1964
YESTERDAY

the snow was thick on the ground. Thick as shit. And it was Mummy's birthday and she went into labour and called out the midwife who was not a proper midwife and was horrid. Thick as shit. She prodded us about and said I was wasn't ready yet so she left and the next day I was born, that's today. Whoopee. Daddy nearly feinted so the real midwife told him to go downstairs and burn my placenta in the coal oven while Mummy squeezed me out. Daddy says we are so poor that that helped warm the house. It happened between half past eight and a quarter to nine this morning, and I think that's why I shall always hate mornings. I weigh more than ten pounds and my face is so fat they call me Currant Bun. My eyes are like currants in puff-pastry and my throat is thick as shit because I swallowed lots of mucus. So they tipped up my cot to get out the mucus with a straw and, whoopee, breathe that air. Soon I will get a chest infection. However, the shops in Beckenham High Street will be closed so Daddy will walk to Boots in Piccadilly and Dr Breen will give him some pink Tetracycline to pick up from the all night chemist. Then I will feel a whole bunch better. When I start to crawl they will say "watch out Atom Bomb's about!" because I will destroy everything I get hold of. I have an older brother called Michael who pouts a lot and will go to punk concerts, but I will giggle a lot, even more than big sister Lou, who will date soldiers from the barracks, or little brother James who will pop along later and mean BIG TROUBLE. But then I will cry when I to go to Holy Trinity Infants School on the Lambeth Palace Road and Mummy and Daddy will take me to a psychiatrist with a beard in a dark room and he will show me curious pictures and wait for me to talk. But then school will be normal, until I go to Big School when I am eleven. I will be shy and grow long and skinny because nobody will notice I got a disease and soon I will have a nervous breakdown and cry in my head. I will sit in the car of my headmistress while she shows me a wonderful grammar school full of pleasant children and she won't understand why I will cry even more. They will put me in Battersea County School and then Boufouy School with thousands of children running around mad and I will hate it and hate it and read books in the corner, if I can even find a corner. Every morning Daddy will drag me out of bed because all night I will rock and moan and try not to wake up for school. Daddy will put off his work and teach me at home but I won't want to learn and I will go to a tiny little school for a few odd children and I will write a space novel about the weirdo Similes and the bug-legged Metaphors. We will go to France for one day for a holiday but there will be no-one there and on that day I will love Maureen. There we will see half a horse hanging up in a shop window and the rain will be cold like at home and at school. Then I will to go to Aspen House School for a lot more odd children, in the middle of Kennington Park where I will feel sick again during football matches but when I am sixteen I will stay after hours and enjoy badminton with the headmaster and do the famous Masquerade puzzle in the library. I will take some exams and my maths teacher will feel sorry and help our whole class cheat. In the holidays from school I will learn to sweep up wood dust and Perspex dust and make coffee and buy biscuits at Presentation Unit who make architectural models and one pleasant day I will have money in the bank and in my right trouser pocket and sometimes we will go to America or Norfolk to work and make more money. But before that lovely day dawns I will go to Putney College for one horrible year just so I can enter Art School. The professors and brightly dressed students will secretly call me 'Odd Fish' but I will say almost nothing and pass the exam with a 'C' which is not good but not bad. However, then I will sit and draw boats as usual by the River Thames where it is still narrow and not brown and decide never ever fucking ever to go to Camberwell Art School because I will be old enough to say FUCK FUCKING SCHOOL FOREVER! BURN THEM ALL DOWN CUNTS! PULL YER FUCKING CHILDREN OUT OR BURN THEM TOO, WHY NOT! and I will earn money as an architectural model-maker until I am twenty five and almost grown up. But unfortunately although joyfully in short periods I will love a model-making female colleague who wears no underwear and smells like sweeties in heaven and I will feel grand as anyone who ever lived and died in the world, but because of this I will have another breakdown and go to hospital for one night. An angel will make me better but forbid me to know her, so after all that I will go self-employed and work all over London Town doing things like special effects and advertisements starring Superman wearing basketball trainers and I will continue to buy crappy sports cars and pretty records by Kate Bush and sit in the dark and listen to Pink Floyd and Mike Oldfield and New Order and think about marvellous things and terrible things. After work I will play for pub pool teams and drink loadsa beer and be drunken and watch television and go to bed when the town goes to bed, and still not sleep. I will writhe around in my sheets and wet cushions until model-maker Bob with dreadlocks moves all the way to Berlin for unknown reasons with Irish Denise. So I can live in their house in Worple Road, Wimbledon, with Danny Flynn the poet and Engine my cat who gets run over and buried in the garden in the pouring rain and the pouring tears and there, or in Richmond next door, I will meet Amanda Jayne Scott the dancing aerobics teacher with the Finger of Death from an advertisement in a lonely hearts magazine. She will be twenty-nine and I will be Toy Boy, but after one year I will meet temperate Tanja the German opare girl in Ye Olde Leather Bottle Pub and she will be only seventeen years old until she is eighteen. Then I will feel relieved. I will give up selling wine and delivering London Bus parts and coffee machines to sports clubs in my big white van around the Green Belt and we will go to Europe together forever. We will say good-bye to Mummy and Daddy and leave frosty England AT LONG FUCKING LAST and get off the ship in sunny Spain and dump half our clothes and shoes on a bench for the tramp at the dock to admire and take home. Then we will freeze in the night in the tent on the hard ground and have trouble getting into lorries. We will hitch-hike to south Portugal where it is warm enough and very new and only a little bit extremely boring and there we will live for a shortish six weeks. I will drive tourists around through mountains and backwards through streams, hurting their backs and drinking local schnapps at stops on the farms in a jeep in the mountains and in rivers and Tanja will work for unusual people in a restaurant. Strange as hell. But our adventure won't be forever as I will get fired for driving too fast and Tanja will get fired for something unknown and she will say "I'm going home to Germany". I will go with her but Gutersloh and her difficult parents will be tiresome as old ice-cream and soon I will depart and return like a hopeless, jobless, penniless fool to London where I will work in bars and deliver sandwiches and visit pubs once more to booze with the local losers. However, I will save a bit of money and travel around Europe again being tragic but happy and learning or not learning a thing. Some places will be lovely and some places will be nasty like Milan until I go to Berlin to visit Bob and the people will be pretty but Bob won't be home so I will go to Scandinavia. But then the money will be gone but Bob will come home to Berlin. His dreadlocks will be gone and I will stay in Lychener Street and meet the neighbours and make puppets and teach English and find some sexy girlfriends and some weird girlfriends and visit parties and take drugs which make me peculiar but have a nice time if I can remember anything the next day. I will get another broken heart and run away to a commune in France in the mountains and eat home made bread and jam for two months and dance and meditate and hold hands around the fire until a witch says I am lazy and I must go back to Berlin for ten years altogether. I will live in some squats and some other places and paint pictures on walls and I will love Krisztina the pastry cook and visit her in Budapest. I will be an artist and people will look at my pictures and laugh or get confused and my stomach will shrink and I will get even more skinny and sleep too much and get a spotty face like a currant bun and feel mostly awful. So I will go to the island near England where Mummy and Daddy live when they retire and I will live with them next to the sea for eighteen lovely lazy boring months and then fly in an aeroplane back to Berlin and build a kind of gallery called strangely enough Wallywoods and meet Sir Thomas and Nikki and nearly one million other odd characters called Windy and Elvis and Mad Lutta and I will pretend to be an Ugly American and someone called Paradox Paul. We will drink more and smoke even more than before and make awful noises and burn CDs nobody wishes to purchase. I will make exhibitions and sell bits of art nobody wishes to buy and two years later Gallery Wallywoods will turn into Art Pub Wallywoods which will NOT QUITE BE THE DEATH OF ME until I build another Wallywoods as big as a house on a frozen lake where I wonder if I will get paid for my job and there in Berlin and forever more shall my brain be a tumefaction.

"According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, as mass is added to a degenerate star a sudden collapse will take place and the intense gravitational field of the star will close in on itself. Such a star then forms a 'black hole' in the universe."
(First usage of the term Black Hole in describing a "gravitationally completely collapsed star" in an article by Ann Ewing, which discussed a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), published in the Science News Letter of 18 January, 1964)


1965
RELOCATED

from Beckenham to London. May as well have been Calcutta. Our lovely big garden was gone. Huge it had been; sunny and green and huge. We didn't even get a window box. Got plonked right in the middle of it. Right slap bang in the fucking middle, between the fish-dead Thames and Kennington Police Station, in the midst of all those marvellous schools. Between the West End, which scared the heebie-jeebies out of me, and the Elephant and Castle before they painted it pink, where I loved to spend my pocket money, until me and that fucking idiot, what was his name, got mugged in the underpass. Years later, Mum got mugged in broad daylight at the Old Kent Road, where she loved to spend her pocket money. From there and East Street, or the Lambeth Walk, or Petticoat Lane, or the Cut, she would stagger back, on the bus or on foot, under the weekly load of six or eight plastic Marks & Tescos bags stuffed with potatoes and leeks, family-sized cans of soup and beans, and frozen meat. The encounter with that young black chap, pulling out all the stops for his family, scared her heebie-jeebies out as well, and by default Dads. But they escaped in the end, early in the next millennium, as Old Tired People to the Isle of Wight. Dad, however, still misses London terribly. "The culture... the culture..!" Truth be told, so do I. Just don't wanna fucking live there. On the day of the London move, bang on Lou's fifth birthday, lucky gal, Mum hauled me onto the wooden kitchen table to change my nappy. Whoopee. She found the head of a silver nail poking out of my right thigh, which I had collected atom-bombing around the new floor. But I hadn't bawled, and didn't when Dad pulled it out. In fact, the next time I remember crying for any worthwhile reason, would be eleven years later. Our new home was a City of London council flat on a grey concrete estate named Blake House. On that same soil, in a smaller, private house of wood and glass, the man himself had lived. Dark, fantastical, terrifying. So here is an opening riddle: If William Blake, or any old geezer, brilliant or otherwise, named Bill, or Jack, or who-cares-what, had access to a startling idea revealing unto his Brain and Soul the power to stop the world, speedily and quite easily, would he have set that knowledge - a knowledge of immeasurable beauty belonging to no other in this corner of the universe - would he have set that catastrophic knowledge into action? And if yes, would he have done it for himself? To prove himself right? Or to prove the world finally wrong? And would he have known, at that second of no return, the thing he knew already very well; that he was no vessel of God, rather, that with his action, he was God, by any name? Or would he have damned us then, like a simple flawed man, simply out of spite? Well... forget it. This is irrelevant. Bill is long dead. And to his credit, or not, he didn't do it. This is for him:

THAT STICKY PLACE

Butterfly came landing
She bent to kiss a branch
And dug herself a home there
(Rest now).

Erupted soon a moth
Of better, badder beauty
Which leapt across the flood
Below and pranced about
The yawning vale where
Petals pour down spinningly
On ants who do not care;
For toil here is light enough
But lighter yet the head
Which wags in fever to deny
That, YES, His Storm is blown aside
But, NO, it failed to cure the Wound
It only rapped upon the crust
Without that sticky zone of reckoning
That Glory Place I made my own
That sullied Hole methinks now CUR-SED!
An ant pit DAMNED and QUEENLESS!
(Breathe now).

Gushing 'neath the bark!
Ahoy!
Burning at the knot!
A-Splicing lower limb from
Little Butterfly - yet digging!
(Fly now!)

And Ye did sow the rhythm
That I did catch the rhythm
Till Ye escaped the rhythm
Lest I should CRUSH the rhythm
And THEE!


1966
MY NEMESIS

was born on a beautiful day in June, behind the War Museum at Brook Drive Hospital, where that tosser Michael Winner filmed Death Wish. Mum's waters broke while she was washing up. Slaving over a sink, you might say. But he was number four and she ignored it at first to finish the dishes. Brother James, as it turned out. 'Jim' to his mates, the rough little turds. 'Jim' had more cred. He coined it himself, and it stuck. When they told her, she quietly said, "oh Gawd, not another one!" by which she meant, not another boy, of course. He was pretty though. More about that cunt later.

KNOBBY TALE

I saw a chap with horns and a knobby tail,
I FOUND MY THRILL IN A BOTTLE OF SWILL!
He sang, his eyes all darting;
He ran away, he couldn't stop laughing!

I saw a chap with eye-brows raised in the middle,
High as heaven, his speech enchanting;
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLOW BLAP BLAH!
He blew, he wouldn't stop farting.

They met one day in London Town.
I hung around a while,
It was ever so exciting!


1968
CYRIL HORACE ALOYSIUS RAYNER

died upon his seventh heart attack, in a little room in Gloucester Place after a last drink at his last local, the Gloucester Arms. To be precise, "Myocardial fibrosis due to coronary atheroma" is what finished him, on the eighteenth of June, aged fifty-five. And there things already get blury, like the people in the photos he left behind, or the undisclosed number of his siblings. Fifty-five is what registrar E.R.Sanders reckons on the death certificate, whilst registrar A.E.Jacobs witnesses Cyril's birth in Forest Gate on July tenth, 1911, killing him at an inch short of fifty-seven. A lonely old gent, by then, one might imagine; certainly no unusual crowd flocked around plot number L.P.344 at St Marylebone's a week later. I never knew him, but Mum did. He was her father. It upsets her to this day to recall him. He married her mother, Maud Lilian Beatrice Holbrook, on the Isle of Wight in 1935, and was snubbed by his family for doing it. Perhaps they imagined themselves Lower Middle Class, back there in the Lower Middle Ages, whilst Maud was born lower than that. (Funnily enough, hilarious indeed, the same subtle class thing happened with Dad's parents, only the other way around. And with better reason. His mum's family cut her off for marrying our Grandad, nickname 'Slim' - oh, that rhymes with 'Jim' - the chronic drinker whose purpose in life, as it turned out, was to terrify his young family and chase them from home to home across the West Country.) A 'sawyer' at the break of war, Cyril enlisted in '42, passed a storeman's exam, and certainly saw action, though it's no longer certain where. Mum thinks North Africa, but then again it could have been the Middle East, or somewhere else. After the war, he was posted in Hamburg and Wehmingen near Hannover, where a mysterious lady enters the scene; towit, the possibility exists that Paradox Paul has German relatives - a shard of information I am still attempting to digest. But whoever she was appears to have dumped him, and he marched off to Lagos in Nigeria, where he sunned himself for a decade or so, by now a Warrant Officer, Class II. Meanwhile, the marriage to Maud was no longer ideal; very likely the reason he stayed abroad for so long. He had returned from the war to face 'great dissappointment' and in 1955, at a cost of 38 pounds and 10 shillings he popped in the post to London a file for divorce, citing, let us say, common reasons, in those shifting times. Then, to round off, another major blow was dealt in 1960 by those untouchables at the War Office in Whitehall:

Dear RAYNER,

The object of this letter is just at the end, on behalf of the Army Council, to say thank you and to wish you well. All of us have to make the change from full time soldiering to civil life sooner or later. In your case the change has come before the full military career which you had every reason to expect has been fulfilled. I can only say that I am sorry; and that we in the Army Council have tried to be as fair as we can.

Like most other occupations, soldiering has its ups and downs; its good patches and its irritating ones. I hope most sincerely that on leaving you will feel that it has been a worth while task, carried out in the best of good company, and you will look back on your time in the Army with pride and affection.

As always, a younger generation is coming up to carry on the tasks and traditions that have been yours, and which remain with those still carrying on. I am confident that after leaving, you will continue to support them in any way you can.

It is physically impossible for me personally to sign this letter to every one of you. I am sorry, but trust you will understand.

Thank you for all you have done. The very best of luck in the future. And I do hope that you will not let your links with old comrades be entirely broken.

Yours sincerely,

General Sir Hugh C. Stockw(ell?) GCB, KBE, DSO, ADC

Cyril ended up in London again, even lived for some uncomfortable months in '61 with my parents, in Thornton Heath, during their Very Hard Years. He re-trained as a traffic warden with the Metropolitan Police (at least '61 - '64) ... The rent was eight guineas a week when Dad was on four at the Bank of Tokyo, so Grandad (seems odd to call a man Grandad who I never knew) helped with the bills while he watched the black and white television he had lugged along with him. He would sit with his drink and do little more but spite about everything and everyone he saw on the screen. For Warrant Officer Rayner, "extremely loyal and honest" and of "exemplary conduct and character", who kept his Long Service & Good Conduct Medal in a box with his wartime Defense Medal, now a night security officer at Bedford College, had grown bitter. His bitterest outbursts and mumblings were triggered by women, all types of women. They just couldn't do a thing right; not any more. Eventually, without warning or explanation, he threw his bits and bobs into a taxi, strapped his tv on its roof, and retired forever to the Gloucester Arms. Had he reached sixty, his army pension would have been 5 pounds, 15 shillings and 4p a week.

GAME RULES

Here is a chess set, short of pieces
Poor blind pawns, they hardly existed
Red wolf guards, now thin with greed
Quick tongues flick, 'tween laugh and grimace
Two bent preachers, cloaked in whisper
Brothers blessed in Rape and Incest
War ground shakes, 'neath black feet stomping
Obsolete armies, wild and frozen
Dominance, Arrogance, Lies, and the rest...

Draw up your turrets of dark oiled marble!
Bolt up your horses, servants and cripples!

As for the fist-king, clasped in murder
Staggering drunk in Empire State
Blasted from his quarrelled throne
Ein Reich! Zwei Reich! swept aside
Right-hand queen lies stoned in death
Toppled again, they teach us nothing!
But hold now; Captain of Hunters, Fox, the criminal
Is snared at last, and dragged from the field;

This field of clay.

... Mum and Dad had been left with the memories of a pungent, uneatable rabbit stew and serious rent problems with the (...Street) landlord ... Dad starts work as sales assistent at ICI, eventually 10 years later is marketting officer when he decides to leave. Before that, Bank of Tokyo but could not stand the work (respectable), ICI more interesting, secure job (still didn't enjoy it), but money got a little easier. Had been "murder" through the 60s, worst beginning of 60s. Back then walked on occasions with no money for fare or food, from Thornton Heath to (Bank of) Tokyo.

What else happened in '68? Oh yes, something else I don't remember. The four of us, Louise the eldest, Mike, myself and James (I never, ever called him by his preferred name 'Jim'), were baptised in a batch on the third of May, up the road at the Church of England's St Mary-in-Lambeth, adjoined to the Lambeth Palace where the Archbishop lives. Gosh, how impressive. Justification for this act of pomp and nonsense? Well, Mr and Mrs Woods of the Parish of Lambeth had no particular bent towards Christ and his all-enveloping blood, muck and lies. Indeed, they both have blasphemous reason to shudder at the thought. It was just the normal, and therefore the expected, thing to do. The good man who dunnit, the then rector of St Mary's (as we commoners knew it), the reverend Oliver W.Feinnes, was a cold fish, an atristocrat, Dad fondly remembers. Slumming it in Lambeth, dunking gutter-snipes and marrying pregnant neighbours stinking of drink, he ended up Dean of Lincoln. On receiving the Woods clan, dressed up on best behaviour (boy did we squabble) James screamed his head off at the doorway ... mum said, "" Reverend Feinnes face dropped and stiffened at the remark.

(Technical Chemical Warefare Course, 23.9.51 to 5.10.51, grade B)


1969
FIRST CONSCIOUS

memory connected to a date. The moon landing. Dad stayed up all night, we slept (must remember all the news reports, mainly images)...


1970
MUM STARTS WORK

(after working the Lower Marsh market with Shirley - "Oh, don't mention that!") at the Central Office of Information (COI) Catering assistent (tea lady). Queen comes to visit, Louse shouts.. Eventuall told them to stuff the job when wasn't put up for assistent manageress...


1971
ON CUP FINAL DAY

group outing from Blake House to Ruislip Lido (swimming pool) a rare event with whole family, plus neighbours including the Afro-British Douglas family (Glen, Laura..) - one of them was stabbed to death in Brixton, answering the door of an aquaintance during a visit, "wrong place at wrong time"...


1972
COLOUR TELEVISION

arrived at 14 Blake House. Kids astonished at Squiddly-Diddly in colour.


1975
MUM STARTS WORK

at BT, telephonist, eventually service supervisor after 17 years, until privatised (about 92) under Thatcher (Dad detests Thatcher still, not just for that reason) Then 5 years as receptionist at I.M.P. (International Masters Publishers), best job, loved it, more "up market", high powered, would have stayed on if not retiring to IOW...


1976
UNCLE PETER DISSAPPEARS

leaving wife and 2 kids, Helena, Adrian. On the run from cops, they were about to fit him up, to USA... Dad bought the families legendary luxury car Rover 2000 (POY 69OF) after the Austin A40...

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