It’s 1968 and I’m in a coach on the M1 that smells of vomit. Not my vomit. It turns out that a school trip to Whipsnade is the ideal opportunity for kids who haven’t got around much to discover that they suffer from travel sickness. Or that when their mothers made egg sandwiches for their packed lunch the day before, they neglected to put them in the fridge overnight. It seems that everybody at the back of the coach is chucking up except me and the kid in the next seat, who is practicing a bit of mild rule-breaking by playing a transistor radio with the aerial poked out of the window for better reception. He’s managed to pick up a pirate station (further rule-breaking) and we’re singing along to ‘My Name is Jack’ by Manfred Mann, with its inexplicable lyrics.
My name is Jack /and I live in the back / of the Greta Garbo Home for Wayward Boys and Girls …
It’s a moment of happiness for me (despite the reek of spew); I feel part of a happy herd. A rare moment of happiness in 1968.
I’m not really enjoying my new school, even though I know I am lucky to be there. I was one of only four kids in my year at Catholic primary school to pass the Eleven Plus, the rest of them having gone on to secondary moderns to learn metalwork and fighting—or in the case of the girls, home economics and hating nuns.
Where my primary school was a mixed, ethnically diverse, fairly happy place, I’ve now landed in this mostly white, male-only protestant hegemony. In Assembly when the other boys bend their backs in prayer, I can spot the other Catholics and the Jewish boys, who are all still sitting upright. Noting how few of us there are, I realise that I am part of a minority.
It seems a brutal, irreligious place to me. People want to fight each other all the time, often for not very clear reasons, and people seem to want to fight me, for one thing, on account of my minority status. A boy in my class, bigger and stronger, pushes my arm painfully high up my back and won’t let go until I deny the Pope.
Irreligion seems part of the school ethos, and not only among the student body. Our Scripture teacher is a self-professed atheist who spends his lessons pointing out the factual variances between the four gospels and going into the history of how and when each was composed, in what seems like a concerted attempt to weaken any belief we might have in the Bible as the revealed word of God.
On Friday evenings I and the other Catholic boys traipse along to the secondary modern over the road, St Thomas More, for an hour of re-indoctrination by a priest, meant to keep us steadfast in the faith. We go for about a term and then when the lectures about masturbation get too frequent and vehement, stop going.
Religion is not the only reason people to want to fight me. I am eminently bullyable—skinny and weak-looking on account of having contracted a mild form of TB when I was two years old, and girlishly pretty. The effect of the prettiness on some boys is to make them want to either punch me or kiss me, or maybe both. Occasionally I can see these two contradictory urges playing across the face of a bully, causing him visible distress.
Since I’m not good at fighting, I decide that the way to avoid being bullied is to make some powerful friends. I befriend the boy who made me deny the Pope (actually it’s more his idea than mine). When he becomes my friend, he stops hitting me, and because he’s popular in the class, other people stop picking on me as well. Soon there is a small group of us friends, a gang. We are the Bears. We have nicknames (mine is Faustus, for reasons I’ve never understood) and an initiation ritual. The neophyte is tied to a tree in the bushes behind the school where we go to smoke, and we dance around him singing a cod-Native-American chant.
My father has a mild go at me for not playing with my old friends from Catholic school; Bruce Murphy and an Indian boy called Kevin White (who he insists on calling ‘Chalky’ White—a great joke in his eyes). It’s something of a shock, as it always is when my dad shows signs of noticing my existence, and I feel a bit wounded by it. I’m not particularly conscious of having dropped Bruce and Kevin, it’s just that we don’t bump into each other so much now that I’ve changed schools. There’s a lot of churn in my friendship group. All the time new people are showing up at the park over the road where I still spend the bulk of my free time, playing football and hanging out. One of these is a kid called Phil Cornwell, whose parents have moved down from London. As well as being annoyingly good at football, he’s also brilliant at impressions.
One day a kid turns up at the park who has often been there before, but whose appearance seems to have altered radically. I’m going to call him Brad, though that’s not his name.
I come in late to the conversation. Brad has already been laying on the grass for a while when I plonk myself down, talking to a bunch of kids who are hanging on his every word.
‘… I have a bath every day, wash myself morning and night. And I always carry this …’ Brad produces a gleaming steel comb that catches the rays of the afternoon sun.
‘What do you need a comb for: you haven’t got any hair?’ I josh. It’s true. His hair, once long and curling over the ears like the rest of us, is now cropped close to his scalp.
His lips curl in a mocking smile. He proffers the comb. ‘Feel the edge.’
‘Ow!’ Blood appears on my thumb.
‘I sharpened it up in metalwork (Brad goes to a secondary modern). Dorises all have girl combs—like this but with a handle. They sharpen them into spikes.’
There is uneasy laughter.
I look at Brad more closely. He’s wearing checked Ben Sherman, jeans jacket and industrial boots polished to a high shine. What has happened to him? It’s more than a new set of clothes; he talks about this thing he’s into now as if it’s a whole way of life. ‘… You have to be clean. Hippies are dirty. Scum … Blacks are dirty. I’d never go with a black girl. I’d never even hang around with a bloke who’d done it with a black girl …’
There’s a new word in our vocabulary after this: skinhead.
Fast forward to the end of the summer and we’re back at school and suddenly half the kids in my class are of the skinhead persuasion. The hardest of these is a deceptively short boy called Gary who wears a Crombie overcoat and Royal brogues. Gary has a theory about fights that you have to get the first punch in quick, before the other bloke has even thought about hitting you. One morning in the form room before History he demonstrates this theory by headbutting me. It’s true; I hadn’t even thought about hitting him. Immediately a plum-sized bump rises on my forehead. ‘What happened to you?’ says the history teacher, breezing in with a stack of exercise books under his arm.
Eyes go around the room. Snitches get stitches.
‘Walked into a door, sir,’ I say.
* * * * * * * * *
Years later—last week, in fact—I decided it was time I found out what the lyrics of that Manfred Man song were all about.
Back in 1968 I think I assumed that the institution in question—The Greta Garbo School for Wayward Boys and Girls—must be some sort of approved school; one of those shadowy institutions about which grownups were always making dark threats; the type of place you would end up in if you continued shooting your brother in the leg with arrows, setting fire to your father’s aftershave and jamming both ends of a wire coat-hanger into the electric socket just to see what would happen. However in the song the occupants of the school seemed happy enough to be there, and the generally upbeat tone of the record was in stark contrast to the rather bloodcurdling tales that had come to our youthful ears of life in places like Borstal.
Then again, what did Greta Garbo have to do with it all? I knew of her as a star of the old black and white films my mother liked to watch. Mum had a stock phrase she always quoted, referring to the actress’s legendary reclusiveness: ‘I vant to be alone’.
It was all too puzzling to figure out. But there was something attractive about that indeterminacy. It gave the song a dreamlike quality.
Life, I was beginning to find, was full of enigmas; questions that never got answered. Such as, what class were we? Were we rich, as seemed to be indicated by the big house we lived in and the area where it was situated—or poor, as my mother always insisted? And which was her real accent; the one she used on the telephone, or the one that came out when she swore at us kids for doing something bad? Why was my father away so much? And when he was home, why was it not possible to have a proper conversation with him? What was he thinking when he fixed his hazel eyes on the sky for minutes at a time and said nothing? Why did my sister cry so loudly in the night: surely it wasn’t alwaysfallen arches?
None of these questions seemed at all welcome when I posed them, so eventually I stopped asking. And as more and more of them stacked up (why didn’t skinheads like black people, why did that anonymous person send me a poison pen letter, who was that man who drove Mum to her art appreciation classes every week?) I surrendered myself to the illogicality of the universe. The trite, packaged fictions of mainstream cinema and pop songs no longer seemed an accurate representation of reality. I became drawn to the surreal, the outlandish, the bizarre and inexplicable. Luckily there was a lot of it about.
At the house of my new friend (and fellow Bear) Tony, I encountered the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s album The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse, and it became my favourite record. The band were on TV regularly in the show Do Not adjust Your Set, doing surreal, outlandish, bizarre and inexplicable things while miming to songs from this album and others of theirs. I was particularly taken with the track Rhinocratic Oaths, a series of monologues from the brilliant Vivian Stanshall, but I also liked Neil Innes’s songs, which were more like songs.
As the tide of unreason rose in my cultural tastes, thoughts of ‘My Name is Jack’ retreated to the deeper trenches of undersea memory. Until last week, when I asked Google what that song was all about.
Turns out The Greta Garbo School for Wayward Boys and Girls wasn’t situated in Britain at all but in the United States. It was a San Francisco flop house inhabited by hippie dropouts and heavy drug users; a sort of earlier West-Coast version of NY’s Chelsea Hotel. The building features in a fairly cruddy underground film called ‘You Are What You Eat’ produced by Pete Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary. In the film you can see the poster of Greta Garbo on someone’s wall that gave the place its name. The song My Name is Jack, written by music producer John Simon, is in the film too. When you see it in its proper context, sung in an American accent, with the little kids running around between the legs of the smacked-out freaks and acid heads, the lyric and the characters in it suddenly make sense.
We live in an age when it feels like everything can be known and the world, finally, will be made to make sense. Just a couple of clicks on Google will unpack any mystery, solve any riddle that might have puzzled you down the years. But it’s an illusion. A few months ago my sister died, taking with her a whole chunk of family memory. She had a way of hinting at dark secrets in the family I didn’t know about. What those secrets might have been, and whether there were in fact any significant secrets left to uncover at all, I won’t ever know. Unreason, irreligion still rule.
Lead image by Sludge G licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0