Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time: Chapter 17
An occasional series of possibly true scenes from a perfectly normal life. Let's call it faction.
Chapter 17: It’s Time the Tale Were Told….
(If you’re new to the book, you might want want to read the other chapters first. Links to each chapter are at the bottom)
Congratulations. You’ve made it about halfway through this highly unlikely, but surprisingly mostly true, tale. Only 16 or so more impossibly stupid and unbelievable daft chapters to go and together we can reach some sort of conclusion as to what sort of life this has been. However, we shouldn’t wait that long before we consider what sort of person it happens to.
Astute readers who have been here since Chapter 1 will have noticed that this sort of attempt at a sort of auto-biography has a strange quirk which is that it starts when the author is already eighteen years old. There are several good reasons for this, including it not being that sort of auto-biography, and me not being the sort of famous celebrity that you feel the desperate need to know what my favourite breakfast cereal was as a toddler. However, we have probably reached the point of the book where we need to understand what sort of personality I have that means that I am constantly besieged by daft situations which I’ve got myself into by making hasty and illogical decisions. So let’s pause the cavalcade of daftness for a brief interlude so we can explore what sort of upbringing and accidents of birth collide together to create the type of adult I became. Trigger warning: If you are quite happy spending some time with the frivolously pointless nature of the things that happened around me, or are just enjoying the book and hoping that pretty soon it will feature Jarvis Cocker and Natalie Imbruglia, why not jump ahead to Chapter 18? This next bit might be a somewhat sobering read.
I was, I believe, a make up baby. The youngest of three, I was born five years after my brother, entering the world one night in June 1964 into a working class household in West London that was, by all accounts, already struggling to get along. Despite this, the partnership at the head of this household had reached the illogical conclusion that a good way to put a sticking plaster over the tensions would be if they worked together to bring a small child into the proceedings.
I was born at home to a policeman father and a stay at home mother. Two years after I was born, the attempt at reconciliation occasioned by my birth inevitably failed and my father became a stay away from home dad and my mother entered the work place. I’ve never really been sure if my sister and brother blamed me for that or knew I was also an innocent bystander to it. The subsequent divorce was apparently horrendous. To understand how bad it was, I did not see or speak to my father again until I was 19. At all, not even once. Quizzed on his absence, and lack of communication, my mother once explained to me that this because he was too ashamed to see me; he had been called to an armed bank raid, badly injured when the bank robbers made their escape, and taken a shotgun blast to his left hand side which had lost him his arm. As we will shortly learn, my mother had a complicated relationship with the truth.
We were now that most sixties of cliches, a broken home with a single mother. She didn’t take this lying down, and began working all hours to make sure we had somewhere to live and something to eat. This resulted in me being dropped off at various places with various people of various reliability, but she did not have much choice. We would move frequently - I lived in something like eight houses I can vaguely remember, and possibly dozens more that I do not. Thinking back on it as an adult, I would realise that we would move at fairly regular intervals of about six months, which I think possibly corresponded with any landlords tolerance for the non-payment of rent. I wouldn’t say we were poverty stricken, but you could probably have made a convincing Ken Loach documentary on us which would have raised a few eyebrows.
This went on for a number of years, until my mother met someone new, a person, for the sake of the thematic coherence of this story, that I have chosen to christen The Vicious Angry Git, a title he was determined to earn. Something had gone badly wrong in the The Vicious Angry Git’s life, leaving him bitterly disappointed by everything and everyone. His own divorce had been twice as fractious and acidic as the chaotic and destructive one that had hit our family, which perhaps was the source of the bond that had brought the pair of them together. Despite the rather obvious fact that The Vicious Angry Git seemed to harbour a loathing for his own children, and was determined to hate hers even more vigorously, my mother was proposed to and accepted. They married when I was nine, and the house became an ill tempered battleground. My sister had already fled the nest. It would take my Brother two more years to escape, and me another six.
The Vicious Angry Git was a violently tempered ball of spite and rage. He would initially punch frustrated holes, publicly and loudly, into walls and then later on, privately and quietly, bruises into me, a fact of abuse I would put out of my mind until I woke up in a cold, terrified sweat some twenty five years later having fleetingly recalled it in the type of nightmare that is so real you can physically feel it. Repressed memories are a hell of a survival technique. When he wasn’t busy inflicting actual violence, he would ensure that every opportunity to humiliate, embarrass or belittle you was seized and acted upon. He chose the occasion of my tenth birthday to announce to the small gathering of the few friends I had managed to keep, despite all the moving about, that the only reason I had not been put up for adoption was that my mother was convinced no one would take me. He was, for whatever reason of what had happened to him or what had caused it, a deeply inappropriate person to bring into an already quite difficult family situation.
I would never get the chance to ask my mother why she had chosen to do it. At the age of ten we just stopped talking about anything of any importance and would never restart. At thirteen our communications would dry up entirely. Conversations until then were reduced to the bare minimum necessary to continue joint occupancy of the house, largely limited to announcing the location of our next home, excluding any concept of discussing or debating the relocation. Around the time of this communication breakdown the pair of them relocated for the first time outside London, moving me for a very brief time to Slough before settling on Tunbridge Wells. I was the unwanted house guest they were legally compelled to bring with them.
The move to Slough seemed to be in part provoked by the fact I was, until this time, an excellent student. I had not only passed the 11 plus, I had scored in the top 1% of entrants for the whole of the London and South East region and was actually considered a bit of a maths prodigy. The result of my 11 plus exam had led to an offer of bursary supported entry into Dulwich College, a private school charging huge sums to parents who wanted rid of their offspring. Mine wanted rid of me, but didn’t have the finances to make it happen. Luckily for them I had been summoned for an entry audition which, if I was successful, would result in me being offered a free, full boarding scholarship. I walked up the path towards the gates, took in the row of Rolls Royces and the cut glass accents, and, realising instantly that I did not belong here, decided to flunk the interview at all costs. This was an outcome I was easily able to achieve by the simple expedient of answering each question with a surly ‘dunno’. Had I been accepted I would have been in the same class as Nigel Farage. In some alternative universe somewhere there’s a version of me that responded to the question ‘what can you tell us about Henry Kissinger?’ with the actual knowledge that was in my brain, and that alternative me goes on to lead a very different life with his good friend Nigel. I like to think that perhaps he had the opportunity to talk the future UKIP leader out of his depressingly angry future. Or at least kick him in the nuts when he started with all the fascism nonsense.
Failing to remove myself from the family home with a scholarship, it was decided London had endured enough of my presence and off to Slough we all went, the Vicious Angry Git’s rage risen to a new boiling point of frustration by my continued demand for a place to sleep. It was around the time of this relocation that I became seriously ill for the first time. I would become completely incapacitated by tiredness, to the point where even keeping my head upright would be too difficult. The Vicious Angry Git insisted to the doctor that I was faking it, but not even his determination that I would be just fine if he bullied me a bit harder could give me the energy to walk the mile or so to the school I had been placed in. One morning I passed out on the street trying, was taken to hospital and given the diagnosis of an extreme version of Epstein Barr viral infectious mononucleosis, known at the time as “kissing disease” or glandular fever. Verdict for Diagnosis One: Not even close.
I was signed off for eight weeks, a period of bed rest only interrupted by The Vicious Angry Git announcing that we would be moving soon and that wherever we went he hoped there would be some actual medical professionals who would not be taken in by my faked incapacity. In case you’re wondering, that’s what he would say to people wheeling me up the driveway on a stretcher; in private it was much worse.
Our arrival in Tunbridge Wells would provoke a second bout of serious illness, manifesting first as red lumps on my head, then a left wrist that ballooned up with fluid. This subsided long enough that I could be enrolled for the last few weeks of Summer Term into a local grammar school 1.4 miles away, a distance walk-able in about 25 to 30 minutes. On the first day it takes me 40 minutes there and 45 minutes back. By the end of day three it was taking me a full hour to make the journey, and large bulging pockets of watery material have appeared underneath the skin of my knees, elbows, and ankles. Waking up on day four, I cannot put my shoe on my left foot because it is the size of a watermelon. I attempt to phone my Mother to communicate this challenge but she won’t take my call. I phone the local doctors, a mere 400 yards around the corner, who tell me to walk round and they will try and get a doctor to see me. It takes me an hour and half to complete the journey, by which time I am screaming in pain and just about manage to crawl through the door. The receptionist takes one look, summons a nurse, who summons a doctor, who summons an ambulance, and I am rushed into Pembury Hospital, sirens wailing and lights blazing. They can’t get hold of my mother or the Vicious Angry Git, so I am admitted without parental or guardian consent into the Children’s Ward where I will take the first tentative steps on a journey of a lifetime of being prodded, poked and tested.
On the evening of my hospital internment, my sister and her husband arrive, demand to see the charts, get a meeting with a doctor, check what I need, and do everything they can to understand what is going on. I look a bit like I’m making a reasonable effort to turn into The Elephant Man. On day two my seventeen year old brother arrives and despite his young age manages to have the same conversations. It takes until day three for my Mother to arrive, demand to know what I’ve done now, then hurry back outside to the Vicious Angry Git who has kept the car running because he doesn’t want the inconvenience of finding a place to park.
It is the long hot summer of 1976, the summer of Punk and rebellion. I spend all of it pinned to a bed by deformity, half the time delirious on a range of pain and anti-inflammatory drugs which, it will be later established, are widely inappropriate to the illness I actually have, the wrong thing to give any child, and, in the most severe of cases, unfit for human consumption. A specialist is summoned from London and pronounces that I have Chronic Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis. Verdict for Diagnosis Two: We are a bit closer but still not even in the correct ballpark of ailments.
On the basis of this diagnosis, the nurses begin a series of medical interventions which start with a course of Aspirination - the direct injection of an aspirin solution into an area of inflammation. This causes me to scream the place down, has no impact whatsoever on the illness, generates violent vomiting and will later be banned. They do it to me for two months, once a day, then prescribe a range of stomach ulcer treating medication when the damage it is causing to my internal organs becomes apparent. In the middle of these treatments they swap out my drug medication to an experimental use of Indomethacin, at the time thought to be a safe drug but which will later turn out to cause, wait for it, stomach ulcers. I throw up quite a bit more for the next month and then they decide that’s not working too well either, so they move me on to Phenylbutazone. This is my first encounter with the Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory wonder drug which doctors will keep me on for the next 12 years in an attempt to control frequent outbreaks of crippling pain, inflammation, loss of movement, debilitating tiredness and inability to function.
I will eventually spend 13 weeks in hospital this time, then sporadic periods of being readmitted and experimented on for the next 5 years. The Phenylbutazone reduces the inflammations sufficiently that I can learn to stand upright again and start physiotherapy to learn how to walk, and I’m on a range of pain medications too long to list, plus another bunch of stomach, kidney and liver medications because of all the damage everything else they are giving me is doing - 24 tablets a day in all. I am a very sick child who will grow into a very sick adult; I will never be considered to be in good health by a medical professional ever again.
In 1984 a second specialist decides I have an auto immune disease which has provided the opportunity for Chronic Osteoarthritis to take hold (Verdict on Diagnosis Three: We are getting colder in some ways but warmer in others), then finally jump forward to 1988 when, 12 years after I initially became ill, the fourth or fifth specialist to have a go at working out what’s wrong with me will eventually run a test on my blood and discover a marker for HLA B27, an almost certain indicator of Ankylosing Spondylitis. Verdict 4: Bingo. We have a winner.
Ankylosing Spondylitis is a type of debilitating joint disease characterised by long-term inflammation and degradation of the joints of the spine. That’s a doctors way of saying that the bones in my spine, starting from the base, are growing together and I should expect, with my extreme chronic version of the disease, to become permanently disabled. While it is busy doing that it is also crushing my nervous system, causing the inflammations elsewhere and the screaming pains that go with them. In the worst of cases it also attacks your eyes, bowels, stomach and other joints. I like to over achieve, so I have the worst case any medical professional has ever seen, resulting in associated Iritis, Psoriasis, Osteoarthritis, occasional Crohn’s, Ulcerative Colitis and Arrhythmia. It is a degenerative disease. There is no cure.
The specialist will also review my medication, and rear back in horror when she discovers I have been prescribed Phenylbutazone for 12 years. During that time the International Agency for Research on Cancer have classified it as “carcinogenic to humans" and it is known to cause Aplastic Anaemia. My newly diagnosed illness is debilitating, life limiting, and degenerative, with the almost inevitable outcome of a total loss of movement in my spine and limbs sometime in my late twenties, or perhaps thirties, but certainly by my forties. The good news is that the treatments they have given me have placed me at very serious risk of heart attack, cancer, liver failure and kidney disease, with the outcome that it is unlikely I will survive long enough to become disabled. My health is, and I’m going to use the full range of medical professional opinion available here, fucked up beyond all recognition.
Being this sick for this long, especially as a child, breaks connections, relationships and friendships in ways that are difficult to explain. I was a gregarious, fairly popular, young child who was outperforming educational expectations. As hospitalisation and painful treatments became a regular interruption to that life, and as pronouncements on my health prospects darkened, all of that melted away. I entered a selective grammar school at the top of the class, the most likely to succeed and meet their ambition of an Oxbridge place for the brightest and best students. I would leave it ignominiously less than 5 years later with the bare minimum of qualifications, an unwanted and almost unknown truant, who struggled to make the effort to turn up to two lessons in a row. By my fourth year, my attendance was so poor that mistakenly turning up to double French one day, it being too cold for my usual activity of sitting in a park dreaming of a different life, the teacher became confused and introduced me as a new boy. The entire class was made to stand up one by one and say hello to me in French despite their protestations.
I was not, to be clear, a disruptive or rebellious young person. I didn’t talk back, get into fights, start arguments. I wasn’t massively into theft, apart from when I needed batteries for my portable tape player, and I didn’t join any gangs or possess any weapons. I just wasn’t there. Whether by conscious decision or as a defence mechanism, I had given up on education, given up on family, and largely given up on friends - from this period of my life I emerged with only the smallest circle of friends, no more than five close acquaintances. Those friends acted as my unknowing accomplices to the decision I had made to do whatever it was I wanted and certainly not what anyone else told me to. They would let me hide in their houses from The Vicious Angry Git until late at night, never once demanding to know why I didn’t want to be at home. They would defend my school absence, claiming to have seen me headed to the teacher’s office limping, or claiming that I might be back in hospital again. My friend Moon once spent a whole two weeks calling out “Here” for me at registration in a series of muffled and disguised voices. It was never discussed why I needed help they just gave it, for which I remain immensely grateful. I was a completely different teenager than the child with so much promise. I had lost touch with who he was. But I had found someone, and something, else to be.
My mother was an infrequent visitor to the hospital and the The Vicious Angry Git completely absent. My sister, however, would sneak me in edible meals and treats, turning up three or four times a week and acting as the surrogate parent. During one brief period when I am well enough to be home she decides to take me to see one of her favourite bands, the UK chart topping, rock and roll revival, nine piece Darts, who are performing at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon.
Other people have a much cooler music origins story than me. The Internationally Famous Photographer excels at this, having seen Iggy Pop when barely out of diapers and The Clash when most sensible people of his age were heavily focused on Sherbet Dibdabs. Other friends love to relate how Bowie, The Stranglers, Roxy Music or Led Zeppelin brought them their first encounter with live music. Everyone’s experience is different and means something to them. Mine means absolutely everything to me and you wouldn’t be reading this book without it.
Aged 13 I sat halfway back in the Fairfield Halls on a raised section of seating at the back of the stalls. To enable me to stretch out my legs, one of which could not be bent, I was placed in the aisle seat, right next to the walkway. Unless you are of a certain age you probably won’t know the band Darts, but they were a very big thing at the time, three top 5 singles in row, selling out everywhere. Their act was a huge rock and roll revival show, featuring a row of singers across the front of the stage performing an updated version of doo wop harmonies backed by a zany group of musicians bedecked in colourful suits. One of these singers is responsible for all the bass harmony parts, which he performs with manic intensity and a series of exaggerated faces. This singer, Den Hegarty, has a reputation for wild live antics, which he is about to prove he has more than earned by running up and down the aisles of the Fairfield Halls almost from the moment the first chord is struck until the last note of the encore fades into the night. Crucially, he is going to do this in close proximity to where I must remain seated, unable to stand, while the rest of the audience dances in, and on, their seats.
In the song Come Back My Love there is a moment at which the music briefly stops and Den’s bass baritone carries the music forward on its own when he sings ‘Come back and give me a chance woah baby’. He’s busy racing up and down the aisles in this number, headed towards this solo moment in the spotlight, when his manic stare falls on me, the only person not on their feet. Now, I don’t know if he understood that I couldn’t stand up, or if he thought I wasn’t into the show, or if he was sent by the ghost of Buddy Holly on a mission to instinctively pick out people who needed something positive to happen in their lives, but for whatever reason, it is then, at two minutes and seven seconds into the big hit of the evening, that Den Hegarty decides to lean right into my seat, park himself no more than two inches away from my nose, and pop the lyrics of the song directly into my face. He hops and skips away, but them comes running back to do it again when he gets to the ‘ba ba ba baby’ at the end, by which time my mind is already made up.
I’m going to do that for a living, it looks like the most fun ever.
The point of this chapter is not any attempt to ape the confessional style of Frank McCourt and to garner the sympathy of you, the poor reader, that had to endure it. Rather it is the background you possibly need at this point to explain what history, what motivation, what massive lack of common sense, might cause someone to make the life choices and almost inexplicable decisions I have made. Some people occasionally say that I make reckless choices, but that’s not really true. I don’t often consciously put myself in any physical danger, I’m not an adrenaline junkie in that sense. But a total lack of parental control, an absence of inherited family ties, a completely disconnected education, and a permanent threat of ill health, disability, and early mortality hanging over you like the Sword of Damocles have combined to give me a particular take on life which, while it might not be unique, is rare and unusual. I basically went a bit feral and never really found a way back, not, to be clear, that I have spent too much time looking. If nothing else, this feral nature means that I will always come to your party because I am secretly harbouring the fear that I might not be able to make the next one.
Mental health and resilience is an entirely self reflective measure. It’s almost impossible for me to tell you how you might feel about something and vice versa. I can’t predict how you might receive bad things that happen to you, how you might feel about them, what challenges they might to present to you. Reading this chapter might leave you thinking that I had an unhappy, and quite challenging, childhood. But the truth is I did not. I didn’t receive the things that happened to me badly. I had a tough couple of years which I really didn’t enjoy, lying around in hospitals and having things put into me that shouldn’t really be there. I had one of the weirdest family arrangements I’ve ever heard about, where I spoke to my mother on only four more occasions in the rest of my life after my twelfth birthday despite living in her house for another three years. I fell completely out of education to the extent that I would be a prime candidate for a life of low skilled manual work drudgery and/or crime. Those things caused a massive change in my personality, outlook and social circle, but I did not become defined by them. At the age of thirteen I experienced a life changing moment of exhilaration and happiness at a live music event and I found someone else to be, something else to build a life around, something else to be defined by. Finding that moment resulted in me adopting a stupidly optimistic view of life that can be summed up as ‘well you might as well, you have nothing to lose’. Provided this approach was sound-tracked by music, I was convinced it would eventually mean that everything would turn out okay.
Just about everything else you read in the book is influenced by that moment, the decisions I make, the things I think are important, the people I befriend, the things that make me angry… it all comes back to that. I was completely lost, and then music came along and saved me. If that sounds overly dramatic, try lying in a hospital bed for 13 weeks having medical interventions done to you against your will then pop some headphones on and listen to White Riot by the Clash. It will instill in you a certain sense of urgency to life, a feeling that what life you have should be lived to its fullest and at maximum volume. Or as the Rollins Band would later put it; “Don’t think about it. Do it.”
Aged 19, The Music Store Owner and I are exploring this theory one lunchtime on the ground floor of the Flute and Flypaper where we have decided to play double or quits pool. The Music Store Owner loves to play pool, but is extraordinarily bad at it, a quality I have been exploiting for some time by playing him for money, drinks and food. We are three hours into this tournament, and he is £512, a lunch, a pair of shoes and two thirds of a bottle of Jack Daniels down, when he announces the last bet of the day. If he wins, all debts cancelled and I have to come with him to Calais right now no questions asked because he quite fancies a night out in France. Unable to think of any similar destination that I would like to be at following the inevitable outcome of me pocketing the black ball before he’s managed to hit even one of his stripes down, an idea pops into my head. “If I win,” I hear myself say “we go and see my dad who runs a pub in Oxford”.
I had been informed that my father, who I have not seen or spoken to even once in the intervening years since he left when I was two, had bought a pub in Oxford when he retired from the Metropolitan Police Force in 1969. This was a popular time for members of the constabulary to stop enforcing the law and retire early, shortly after the locking up of both the Richardson and Kray gangs with whom they had for a number of years operated amicable arrangements on the best way to police their activities. He had taken on a pub called the Red Lion, allegedly purchasing it for cash, and had remained there for the next 14 years. I phone my sister to confirm the location and after some nervous prevarication she eventually gives in and confirms that yes, that is where he is.
The Music Store Owner loses. We persuade Terry the Landlord that the rest of the catering sized bottle of JD should come with us, drive round the bits of the M25 that are currently completed, and arrive in the car park at about 6pm. I don’t know if you’ve ever drunk a bottle of Jack Daniels and attempted to walk anywhere, but I have a go, trip on the step into the lounge bar, fall through the door, pause to try to not land on my face, and eventually crash into the billiard table where my left ear lands neatly into the central hole allowing my face to point at the bar. Behind it is a man who looks just like me, only older, wiser, greyer and a bit weightier. He is polishing a glass and fixes me with a calm stare.
“Alright, son. It’s been a long time” he says.
“Your arm grew back then” I reply.
Read the previous chapters of Our Johnny is the Only One Dancing in Time here:
After reading that I had to go and find Gordon Giltrap on TOTP with Heartsong because I had no memory of it at all. And by crikey, it's truly awful, it's like the introduction to a decent song but they kept forgetting to start the actual song.