Born on the Goldhawk Road

Book Two

The Spawn of the Swinging Sixties

Chapter One Born on the Goldhawk Road

Introduction

Born on the Goldhawk Road and Wicked Cahoots could be said to set the scene for the entire work, a kind of experiment in memoir writing with a spiritual core. Both deal with my childhood in London in the 1960s. The first was adapted from a Christian testimony dating from 2002, and published at the Blogster.com website on the 1st of February 2006, the second from an unfinished short story penned in the midtolate1970s about a close friend from Bedford Park where I lived for some thirteen years between ca. 1957 and 1970. Once reputedly known as Poverty Park despite having been London's first Garden Suburb, Bedford Park now forms part of a conservation area within the London borough of Ealing, with a small part within that of Hounslow. It was initially published at Blogster as Wicked Cahoots on the 15th of February 2006. “Definitive” versions of both works were created with further minor variations in July 2007, and then again in December.

Born on the Goldhawk Road

I was born close to the source of West London's Goldhawk Road and my first home was in Bulmer Place near Notting Hill Gate. My brother was born two and a half years later, by which time my parents had bought their own house in Bedford Park in what was then the London Borough of Acton. By '63, with my brother and I safe in the Lycee Francais du Kensington du Sud, social change was in the air, though in truth it had been for some time, especially in Britain and the USA, at least since the rise of Rock and Roll, and youth culture, whose watershed years were '55 to '56, but for all that England in '63 was still apparently in black and white, and the first shaggy-haired beat groups fitted quite snugly into this relatively innocent time of Norman Wisdom pictures, of the well-spoken presenters of the BBC Home Service, Light Serviceand World Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob notes, tuck shops and tuppeny chews. I was an articulate child, cheerful and sociable in an idyllic world, although I went on to become a tearaway, both at school and at home, what you might call hyperactive today. Still, I managed to pass my common entrance exam, necessary for entrance into British public, which is to say private, schools, and so become Cadet RNR no. 173, at Welbourne Nautical College in the September of 1968, officially a serving officer in the Royal Navy aged only 12 years old. In early 1970, we left Chiswick for good and took up residence even deeper in suburbia, where I remain to this day...a suburban dreamer if ever there was one...

Wicked Cahoots

When he made

his first personal appearance

in the dirty alley

on someone else’s rusty bike,

screaming along

in a cloud of dust

it rendered us all

speechless and motionless.

But I was amazed

that despite his grey-faced surliness,

he was very affable with us...

the bully with a naive

and sentimental heart.

He was so happy

to hear that I liked his dad

or that my mum liked him

and he was welcome

to come to tea

with us at five twenty five...

Our “adventures” were spectacular:

chasing after other bikesters,

screaming at the top

of our lungs

into blocks of flats

and then running

as our echoed waves of terror

blended with incoherent threats...

“I’ll call the Police, I’ll...”

Wicked cahoots.