Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite Read online

  There was a place called Bunny Park, right under the Wharncliffe Viaduct in Hanwell, and we’d spend all Sunday afternoon playing cricket there as the Great Western steam trains raced past. It went on for hours and hours on long summer’s days, and all the cousins and aunts and uncles joined in.

  Maybe I’m just remembering the good times. Maybe I’m making the best of it, just like they were. There must have been arguments, but I don’t remember them. They used to say I was a terror. I was always up to mischief. I was always building something and making a mess. What I do remember is having to fight for everything I wanted. In those days nothing was handed to you on a plate. That was all right, though. I doubt my life would have turned out the way it has if I hadn’t learned that particular lesson very early on.

  * * *

  We lived in rented rooms at number 16 Percy Road. Aunt Jessie and my Uncle Ed were downstairs with my three cousins, Enid and Brenda, both older than me, and Margaret, the youngest. Me, Mum, and this strange man in army boots who turned out to be my dad were upstairs. We had two bedrooms, a lounge, and a kitchen, which became a little cramped when my two sisters came along. Behind the kitchen, down a little flight of stairs, was the communal bathroom. I was the only boy sharing a bathroom with two sisters and three cousins. Five girls versus one boy. I learned to cross my legs.

  My aunt and uncle were staunch Labour—when I was older they used to take us away for Labour social weekends—all smoke-filled community centers and beer. I never spoke to Dad about his politics. He should have been Labour, too, but for reasons that never became clear he hated them. He just said they were full of shit.

  My cousins, by the way, were very bright. They used to talk endlessly about the things they had learned that day at school, and I would listen in with fascination. Like most kids, I was up for learning. The system hadn’t beaten it out of me yet. Enid was an early follower of fashion. She was into what she called the Beatniks. To me, they all looked like old men with their knitted baggy pullovers and scruffy beards. The girls all dressed up like Doris Day. They listened to trad jazz, which was certainly more lively than the Billy Cotton band that played on the radio every Sunday lunchtime.

  Enid and Brenda passed all their exams. They went to university. I don’t know where they got their brains from. It’s baffling. My mum’s other sister, Lorna, married a bloke called Ernie, who was an electrician. They had two sons, one of whom got into Oxford when he was fourteen. Both of them became top nuclear physicists. You wouldn’t have guessed that I have nuclear physicists in the family, would you? All these cousins got on because of the grammar school system. They were the clever working class—the grammar school generation that rebuilt Britain after the war—and they went up in the world. It shows that the system worked. It just didn’t work for me. I think I struggled more with the conformity than the actual education. I was more rebellious than my cousins. I hated being told what to do.

  No, that’s not true. I was happy enough following orders in the Boys’ Brigade, singing away on the sergeant’s shoulders, promenading up and down the beach in formation. I was happy sticking to the rules at primary school. In fact, I loved it. I got on well with the teachers. I came top of my class. And my favorite part of the day was the walk to Victoria Junior Boys’ School. How many kids can say that?

  I had to wear short trousers, a vest, and a pullover. The pullover was the only cloud in an otherwise clear-blue sky. It was made of wool. Not nice, soft, comfortable lamb’s wool. This was the early 1950s. It was thick, scratchy, horrible wool. Mutton wool. Horse wool. Steel wool would have been less itchy. I was stuck with that pullover for years and years, and I hated it. Then, when I was eight, Mum bought me a gray flannel shirt, and it meant the world to me.

  Mum used to tell me I could only wear it two days in a row, and then it had to be washed. Back to the itchy, scratchy, horrible bloody pullover. So I used to get up at six in the morning and wash that shirt, dry it, and iron it so I could wear it every day. I was a slave to fashion. Or comfort.

  My form teacher for my last three years of primary school was called Mr. Blake, and I loved him almost as much as I loved that flannel shirt. He taught me about history and geography and all the things I was interested in. He took us on school trips and we did interesting stuff with him.We learned naturally, which is the best way. And he thought I had potential. “A boy of wide interests—practical, intellectual, musical and athletic,” he wrote in my end-of-year report in 1955. Maybe I could have been a nuclear physicist, too.

  That summer I passed my eleven-plus and “won” a place to Acton County Grammar. At the same time, Dad got a promotion at Armitage Shanks, the “sanitary pottery” manufacturer, and so the family moved up in the world, too. We moved two miles west to the leafy, semidetached delights of 135 Fielding Road in Bedford Park. We had our own bathroom, our own gardens, front and back. It was an aspiring working-class family’s dream. To me, I didn’t care about any of that. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to move away from my friends. Two miles may as well have been a million. I felt like we’d moved to Mars.

  chapter two

  School’s Out

  The first week of life at my new school and I already knew this was a terrible mistake. The kids were from places like Greenford and Ruislip, places with trees and grass and wide pavements. They spoke middle class, or “posh,” as me and my mates would have called it. It wasn’t just a different accent, it was a different language. I didn’t understand a word they were saying.

  It didn’t help that I was very skinny and quirky looking. I’m not exaggerating. I looked … unusual. Because of the accident. Not that one, another one. It happened four summers before I pitched up at secondary school. We were on holiday at my aunt’s bungalow in Bournemouth. Next door was a building site. That’s how it was in those days. So many homes had been bombed to rubble. People had nowhere to live. As soon as a house was built, you moved in, even if all the other houses on the street hadn’t been finished. It was normal to be surrounded by building sites and to play on building sites. So I was mucking about next door, probably playing cowboys and Indians. I tripped over some bricklayer’s wire and landed on my jaw.

  Mum took me to the hospital; they looked at it and said it was fine. I don’t know what it is with me and hospitals. They always look at whatever is supposed to be wrong and say, “It’s fine.” Off I went back home with an apparent all-clear. Within twenty-four hours my jaw had swollen up. For the next couple of days, whenever we left the bungalow, I refused to get out of the back of Dad’s taxi because I was making the Elephant Man look like Frank Sinatra. Everyone on the street was staring at me and I just sat there feeling sorry for myself.

  It didn’t get better. It just got bigger and bigger, and by the time Mum took me back to the surgery it was pulsating. As we were waiting to see the doctor, something happened. All of a sudden, there was this terrible smell. Everyone in the waiting room started to look accusingly at everyone else. Who had been so indelicate as to let one off in a surgery?

  “It wasn’t me,” my eyes pleaded as they all settled on me. But then, I felt it. My shirt, my lovely flannel shirt, was wet. My infected jaw had burst. This time they did send me for an X-ray and realized that my jaw had fractured in three places. I’m telling you this story for two reasons.

  First, because you need to understand that when I walked through the gates at Acton County Grammar, I stood out like a sore thumb. Second, after the jaw got better, I never felt any pain when someone punched me in the face. That’s probably quite important. If I’d gone through life with a glass jaw, things might have turned out quite different.

  In a school with a high proportion of toffs who expected the first years to be their fags, the last thing you wanted to do was stick out like a sore thumb. Very quickly, very predictably, I was bullied. My nickname was Trog and it still grates with me today.

  A favorite pastime of the older boys was to hang me from the wire-mesh fence that surrounded the playgro
und. They’d make me hold on to it with my hands and then they’d lift my feet up so I was horizontal. When my arms got tired, bang. They loved that, they really loved it. And I had never felt so low.

  It wasn’t long before I started to play truant from school and just walk around all day on my own. I used to walk up and down the riverbank on Dukes Meadows, up and down, up and down, starving and lonely, really desperately lonely. It was beautiful down there by the river because it was wild and green and the air was fresh, but I used to think, if this is what life is like, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be in this world. I felt almost suicidal.

  I think it felt worse because it was so far, so suddenly, from a happy childhood.

  That time in my life seems distant now. It is distant. It was sixty-odd years ago. But I can still remember one day like it was yesterday. It was a Friday, the end of a long week. It was break time and I was in the playground, alone, trying to look busy, trying not to look alone. I looked ahead and remembered I had years of this to go. There was no end to it. I walked out of school and I went home, feeling completely empty. No one was home. I found my mum’s sleeping pills and I just sat there looking at the bottle. Then I took four or five pills. Mum and Dad couldn’t work out why I’d slept for forty-eight hours. I suppose they thought it was just part of growing up.

  It didn’t help that the teachers couldn’t communicate with me either. There was no Mr. Blake. The only one I liked was Mr. Hamilton, our metalwork teacher. There was the maths teacher who hated me because I hated maths. I just couldn’t get it to go into my brain. I don’t know why they don’t work out which kids are good at maths and let them get on with it and which ones aren’t and give them a break. We still haven’t worked that one out today. It’s mad. Obviously it helps in life if you can add up a few numbers but I could do that. How else do you think I managed to work out how much we were being ripped off when The Who started making proper money in the 1970s? But algebra? Trigonometry? Sin, cos, tan, and all that stuff? Do me a favor. Horses for courses.

  Then there was Mr. Watson, the form teacher who despised Elvis. Who could despise Elvis? I had the same English teacher for three years and all he did was chuck us a textbook at the beginning of each class, light a pipe, put his feet up, and work his way through the Racing Post. He never taught us a single thing. Then there was the music teacher, Mrs. Bowen. She just wanted to teach us dots on pages and it didn’t mean anything to me. Here’s how to do a Bach chorale. This is a quaver. This is a crotchet. This is this. This is that. I couldn’t stand it. Where was the music? And her response? She told me I’d never make a living at it.

  All I wanted was to be left alone to play my guitar. Over the summer of 1956, I made my own approximation of a guitar, and from the moment I strummed my first chord I was absolutely focused on it. That was the trouble with school. I could focus on something if I wanted to. I could do anything if I wanted to, but the system didn’t allow any latitude. You had to sit still in class. You had to follow their stupid rules. You had to do what they wanted you to do when they wanted. I couldn’t do any of those things. I took about a year of this shit—bossed about in class, picked on outside it—before I answered back. One morning at lunch break, one of the bullies was having a go, so I picked up a chair and hit him with it hard. After that, they all backed off. The chair had turned the tables.

  I don’t think I ever became a bully myself. I learned to defend myself and I learned not to put up with any shit, but I never actively looked for trouble. Pete seems to think I did. It fits his narrative of what happened farther down the line. So he claims to remember me fighting a Chinese guy in the year below me at Acton. I swear there wasn’t a Chinese guy in the whole school.

  Now, I’m an incredibly peaceful bloke really, and I think I’m fair as well. But in those days I was quite volatile. My fight-or-flight fuse was shorter than a hummingbird’s dick—and it was always fight. I also had a lot of energy so when the red mist came down I was like a bomb going off. As soon as I got the whiff of someone about to attack me, I’d get the first blow in. When people worked that out I was left in peace, and when I wasn’t, well, then usually they deserved it.

  * * *

  The only fight I remember actually starting is one that I regret to this day. I was fourteen, the age when you’re still finding your macho feet, and this friend and I were having a bit of a ruck in the common room. It started playfully but then he was squaring up to me, telling me he was going to have me. I just lost it. The red mist came down. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d leapt across a bench and started throwing punches and kicks. I nearly killed him and immediately I felt dreadful about it.

  To make things worse, he was friends with a gang called the Acton Teds. They were a heavy mob—Acton Acton, not grammar-school Acton. They came from Acton Lane on the Vale council estate over on the other side of the British Light Steel Pressings railway line. That line has long since gone but, back then, it was the Berlin Wall of 1950s West London gang culture—a line I had to cross every time I went to see my mates. And the guy I’d half beaten to death was a member of this gang. Brilliant.

  So he told his mates I beat him up and now I was on their hit list. They were going to get revenge and they were going to get it sooner than I thought. The Sunday after the fight, I was up on Ealing Common watching my friends playing football. I wasn’t very good at football myself. I just used to go and watch, to have a laugh and a joke. Halfway through the first half, seven of these Acton Teds came up in all their Teddy Boy clobber. Their leader was a guy called Johnny Craft, a cooper from Fuller’s Brewery, and the Williams brothers from Acton Lane were there, too. They wanted to have a little chat.

  You can’t run.

  If you run, you’ve got your back to them. If you run, you’re dead.

  More importantly, I wasn’t a particularly quick runner. So they formed a ring and little Johnny Craft—he was about my size but he was a cooper so he was a tough guy—says, “You beat our mate up.”

  “I know,” I told him. “I’m really, really sorry,” not just because I was really, really sorry but also because there were seven of them.

  Unmoved by my apology, Johnny explained that it was my turn now and started hitting me. I refused to fight back because the only thing more dangerous than trying to run for it was to start fighting back.

  That’s what they wanted. It would mean they could all pile in. So Johnny, exasperated, brings out this great big wooden cosh and starts whacking me with that. All his mates are telling me I have to fight and, in a terrifying moment of oh-fuck epiphany, I realize I have no choice. Passive resistance isn’t working. So I hit him in the face.

  His nose explodes.

  There’s blood everywhere. His mates look even more pissed off than they did a minute ago.

  Oh shit, I think to myself. Why couldn’t I have hit him where it wouldn’t have bled so much? Why didn’t I just kick him in the nuts? Now the circle is closing in and I find myself facing Mickey D. who you’d know, if you knew anything about the Acton Teds, had a terrible reputation as a knife man. True to his terrible reputation, he’s pulled out his penknife, so now I’ve got real problems.

  Roger Harry Daltrey RIP.

  Cut down long before his prime.

  And all because I lost my rag in the common room last Wednesday. About ten minutes later than I could have done with, I was saved by some older guys playing football on another pitch. They saw what was going on, came over, and pointed out that seven against one was a bit unfair. The Teds from the Vale backed off. Mickey put his penknife away, whispering that I was a marked man as he did.

  And that would have been the end of that if I hadn’t started going out with Barbara Mason. Barbara was my first girlfriend and she was a beautiful, lovely girl. Way out of my league. She was attracted to me because I was in a band and I sang. She lived in one of the East Acton prefabs hastily erected by the government in an attempt to solve the housing crisis, and the only way to get to her hous
e from my house was to walk right past Mickey D.’s house. At that age, at any age, you’d do anything to get to your girlfriend’s house, especially if she was a year older than you, and several inches taller. So I was wearing turned-up collars and fucking hats and everything right in the middle of summer, just to make it to Barbara’s in one piece.

  I had to learn a kind of rabbit sensitivity. I also went round telling everyone I was carrying an ax, which wasn’t very rabbit-like, but they believed me. It was all about image, which I suppose put me in good stead for my life as the front man in The Who.

  * * *

  On March 1, 1959, the day I turned fifteen, I was slung out of school. It had probably been on the cards for a while. I’d been caught smoking. I’d been caught playing truant. I was disruptive in class because I just wanted to be left alone by these teachers. And I was the unofficial school tailor, which I guess they hated more than anything. I’d charge a shilling to “update” uniforms. Mum had a sewing machine and I was pretty good at it. I still do my jeans today. My customers would come in with their gray baggy trousers and leave with drainpipes. I’d add jauntily angled school badges to their jackets. They’d go from proud parents’ grammar school cherub to the very latest in late fifties youth fashion.

  There was always a queue for Daltrey’s Personal Tailoring Services Ltd., which must have been infuriating for the authorities. I was, literally, tinkering with the very fabric of the establishment.

  The final straw was an air-gun pellet, which I didn’t fire. Here’s what happened, Your Honor. Back then, we watched a lot of war films and we were kids so we used to spend a lot of time pretending to be soldiers. We were armed with air guns. They weren’t particularly powerful air guns—you could barely shoot from one end of the room to the other—but I imagine Health and Safety would have something to say about them today and, in this very particular case, they might have had a point. But as I said, we were kids and I was a kid who didn’t like rules, and one of the rules was that you weren’t allowed to bring air guns to school.