Pete Townshend: Who I Am

When I began at St Saviours at age six I came bottom of the class for reading and writing. By the time I finished I was on the top desk. That, I suppose, was the good part of going to live with Denny. I wrote a letter to Aunt Rose, Denny’s older sister, who returned my letter covered with red spelling and grammatical corrections. I was hurt by this, but Aunt Rose also told Denny that I was too old to be unable to read and write properly, and suggested Denny read me half of a suspenseful book, then stop and give it to me to finish. Denny read me Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, and the ploy worked. Caught up not just in the story but also in the unfamiliar comfort of being read to, I immediately picked up the book and finished it off.

I don’t remember any other books from my time with Denny. One of my few amusements was playing with the knobs on a chest of drawers, pretending they were the controls of a submarine. I also listened to Children’s Hour on the radio; the ‘Toytown’ adventures with Larry the Lamb and Dennis the Dachshund were pretty good.

Opposite our flat was the bus station. Denny would call out the window and invite the drivers to come up for a cup of tea. Sometimes she’d take tea over to them, or send me. Denny saw nothing unusual about going out into the street in her nightdress under a dressing gown, and I didn’t mind crossing the street in my pyjamas to give a cup of tea to a bus driver, but I was upset when she asked me to go further, to the local newsagent or grocer, where I would come upon grown-ups on their way to work, looking at me oddly.

Denny would get me up at five in the morning and she’d pack various items of food prepared the night before, including sponge cakes in baking tins. We’d march to various prearranged assignations, usually with American Air Force officers. There were brief exchanges, Denny passing over a sandwich or a tin, but what she received in return I don’t know. I remember large flashy cars with half-opened windows. I also vaguely remember a man I had to call ‘uncle’, who was deaf in one ear, staying the night a few times. He had a little Hitler moustache.

The whole affair left me angry and resentful. I’ve spent years of psychotherapy trying to understand it. In 1982 my therapist urged me to try to push through to some clearer level of recall by writing about these morning exchanges. I started to write, and as I began describing a meeting – the Air Force officer winding down his window, Denny leaning in – I suddenly remembered for the first time the back door of the car opening. I began to shake uncontrollably and couldn’t write any more, or remember anything else. My memory just shut down.

Our flat opened onto the first-floor landing, and my room was never locked; the key was kept on the outside. When I was afraid at night I’d run to Denny’s room. If her door was unlocked, she shooed me away; if it was locked, she’d feign sleep and wouldn’t respond. To this day I still wake up terrified, sweating with fear, shaking with rage at the fact that my door to the landing was always kept unlocked at night. I was a tiny child, just six years old, and every night I went to sleep feeling incredibly exposed, alone and unprotected.

In addition to the buses, we also had a view of the train station. I loved to look at the magnificent steam engines, fantasising about sharing the moment with a friend, brother, sister – someone. My last thoughts before sleep often focused on longing for physical affection. Denny didn’t touch me apart from slapping me, brutally scrubbing my body in the bath or ducking my head under the water to wash off the soap. One night, when Denny lost her temper, she held my head under for a long time.

At St Saviours there were a few children from the nearby American air base. One tall, lanky boy came to school wearing a jaunty seersucker suit – still de rigueur in certain parts of the USA. His parents were oblivious to any ridicule this might provoke. That is, until Rosie Bradley’s son Robert and I taunted him to the point of tears while his hapless mother walked him home. The fact that I took part in this bullying shames me to this day.

The school’s fat, balding, insincerely jolly headmaster was Mr Matthews. The window in Mr Matthews’s study faced the playground, and his favourite ritual was to cane children at his desk with an audience of jeering children gathered outside. I ended up at his desk one day, I can’t remember what for. I bent over the desk, facing the window full of eager, greedy faces ready to feed on my pain, but to their great disappointment Mr Matthews let me off.

When Mum paid the occasional visit to Denny and me at Westgate, she gave off an aura of London glamour and of being in a hurry, but also of being unreliable. Meanwhile Denny was running after bus drivers and airmen, and I was miserable. I had lost my beautiful young parents to a life of Spartan discipline with a pathetic woman desperately watching her youth slip away. Denny’s feelings for me seemed vengeful, as did Mum’s abandonment. The deaths or disappearances of the beloved men in my life – my absent father and the recently departed George VI – seemed vengeful too. At the age of seven, love and leadership both felt bankrupt.

During this time Mum became romantically involved with another man. I remember sitting in the back seat of a Volkswagen Beetle, waiting at an intersection on Gunnersbury Avenue. Mum is introducing me to the driver, Dennis Bowman; she says he means a great deal to her – in fact, he’s going to be my new father.

‘I like you better than my other dad,’ I say to Mr Bowman. ‘You’ve got a car.’

The car is light green; the traffic lights change to green and I’m giving Mr Bowman the green light.

3 YOU DIDN’T SEE IT

The memory of Mr Bowman came back to me when Mum told me about him years later. Rosie Bradley had kept Mum informed about Denny’s worsening state of mind, and in the end Mum asked Dad to go down there with her. Shocked at Denny’s erratic behaviour, Dad announced: ‘This is ridiculous – he can’t stay with her there – she’s completely round the twist.’ They decided instead that Denny had to come and live with us, until she got better. I sometimes think that if it weren’t for Denny’s obvious madness I might never have returned home from Westgate.

In July 1952 Mum came to collect me from Westgate on the train – not with Dad, but with Dennis Bowman and Jimpy, whom I was delighted to see. On the way back on the train, though, it was clear my mother hadn’t prepared herself for having me back. My fidgeting irritated her, and so did my runny nose. Nothing I did seemed right. Dennis Bowman said quietly to her, ‘That’s a really dear little boy you’ve got there. Why don’t you leave him alone?’

While I’d been away the kids my age in Acton had fallen into two gangs. Jimpy was leader of the larger group, his authority renewed by a weekly running race he always won. On the day I returned, by some miracle I nearly beat him, and was instantly promoted to Jimpy’s second-in-command. After the race I went over to the playground climbing frame, which was occupied by a menacing-looking boy who sneered at me. ‘You’re not getting on here, mate.’

Normally I would have turned tail, but a new courage compelled me to challenge him. I climbed up, and when the boy pushed me I pushed back so hard that he fell. As he dusted off his trousers I could see he was considering teaching me a lesson, but someone whispered in his ear. He skulked away, almost certainly having been told I was a friend of Jimpy. Even then I felt happy and safe in a gang of boys, protected by a dominant male.

Just as my childhood status was improving, the ground under me shifted again. It seemed I was going to lose one of my beloved parents. I didn’t get the details until years later.

‘Dad had agreed to let me go, and to let me take you with me. Then Dennis got a new job in the Middle East,’ Mum explained. ‘Dennis was an ex-RAF officer with qualifications abroad, very presentable, and because of the mess he got me into here he put his name down for a job outside the country. He finally got a position in Aden. Big money.’

But then Dad had a change of heart.

‘As soon as Cliff knew it was Aden I was taking you to, he came back and said, “Sit down, I want to tell you something.” I had our tickets, yours and mine. Cliff said, “I’ve changed my mind; you’re not taking Peter. It’s too far away. Think about it, do you still want to go?” So I thought about it, and in the end I decided to give things one more try with your father.’

I wondered what Mum meant by ‘the mess’ Dennis Bowman had got her into? Had she become pregnant? ‘Yes. I was in very bad shape in that respect.’ She hesitated. ‘I’d had some miscarriages.’ She paused for a long moment. ‘Self-inflicted miscarriages.’ After having one back-street abortion Mum had decided that from then on she would end her pregnancies herself. ‘I did it five times.’

I was seven, and happy to be home again, back in the noisy flat with a toilet in the back yard and the delicious aroma of Jewish cooking from upstairs. It was all very reassuring. Jerry Cass still played his radio – the BBC Third Programme, classical music, mainly orchestral – incredibly loudly for fifteen minutes every morning as he shaved. (I still like to wake up to Radio 3, as it’s now called.) As I settled back into my old routine, life seemed full of promise. Dad was still often away on tour or at one-night-performances, but Mum was always around, sometimes distracted, but no longer willing to rely on Denny to look after me.

In 1952 the Squadronaires began a regular summer engagement at the Palace Ballroom in Douglas, on the Isle of Man, that would continue for ten years. That first season we rented a flat for the entire holiday, and Mum, still extricating herself from her love affair, got a secret box number at the post office where she would collect Dennis Bowman’s daily letter.

The one-bedroom holiday flat we stayed in was on the lower-ground floor of a large block. My bed was in the living room, an upgrade from the dining room. I would wake occasionally to Dad creeping about in bare feet, coming in late from a night in the bar, or trying to slip out.

I loved Jimpy like a brother. He and I played fantastical and elaborate games. We were also great explorers. In Douglas, the capital of the Isle of Man, where Jimpy was staying with us, we discovered a crumbling old mansion surrounded by high walls that we climbed to steal apples. The house seemed abandoned. We managed to get into an outside room and, peering through a keyhole, could see an old vintage car. Through another keyhole we saw a table covered in what appeared to be treasure – old watches, tools, chains. We tried to force the doors, but they were absolutely secure.

Being explorers was fun, but the biggest treat of all was watching the Squadronaires. This meant dressing up smartly and getting a few shillings from Mum for crisps and milk-shakes. Before the dances began we’d stand in the middle of the huge empty floor and bounce gently up and down – the entire floor was on springs. Then we were free to wander, listen to the music and watch the bouncing hemlines of the teenage girls dancing. Sometimes we’d practise dance steps of our own at the edge of the oak dance floor.

On Sundays there were concerts at the Palace Theatre next to the ballroom, where the Squadronaires would accompany visiting artists, some quite special: Shirley Bassey, Lita Roza, Eartha Kitt, Frankie Vaughan, the Morton Fraser Harmonica Gang, and a string of comedians – even, I think, George Formby plunking away at his silly little banjo. I remember a novelty guitar player who strummed an electric guitar while playing a tiny harmonica in his mouth. He looked ridiculous, and the harmonica was so high-pitched it sounded like a squeaking mouse trapped between his teeth. However, he became a regular at these concerts, so it obviously went down well with the crowd.

Seeing this, I became keen on learning the harmonica, and began playing Dad’s quite seriously.

There were wonderful times on the Isle of Man that year. I fell in love with the younger blonde girl who lived next door. One day, while playing at ‘Mums and Dads’, I had her wrapped in my arms in a play-tent and felt for a moment like a real adult. I remember her mother telling me later that the little girl would be a ‘heartbreaker’ when she grew up. I had no idea what she meant, despite my own rapidly beating heart.

Near the end of this first Isle of Man holiday, Mum brought Denny over and left me in her care while she returned to London to end her affair with Dennis Bowman. Mum and Dad began to put their love life back together that autumn. They tried hard to have a second child to stabilise the family and provide me with a sibling. I know now that the reason it took so long – my brother Paul wasn’t born until five years later – was Mum’s battered reproductive system. She might not have put herself through all that abuse had she been clearer about which man she was going to settle on.

It must have been difficult for my proud father to take Mum back after Dennis Bowman. I don’t believe he knew about her abortions, but if he had, or even suspected anything, it might help explain his drinking and his absences. It could also explain why, after they reconciled, he seemed most at ease with his wife and family when he was tipsy; only then could he express words of love.

In September 1952 I started at Berrymede Junior School. I remember coming home to Denny’s face peeping out through the french windows like a strange, trapped animal. Mum and Dad had given her their bedroom, which she’d filled with the sad booty of her years as Mr Buss’s mistress – sterling silver hairbrushes, manicure sets and Ronson table-lighters. I wish I could say I felt sorry for her, but I don’t believe I did.

Around this time I became a fire-starter. I went door-to-door borrowing matches from neighbours, claiming Mum’s oven had gone out. I didn’t set light to any houses, just to piles of rubble on bomb sites, or old cars. One day I misjudged things: I created a city with building blocks underneath a refrigerated van I took to be abandoned, then stuffed the city with paper and set it alight. The van’s occupant came out screaming: ‘Petrol! Petrol! You’ll kill us all!’

On another destruction-minded day Jimpy and I laid a huge piece of steel across the railway tracks under the bridge and stood back. As the train approached we ran away, waiting to hear the sound of a terrible train crash. This could have not only injured or killed a lot of people, but led us into a very different life, in the penal system. Thank God the train passed without derailing.

At home our chief entertainment was radio. Television had arrived on the scene in 1952, but our family, like millions of others, waited until 1953 and the Queen’s Coronation before buying a TV set. I also read a lot of comics and enjoyed Enid Blyton’s Noddy books, which first appeared in 1949 and were still pretty new. Dad made a model sailing boat that we sometimes took to the Round Pond in Hyde Park on Sunday. He also took me greyhound racing, which I found magical, especially at White City Stadium. And he always gave me far too much pocket money.

Berrymede was in a poor neighbourhood of South Acton, and one day in my first term at school I told a boy in the playground that Dad earned £30 per week. He called me a liar – the average wage was less than a third of that – but I stuck to my guns because I knew it was true. We nearly came to blows over it before a teacher intervened, warning me to stop telling lies: ‘No one earns that much money. Don’t be stupid!’

Dad may have been well paid, but there was little sign of it in our lifestyle (beyond Mum’s clothes). I wore grubby grey shorts and a Fair Isle pullover, with long grey woollen socks drooping around my ankles, muddy shoes and a white shirt that was never quite white. We had no car, lived in a rented flat and rarely went on holiday or travelled unless it was part of Dad’s work; we had a gramophone but listened to the same twenty records throughout my entire childhood, until I started buying new ones myself.

One of the only children’s records available was ‘The Teddy Bear’s Picnic’, backed with ‘Hush, Hush, Hush! Here Comes the Bogeyman’ by Henry Hall with the BBC Dance Orchestra. I played it a lot, but even then I preferred the sound of the modern big bands, including the orchestras of Ted Heath, Joe Loss and Sidney Torch, with whom Mum was guest vocalist for a time before her marriage. My life with Denny in Westgate had left me disliking Broadway musical tunes: every day I was there the eerie strains of ‘Bali Hai’ from South Pacific had crackled from Denny’s big radiogram, a gift from Mr Buss. There was only one South Pacific song I liked at the time – ‘I’m Gonna Wash that Man Right out of My Hair’ – but thanks to Denny’s bathroom brutality, even that had sinister overtones.

1953 was turning out to be one of the happiest years of my life – but then Jimpy moved away. Until then, even though we were no longer going to school together, he had still been the centre of my existence. Now he was gone. My parents decided to replace him with a Springer Spaniel puppy. I remember waking up sleepily on my birthday and being introduced to this adorable, snoozing puppy curled up in an armchair. We called him Bruce.

Bruce became my great joy, although he was shamelessly disloyal. If someone in my gang of friends or a neighbour down the street called Bruce, the disgraceful creature would immediately run to him; no matter what I did he would refuse to return to me. It never occurred to anyone in my family to attempt to train the dog, and as a result Bruce spent a lot of time running around the neighbourhood, barking.

One summer day a local photographer took a photo, reproduced in the Acton Gazette, of my Jimpy substitute and me in the afternoon sunshine, leaning against a wall, almost dozing. In those days the pavement was a long, limitless bench to sit on. Like apprentice winos, wherever we sat in our neighbourhood, we appeared to preside over and size up all who passed.

We were getting more adventurous as a gang and as we got older we used to sit under West Acton bridge on the GWR fast main line to the West. The Twyford Avenue gate there was left open, and under the bridge, out of the rain, we could wait for the West Country and Welsh expresses from Paddington to thunder by as they approached at full speed. As one train approached, I absent-mindedly threw a stick across the tracks. Bruce – ever the instinctive retriever – leapt after it, the thundering locomotive ran over him, and I felt sure he must be dead. Suddenly, with the stick in his teeth, he appeared between the large driving wheels, his head going up and down with the driving shaft, and somehow managed to jump through without getting hurt, dropping the stick at the feet of Peter S, a favourite neighbour of his, while I looked on amazed at both his impregnability and his disloyalty.

One day I came home to find Bruce was gone. He’d been returned to his kennel of origin – or so Mum said. I knew deep down he’d been destroyed, but I went along with the pretence so that Mum wouldn’t be upset that I was upset. I tried consoling myself with the thought that if Mum hadn’t had him destroyed he would probably have died in any case.

Bruce was more than a companion. When he was suddenly gone I was heartbroken – not just over the dog, but for what he was supposed to have replaced. When Jimpy had been around we’d felt like a proper family.

In June 1953 we watched the Coronation at Westminster Abbey live on our brand-new, nine-inch television set, the images barely visible unless all the lights were out and our curtains drawn. Until then my parents had to take me with them if they wanted to go to the pub, or hire a babysitter. Now, with TV to entertain me, they could let me stay home alone.

On my own, terrified, I watched the scary science-fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment. Returning to Earth, the sole survivor of a space mission, ‘infected’ by aliens, gradually and horrifyingly turned into a monstrous vegetable. Although the ‘special effects’ were primitive, their psychological impact was genuinely disturbing and realistic and I began having terrible nightmares. Perhaps in a subconscious effort to make my parents come home, I’d fiddle with the electric fire, folding up slivers of newspaper and lighting them on the red-hot bars. Luckily I never set the house alight.

My parents were still trying to rebuild their marriage, I expect, and the pub and the circle of friends they shared there were vital in this process. It was more normal in those days to leave children alone, but I won’t pretend that I liked it, or that it felt normal. The truth is, though, that my experience of feeling alone, different, alien, was much more ‘normal’ than I realised.

I have always been a dreamer. My new teacher, Miss Caitling, noticed this and helped me. She caught me out once or twice telling lies and let me know she knew, but never made a great deal out of it. The way this clever woman handled me denied me the option of blaming someone in authority for my sense of shame over making things up; I had no choice but to see it as self-inflicted.

Miss Caitling wasn’t conventionally beautiful or pretty. She was stocky with short, dark hair, a little mannish, and wore sensible shoes. But her dark eyes were full of warmth and understanding. She was a champion of the underdog, a perfect teacher for the run-down neighbourhood South Acton had become by then. She was neither an unreliable vamp (like Mum) nor a wicked witch (like Denny); she was an altogether new kind of woman.

As far as girls my own age went, I relied entirely on my peers for guidance. They knew less than I did. Even Dad wasn’t much help. Drunk one night, Dad told me the facts of life. ‘The man does a kind of pee into the woman,’ he said. The rest of the details were explicit, so I don’t know why he fudged the critical bit. I remember passing the facts, as I understood them, to a young friend of mine, and his astonishment that we should all have been synthesised from urine.

On 8 May 1955 Dad was playing at Green’s Playhouse in Glasgow when he was sent a telegram from Norrie Paramor of Parlophone Records, part of EMI, offering him a solo record deal. Dad’s record, ‘Unchained Melody’, was released on 31 July 1956. His handsome face was plastered all over the local record shops. Although it was never a hit, ‘Unchained Melody’ was covered by at least five other artists, three of whom I think charted simultaneously. My father, the pop star! I wanted to be like him.

That summer we all went as usual to the Isle of Man. On one occasion while the band played at the Palace Ballroom, two teenage girls sat either side of me and began to tease me. They were dressed in the full skirts and petticoats of the day, with pretty shoes and low-cut bodices. I felt very much the little boy, my eyes darting back and forth between their heaving cleavages as they discussed which member of the Squadronaires they fancied. One girl immediately claimed the drummer. The other took her time and eventually selected the sax player.

‘That’s my dad!’ I shouted. Her disappointment at this confused me.

The incident served to do two things: it set my heart on becoming a performing musician, and prejudiced me for ever against drummers with their fast-pedalling sex appeal.

In 1956 popular music did not yet mean rock ’n’ roll. But The Goon Show, which Dad and I listened to, featuring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe, did include some early BBC broadcasts of rock performances. One of the show’s resident musicians was Ray Ellington, a young English drummer–vocalist and cabaret artist. With his quartet he sang songs like ‘Rockin’ and Rollin’ Man’, which he composed specially, and rather hastily I think, for the show. I thought it some kind of hybrid jazz: swing music with stupid lyrics. But it felt youthful and rebellious, like The Goon Show itself.

I was regarded by my parents as having little musical talent other than a thin, nasal, soprano voice. I was forbidden to touch Dad’s clarinets or saxophones, only my harmonica.