The Unsteady State Condition

Welcome to Earlsfield Estate

Earlsfield Estate is when my memories really start. Before that moment I have a kind of ‘forces child amnesia’ due to constant uprooting. The house in Kestrel Court was covered in grey pebbledash and I often wondered “who the fuck” thought that was an innovative architectural look as I scrapped my arm on it propping up my bike against the wall. Apparently, it was C F A Vosey who pioneered the use of pebbledash in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, nasty bastard!

The first bike I can remember is my red Raleigh Chopper, which I rode everywhere and over everything. A group of us would make bike courses which mostly consisted of jumps, and which eventually led to the back seat springs on my Chopper breaking. I remember being distraught at the time, but my dad managed a quick repair with some dodgy welding. They broke again soon after and I got a racing bike. I struggle to remember my exact age as I recount these events, but together they will, hopefully, paint a broad picture of my time in Grantham, or what I refer to as ‘The Grantham Years’. It could be titled ‘The Grantham Tears’ or ‘Fears’ or ‘Tears for Fears’. but that would be too melodramatic, and they were a shit group!

This period, the Grantham years, really shaped and shifted a lot of things for me, not by design but through adventure, misadventure, recklessness, subculture, health scares, sociocultural events and a great group of friends who were all struggling to cope in Thatcher’s hometown and many of whom were set on exploring escape routes! Among the other escapees was my friend, Graeme Park, who went on to become a well-known DJ. We were in several bands together before he escaped to Nottingham and beyond.

An eye-opening opener when I arrived on the Earlsfield – fresh from airman’s quarters on RAF Scampton, which was like a council estate but with a wire fence keeping me in, and the world out - occurred during the period when I was too old to attend primary school but too young to attend year one of secondary school. I was in-between so to speak. I was, and am (time has revealed), an in-betweener.

Anyway, back to the eye-opener. I was fishing on the canal which ran in front of our house, and I had caught a beautiful big silver bream which was, for now, in my keep net in the water. It must have been around lunch time when a group of four older boys from the estates St Hugh’s secondary school came along to chat to me. They were friendly and inquisitive, asking me questions about my fishing tackle, what I had caught and how I had caught it. Two of the boys were on my left side and two on my right, so I kept turning to face each pair as I responded to their questions. Finally, they asked if I could show them the fish and I very eagerly pulled up my keep net and laid it on the floor by my side so that they could see it. Then, in an instant that remains vivid in my mind, one of them stabbed the fish with a pencil, they grabbed handfuls of my fishing tackle and ran away laughing. I was stunned, and, in retrospect, a bit traumatised by the sudden event. I put the bleeding and dying silver fish back into the water, only to see the blood trailing from the wound as it struggled for life. I grabbed my fishing stuff and ran back, crying, and breathless, the short distance to my house and told my mum what had just happened. She didn’t know what to say or do, and when my dad arrived home after work, he too had no words to comfort me or explain this brutality to me. It was at this exact moment that I realised I was as on my own in this new post-RAF base environment, and that my parents had no idea what it was like to be there as a young boy. So, I decided to adapt myself to survive and thrive.

To be fair, once I made the decision to fend for myself and to just get on with it, I started having a great time. After a few fights at my new school, a part of the hierarchical struggle when new boys arrived there, I found good friends and began my years of being disruptive in class and not fulfilling my potential: as my school reports describe. I found myself in trouble all the time at school, and it was a place that didn’t allow for concentrated learning, or any learning at all to be more exact. This stark fact was driven home to me in my fourth year when my Grantham Town geography project was stolen from its folder inside my desk, and a pair of glasses and a cigarette with smoke coming of it drawn inside the empty folder: representing the invisible man, which was a popular TV series with David McCallum at the time. I had spent a serious amount of time on the project and had, for once, enjoyed the process and expected a decent mark for my troubles. I was totally pissed off and my parents went to the school to complain to the headmaster, Mr Elliot, who decided I had to do the entire thing again and hand it in for the deadline, no extension. Needless to say, I thought fuck that and adopted an attitude that expressed that ethos.

Shortly after the ‘invisible project incident’, I was sitting in Mr Elliot’s History class when he popped out to get something. Whilst he was out, two boys, Nigel Higgs, and Joseph Conboy, ran to the cupboards, took piles of textbooks out and piled them onto the front of Mr Elliot’s desk to form a Berlin Wall type effect. When the headmaster returned, he very coolly sat behind the pile of books, which now obscured his face, and his view, and called out “Sadot, Higgs and Conboy put the books back in the cupboard and you have detention at lunchtime”. I, of course, argued that I had no part in the matter, but was told to “shut up and sit down”. During the detention I became so pissed off by the false allegation that I took a large picture off the classroom wall (a copy of Guernica by Picasso) stamped all over it and threw it out of the window! I was caught because the brilliantly sleuth like Mr Elliot checked the soles of our shoes and found that my Adidas footprints were all over the destroyed picture. I was suspended from school for two weeks for my ‘destructive behaviour’. But, in my mind, I had decided that it was yet another example of life’s unfairness, and that, if I had not been unfairly blamed for the ‘Berlin Wall book incident’, there would have been no ‘Guernica incident’. I must remind the reader that, at the time, I had no idea what the seemingly crap picture was about or who Picasso was, and I hadn’t heard of the Berlin Wall either, despite the incident occurring during a history class! I can picture (pardon the pun) a sort of tenuous irony in the incident now, given that Picasso’s picture is about war and destruction and the Berlin Wall was about segregation and oppression. As a young lad in Grantham, I was constantly at war with the school system, and had most definitely developed the idea that I was being picked on and treated differently.

Fishing Interludes

One thread that ran constantly throughout my life, until I started running away to dance at Northern Soul all-nighters, was course fishing every Sunday with my dad. Wikipedia, that fountain of knowledge for many, notes that, ‘In the British Isles, coarse fishing refers to angling for rough fish’: not those poncy Trout or Salmon! Apparently, I began these excursions at the age of six and by the time I was eleven I was going every week to various waters that surrounded Grantham: Culverthorpe lakes; Denton Reservoir; Foston Beck, Woolsthorpe Canal, and a few others that I can’t remember. We fished for Tench, Bream, Chubb, Roach and Perch mainly, or Eels if I could catch nothing else.

We would get up at 3am usually, having prepared our rods and line the night before so that we did not have to thread the line in the pitch black once we arrived at the water. We generally took it in turns to have the best spot, but there was always an underlying competitiveness with my dad and I when we were fishing. I remember one morning, at the massive Denton Reservoir, when, racing ahead, he took my fishing spot. We argued about it, but he would not let me have it, so I stormed off to the other side of the very large reservoir. My petulance however, had led me to forget that it was pitch black and that I only had a tiny torch, and I was, once the anger died off, quite scared as I edged my way slowly towards the other side. Now the next part is going to sound totally unbelievable, but it is the truth. Already scared by the pitch-black isolation of the location I was in, I began to hear voices and rustling in the near distance, but thinking it was in my head, I continued setting up my rod and chair. However, the whispering voices grew nearer and nearer, and I was so terrified that I picked up my sharp pointed rod rest to defend myself from whatever ghoul it might be. Then suddenly from the bushes there appeared a group of men in camouflage uniforms with painted faces and carrying rifles. I stood mouth open, speechless, not even able to shout because I was so shocked. One of them comforted me in soft friendly tones and informed me that that they were an Army patrol group out on an early morning training exercise: totally fucking bizarre timing, and I still sometimes think I might have imagined it, but it was (sur)real for sure!

I didn’t catch a thing that day, my heart wasn’t in it and eventually, later than the hour we had agreed, I trapsed my way back around towards where dad was. Where dad had been and should have been is more appropriate, because when I arrived at the spot, he was gone! I looked everywhere and when I asked a nearby fisherman if he had seen my dad, he said he had left about twenty minutes earlier. So, I headed to the car park, because surely, he must be there waiting for me. But no, his car was gone. Bastard I thought! He’s left me behind on purpose!

Not to be outdone, I decided to drop my dad right in it by approaching a fisherman in the car park and telling him that my dad had gone home without me, I seem to remember crying a bit to help the proceedings. The fisherman was horrified by my story, asked me my address, and drove me home. When we arrived at my house my mum answered the door and was shocked to hear my story, because she had not seen my dad yet. When my dad eventually arrived home his face changed when he saw me at the door with my mum. It turned out that he had left me alone at the reservoir to teach me a lesson and had, after an hour, headed back to collect me only to find that I had gone. He then began to panic and worry that I was lost or in danger. My mum was furious that he would do such a childish and selfish thing and the rest of the Sunday was very awkward for us all, with my dad giving me daggers when my mum wasn’t looking. Revenge is sweet I thought....