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Life on Mars

I have never smoked tobacco, except in the odd joint when I was aged 19 to 21, which we’ll address a bit later on. I say this because, in fact, I probably smoked a pack a day just by being around my parents. My God, could they puff away. Aged 16, they tried to enlist me in the filthy weed society, but it was my greatest act of rebellion to evade their yellow-stained clutches.

Drink was frequent, and frequently reckless. My father was violently anti-seatbelts on the grounds that they might strangle you, and I lost count of the number of times he drove home blind drunk.

Nothing in childhood is ever wasted, except occasionally parents.

So now I really don’t recommend drinking anything alcoholic at all and then driving, not even one. Of course, youth and indestructibility means I am guilty of hypocrisy of the first order, but fortunately I grew up a little bit before I killed myself, or, more importantly, killed an innocent somebody else.

But we have fast-forwarded way too far in our time machine. The button to push for the cassette recorder did not even exist as I joined my new school in what was supposedly a rough area of Sheffield, Manor Top.

Actually, I thought it was okay. I learnt to extrude mashed potato, fish and peas (it was Friday, after all) through pursed lips, forming a crinkly curtain with which you could compete with your fellow diners for longevity before it fell from your mouth.

I think Gary Larson must have attended this school too, because the scary horn-rimmed glasses on the female staff gave them that designer concentration-camp-guard look beloved of seventies sexploitation films. Better still were the Hannibal Lecter types who administered the punishment beatings. Abusing mashed potato and peas was a beatable offence, and a stick was laid heavily into your outstretched palm. To be quite honest I don’t even remember if it hurt that much. It just seemed a bizarre thing to do, witnessed and solemnly entered in the punishment book. I felt as though I should have been wearing striped pyjamas on Devil’s Island.

I didn’t stay at that school for long because we moved. Moving was to become a feature of my life forever, but as a family our stock in trade was moving house, mainly to make money. My new abode was a basement, which I shared with my new sister, Helena, who was by now a sentient being capable of actual words.

There was a window the size of an iPad, which opened into a gutter full of dead leaves. There was a refrigerator with an enjoyable electrical fault. I would hang on to it with a damp cloth and see how much electricity I could take before my teeth started rattling. Up the stone steps was the rest of humanity. And oh … what humanity. I was living in a hotel. A guest house. My parents ran it. My father had bought it. He sold second-hand cars from the front of it.

Dramatically, the house next door was purchased. Suddenly, the empire struck back and built an extension linking the two properties. Dad rolled out his blueprints, which he’d drawn and designed himself. I found a piece of wallpaper and tried to design a spaceship with life-support systems to go to Mars.

Builders appeared and they seemed to be working for him as well. As for me, I gained useful, if poorly paid employment. I didn’t put up buildings but it was bloody good fun knocking them down. Demolishing toilets was my speciality. When I was at university later on I could never take seriously the exhortation to ‘smash the system’; I knew much more about smashing cisterns than they ever would. It was all very impressive.

Next, the hotel, the Lindrick, had a bar constructed to Dad’s own design. As far as I could tell, the Lindrick never really closed at weekends, especially with Dad behind the bar. I would hear the tales on Monday from Lily.

‘Ooh, that Mr So and So headbutted Mr Rigby … and then that other fellow was dancing on the table and fell over. Ooh, he broke the table in half, you know. It was teak as well. I think it was his head what did it …’

It was all bed-hopping among the travelling salesmen, and some of the people who stayed were just plain odd. One creepy individual stayed for two weeks and gave me a card and whispered, ‘Ay up, I practise Karma Yoga.’ He would then leave at 7 p.m. and walk the streets till dawn. And no, he didn’t have a dog to walk.

Other people came, and some never left. A few dropped dead in bed. If it was a horrible death, everyone was kept informed by Grandma Lily: ‘She were burnt to death in her car …’

One evening, two gentlemen surprised each other in the dark, each of them assuming they had been fondling a female guest. That took quite some sorting out in the morning. It was like living in a permanent state of farce.

More bits were being added to the hotel all the time, and more of the family moved up to Sheffield. My paternal grandparents, Ethel and Morris, sold up their seaside boarding house and moved in down the road. Grandad Dickinson was a dead ringer for rascally actor Wilfrid Hyde-White, only with a broadish Norfolk accent. A roll-up behind one ear, a pencil behind the other and the racing paper in hand, he set about what would now be called ‘repurposing’ buildings. In practice that meant knocking them down, but using the dressed stone to put them up somewhere else.

Grandma Dickinson was a formidable woman. Six foot tall, with intense, black curly hair and a gaze that would fell a tree at 20 paces, she’d worked as a servant girl, and had been purchased from the railway carriage where she lived with 18 other girls on the land. She was fleet of foot and might have had an athletic career, but she couldn’t afford shoes: 200 metres barefoot was no match for the opposition in spikes. She never forgot that humiliation till the day she died.

While Ethel baked cakes, Morris would emerge from the toilet with a half-smoked roll-up and lots of boxes ticked for the horses. ‘Here you are, sonny – don’t let on,’ he’d say, and he would slip me half a crown from his hand, clawed from years of laying bricks and handling trowels.

At a family summit spent drinking all afternoon in our hotel bar, my uncle Rod did me several favours, one of which was to persuade me never to have a tattoo. Uncle Rod (who was actually my uncle – my dad’s brother) was charismatic to say the least, and frankly looked a bit like one of these roguish gangsters who might be surrounded by women of easy virtue. Right now, though, I sat on his knee aged 10 as he explained the British film-certification system to me: ‘Now, yer ’ave yer X films and, basically, yer have your sex X and yer horror X …’

Whatever he said next faded into the background as I stared at the scars on the back of both of his hands. Uncle Rod had a habit in his youth of misplacing other people’s motorcars. Despite the family’s best efforts, he was so prolific that he was sent to a horrific young offender’s institution known as borstal. Self-tattooing with brick dust and ink was the thing in borstal, and it marked you for life as a product of that institution. Uncle Rod had spent what then would have been a considerable amount of money to get them removed. It was early skin-graft surgery, and these days it would qualify as a special effect in a low-budget horror movie. I just thought, I think I’ll stick with what I’ve got. That really doesn’t look like much fun.

Then Uncle Rod reverted to talking about war films. I had seen loads of them with Grandfather Austin: 633 Squadron, The Dam Busters, Battle of Britain, The Charge of the Light Brigade.

‘And what about Ice Station Zebra?’ I piped up.

‘’Aven’t seen that one,’ he grunted, and he went back to his pint.

Ice Station Zebra was the movie that introduced me to my first rock ’n’ roll band. Yes, with a truck, electric guitars and gigs. The band were called the Casuals. They’d had a hit with a track called ‘Jesamine’ and were now playing residencies at clubs for a week or so at a time. They stayed in the hotel, and during the daytime – which for them, being creatures of the night, didn’t start till midday – they would surface, bleary-eyed and longhaired, in stack-heeled boots and white trousers, for a late breakfast of tea and toast provided by Lily, who was all of a twitter.

I am sure I must have appeared precocious with my questions about rockets and submarines, and it was probably a way of levelling the playing field that the guitarist brought down his electric guitar. I held it. It was surprisingly heavy. He explained carefully how it worked, and I just stared at the round steel discs under the strings and tried to imagine how sound really worked, produced from such tiny fragments with the tinniest-sounding twanging strings.

Like most bands, they were bored silly during the day, and they decided to go to the cinema. Ice Station Zebra was on at the Sheffield Gaumont. Popcorn in hand, aged 10, sitting in a cinema with a rock ’n’ roll band watching a war movie about nuclear submarines and rockets: I thought, This is living.

Dad expanded his empire and purchased a bankrupt petrol station. It was a huge property, an old tram garage with four ancient petrol pumps, no canopy, and workshops full of caked oil and dirt half an inch thick adhering to 50-year-old bricks. The motor trade started to dominate our lives. I pumped petrol in between falling off scaffolding (repurposing buildings), and polished cars and scrubbed wheels with wire wool until my fingers turned blue in winter. I washed windscreens, checked tyres and watched the growing number of cars coming and going as sales picked up.

Dad was an encyclopaedia of motor-car components. He was a natural engineer and would go straight to the heart of the problem. His diagnosis was seldom wrong. He could recount the provenance of the exhaust system of the Fiat whatever-it-was, and why it was superior to the gizmo of the Ford, but anyway, both of them were actually designed by an unknown Hungarian genius. That sort of thing. Get him started, it could go on for hours.

We sold up the hotel as he acquired the dealership for Lancia motor cars, and did rather well until they produced one that rusted faster than you could drive it. I expect money must have been made on the house transactions because there was a property boom, and a house was still an achievable objective for a working family. At one point we made the mistake of selling before we had anywhere else to live. It must have been a very good deal.

In the end we moved back into a terraced house only a hundred yards up from the hotel we’d vacated a year or so earlier. Some people are addicted to crack. We were addicted to moving house.