GRAND HOTEL (Summer 1968)

When my plan to work away fell through, I returned to find Rick had moved out of Dolphin Crescent to make his way in the world, and had placed his solid experience as a kitchen porter at the service of Torquay’s Grand Hotel.

I met him when his morning shift ended, and we caught up on our respective adventures as we walked into Torquay.

Hardly anyone we knew had ever tasted wine at that time, but suddenly they’d all been on Spanish package holidays and you couldn’t move for it. Regent Wine Stores, Saccone and Speed, off-licences were escaping from the pubs and turning up in high streets all over the country.

We decided we’d better celebrate our reunion by buying a bottle of Spanish plonk with ten bob of Rick’s hard-earned and drinking it on a park bench, in the manner of winos.

Although Rick had often tried to lead me into temptation, as he had succeeded in doing with smoking, I hardly drank in those days. I was more Coca Cola with the occasional Woodpecker cider. So half a bottle of tinto was a bit more than the system was ready for.

Rick guided me to Avenue Road and his room at Maracville, one of Torquay’s substantial Victorian villas that had been guest house, B&B, and was now ‘rooms’. Rick’s room at that time was upstairs overlooking the garden. He opened a window and spoke to his landlady (Hettie?), who was hanging washing out down below. I joined him at the window to make myself known at the precise point that my innards decided to reject the denomenacion de origen. She would not forget me in a hurry.

Rick had landed on his feet at Maracville. His room was a good size, and he had already personalised it with posters and reproductions of paintings. Visitors were greeted with the last words of Erik Satie: ‘Ah, the bastards!’

The 'Velvet Gentleman' - French composer Erik Satie.

The residents all seemed to be interesting and creative people, including and especially Mick Jacques and John Briggs, soon to be guitarist and drummer respectively of local blues group, Sleepy Dog. 

Mick had fetched up in Torquay when he set out from his native Yorkshire on foot with a guitar and lived on his wits. He would go on to great things, graduating from local bands to the London scene and eventually joining the hugely successful Curved Air with Sonja Krystyna and Darrell Way. He now keeps horses somewhere in the Dordogne.

Rick jamming with Mick Jacques at Maracville.

I would be needing work, so the obvious thing was for Rick to recommend me to the Grand Hotel. My dad was working at Battery Maintenance opposite the old school, so was able to drop me into work in the mornings.

The kitchen of the Grand was ruled by a chef known as ‘Mad Louie’. He was a brisk military type with similarities to Fulton McKay’s character in Porridge, especially a sort of supercilious expression and a belief that he was superior to every other life form. He was buoyed up in this by the traditional deferences shown to chefs by those wishing to get on in the catering world. Rick and I had no such wish, so were never likely to be listed among his favourite people

He had always a flock of fawning comis chefs about him to say, ‘yes, chef; no chef,’ etc., and had just finished demonstrating some culinary principle to them when he recognised my existence.

‘Fetch a bucket of water and a brush and clean my table,’ he instructed me.

With the aid of Ernie, the pot-washer, I secured the tools for the job and began dipping the brush in the hot water and scrubbing the wooden table.

‘Not like that,’ shrieked the mad one. ‘none of your namby-pamby arsing about.’ And he took the bucket and poured some of its contents onto the surface of the table, causing a mild flood. ‘Like this, man. Put your back into it.’

I took the bucket from him and hurled the remainder of the contents at the table, soaking him from the knees down in the process.

At lunch, I met Danny Bumper. I never worked out what purpose he served. He wasn’t in the kitchen with us, but it is a big hotel and he must have had his uses. I think he’d been there forever, and that his ‘surname’ came from his white plimsolls. Danny was not entirely right in the head.

A typical lunchtime would start with gentle Ernie imparting some piece of information: ‘I see there was somebody drowned in the River Dart th’other day.

At which, Danny would bang his knife and fork down on the table and declare: ‘I don’t know how you can sit there and tell me such lies!’

Apart from the teams of comis chefs, Ernie the pot washer and Mad Louie, there was what I think was a sous-chef, who was probably Hungarian. Like Louie and all other chefs I’ve worked with he swore like a trooper, but was much funnier. ‘What you have done my fucking pot, fucking asshole idiot?’ And there was David, who was from a disabled workshop. He would patrol around the kitchen, mopping or sweeping as called for. Whenever he put down his mop or broom, somebody would take it and put it somewhere else, so he spent as much time on patrol looking for them as he did performing a useful service.

When the sous-chef finished with a cooking pot, he would indicate to one of us to remove it for washing. As Ernie leaned over his sink, we would come behind him and drop the pot into his washing up water from a great height, soaking him and everything in range.

We didn’t have any direct contact with the customers at the Grand. The orders would come via a tannoy and be delivered to the waiting staff by dumb waiter. The sous-chef would advise the waiting staff when food was ready by switching on the tannoy and making the announcement.

Louie treated us the same way he treated the comis chefs, as the lowest form of animal life. We refused to rise to his rudeness, disparagement and foul language.

As at Addisons, we were prepared to work hard, but things came to a head when we had both had enough of being effed and blinded at by both him and the sous-chef. As they continued to pour out streams of invective, we switched on the tannoy to the public area and prepared to be fired.

(Extract from my forthcoming memoir: GOLDEN PLAYGROUND; Summers of Love on the English Riviera.)

BEING INFANTILE (1953-7)

I look back upon my childish self as a stranger. Young ‘Dai bach’, as my mother liked to call him, although neither party was Welsh, was an ungainly creature in round, skin-coloured National Health glasses, one of whose lenses was rendered useless by a big square of Elastoplast - 1950s technology designed to inspire gumption in what was regarded as a ‘lazy eye’.

Neither the eye nor its possessor was much impressed, any more than by the protracted infliction of rubber underwear that was supposed to encourage nocturnal excursions to the perfectly civilised indoor toilet.

I can recall both parents being gratified when the child beat out the entirety of Eric Coates’ Dam Busters theme on his high chair, but his general combination of fearlessness and attendant tendency to be always broken and bleeding in some manner - especially about the head - was less winning and a clear disappointment to mother who found the more athletic and less frequently damaged children of the neighbours, especially those with ‘dark brown’ voices, to be more in the line of ‘real boys’

.

Bobby Truscott was not without barked shins and knees, but was altogether a more shining example of the breed. He lived in number 62, the lower flat in the next block up from us. His mum was very jolly and Devonian and his dad always seemed to wear a flat hat. Mr Truscott went off to work on a bicycle and was skilled in the art of starting off on the left hand pedal and swinging his starboard leg over the then obligatory ‘top tube’ when already in motion. All proper workmen did that then but it seems to be a vanished art.

The top flat was occupied by the Leadbetters. They both seemed quite old to me by comparison with the other neighbours, though they had a daughter called Susan who was younger than we were.

I joined those from all over the estate of a similar vintage for an introductory day at Foxhole Infants’ School. We were each given a piece of paper and some wax crayons with which to do a drawing. The teacher was full of praise for my colourful representation of an unspecific quadruped all four of whose legs were on the same side. I found it a pleasing sensation at the time, though I now wonder if it wasn’t a marketing technique. Either way, a neighbour from the other end of Hoyles Road, Maurice Beer, took exception to my singling out and scribbled all over it, immediately the teacher had moved on

.

The die was cast, however, and we were all soon trapped into the education system. Some of the boys had little green caps with a fox and a hole on them, but mostly people just wore their best clothes. I remember the girls mainly wearing tartan skirts and cardigans often done up only with the top button. I sported a green zip up jerkin.

We took it in turns to be ‘monitors’. As a milk monitor you were required to hand out the third of a pint glass bottles of free milk or orange juice and wash the silver foil lids in a washbasin at the back of the classroom ‘for the blind’. Another monitor would distribute books marked overnight by the teacher.

Fringed in the golden sunlight of memory, Jaqueline Baker, Ann Rowden, Eric Underwood, James Ravenscroft, David Pottinger, Celia Brown, Heather Coin, Esme Stevens, Graham Elswood, Stephen Raymond, Hilary Richards, Virginia Dunn, Maurice Beer, Jaqueline Maunder, Keith Tonkin, Jane Webber, Margaret Choke, Mike Weed, Barry and Susan Bickle, Pamela Hines, all running and shouting on the tarmac playground and daisy smudged grass during the joyous momentary relief from classroom drudgery.

Music in the mid-fifties took the form of a ‘percussion band’. We were each issued with anything from a xylophone to a triangle by way of castanets, tambourines and cymbals with which to make a god-awful noise to accompany something coaxed from the school piano. More mysteriously when I look back on it now, we also were given a go at conducting the resulting cacophony, actually learning the basics of the art at the age of six.

Somebody told Miss that I had been heard playing our home piano, so she offered me an opportunity to demonstrate my expertise. I launched into a rhythmically and harmonically suspect rendition of Rock Around the Clock to rapturous approval from the other inmates, but was offered no further such opportunities.

At Foxhole, I had my first serious injury when a bench upon which a number of us were sitting collapsed and took the skin off the back of my legs; I observed one of the worst accidents I was ever to see when  the gardener (Mr Towler?) cutting the grass on a bank during playtime slipped over and lost control of the school’s heavy Ransomes motor mower so it ran onto the playground and into the young legs of Pamela Hines; I saw dinner lady, Mrs French, stamp on an enormous misguided locust with her flat slip-on shoed foot; I learned the invaluable one times table, so have always afterward known how many ones make one; I learned how much fun girls could be by pursuing them with my friend Graham Elswood around the back of the prefab classrooms during playtimes; that the farmer had a wife and that along would come a chopper to chop off my head. Miss Buick showed us strange slide shows of Grimm goings on in German forests on her wonderful back projection screen, and I was not the only five year old to wet himself before being dismissed and having to walk home three-quarters of a mile along a muddy track and unpavemented roads in that condition.

The school day, even for five year olds, ended at four o’clock all year round in those days, and after a long afternoon, you were expected to stand for a final prayer and lift your chair onto your desk before being allowed to make a break for freedom.

For some period, a gang led by John Garrett used to wait for me at the top of Smallcombe Road and knock me about. I came to approach the place in terror. We were all five or six years old and our parents just thought this sort of thing toughened us up.

I might have waited until they gave up and went home, but I was even more terrified of Farmer Manicot’s dogs, which would hurtle across the field, slavering and barking, if you were too long in their jurisdiction.

One evening the gang was all in my face, haranguing and shoving, and I lost it finally and punched John squarely on the nose. ‘Now I’ve done it,’ I thought. But, his nose bleeding, his handkerchief (we all had one then) reddening, he put his arm around my shoulder and declared me all right.

It had all been part of some bizarre initiation ceremony. I had passed at last and would not be bothered again.

Not that this made my journey home any quicker.

The top part of Fernicombe Road, above the school entrance, was not surfaced in those days. It was mainly mud, with a certain amount of cinder mixed in. At the top, where it met the King’s Ash Road, was an enormous puddle that we had to edge our way around.

We had noticed that when the puddle overflowed the water took a certain course down the track, and worked out that by digging away with the heels of our expensively provided shiny school shoes we could create our own channels and guide the water wherever we wanted it to go. This engineering exercise with such ill-suited equipment was endlessly fascinating and occupied us for the best part of an hour each evening before we headed for hearth and home.

There was no telly to get back for and no homework. Later, I would be allowed to go round to David Wills’s house near the roundabout to watch children’s television (Whirlybirds, Bengo the pup, Tintin, and Sketch Club with Adrian Hill), but we were still sticking with the radio from Listen with Mother to the Flying Doctor - ‘Hang on to your braces, folks, we’re going down!’ and Journey Into Space.

Sketch Club with Adrian Hill.

As she would with all the many children she benefited during her life, Mother started early teaching me stuff. Walking had taken a while, but talking came easily. Not long before I was sent to Foxhole school, so she told me, I astonished her and my dad by reading the cover flashes from the Radio Times.

I wouldn’t dream of arguing with her a second time, but I’ve looked over some of the covers from that year and find it hard to believe that words like ‘Othello’, ‘Berkeley Square’ or ‘official organ’ tripped from me without an unsupportable quantity of tongue-sticking or face-pulling. I’d have been less challenged with the current issue.

Whatever the veracity of the claim, I had little trouble with Janet or even John, though they were rather priggish and unadventurous. I preferred Rupert, and was able - perhaps bothered is more to the point - to read the rhyming couplets and let someone else read out the prose from the bottom of the page. ‘Rupert’s chums were so perplexed to see the little bear so vexed.’ I also liked Honk & Tonk - a car and a tractor created by that same Reverend Awdry that gave us Thomas the Tank Engine - and the adventures of a pig called Toby Twirl. Richmal Crompton’s Just William came later, along with Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Men and Women, but it seems I missed out on many of the standard children’s favourites - Winnie the Pooh, Roald Dahl, etc., and never really got Anna Sewell or Biggles. Horses were things you fell off when shot, and aeroplanes were and remain a necessity, not nearly as interesting as cars.

My mother was a constant source of amazement. A year after making me go to school, she suddenly announced the impending arrival of a brother. This was information I was very unsure how to respond to. My dad and I were permitted by the matron-at-arms to see Mother in her starched bed at Paignton hospital. Everything was spotless white or that sort of municipal green they only use for hospitals, including and especially Mother, who also looked rather scrubbed.

The baby seemed all right, I suppose. 

DOCTOR’S ORDERS 1950s

Mass incolulations.

Although we were intermittently lined up in infant and junior schools to be punctured - inoculated they said back then - by a series of shared needles, we mostly seem to have ‘caught’ everything going - measles, German measles, whooping cough, mumps, chicken pox, laryngitis, bronchitis, colds, influenza, earache, sties, constipation, diarrhoea, food poisoning, conjunctivitis, athlete’s foot and even, in my case, shingles.

The last was the worst; big blisters in a line from the chest to the back. The story goes that, if they meet you’re done for. Mine didn’t meet, for which I’m grateful. Whether or not it is the reason I am still extant, it did at least leave me one side to lie on.

The quack usually came out to you in those days, even for the things everyone got, and left the distraught parent with a free prescription for some kind of concoction. Cherry linctus was the best. I can taste it now. That much sugar was never going to convert to alcohol, but more than enough did to give us a serious taste for it.

When you got really pissed off with doing stuff - especially school stuff - if you were lucky, the doc would declare you anaemic and prescribe something that tasted like essence of iron bar; like the smell on your hands after going on the climbing frame, only bottled.

Probably something to do with going from a fat baby to a beanpole in what seemed like minutes, I had a weakness in my knees, so was taken to the surgery to find gentle old Tommy Sutton Coulson had gone off on holiday leaving some latter day Boadicea in charge. She laid me on the couch and mangled my legs in all directions before declaring in foghorn tones that there was ‘nothing wrong with them that a good game of rugby wouldn’t cure’.

I had two spells in hospital, both in Newton Abbot. One was for a hernia operation, the other to do something to resolve the ‘lazy eye’.

Children's ward.

The children’s ward was a twenty-four hour a day nightmare in the fifties. Visiting hours were strictly adhered to and, to a child, the wait from afternoon to afternoon was interminable. The nurses were pleasant enough, but also strictly business, especially when the fearsomely starched matron was about.

Night times were full of piteous screams, of pain and fear, nightmares and serious injury. We tried to cover our ears and eyes to shut it out and get some sleep. It seemed that nurses only visited at intervals, even though a child had been rushed in by ambulance men and wailed inconsolably for hours. I never saw their parents brought to them or allowed to stay in the hallowed chambers of misery and horror. I think we all knew what the ensuing silence and the rolled up mattress betokened.

The ward must have been single sex because the only friend I made was a poorly looking red haired girl in a faded red dressing gown. Apart from visits and telling the nurses I didn’t want a bath, she was the only person I can recall talking to. She was pleased for me when my parents sprung me, but terribly sad with it. I felt awful about leaving her in that place.

I was a great fan of Russ Conway, whom I would miss playing at the Pavilion. My parents even tried to get him to visit the ward, but it wasn’t possible. He did send me a get well message though. I can still play Sidesaddle and Roulette as badly as I did then; more Eric Morecambe than Mr Conway.

Russ Conway.

I came out of the hernia op with a great gash across my abdomen held together with industrial stitches and a long thin regular Elastoplast. The holes from the stitches never completely healed up. Luckily they are mostly covered by the undergrowth.

My treat for surviving the eye operation was to be collected in Syd Wilkes’s proper American pre-war Chrysler with its cool whitewall tyres and V8 engine. They left the stitches in that time. It was difficult for anyone to judge the success of the operation because my right eye had a big pad over it and I was constantly aware of whatever they’d left in it, which felt like a telegraph pole.

The stitches were removed some time later.

I was never told the prognosis for the operation. It had cured a droopy eyelid, but seemed a bit over the top for that purpose. I was accordingly horrible to my mother for putting me through it, but I daresay it was worth it.

V8 Chrysler.

I’d made something of a habit of falling on my head as a child, but I think medical intervention was minimal compared to the seriousness with which such things are treated today. Luckily I only went a bit weird as a result.

With time, my knees even got better.

My dad never had too much time for doctors and brought me up in that part of his image. Tommy Sutton Coulson had told him aeons ago that he had a thyroid condition and treated him accordingly. Half a lifetime later when Dad was in the convalescent hospital in Kings Ash, recovering from bronchial pneumonia, the doc took him aside and said, ‘You know, Ron, I don’t think you ever had a thyroid condition.’

‘Bloody idiot,’ came the reply.

From the time Dad took over the catering at Hoyles Road, we went on to a kind of set menu. The chicken that was roasted for Sunday would provide the makings of an omelette on Monday. Macaroni cheese followed on Tuesday and so on round to Saturday when we would all return from lunchtime in the Vic with boil-in-the-bag Bird’s Eye cod.

On Monday nights, there was still enough meat on the chicken carcass for me to pick while sitting through Come Dancing with Peter West. Not a celebrity spectacle in those days, but a competition between ballroom dance groups, such as Midland Counties (South). The ritual of the chicken picking was gradually accompanied by a ritual toothache. It only happened at that time on a Monday night, and a single Anadin tablet from the family pharmacy was sufficient to allay it.

Cricket commentator and Come Dancing presenter, Peter West.

One Monday, the cupboard was bare. Somebody had swallowed the last pill. Almost without thought, I filled a glass of water from the tap and pretended to take an Anadin. The relief was identical. I had experienced the placebo effect at first hand.

PAPER SUN (1967)

Geoff Meade and I shared a passion for cars and music. We would often take a very long time after school getting to his house in Paris Road, as we visited car dealers to inspect the latest models, grilling salesmen and mostly being given carte blanche to climb all over their wares.

Geoff Meade MBE today - veteran Europe correspondent.

Geoff’s dad had recently upgraded his company car to a smart new sheer line Vauxhall, and I remember the excitement with which we descended on Tom Brown’s dealership around the corner from the school in Brunswick Square for a first encounter with the final facelift version of the Victor 101 in May of 67.

Victor 101.

Geoff had a decent piano at home to which we would often adjourn when we had finished our motoring investigations. One song I remember us learning from sheet music bought at Harris & Osborne’s was Gimme Little Sign by Brenton Wood. And it was at Geoff’s that we were first left speechless by seeing Jimi Hendrix play Hey Joe on the telly.

An early season series of Sunday night concerts was coming up at the Princess Theatre in Torquay, and we booked to see some of them.

The Moody Blues hadn’t gone psychedelic by then, so their gig was built around familiar material, mostly, as was the general rule, reworkings of black American songs such as Go Now. They did that one twice in response to public demand and the piano solo sounded exactly as learned then as it still does now. If it had been punched in, it would have sounded the same, but it was a great song and a great evening.

Moody Blues.

John Maus had recently gone solo along with his Walker Brothers colleagues. We were all big fans of the Walkers and the powerfully produced sound Phillips Records got with them. None of us was a Scott Engel, but many an attempt was made on The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More, Our Ship is Coming In and Bacharach’s Make It Easy on Yourself, while waiting in the school corridors for admittance to lessons.

John Maus, before and after the Walker Brothers.

We knew we wouldn’t be getting any of the hit material when Mr Maus played the Princess, but our main reason for going was the fact that his backing singers would be Sue and Sunny, aka The Stocking Tops - top rank UK session singers on a par with the likes of Madeline Bell and The Ladybirds. As Sue and Sunny they had released a single on Columbia entitled You Can’t By Pass Love (sic). Like Chris Farlowe’s Out of Time and the Troggs’ Any Way That You Want Me, it had been the killer ’cello intro that had got to me first. It also had a Motowny shape to it and it only needed us to see the girls doing it on the telly for us to be sent, in a groovy 1960s happening kinda way.

The B-side was written by that same Martin and Coulter who would find serious success with the Sandie Shaw Eurovision sensation, Puppet on a String. In those dark and ignorant days, the composer credits for the A side meant nothing to me. Motown loony that I was, the only people I knew from the production side of things were Smokey Robinson and Holland, Dozier, Holland. To be fair to me, the music press in the UK was still calling Berry Gordy Barry Gordon.

‘J. Hunter’ was, of course, Joe Hunter, the bandleader that preceded Earl Van Dyke with Motown’s Funk Brothers. That’s Joe’s distinctive piano on Marvin Gaye’s Pride and Joy, Try It Baby. How Sweet It Is  and loads of other Hitsville delights. Forty years later I would have the honour of meeting ‘Papa’ Joe and was with him and Jack Ashford at Ronnie Scott’s only a couple of days before he died, aged 80 in Detroit. He was a real gentleman with a fine sense of humour and a ready stock of Shakespeare quotations. No matter how successful he was during the ups and downs and false promises of a musician’s life, he never turned down a gig. Ronnie Scott’s was the last venue in a punishing European tour, but Joe still fitted in one more show on his return to the Motor City.

'Papa' Joe Hunter.

Back in Torquay, John Maus was doing Long John Baldry’s and most other solo males’ acts at the time. Midnight Hour, Land of a Thousand Dances… Na-na-na-na-na, sock it to me one more time.

Then Geoff and I struck really lucky. We booked to see someone nobody had ever heard of: Procol Harum. I think we paid six bob (30p) each.

By the time we took our seats for the show, the band was number one in the UK and a sensation all over the world, A Whiter Shade of Pale already on its way to legendary status in the US, Ireland and France, and the world and his dolly bird were all wandering through their respective playing cards as their ceilings flew away.

Procul Harum.

The mad people who contributed to the letters page in the Melody Maker were already asking who Procul Harum thought they were, and accusing them of imitating Bach, Reginald Dixon, Chris Montes. Sooty and anyone else who had an organ on their record - a sure sign of having made it, just as when Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson had been accused in their turns of depending on big bands for the success of Yesterday and Good Vibrations.

The combination of Gary Brooker’s voice and Matt Fisher’s Hammond is, was and ever will be irresistible - and we were there at the beginning, in Torquay, and for six bob!

We were also there at the end, in fact, as Torquay was the last gig played by the band as was, both the bass player and guitarist Ray Royer departing before the next outing.

Ray was not really a side-man by nature. Producer, Denny Lane, remarked that during sessions he could either be original and exciting or unable to play at all. I met him several years later and found him deeply spiritual - scarily so in some respects, in that the universe as most materialists conceive it and the one Ray could see were not necessarily compatible. Riding in an open car with him was not for the fainthearted. He was literally ‘laid-back’ before the expression was common coin, his attention on the beauty of the trees passing overhead rather than prosaic matters such as watching the road. I wasn’t going to beat him, so I joined him, and have him to thank for that aspect of my own spiritual education.

Ray Royer.

As May gave way to flaming June, the props, the scenery and the actors were gathering to set the stage for what would go down in history as the ‘Summer of Love’.

Only a few weeks later, it was curtain up as the Fab Four performed the signature tune, All You Need is Love, across the networks and across the world. The summer was on and some kind of employment would be needed to see cousin Rick and me through the six weeks of school holiday.

The labour exchange sent us to Goodrington, one of the jewels of the Devon coast, with landscaped boating lakes, a small-scale railway (with bikini-clad engine drivers), playgrounds, a variety of cafés and bars, acres of sand and a magnificent walk around the red cliffs to Paignton proper.

The 'bikini' line.

All Goodrington’s catering facilities were managed by a single operation, known as Addison’s, though it was part of a larger combine called Nuttall’s Catering, which also ran a café in Paignton’s Victoria Street and another in the old fishermen’s buildings on the Strand in Torquay.

The manager’s name was Whiting. He and Mrs W occupied a house on the complex and it was there that we had to report for interview.

He was a shrivelled looking cove, like a Giles drawing of an undertaker, with sunken cheeks, dark round glasses and a stooped, bent-legged walk after the manner of Groucho Marx. His wife looked somewhat younger and more robust.

In those days it was normal for employers - even jumped up managers - to address male employees by their surnames, without even the courtesy of a ‘mister’ or ‘master’.

Our paperwork was inspected by Mrs W and we were sent to be interviewed by the under-manager, by the name of Aldridge. Like the Whitings, he was a Londoner, but in place of Whiting’s sepulchral tones, he had a rather piping, high pitched voice, and tended to lope about in his dark suit looking harassed.

Whether or not he then had good reason for his demeanour, he soon would have, as he took both of us on and gave us a start day almost immediately.

Getting to Addison’s in the morning meant walking down over Edenvale, Blatchcombe and Woodlands to the Torquay Road, through Paignton and out on the Brixham Road, past the ‘Big Tree’ and over the railway bridge at Tanners Lane into the complex - approx. 2.5 miles. There was a punch clock on a wall that recorded the times of our arrival and departure. After a little while, whoever got there first - usually a guy (Big Rick) with a bicycle who worked in the fish café - would clock on for the rest of us.

Cousin Rick was led off by Mr Aldridge to work in the said fish café, known because of its location as the ‘Prom’.

I was taken to a rather smaller affair near the entrance car park, which would later be turned into an arcade. Then it was called the ‘Sands’.

My job would mainly involve dish and pot-washing - by hand in an ordinary kitchen washbasin. Table-clearing was also part of the description, but this was mainly done by the two girls who served and prepared the food, Samantha and Lizzie.

Sands manager, Mr James was on his day off when I arrived. Samantha asked me: ‘Is this your first day?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, accepting a proffered broom and helping her sweep the floor.

‘’Ard luck!’ She introduced me to Ernie, the cook, whose pots I would be washing, and a man who liked to laugh. Also, at the sandwich counter, was a third girl who turned out to be so kind and funny that all the many trepidations of starting my first official job of work melted away by the end of the first long day. Theresa - Terry - was the ‘older woman’ (probably about 20) we lads fantasised about in free periods at school. She had poise and experience; she was what we then called ‘dusky’ (black) and beautiful.

Soon enough, I was a gone swan.

Even washing people’s pots and dishes seemed like a reasonable thing to be doing if it meant I could be around her - just talking, joking and laughing in a comfortable way that didn’t happen with girls my own age - especially on a brief furlough from being banged up with six hundred other lads.

Her day off seemed endless and miserable, but there was worse to come.

Not much more than a week after I started she disappeared altogether. Lizzie told me she had been betrayed and sacked on the spot.

For days I was inconsolable - not that anyone tried to console me or knew what I was going on about. The combination of the injustice of her dismissal and the fact that I never had a chance to see her again was all I needed to bring on the teenage angst I was fully qualified by age and innocence to make the most of.

Piling on the agony, I decided to skip the weekend beach party and sulk at home, too stupid to guess that she would be there, so it was my own fault I lost touch with her.

However, another day, another load of washing up. Then Mr Aldridge loped back into my life. It seemed I was to hang up my rubber gloves and follow him to the Prom fish café, where my week of training and experience was in demand.

The Prom had forty odd tables, a counter at one end serving fish and chips to eat in, or via a takeaway window, and a much longer counter running along the back wall for snacks, drinks, sandwiches and the like.

The till was at the left hand end and the trays at the right. Once you had chosen your food, the order was shouted through a hatch at someone in the kitchen. Among the things you could wash it down with was an orange liquid that issued from a transparent box with three plastic oranges circulating inside it, or tea from a pot that received an additional catering size tea bag every time it was topped up with boiling water. Its liquid was very brown and viscous and tasted more disgusting as the day wore on.

At each end of the counter was a set of swing doors leading to the kitchen. This ran the full length of the café at a lower floor level, so was reached by a few steps at either end.

I entered the kitchen from the rear outside door. To my right was an edged plinth designed to receive the table-clearing trolley on a level with the café. Next to this was a dishwashing machine with worktops on either side and a semi-cylindrical lid that could be revolved to the left to slide in trays of dirty crocks, and to the right to withdraw the cleaned items.

The sloping floor was covered in flattened out cardboard, most of it stained with food and dust. At the midway point, next to the left hand work surface, was an arrangement to hold the clean dishes, glasses and cutlery. A separate sink was provided for pots and chef’s equipment.

Next to this again was an aluminium dustbin containing food waste. Every so often the chef would shout: ‘Bin Brigade!’ and he and the assistant chef would each take a handle of the bin and march it outside to a waiting paladin for emptying.

The chef - Ralph - and his assistant, John, both wore flowers in their beards and longish hair à la Scott Mackenzie.

Ralph would get occasional visits from a girl named ‘Cosie’, whom he always referred to as ‘the woman of the moment’. Cosie was in charge of a kiosk opposite the front of the Sands Café, from which she sold ice-cream, knickerbocker glories and the like. The big attraction of Cosie’s kiosk was the donut machine. On the counter was a sort of oil bath with a chain driven mechanism running through it. Cosie would insert an uncooked donut in one end and it would fry in the oil as it was dragged by the mechanism from one end to the other, to emerge hot, perfectly cooked, wonderfully moist and encrusted in sugar.

Cousin Rick had been promoted to fish and chip duties, so had his own domain in a separate backstage area behind the fish counter, where he was in charge of a dalek-like potato peeling machine, two chip baths with a chipping machine where the soap rack would normally be, and a metal surface on which to batter fish.

Aldridge demonstrated the workings of the dishwashing machine and showed me two bowls containing coloured powder or flakes. ‘Always use the green, never ever the pink,’ he told me, and loped off.

Everyone had heard this last admonishment, including Rick who had come through to welcome me, so we immediately set about charging the machine with the pink substance.

The workings rattled into life and began to rumble and gurgle in their prescribed manner for a few moments before, to everyone’s delight, beginning to issue a thick pinkish-white foam which first filled the work surfaces before taking off ‘Blob’ like to conquer the rest of the kitchen.

It was more than worth it to be standing in two feet of foam and having to mop up and change all the cardboard. I had joined the team at the Prom and would remain there for the rest of the season.

The nearest thing Aldridge could manage to my name was ‘Rande’, so Rick started calling me that, and would do so for the rest of his life.

Treated as idiots and addressed by our surnames, we, whose only vision of work had come from Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Drake and Mr Pastry, were loyal and conscientious to a fault, especially as we were working all hours and receiving such untold riches in the way of remuneration - 3/6 an hour (17.5 pence).

Actually, we did work hard and more than earned our money,  but each passing day took us further toward complete anarchy.

A young lad called Sid and I moved among the customers and cleared the tables with the legendary trolley - a substantial affair with five inch castors. There was a bin on the top for cutlery and another for slops. I don’t recall from the entire season anyone finishing a meal, so there were always plenty of slops, and trying to eat at a nearby table while Sid and I added to the bin’s contents was guaranteed to produce more.

We had a dry cloth with which to wipe the tables, so crumbs and other detritus mainly went on the floor. If a customer occupied an uncleared table - and especially if he or she shoved the contents somewhere else, piling plates up with the leftovers in between - a flick of the cloth delivered the crumbs into their laps.

‘Accidents’ at the swing doors were a daily occurrence. If two people approached them on opposite sides with loaded trays, the result could be especially joyous.

Sid and I piled dinner and side plates as high as we could on the top level of the trolley. Pushing it through the swing doors was enough to cause the piles to totter. Running it against the retaining rim of the plinth could do the rest.

We all had other jobs that we were called off to do from time to time, such as making and wrapping the sandwiches with a heat sealer or making up a ghastly concoction called ‘Millac’, which was supposed be powdered milk, but could have been anything.

I was once called to a table by a woman who had ordered a glass of milk from Winnie on the counter. ‘Excuse me, young man, is this milk fresh?’

‘Certainly,’ I told her.

She tasted it again and pulled a face. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I should know, madam, I made it myself ten minutes ago.’

We were issued with white coats from the laundry, which rarely stayed that colour for long. Apart from slinging tea bags at each other and divers items of food, the favourite trick was to drop an egg in someone’s pocket, then break it. I don’t recommend the sensation of putting your hand in your pocket when this has been done, and the practice wasn’t restricted to work clothes.

Back at my dishwasher, I would look up to see Rick come to visit. As I pulled a tray of freshly washed dishes from the machine, he took his hands from behind his back and smeared them all with batter.

I did a double-take and made a deep ‘Ohhh!’ like Bluto in the Popeye cartoons. Sometime after, I would visit him in the chiproom and introduce some of the dishwashing powder to his potato dalek with a similar response from him as the foam began to arise from within.

Since Paignton and Torquay were all about catering, there was a grapevine between the various establishments. If inspectors were spotted anywhere, everyone knew about it, and all the staff at Addison’s were detailed to forget about the customers and get on to cleaning duties. Even this would not have earned the place a ‘one’ on the current hygiene ratings, however.

Winnie, behind the counter, was a voluble cockney and an obvious target for our dubious sense of humour. If she was serving a family with children further along the counter, we would shake up the Coke cans, so that when she opened one, it would spray up the wall, soaking her in the process.

‘I’ll have you, you buggers,’ she would yell before sitting down at the till to find we had removed her seat. For some reason, despite this, she used to tell everyone - and especially the girls that she ‘lived-in’ with - that I was her favourite. I really didn’t think this was doing me any favours, when I was trying to appear cool and tough. Of course, that’s all I knew, and the only girls that liked me probably thought I was more sweet than cool for the abovementioned reason.

A few girls were regulars in the prom and we would ‘hang out’ together most days. One was Jane Wellins, who had been in the last year at Hayes Road and was nursing a broken leg in the summer of 67. She introduced me to the works of Tolkien. ‘You remind me of Gollum,’ she said.

One day, for reasons I don’t recall, we arrived late. Opening the swing door slightly, we found the place teeming with customers. Trays of leftovers were piled up on every surface and staff had been drafted in from all over the complex to handle the situation.

Rick and I shut the door and looked at each other for a response. ‘I’m not going in there,’ I said.

Outside we met the gardener/handyman who was about to take a load of boxes to the furthest reaches of the Addison’s empire - the tea stall at the far end of the ‘bikini line’ railway track. We told him we were there to help him and climbed on the back of his Lister flat-bed truck for the slow chug there, where we helped him unload, and back again, by which time the rush had evaporated.

Some years later, I got talking to the gardener in the London Inn and he told me he had always entertained an ambition to go into the church. I got hold of a copy of the Church Times and helped him with some letters to the powers that could grant him his wish.

On one occasion, the management were absent for a day, both the Whitings and Aldridge, we assumed summoned to some kind of court of hygiene.

Ralph and John disappeared around this time and, of all people, Rick was promoted to cooking duties. As his signature dish, he incinerated a piece of toast and did something of the same with an egg, placing the latter on the former and putting a lump of butter on each of the four visible corners. The resulting horror was put on the counter on a cracked plate with a notice saying ‘Egg on toast, our speciality’.

The following day, I was called before the presence of Mr Whiting. ‘I’ve had reports you’ve been kicking my machine,’ he told me. I had gone there in some trepidation lest my sins should find me out, but was in the frame for the one thing I certainly had not done, and of which I could claim angelic innocence.

I must have been believed, because the axe didn’t fall. How he never found out about any of our real transgressions was hard to understand. However, a new characterisation was born and we would now approach other staff with the Groucho walk, our cheeks sucked in, using our forefingers and thumbs to ring our eyes and looking about us suspiciously: ‘I’ve had repotes…’ The cockney accent was vital, as it was with our impersonations of Aldrich: ‘Er, got any fowkes?’

We had various stock routines that Rick and I cooked up. In the middle of my explaining or describing something to Rick, he would look at me disparagingly and say, ‘Don’t be rrridiculous!’

I would shake with mock rage, stamping my feet, and reply, ‘Allll Right!’

Aldridge loped up to me one day and asked me to go on some errand to another one of Addison’s many premises, next to the Brass Monkey pub, in his hesitant and piping way; ‘Er, Rande - go to the Bettabar, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Er, go to the Bettabar, right?’

‘Allll Right!’ Everyone roared with laughter, and the exchange became another of our quotidien comedy routines.

The Bettabar amd the Brass Monkey have been absorbed into the new Premier Inn.

Outside the front of the Prom café, on the promenade proper, was an automated vending machine for an orange drink - orange in colour, anyway.

According to Mr Aldridge, the thing had become empty, so I was detailed to take Sid with me to attend to it.

Opening the front panel with a supplied key revealed a sort of sticky metal bomb surrounded by wasps. We were supposed to take this object to the stores and exchange it for a clean new example.

As we took it from the machine, we realised the wasps were following us. It was quite a long round trip to get to the stores, outside the building, and it struck me as a much more amusing plan to carry the thing through the restaurant. So it proved. Chairs went over and cutlery flew into the air as customers fled from the bomb, us and the posse of wasps.

Ralph and John never returned to the kitchen following their sudden disappearance, so the management, not having been witnesses to his signature dish, and unaware of the fact that he had negligible experience in eating, never mind cooking, put Rick in permanent charge of the short order stove.

Foremost among the tools of his new trade was a seriously large carving knife which rested near at hand on a wooden table. In quiet moments, he would grasp it and brandish it in my direction, a murderous glint in his eye. Waving my arms in the air, I would flee through one of the sets of swing doors into the packed restaurant, where he would pursue me behind the full length of the counter, uttering bloodthirsty cries. We’d crash through the opposite set of doors back into the kitchen with him in close pursuit - the customers’ mouths hanging open in horror.

After a brief silence, Rick would hand me the knife and I would chase him back the way we had come.

There were some great people working at Addison’s in ’67 - Stan, who ran the fish and chip operation went on to run Gayton’s in Coverdale Road. Some of the girls that came to Goodrington as waitresses would later work in the Pacific in its heyday. (Rita and Audrey.)

The seasonal staff included a large proportion of musicians - especially guitarists - and a lot of people called Rick. There was Big Rick, aforementioned, Rick Moxham, who lived in Southfield Road and played guitar, and there was Rick Pralitz.

I’d known  Keith Tonkin since infant school. For reasons of his own, cousin Rick christened him ‘Buke’. He accompanied himself on guitar while singing songs from the Bob Dylan Songbook, and once came around to mine so we could work together - me playing glockenspiel. Wot?

There was a guy in the stores, who might have been R Pralitz aforementioned. He was a serious guitar player who spent his time learning Hendrix two-handed chords for his 3/6 an hour unless somebody interrupted him by wanting something. He went on to play in local bands such as Ulysses and Atlas.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, we soon formed the Chiproom Blues Band - cousin Rick on harmonica (blues harp), various guitarists and me on a Woolworth’s reed organ, the property of that same R Moxham, similarly aforementioned.

One of the biggest hits in those early days at Addison’s, hardly played now, was Gin House by Amen Corner, on which Blue Weaver accompanied Andy Fairweather-Low on a double manual Vox Continental. This, and I’m A Man by Muddy Waters were ideal outings for my little organ.

The most frustrating thing for a keys player then was the fact that every venue had a shit piano. The alternatives were not only limited, but even if you could run to your own Hammond, it was a nightmare to move about.

Vox Continental.

New contraptions began to appear around then - the Vox Continental with its drawbars and optional pedalboard was favourite. Farfisa did a good range, including the ones used by Pink Floyd. The Teisco WEM single keyboard was mainly designed for glissando ad nauseam, and for frustrated bass players like me, there were singular weirdnesses such as the Livingston-Burge Tubon, made by the makers of electronic church organs - a thing like a bazooka on a strap with a short keyboard let into one side that played various footages of bass twenty years before keyboard bass became the next big annoyance in the 1980s.

I wanted one then but, perhaps fortunately, it was not to be.

The musical soundtrack to 1967 still takes me right back there. The juke box at the Prom was rarely silent and it was such a productive and inventive period. All You Need Is Love was played over and over, and so was the B-side, Baby, You’re A Rich Man one of my Beatles favourites and so rarely played now that it exists still in that time. Traffic were huge then, Hole In My Shoe being a big hit, though Paper Sun really captures the atmosphere for me, and its instrumental B-side was also played repeatedly. Art Conley’s Sweet Soul Music, Aretha’s Say A Little Prayer, Percy Sledge, Keith West’s Excerpt From A Teenage Opera, See Emily Play, Let’s Go To San Francisco, Reflections by The Supremes, Massachusetts and the New York Mining Disaster, I Was Made To Love Her, Daydream Believer - mountains of great new music, not to mention The Monkees’ Alternate Title. But 1967 was also the year of the ballad. Tom Jones Green Green Grass of Home, Funny, Familiar, Forgotten Feelings and my favourite (composed, I recently discovered, by Lonnie Donegan) with its three-four arrangement owing more than a little to Lincoln Mayorgis: I’m Never Gonna Fall In Love Again; Engelbert Humperdinck’s Last Waltz, Long John Baldry, Let The Heartaches Begin, Vince Hill’s Edelweiss.

What most people thinking back to those days of I Feel Free, Strange Brew, Hey Joe and Purple Haze seem to forget was the sheer weight of musical ballast such as Barbra Streisand’s Second Hand Rose and Frankfurter Sandwiches, Danny La Rue’s Mother Kelly’s Doorstep and - do me a favour - Fanlight Fanny, The Floosy Nightclub Queen, by Clinton Ford.

I joined the staff of the prom in a time of change. Not only did Winnie join but there was a turnaround in waitresses. I never really knew the previous incumbents, but Audrey and Rita joined just after me.

Since they ‘lived in’ in the firm’s chalets, they didn’t bother with street clothes under their white overalls. Naturally, this was sufficient provocation to dump them in Rick’s chip bath.

Although an anarchist with a brutal sense of humour, Rick was anything but one-dimensional and was actually an enthusiastic worker, often working evenings on the fish counter. The same was true when we both worked as postmen, when he often did a second round while the rest of us had had more than enough with one.

As the season began to wind down, we were given our cards, one by one. No bonus or gratitude for sterling service. Only free fish and chips from the girls at the takeaway window and the satisfaction that came from having turned off the chicken fridge.