Roger’s Aunt Maud lived in a tiny house in Ivy Street and after Sunday School we began drifting there simply to prolong our freedom before being reclaimed by home, homework and parental supervision.
Aunt Maud, without ever intending to, changed our lives.
She owned a record player.
In late fifties Rainham this placed her somewhere between a cultural revolutionary and a public danger. Among her records was Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues long-player, and hearing it in that cramped little house was like somebody quietly opening a door in our heads. Until then music had mostly been background noise supplied by adults. Suddenly it became identity.
That was the spark.
The basement beneath Aunt Maud’s house became our headquarters, our den, our Liverpool cellar club without the audience. Damp walls, low ceiling, smell of dust and coal, but entirely ours. We gathered there with the absolute irrational confidence only adolescent boys possess. None of us had talent worth mentioning. Ambition was sufficient.
We loved Buddy Holly, so naturally we called ourselves The Rave Ons.
Bryan acquired a guitar first. John followed soon after. Then Aunt Maud somehow located another guitar for Roger, probably through the mysterious female barter system that kept England functioning after the war.
I became the drummer.
At a second-hand shop I bought a snare drum and a pair of sticks and immediately developed the posture and self-importance of a jazz musician despite possessing neither rhythm nor experience. None of this discouraged us in the slightest. The point was not competence. The point was transformation.
We no longer wanted merely to leave Rainham.
We wanted to become somebody else entirely.
Our first gig — though nobody in Rainham yet used the word “gig” — took place in Roger’s prefab living room with his extended family serving as audience, management and unwilling security staff.
The performance itself was intoxicating and mercifully brief.
Between us we knew perhaps four songs, badly. The guitars drifted in and out of tune almost immediately and my drumming possessed all the subtlety of industrial demolition. But none of this mattered. What mattered was the noise, the attention and the extraordinary discovery that girls might actually watch boys if those boys stood together holding instruments.
Roger’s prefab shook with enthusiasm rather than talent. Aunt Maud applauded everything with the determined encouragement of somebody aware she might be witnessing either the birth of a band or the early stages of juvenile delinquency.
For an hour or so we stopped being schoolboys from Rainham.
Back in the school universe another change was taking place. Quite suddenly, and with no improvement whatsoever in my character, I became more interesting to girls.
At first it arrived in fragments. Notes passed through the railings outside the girls’ school as I walked past attempting an expression of complete indifference while internally suffering cardiac arrest. Girls who had previously treated boys as an inconvenient species now giggled, whispered and occasionally used your Christian name with terrifying precision.
During athletics training the running track curved close to the girls’ side of the playing fields and as I came round the bend running hard I would hear shouted encouragement, laughter or commentary of a nature guaranteed to destroy concentration completely.
For adolescent boys in the early sixties female attention functioned like an unlicensed narcotic. We had absolutely no immunity to it.
The strange thing was that none of us understood why it was happening. Puberty had transformed girls far faster than boys. At thirteen they already seemed socially advanced creatures from another civilisation while we still travelled everywhere covered in mud discussing Buddy Holly and bicycle tyres.
But once girls begin noticing you, childhood starts retreating very quickly.
Once, after athletics training, Gillian Gower walked home with me from school. We went past her house in Maidstone Road and continued along the main road towards ours, talking with the solemn intensity peculiar to adolescents who suspect conversation itself may now carry sexual significance.
Unfortunately this small romantic advance was observed by my father driving home from work.
He stopped the car beside us and, with the baffling impulsiveness fathers occasionally mistake for sophistication, invited Gillian to tea the following Saturday.
To my horror she accepted.
She arrived exactly on time, delivered by her father with the formality of a diplomatic exchange between nervous nations. We sat in the front room talking awkwardly about school, music and nothing at all while my parents conducted covert observation from elsewhere in the house.
Then my mother appeared silently at the door and summoned me to the kitchen.
She was crimson with fury.
In a fierce whisper she announced:
“She’s wearing stockings.”
At thirteen I understood this to mean catastrophe of some unspecified kind. It would take several more years before I fully appreciated how significant stockings could become in relations between men and women.
The physical gap between girls and boys was beginning to close and none of us were remotely prepared for it.
At the Royal Cinema whole relationships could begin and end within a single Saturday matinee. You met outside beneath the posters and cigarette ends, sat together in the darkness and spent half the feature film building sufficient courage to slide an arm along the back of the seat behind her shoulders. If your hand survived there without removal or public humiliation, the sense of triumph was extraordinary.
Having a girlfriend then was measured less in weeks than in minutes.
Mayfly romance.
An hour beneath the flickering light of an American western could sustain a boy psychologically for months.
But alongside excitement came confusion, terror and the growing realisation that girls possessed mysterious physical realities entirely absent from school biology lessons.
One Sunday our gang merged uneasily with the female equivalent from Sunday School during a trip to the swimming pool at the Strand in Gillingham. The place was packed. We stood bunched awkwardly along the concrete perimeter pretending conversational sophistication while secretly paralysed by proximity.
Then I looked down.
A girl standing opposite me had tiny hairs escaping from the edges of her bikini bottoms.
I remember staring at this with complete alarm.
Nobody had explained this possibility.
At thirteen you possessed just enough information about the female body to be astonished by almost all of it.
A Sunday School trip to Broadstairs produced three unforgettable firsts: my first Coca-Cola, my first jukebox selection and my first experience of skin touching skin voluntarily.
We escaped from the church party and drifted into the arcades beside the beach with pockets full of paper-round money and the exaggerated confidence of boys temporarily beyond adult supervision. I bought an ice-cold Coke from a machine and received change in sixpences. Nearby stood a glowing jukebox, magnificent as a spaceship. I fed in a coin and selected Wild Wind by John Leyton.
Then, as the music played, one of the girls took my hand in hers.
Looking back, the Coca-Cola and jukebox were merely American imports. The hand-holding was the genuine revolution