Teenage Rebel in Sidmouth.

It was in my fifth year of grammar school that things came to a head. My mum always said it was working in hotels that got me growing because I was eating so well, definitely compared with what I got at home. So suddenly, like a lot of my mates, I could get served in pubs, not all of them, just the more dubious ones that could do with the extra trade. So, added to smoking came the drinking and the need for mints as well as squeezing my fingers on the lavender plant in the front garden when I went home. Mum and dad were usually in bed by ten so if I came in just a little late I wouldn’t have to face them and I usually didn’t, and if dad was still up he would be occupied and we would just call out goodnight to each other. We were never a touchy-feely sort of family.

And then there was a party with a sleep-over so I could get really drunk. I asked a girl name Sue to

come out to Exeter with me the next weekend and she said yes and to celebrate a bunch of us went skinny-dipping in the sea before puking up everywhere in a romantic way. Bob Posta, who lived in the house on the hill opposite, had become an increasing partner in crime. His father was Czech and was a watchmaker and a bit irascible, but his wife was all Devon niceness. Bob would signal me with a huge mirror, beaming it into my bedroom window when he was ready to go out so that we could meet at the bottom of our hills saving one of us a climb. He was as wary of my parents as I was of his, particularly after one of his mirror signals caught my mum’s eye when she was ironing in the front room making her burn herself.

One night after some sort of drunken activity, Bob and I had a fight at the bottom of the hill over nothing at all. I had a sharpened steel comb and he combated this by picking a large round stone off the top of someone’s garden gate post and hurling it at me. He missed and it rolled on down the hill until it smashed into someone’s parked car and we scarpered. But worse was to come. It was the time of the school play and we were doing The Crucible and Bob and I had very minor roles. We decided it wasn’t worth going home to come back again, so we went into Ottery into a cider bar and got stuck into some rough cider, ten old pence a pint, whilst playing darts. When I managed to make the tire round the dart board fall down, the landlord had had enough of us and chucked us out. On the edge of town by the train station we caught up with some of the girls in our class who were the leading ladies in the play and were rather toffee nosed. I picked up some dog shit and threw it at them for fun and they ran off disgusted, but then in the boys’ dressing room when the girls came in in their beautiful costumes to show off, Bob puked up in front of them and one of them refused to go on with the show. We were grabbed by Mr Herbert, a rugby playing chemistry teacher, and marched round and round the playground to sober up until we could walk a straight line. We were in total disgrace.

The next day we were both spoken to by Tack, short for Tacitus, the Latin teacher and Deputy Head. He told me he knew it wasn’t easy being the son of a church minister, having to be over-bad to prove I wasn’t a goody-goody, but this was a step too far. My cheekiness in lessons was well known and my well known dirty rhymes about various teachers had not gone un-noticed but this was a step too far. I was under warning that unless my behaviour changed immediately I would not be wanted in the sixth form. Bob had a similar talking too and was told that in view of his exemplary performance as captain of the rugby team he would be forgiven BUT he had to keep away from me. Of course, letters were sent to our parents. I can imagine the bollocking Bob got, but mine were more upset than cross and I persuaded them it was all Bob’s fault and that my O level results were going to be hot. They had better be was all they could say and no more going out when there was school day the next day. And, basically, I learnt that I could push the boat out pretty far and nothing much would ever happen.

Of course, my parents encouraged anything that could keep me on the right path and this included paying for me to go to Covenanter camps. Now, when I was 14 and 15 these were kind of fun, down in Polzeath in Cornwall, surfing and all that stuff. The first year, I knuckled down and played the game(s) including the chores like peeling spuds for 50 odd men and boys. By the second year I was already feeling this was all dull and I particularly hated the nightly singing round a bonfire, ten green bottles and all.

The best thing was I got to know my first ‘negroes’ or ‘coons’ as some of the boys called them. They were from Islington and were rebels like me. We would go for long walks instead of playing beach volley ball or something like that and we’d talk about their life and soul music and Jamaican music, that which was slowly turning into reggae. We just hit it off. I must admit to being horrified when I saw one of them pee and realised that his dick was loads bigger than mine and reassured when I saw the other one’s was more normal. They liked me cos I treated them like normal people and I liked them cos they were different. One kid in my tent had the cheek to call me a coon lover so I got my own back by putting a dead grass snake in his sleeping bag and nearly killed myself laughing when he nearly died of fright. The others laughed too and then we got down to our regular game of who could come first, our nightly wank game. I must admit there was not much religion there.

When I was 16 we could go to the seniors’ camp and there was one sailing on the Norfolk Broads. This meant going through London and a stop-over at one of the other lad’s grandparents in Tottenham. Part of our plan, there were three of us, was to go into ‘town’ and see a group in a club. We got a copy of NME and saw that there was a band called Steam Packet, with Long John Baldry who we knew off Top of the Pops, playing at the Marquee Club and that it didn’t finish late so it would be on for us. The only thing that pissed me off was that my dad insisted I had a hair cut before we went and told the barber to give me a short back and sides which left me looking daft and not modern at all. Still, couldn’t be helped and we went and saw the band. The other singers were the then unknown Rod Stewart and Julie Driscoll, and for me they stole the show. Brian Auger was a top organ player and I was beginning to get into bands who had keyboards, people I could try and emulate on my piano at home. The sailing on the broads was fairly tame and being stuck on a boat, 8 per boat, it was difficult to escape the religious bits which bored us to tears.

Then my dad had organised a trip to Germany and we were looking forward to that, particularly me and my new mate from outside the school, Keith Hudson, the first mixed race kid I knew. He was a year older than me and already had a scooter and a parka with his initials in white fur on the back. We all went over on the ferry from Dover to Ostend and then it was train to Cologne. Belgium seemed a bit like home, a bit grotty, but when we arrived in Germany we saw it straight away. Everything was sparkling new and clean and a lot of people seemed to be wearing uniforms, although that may just have been us. We were met by the German pastor and his wife, Herr Nagle, and he was smoking. Wow, this was different!! You must remember this was the year we had won the World Cup and beaten the Germans. We had Union Jacks on everything, our bags, t-shirts, jackets, even little flags to wave in our hands.

We were staying in a school, a room for the boys, one for the girls and another, a way off, for the leaders, including my mum and dad. And there were some German kids mixed in with us who, fair do’s, right from night one, showed us how to get out and go into town. Not that much was happening. We bought some bottles of Leifraumilch and got a bit pissed, nearly had a fight with some local kids and crept back into our rooms. We traipsed around visiting things and moaned about the food and saw Pastor Nagle having wine with his lunch, another unheard of thing, and did a lot of shouting ‘England’, waving our flags. Having been served sour milk with our food on day 2, we became very suspicious of everything we were offered and I asked for translations from a German friend I had made, Wolfgang, and his girlfriend, Gita. She was very pretty, a bit of a Sandie Shaw, and she would often be found next to me until we always sat next to each other in the bus. Wolfgang didn’t seem to mind although I found out later this was absolutely not the case.

We all laughed when we went to visit a castle whose name when translated meant castle castle castle and we all enjoyed the hanging train in Wuppertal. I wasn’t much impressed by the country but was pleased when my parents announced that Wolfgang and I were going to do exchange visits. I could see more of Gita – we were now on snogging and upper body petting terms.

When we got back from that, I started working in a hotel, still on the washing up, but bringing the money in, and, my ‘O’ level results arrived and I had got 10, making me the top in my year, equal with Peter Crab who lived out in the wilds and had no distractions and was treated by all as a genius. I did fail one subject, chemistry, which was the only science I took. But, the main thing was, the school could hardly not let me back in the 6^th form next year and I was well and truly back in my parents good books which meant they were letting me go out as often as I wanted, no questions asked.

The summer flew by and it was back to school where I was to study for English, Geography and Economic History. These were subjects I could eat for breakfast, this was not hard work, almost fun. So, my behaviour got worse at school. I would always arrive a bit late having taken the normal bus, not the school bus, so I could smoke on the way, along with some mates from lower forms. I wouldn’t wear my cap, had started growing my hair long again and deliberately gave the air of not giving a shit. When I was 16, I bought myself a scooter, a Vespa 175. It was always breaking down on me and I couldn’t afford to tax and insure it right away but with other mates with scooters, we went out on a few runs. On one of the first of these, we went round a bend, all over the road, and a car coming the other way swerved to avoid us and crashed into the hedge with the lady passenger, her door having opened, falling straight out onto the floor. It all happened in slow motion but we didn’t hang around using the back lanes to get back home.

We weren’t welcome around Sidmouth as mods and used to go to other places where mods were more common, like Whimple where there was quite a crowd. A guy called Ash was the ‘face’ and he started having uppers, black bombers and such, which we took increasingly. We would go to certain events, mob handed. Some of my mates were at the dance in Exeter where two servicemen were kicked to death by the mods, and some of our lot had been beaten up by rockers too. We all went to an outdoor concert starring the Kinks and had been having a ball, flirting with girls, getting drunk, pills working well. I went off for a piss and came back just as the Kinks hit the stage. Suddenly at the end of their first number I felt fur being pulled off the back of my parka. At first I thought it was my mates and shouted leave it out. But it continued and I looked round and saw it was a rocker doing it, one of a mass of them. I ran for the stage and slipped under it then headed for my scooter and was off like lightning, my mates having already left when they saw the number of rockers. 

I always saw the mods as non-violent, sinned against, but all that changed when one evening a London mod working in Sidmouth picked up two of us and said let’s go to a decent mod club and drove us down to Torquay, a good hour away. Once in the place where I met up with that lighting that picks out all the white and where the music was good but incredibly loud, within 15 minutes our new friend had got in a squabble with some guy, head-butted him, blood everywhere and we got thrown out. What a waste of money!!