| 1976 “Now exposed as an architect of tissue-thin deceit, I squirmed on a Jacobean ébéniste as Dr Friskney began to recite my letters to Mr Potter.
Unfortunately, James is unable to attend school for one week because he has been diagnosed by the doctor as suffering from advanced impetigo of the lower lip which, as you may be aware, is highly contagious.”
“Dear Mr. Potter James’ impetigo has now rapidly spread to the upper lip and its immediate environs. The medicated cream is being applied thrice daily but, at this time, we feel it inadvisable to allow him to return to school for at least another week. We are concerned for his nose. Mrs Maker.” My mother asked, “What does ‘environs’ mean?” Unwisely, I laughed. Three pairs of eyes shot up and drilled me with stony censure. It was my parents’ second audience with the principal of the grammar school I attended. I hated every brick that built that school and, reciprocally, it hated me. Worse, one had to negotiate two buses and two trains on a disintegrating transport network to reach it. Dr Friskney was a gowned encumbrance with corns the size of pomegranates who insisted on bringing his bewildered daughter along to open day sports events. She had a lazy eye, so competitive badminton must have been quite a struggle to enjoy. It was serious: one more infraction and I was to be expelled. Six months previously I decided to take a two-week sojourn from the women’s prison that constituted my education and spent my holiday riding a commuter train up and down a metropolitan branch line. As the suicide allotments of Selsdon gave way to the semi-detached Betjeman desert of Sutton I murdered the hours gorging on cheap chocolate, reading Jacqueline Susann’s “Valley of the Dolls” and Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness”. “I have nine other letters,” Friskney said, directly addressing me with a mixture of disapprobation and the sly amusement of someone who knows they have you dangling over the abyss. “He’s quite the novelist. I haven’t been able to close my drawer for his handiwork. He’ll take double Latin for the next month.” Double Latin. I’d rather work on the production line of a birdseed factory picking out the husks than memorise the declensions of a dead tongue. On the first occasion I was suspended from studies because, with a little help from an adolescent John Galliano who later bias-cut his way to become the cause- celebre of Paris haute couture, I deliberately fed an Alice Cooper fan’s hair into the lathe during metalwork class. This action was provoked by the simple fact that he refused to listen to “Frankenstein” by the New York Dolls. But also because his hair was longer than mine. Consequentially, all pupils taking metalwork class were forced to wear an Education Board issued hairnet. Whilst the sight of thirty schoolboys wrestling with this elastic complexity was hilarious, I was Public Enemy Number One until the day I left. Furthermore, there was the incident when Galliano visited the school chaplain in his office on the second floor to discuss a spiritual matter. I climbed out of the window of an adjacent classroom onto a foot-wide ledge, walking back and forth past the window – and behind the chaplain’s head – as if I were an undecided shopper. When Friskney announced this new safety ordinance from the stage at morning assembly I began to laugh uncontrollably and was escorted, or rather frog- marched, off the premises by two Christian foot-soldiers – one of whom I had successfully seduced a year earlier at the school’s field study centre in the Brecon Beacons. However, it occurs to me that everybody at my school had to, and probably still must, wear a hairnet because of my overtly aggressive New York Dolls fixation. This I consider to be my contribution to the Punk War. In one sense I was at least spared in that no-one had divined the fact that I would often blithely alight at Forest Hill – ahead of my destination home – to visit my newly acquired boyfriend. Dave was a twenty-six year old, self-employed carpet fitter who was eleven years my senior. Naturally, he held a full driving licence. Born to be driven, I am not a motorist and this is my first requisite in anyone who wishes to befriend me. These trysts, which continued for the better part of a year, were strictly illegal on his part and had it come to light he would most certainly have been detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. I love that phrase; it somehow implies that The Queen derives gratification in seeing people banged up. He once took me to Putney as a carpet fitter’s mate – another absence from the school register – but I tripped over an unfurling roll of Axminster, charging headfirst into a treasured glass display cabinet. Miraculously, I was unhurt although its owner howled with grief, pointlessly trying to reunite two pieces of a 25th Wedding Anniversary Champagne flute. I was sent to sit in the car and play with the cigarette lighter. We broke up when I discovered him kissing somebody else in the upper room of The Green Man public house on Great Portland Street. I threw my Gin and Tonic in his face and walked out, amply protected by the entourage of the Elephant & Castle Boot Girls. He followed suit and tried to run us down in his Vauxhall Viva, mounting the kerb in an attempt to kill me. Passion, we knew how to do that back then. The summer of 1976 was a long and glorious one. The pavements of South London sizzled with a heat unknown since King George V flatulated on the throne, prompting an outbreak of flying ants that teemed in armies from the cracks between flagstones. Asphalt baked and softened. Every day was a perfect drying day and the washing lines of Brixton were festooned with a technicolour of flared trousers and lovingly customised waistcoats. Reggae blasted from jacked-up cars, vibrating the kidneys of passing pedestrians. Afros mushroomed ever higher to challenge gravity, each exponent vying to become the Fine Example. Black skin poured into acid yellow hotpants that languished on the bonnet of a Capri. On the steps of unfumigated terraced dwellings that were once grand villas girls would chain- smoke, endlessly rearranging their hair. Stereo players blared from open windows with the sound of the Sex Pistols – visceral, violent and unrelenting – the pneumatic guitars jamming the ears of unsuspecting listeners with the audio equivalent of erect cock. On the radio, David Bowie’s nonsensical, hallucinogenic dance topper “TVC15″ battled for airplay and civilisation with Maureen McGovern’s “The Continental.” I was present at the birth and at the burial of disco. Saturdays marked the pilgrimage to the King’s Road in Chelsea which was, if not the crucible of Punk, its Broadway. Semi-dislocated suburban youth flocked here from all points of the compass to shop in its clothes market, to venture into the hallowed temple of Vivienne Westwood’s boutique Seditionaries and to shock the bourgeois ratepayers of Sloane Street with their nonchalance and safety pin nihilism. But mostly they came to be seen. I think that the groundswell of punk was more a suburban revolution than an inner city one. Those who lived on the periphery or in the outlying boondocks of a bankrupted, socialist experiment needed rebellion more than anyone else. Punk was a music movement without politics, unless you consider anarchy to be a belief-system, and it fizzled out after three years, running dry of sputum. However, Punk left us with an important legacy: anyone could form a group. Even me. Attitude is all that counted and you no longer had to figure out a half-diminished guitar chord in order to be a musician. One cannot guess what the musical landscape would look like today had the Punk Revolution never happened. Certainly, Rap – which to my mind is the counterpart of Punk on the family tree – might never have been invented. A modern, corporate metaphor for Punk is the Vikings coming back to divest us of our chintz and convert our sensibilities back to simplicity and functionalism, and it was as far-reaching as the Swedish reconquista of the 1980s. I wandered the King’s Road in my plastic sandals, Oxford bags and Ramones t-shirt with Tony. Tony was an Anglo-Turkish Cypriot kid who shared my enthusiasm for David Bowie and T Rex and whom I met through a friend from primary school. The anglicisation of his name from Tahir suited him because he looked a little like a very young Tony Curtis. He was slightly shorter than me, a little more flesh, naturally cheerful with a keen sense of humour. He lived close-by on Ilderton Road with his fearsome mother. We became good friends and would travel together to hang out at a leather shop he introduced me to that was frequented by punks, gays and fetishists in the King’s Road market. The proprietors were a couple of forty-something leather queens who were known as Mr and Mrs Fenner. Mr Fenner was masculine in the gay San Franciscan style of the 1970s: moustache, short preppy hair but emerging from behind the counter to reveal leather chaps worn over his Levis. Mrs Fenner was a pigskin Polyanna and the first person I ever met who was genetically camp. For some, life really is lived as one long protracted comedy sketch which they – and us – are unable to escape from. Overweight and perpetually out of breath, he martyred himself to deep vein thrombosis. The personality had long since been surrendered to the purpose of public entertainment. Every sentence uttered began and ended with a bold exclamation mark, which is enormously tiring, especially for the listener. Nevertheless, he was the matriarch and counsellor to the assortment of Mohican waifs and strays who bought nothing but colourfully draped themselves over the merchandise as living decoration. His first words to me were, “Why is my punishment so endless?!” A question that forebade answer as clearly he adored every excruciating minute of it. I felt as if wedged in the front row of the circus of fear, hypnotised by a glove- puppet cobra whose eyes could not be accommodated by their sockets. “Thrombosis at my age! I’m only 35! You’ll never know the agony!” He broke off to speak to an invisible, itinerant Belgian seamstress called Yvette who deftly stitched away behind a heavy felt curtain that shielded her from questioning by the Home Office. She was pelted with whispers. Then, leaning across the counter in mock- confidentiality. “Don’t say anything to Mr Fenner but I don’t know how long I can carry on like this! Can you tell me why my punishment is so endless?!” I don’t know what happened to Mr and Mrs Fenner. Whether they were swept away by that awful contagion of the 1980s that stole so many fashion leather luminaries from us or whether they went on to harness the worldwide web from a workshop in the Castro, is unanswered. What I do know is that the market no longer exists. The punks drifted away before receding altogether, retreating back to whence they came to become a new generation of semi-detached parents. Those who continued to fight the battle either eventually overdosed, lost their hair to Speed addiction or forged expense account careers in a media that rapidly globalised the world. Overdosing the rest of us on them. Autumn arrived with unpredictable and spectacular thunderstorms. The plastic sandals that had once assured passage across three London boroughs suddenly fell apart – on cue. Michaelmas re-entered the calendar and Disco Mysticism arrived with the holy terror of Abba’s unstoppable “Dancing Queen”. “Dancing Queen” is not merely a song, it is a tyranny and a reliable instrument of torture. “You are the dancing queen, young and sweet, only forty-six…dee-dum dee-dum dee-dum”. This was to be my last year at school.” © James Maker 2009 |
