Part One

It was, I suppose, summer 1959 when we moved house. Village life was exchanged for that of the big city. Actually, Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire was a fairly quiet market town, but it seemed pretty big to little six-year-old me. 

The sedate idyll of rural England was gone. Half the houses in our new street were inhabited by Sicilian families and other southern Italians, recent immigrants come to work in the brickworks nearby.

One morning my mum took me along to check out the school that I would be going to. It was morning playtime, and all the kids were out in the playground. I had never seen anything like it before. World War Two had officially ended fourteen years ago, but nobody seemed to have told the children at St Johns Church of England Primary School, Aylesbury. The fight was still on, Italians versus the English, and it was vicious. As I tip-toed aghast through the debris of battle strewn across the playground, it looked as if the result declared in 1945 was about to be overturned. This was a world apart from the one that I inhabited; a major task over the following months would be learning how to navigate this and remain intact. 

Amazingly, I managed to survive those years at primary school without much bruising, physical or emotional. In retrospect, it is as if I flitted through it all like a ghost. Nobody paid me much attention, or seemed to notice me at all. I remember little about the many hours spent in the classroom.

I only got involved in one fight. It was with a wiry little Sicilian named Luigi Belardo. I never knew what the fight was about; I think he was just looking for somebody to have a go at, and I was close at hand. Soon, the entire school was gathered round to watch the spectacle. "Fight, fight!" I was actually holding my own pretty well when headmistress Miss Ryall came out and pulled us apart. 

The other potential pummelling came when another of the Italian kids started to get tough with me. A street-wise English boy named Lawrence stepped in. "Don't pick on him. He's not strong." Thanks, Lawrence. I'll take that.

A few years after I left, St. Johns Church of England primary school was closed down and demolished, deemed unfit for purpose. Then, Pakistani families began to move into the street and the Italians left: they didn't like the foreigners......

Part Two

The real trouble, though, came from the generations of adults. It was just the deadening, numbing feeling which accompanied the conformist, all-doing-the-same attitude which most adults seemed to come onto the stage with.

The grandparents. On my mum's side, my granny was kind, warm-hearted, smoked a lot, and was very overweight. She died of a stroke when I was young, and I was very upset. Grampy kept pigeons and took me to the train station in the evening to watch the steam engines come in. There was not an out-of-line cell in either of their bodies, but they were warm-hearted and I really couldn't complain.

My father's side, though. We acquired our first car, an enormous Austin A70, which guzzled petrol enough to drain Texas dry. It also reeked of petrol, and made me sick. Despite the undoubted boons of having our own transport, there were setbacks. Prime among these was the drives over to my father's relatives for Sunday lunch.

They lived in Woodstock. Not the Woodstock, but a small town in Oxfordshire, known for its neighbouring Blenheim Palace and the grave of Winston Churchill. 

As soon as you entered the family house, it hit you. Generations of repression oozed from the somber wallpaper lining the long, dark hallways and corridors, hanging heavy in the damp, musty air. Lots of brass, polished severely, and big, heavy furniture: these are the images which remain. It wasn't just me - my sister recalls exactly the same.

My grandfather was Town Clerk, second in official and officious importance in town only to the mayor. My father was partially self-appointed black sheep of the family, and would look out for any difference of opinion to object to. His parents and sisters were only too happy to oblige, while mum, sis, and me watched in quiet despair. Sunday lunch was, I suppose, roast. The only thing I remember was that we would have tinned carrots; at home we never ate carrots.

The best part of the trip was invariably the sense of relief when we got back into the retch-inducing car for the journey homewards. Once back, my father would put on the radio for a uniquely depressing programme called 'Sing Something Simple'. This meant only one thing: it was Sunday evening, and further despondency. Soon it would be Monday, and school. 

Part Three

Music was the main thing. And the newly-purchased little television, broadcasting grainy black-and-white images, was the perfect medium for its dissemination. Pop, rock: vehicles of vitality, hope, life-is-going-somewhere. My father would sneer as by the week the hair got longer, the clothes got wilder, the guitars got louder, the skirts got shorter. My sister and I loved it.

First up was a programme called 'Ready, Steady, Go'. Hosted by skinny mod Cathy McGowan and bizarrely-suited middle-agester Keith Fordyce, it introduced us to the likes of the Kinks, the Yardbirds, the Who, the Rolling Stones, all new to the world at the time. Some of the group members looked as if they didn't smell too good. But every week the hair got longer, that was the main thing. My father complained, and I began to develop the art of dodging teachers along stuffy corridors who would be out looking to issue the edict: "Get your hair cut." 

'Ready, Steady,Go' broadcast early Friday evenings. "The weekend starts here" the announcers would proclaim with barely-contained excitement as the show went on air. Friday evenings. My sister and I weren't popping pills and dancing until dawn, but, hey! We had school. We needed the weekend too.

Very soon, Friday revels with 'Ready, Steady, Go' were augmented by the early Saturday evening offerings from 'Juke Box Jury'. On this programme, ninety-second clips from the week's new singles releases were played, followed by a short panel discussion and a vote on how the record would fare. 'Hit' was denoted by a high bell-like sound, while a 'miss' was indicated with a loud farting noise.

The panel consisted largely of highly uninteresting boffins from the music industry, along with a sprinkling of people who actually played or sang stuff. These were irrelevant to the real value of the programme, which was the chance to hear the new bands, the new sounds, the new people. And all on a weekly basis!

Televised events on Friday and Saturday evenings encapsulated the essence of life (for me) in the early 1960s. It was new, it was inventive, it was exciting, and the future looked just great. It is difficult to convey anything of the optimistic vitality that was there to be plugged into - a far cry from the life perspectives on offer today. If so much as a week should pass without some new sound - and with it some new feeling or attitude -, you would feel cheated, short-changed. Such was the speed of things.

I vividly recall hearing for the first time on a 'Juke Box Jury' show the opening chords of the Animals' rendering of 'House of the Rising Sun'. Today they are a commonplace, but the electric, echoed, haunting effect of that guitar had never been heard by a human being before. And two years later 'Good Vibrations' by the Beachboys. What on earth was that? Could this really be the same bunch of smiley-smiley feelgood Californian surfers from only, it seemed, yesterday?

Novelty - expansive, always moving forwards - seemed to be the hallmark of culture. I kind-of assumed it had always been that way. The excitement, the energy, the anticipation: it seemed hard-wired into the fabric of existence. Meanwhile, my peripheral vision announced, the grown-up nine-to-fivers continued their life on the treadmill.....    

Images: Part One. Some Sicilian kids, 1959. Image: vintag.es

                  Part Three. It's a miss! Image: Steve Scalise