Part 2 (1966-1979) - 1067-1968 - Growing Learning

Part Two - 1967-1968 – Growing Learning

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I was 11 Years old

Grosvenor Square, 49A Carlos Place.

A grand millionaire’s apartment Block, and again we had a basement flat that we accessed from a hidden small stairs that led down from the back of the ornate entrance hall inside the main looked out into a light well. From that basement level you could access a rear concrete yard surround by a high brick wall, and from here you go deeper, to a sub basement where the buildings coal fired hot water boilers were hissing and steaming.

The Flat itself, was dark but warm and clean. There was a fairly large kitchen and living room area divided only by low wooden partition of about 3 feet in height. There was a corridor that led to the 3 bedrooms and bathroom. And most curiously the door to the toilet opened to a internal building ‘well’ and a few steps to a small toilet. The effect of this was that I remember making that short journey to the toilet across the well, open to the sky, in rain, sunshine and even snow. This while being encased in the heart of a grand London apartment building.

The days and months passed. Dad would sit upstairs in the small Porters lodge in the entrance hall exchanging pleasantries with the wealthy residents.  Meanwhile my Mother was working in Selfridge’s basement Kitchen Department. Sue was in Secondary School and I continued at St Georges.

And one afternoon I remember my father coming into the flat. He felt unwell, looked pale, complained of palpitations. My mother called the General Practitioner, who duly arrived. My father was lying on the settee, whilst the doctor took his pulse. And then, as I stood peeking from the corner of the room, the doctor began methodically rubbing my father’s neck.  It would be many years later that I would understand that my father was experiencing Supra Ventricular Tachycardia (SVT – an abnormally fast heart rate) – and at that time a first line intervention was Vagal nerve stimulation by rubbing the neck. In due course he looked better, and the Doctor left. And then I remember seeing my Mother sit next to him – holding his hand. And I heard him say to her in a quiet trembling voice “I am so scared”. It was the first time I saw one of my parents vulnerable.

My father was a complex man. I have many mixed memories of him. I remember him putting together a train set on a wooden board. It was going well, and he by degrees got angrier and angrier, losing his temper spectacularly. Eventually I fled my bedroom in tears. Immediately he came after me, gathered me up and apologised over and over whilst holding me tight to him. He was a man with a temper, but he was also a man of deep complex emotions.

St Georges sent us off to learn to swim. Off in a Coach to a Grand Victorian Swimming Bath – I can’t remember exactly where, but I think it was somewhere near Victoria Station. I remember my first tenuous strokes, and then a width, half a length, a length. I won my Certificates (Bronze, Silver) – I learnt to swim in Central London. I have loved swimming ever since.

I had a teacher - Miss Blackmore. She` was a very special person. At once fearsome, and yet also a great advocate. I like my peers always remembered Miss Blackmore as a teacher who “believed in you” – each and everyone of us. She nurtured me from being a very shy young boy, to one who had a growing sense of confidence in his ability to face the world. My Mother told me that Miss Blackmore said of me that “David will never get there 1^st – but he will always get there in the end”. She was a very smart lady!

It was Miss Blackmore who put me forward for the lead part in the School Play – I was to play Dick Wittington.  I had never been more petrified in my young life. But to my surprise, on the night, it all went rather well. I had discovered that inside the rather shy exterior that was ‘me’, was a lurking extrovert.

Food! Dinners. Suppers. For the first time – I notice FOOD in a real way. My parents had (for their generation) a highly varied palate that reflected their earlier international travels. I discovered the foods I would love, and learn to enjoy.  My Mothers cooking varied widely. There were Stews, ghastly post war pots over vastly overcooked fatty stewing steak and whole peeled onions in a thin tasteless gruel. This was then contrasted with glorious Steak & Kidney Puddings, Roast Dinners, and even rich Curry (long before they were a common part of our British Diet).  

 I have mentioned previously Coco – the lovely Labrador Coco. I have no recollection of Coco’s life with us during the turbulent Bognor and Birmingham days. But somehow Coco was still with us in Grosvenor Square. How do I know this – because I remember his death! I remember him becoming ill (Distemper), and my Mother nursing him in a box in the corner of the kitchen. And then my Father carrying him in his arms through the streets of central London to a Vet – and that he never came back. Coco was my first real bereavement.   

Memory is the strangest of evocative human abilities. Memories may reflect the strangest things and unusual. And this vignette - remember the context of the time that I write of – the 1960s, Post War, when the echoes of an older class system still persisted and pervaded despite the Modern and Post Modern youth revolutions, and despite the massive cultural revolutions brought about by war and subsequent social change. At the rear of the Grosvenor Square building was a concrete yard that gave access to the bowels and foundations of the building. There lay the Boiler Room, a subterranean cavern access by steep iron stairs. In this dark recess there lived to Grand Brass and Iron Boilers – giant machines all joined by a complex of gleaming piping and valves that steamed and hissed. There where dials – that warned of pressures. And there was The Boiler Man – Francois Hubert Fitzstilling!! A stereotype and picture of the British Class System, in his working clothes, and NHS Specs. François glorious name belied his devotion to loading the boilers with coal that he religiously shovelled into the gapping maws of the two boilers to provide heating and hot water to the privileged residents above his head – they unaware of his daily sweating labour.

Frank and I became good friends – and I would sit for hours is his darkened cavern and listen to his wisdoms on life, class and position. I was captivated by his ritualistic polishing of brass vales and piping, his utter devotion to ‘his’ boilers, and their pristine appearance. No one would ever see his precious boilers, or know of his pride in stoking and caring for their function – but I knew – and he shared his devotion with me.

I remember his utter devastation when they upgraded the system to ‘oil fired boilers’ – no grace or style, sleek modern machines thyat required the minimum of love, affection, pampering. Franks life was never to be the same – his pride was swept away by new efficiencies.

And then I was 12 years old. And there was a Riot.

The Grosvenor Square Riot – March 17th 1968

I stood there watching from the corner of the grand London Square - a chaos unfold – I was an observer of a remarkable event and history that I could not understand until later in life. My Mother was “sorry for the Horses”.

I was never a ‘Boys’ boy. I was a shy, introverted boy with a latent eccentricity. I loved stories, fantasies, train sets. I was a gentle boy who was easily intimidated by others. It is my belief that my Father was alert to this, and in his own way attempted to make me ‘tougher’ – a tougher ‘boy’.  He was cut from a more traditional model, he loved sport, and was overly fond of a regular flutter on the horses. So he started to take me to see the Arsenal to watch football, and was disappointed when I was thoroughly disinterested. I went on to develop a life-long aversion to the game. I was also packed off to learn Judo, which was fun, but I would never excel.  My Father I am afraid had to learn to live with his unusual and somewhat eccentric son.  It did not matter – I knew he still loved me.

And then, in 1968 I moved on from St Georges, and became a brand new school boy in Quintin-Kynaston – an daunting and substantial Secondary School of some 2000 boys on the Finchley Road. For the next 7 years I would take the “13” Bus from outside Selfridges, up Oxford Street, Gloucester Place, around Regents Park and past Lords Cricket Ground. Passing St John’s Wood Tube (close to where I would later live and work).There on the left was the sprawl of “QK” – a place that would make me the “the man” I was to become.