Life

Being an only child forces you to in­vent your world. First you're liv­ing in a house with two adults, and so cer­tain bits of child­hood will go by with you lis­ten­ing al­most ex­clu­sively to adult con­ver­sa­tion.

And on top of that it was around Dartford where German bombers would get cold feet and just drop their bombs and turn around. ‘Too heavy round here.’ BOOM. It’s a miracle we didn’t get it. The sound of a siren still makes the hair on the back of my neck curl, and that must be from being put in the shelter with Mum and the family. When the sound of that siren goes off, it’s automatic, an instinctive reaction. I watch many war movies and documentaries, so I hear it all the time, but it always does the trick.

My earliest memories are the standard postwar memories in London. Landscapes of rubble, half a street’s disappeared. Some of it stayed like that for ten years. The main effect of the war on me was just that phrase, ‘Before the War.’ Because you’d hear grown-ups talking about it. ‘Oh, it wasn’t like this before the war.’ Otherwise I wasn’t particularly affected. I suppose no sugar, no sweets and candies, was a good thing, but I wasn’t happy about it. I’ve always had trouble scoring. Lower East Side or the sweet shop in East Wittering, near my home in West Sussex. That’s the closest I get nowadays to visiting the dealer – the old Candies sweet shop. I drove over there at 8:30 one morning not long ago with my mate Alan Clayton, singer of the Dirty Strangers. We’d been up all night and we’d got the sugar craving. We had to wait outside for half an hour until it opened. We bought Candy Twirls and Bull’s-Eyes and Licorice & Blackcurrant. We weren’t going to lower ourselves and score at the supermarket, were we?

The fact that I couldn’t buy a bag of sweets until 1954 says a lot about the upheavals and changes that last for so many years after a war. The war had been over for nine years before I could actually, if I had the money, go and say, ‘I’ll have a bag of them ‘ – toffees and Aniseed Twists. Otherwise it was ‘You got your ration stamp book?’ The sound of those stamps stamping. Your ration was your ration. One little brown paper bag – a tiny one – a week.

He was a dispatch rider in Normandy just after the invasion, and got blown up in a mortar attack, his mates killed around him. He was the only survivor of that particular little foray, and it left a very nasty gash, a livid scar all the way up his left thigh. I always wanted to get one when I grew up. I’d say, ‘Dad, what’s that?’ And he’d say, ‘It got me out the war, son.’ It left him with nightmares for the rest of his life. My son Marlon lived a lot with Bert in America for some years, while Marlon was growing up, and they used to go camping together. Marlon says Bert would wake up in the middle of the night, shouting, ‘Look out, Charlie, here it comes. We’re all goners! We’re all goners! Fuck this shit.’