and the occult. He dressed in black and would go up to the haunted Clapham woods and pretend to be a druid and was fascinated with Iron Maiden and the number 666! I showed him the place in Revelation where it mentioned the 'number of the beast' and his curiosity was aroused.
We invited him along with us to the book study group and then the local meetings. The Kingdom hall in South street Tarring was a listed building. Inside there was a huge room that could hold about 150 people, two enormous pillars and a bright green carpet. From the outside it looked very secretive as the entrance was round the back and the two bay windows had been blocked up, this stopped any potential vandalism attempts. The only natural light came from two skylight windows facing the internal car park. At this time there was one congregation, but it was absolutely jam packed and sometimes if you were late you had to sit in the corridor. On the Sunday there was a 45 minute 'public talk' followed by a study of the famous magazine 'the Watchtower'. At the first meeting the audience would just listen to the man (women were not allowed to address the congregation) giving a talk. In the Watchtower study, paragraphs were read and then members of the congregation could give a comment. The congregation was made up of all different kinds of people and there were lots of young people. There was a 12 year old girl with shoulder-length dark hair and the sweetest voice that I quite fancied and I would always look out to see if she was there when I went. Her name was Annette Woodland. In addition to the two-hour Sunday meeting and the one-hour Tuesday book study there was also another two-hour meeting on a Thursday, it was a very time consuming religion, much more than the half hour Sunday mass we had been used to with the Catholic church.
At school I would speak to my friends about this new found religion, as this was a Catholic school we had some quite heated debates and I wasn't too popular with my R.E. teacher. One friend, Andrew Simpson came to a meeting with me, but his dad didn't like it and got the priest to speak to him! Another, Jan Wojyk also came to a meeting, I only found out years later his mother had recently died. The Witnesses generally filled a need for people who were grieving or feeling low and this is why it appealed to my mum. Another school friend, Grant Goodman was obsessed with the singer, Michael Jackson, who had been brought up as a witness and so Grant, who even walked round school with one white glove, wanted to know all about the Witnesses for a school project. Next door neighbour Steven Kefford even came to a meeting, but only to make fun. It was only Stef that seemed to be interested. We went along with my mum, bothers and sister to the convention at Twickenham that summer and I was impressed by the sheer number of people together, in a peaceful and organised way. Everyone wore smart clothes, the men suits and ties and the women in smart dresses, women weren't allowed to wear trousers to meetings. Stef came still with his long hair and denim jacket. He had a patch with a naked woman on it and we covered it up with a jumper!
When we got back to Worthing we both agreed to have a 'personal bible study' and the conductor of choice was a young, blonde haired 'pioneer', called Peter Marshall-Saye. A pioneer was someone who preached from door to door on a full-time basis. All the other Witnesses would spend an average of 10 hours a month, as opposed to a 'Pioneer' who spent 90 hours a month preaching. He was a bit of a smoothy, although only five years older than me, but we got on quite well.
Stef and I had become best friends and I also made friends with his brother, Marco at school. Marco was also into cycling, we would have epic races at Goring railway gates after school, he liked art too and we would paint the scenery for school concerts. For lunch he would always have chips and cake and had the most terrible acne! I would spend time round Stef and Marco's house in Broomfield avenue. They lived with their mother, Pat who had divorced their father when the boys were very young. He was from Sicily, but had moved to Florence, where Pat met him, married and had Stef. They moved to England, had Marco, before he left them and went back to Florence. He would phone them every Christmas, but they had never met him since. Marco was really into c.b. radios, which were popular at the time. His 'handle' was 'Green Bean'. I bought a radio too and we attached them to our bicylcles with these huge ariels on the back. We would cycle around chatting to each other and others we met over the airwaves. My 'handle' was 'Monkey Man', Stef's was 'Thruster' and then 'Pathfinder' and my sister, 'Pink Panther'. We set up 'eyeballs', which were meetings with other users and on one occasion, we played a joke with someone we knew, a guy called Aubrey using Rita as bait!
In the summer of 1984 Stef and I got a job, working as kitchen porters at the Beach Hotel on the seafront. We had some great laughs there, although we worked very hard. We did split shifts, working from 9-2 and then 5-9 in the evening. There were some real characters there, including a couple of Italian chefs, Gino and head chef, Gennaro. One of the other kitchen Porters was an old guy called Harold Kelly, he was barking mad and we would always play jokes on him, like hiding eggs round the kitchen so he would break them. The food there was incredible and we would eat the same food as was served to the guests! I developed a love of fillet steak with a diane sauce at the Beach hotel. We would listen to the radio there, I remember a particular Sunday evenings, when the new top 40 pop charts were announced, cheering when one of my favourite groups UB40 finally got to number one with 'Red red wine'. Also we would bring one of our stereos in and listen to our music while we washed dishes. We had both bought very large 'ghetto blasters', I used to carry mine whilst roller skating playing my new musical style, RnB at very high volume of course. My stereo was this huge Phillips double cassette radio. The cassette decks had a fader control so I could mix one song into another and create some cool tapes.
At the end of our four-week stint we went on a cycling holiday to Taunton. We stayed with the Warden family. Bill, the father was the brother of Max Worden, a local elder that had recently moved down to Worthing. Bill, his wife Vanessa and daughter, Laura, made us feel very welcome. We did the cycle in two days, sending our clothes by train and stopping eighty miles from Worthing, in Salisbury. On the second day we cycled the other sixty miles to Taunton. As we rolled into Taunton, Stef dropped his bike, he had a black and gold Raliegh Record, and rushed to get the number of a train that was arriving at the station... he was a confirmed train spotter. We had a great time, we also stayed with another family in nearby Chard and visited Cricket St. Thomas country park. As always I would check out the record shops and bought a 12" copy of the Kenny G song 'Don't make me wait for love' featuring the legendary Lenny Williams on vocals, a classic.
Soul was my new musical love. I heard this amazing song, 'Treat her like a lady', which turned out to be by the legendary Motown group, the Temptations and was an immediate fan. The new kid on the block was Luther Vandross and his 'Give me the reason' album was an instant favourite for me. I really like Sade too and American soulstresses Anita Baker and Regina Belle as well as many others. I wasn't really that moved by the 80's chart music, so I got into mainly this American soul and Jazz fusion music, listening to artists like George Benson, Grover Wahington Jr, Alphonse Mouzon and Ramsey Lewis. In four years I'd gone from disco, to Ska, to Reggae, to Soul and Jazz fusion. This music wasn't very mainstream, but very personal to me.
The summer assembly again was at Twickenham and I arranged to go up with Mark Berry and stay with this guy who was doing the flowers for it. His name was Greville Arnold-Jenkins and he lived near Brixton. Mark and I had a great time helping him work behind the scenes.
After the summer I entered my last year at school. I continued working at the beach hotel at the weekends and during the week I was doing cleaning with my grandma at Barclays and in the morning I took on a cleaning job at the main Lloyds bank from 6.30-8.30 in the mornings along with Mark, two hours of polishing and buffing floors at fifteen years old, I can still hear my supervisor, Blanche Coombes, coughing her way down the corridors to check on me. Suffice to say my school work suffered. At lunch time I would go to Mark's house usually with my brie baguette.
That December, while I was on my way to Barclays in the evening, I was cycling round the clock tower roundabout in Chapel road when some guy came out of the pedestrinised Warwick street and crashed into me. I went flying up into the air and came down in a heap. The guy that hit me was 90 years old and had a blackout earlier in the day, in the ambulance he came round and said to me "So are you my victim then?" I only sprained an ankle, but my bike was a right off. I did however get a new one through his insurance.
I was making new friends at the 'Kingdom Hall'. Mark Berry was a guy the same age as me, he went to Durrington high school. His mother Mary , who was a bit schizophrenic, was a Witness, his dad, David wasn't at the time and used to sit outside in his car. Mark was also interested in the same music as me and sports so we quickly made friends our friendship was short live however when my sister, Rita accused him of copying me. There was also Jonathon Saunders, Michael Musgrove and Adrian Annear, these were guys a bit older than us that we made friends with also, along with two younger guys, Ben Lobb and Jason Atherton. Jason's mother Julie became best friends with my mother. She was a Witness, but her husband Michael was very opposed. They shared some amazing coincidences. They were both born on February 22nd 1948. Their husbands were both called Michael and were born on 7th March, one year apart! Rita and me quickly became friends with Emma and Jason. They were almost like twins, Jason was a bit 'vertically challenged', but very musical and could play any musical instrument. They had an enormous three-tiered organ, which he seemed to have mastered instantly. Jason and the girls made a dance routine to Jonah Louis' 'Stop the Cavalry' which was very funny. Jason taught me how to play the bass guitar and later when I bought a drum kit of ex Gary Newman guitarist, David Lusted, we had ourselves a little band. I even took up drum lessons after school for a while. There were plenty of girls too. My sister Rita made friends with Annette, who claimed later that she fancied me too, for about a year! Mark had two sisters, Amanda and Joy. Jason's sister, Emma, Tiffany Brown, (who Stef fancied, but whose family soon after moved to Wales) Sheena Bryant, Rachel Hobden and several others. We all quickly became friends and hung out in various groups. On a Sunday evening we would all go swimming at the Aquarena, where I had my ear perforated after Ben Lobb kneed me in the ear, bowling at Worthing bowling alley, roller skating at the Worthing Assembly hall, where I can remember skating to Madonna's 'Like a virgin' and Ashford and Simpson's 'Solid' or play on Goring gap. The boys would sometimes play football too. We didn't really hang out with Peter Marshall-Saye, as he was a bit older, or other guys like Steven Clarke, Michael and Paul Limmer. Although on one infamous evening, Paul Limmer, who was a bit mischevous, took Rita and me to decorate Steven Clarke's car, who was getting married. We got back rather late and his mother, Pat gave him a good telling off. We did have some very fun times. I was particularly happy that Rita had made friends with Annette, but I was too shy to make my feelings for her known. The witnesses frowned upon young people dating unless with marriage in view and Annette's father, Charlie was an elder in the congregation, so I thought I should tread lighly, besides she was getting attention from many other male admirers.
End of Part 1
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