All the Young Dudes

Sun

About the Author

Ellie Russell lives in Lee-on-the-Solent on the south coast. She loves music, cookery, nature and is passionate about history. This is her first book.

About the Book

Question: What do you get when you cross a not-so-lovable rogue with an uptight lawyer and throw a little Elvis into the mix?

Answer: A thoroughly ripping page-turner of a yarn and a permanent residency in Heartbreak Hotel. Ellie Russell could certainly be forgiven for thinking somebody up there doesn’t like her. Laugh with her, cry with her – be very glad you’re not her!

Dedication

F T D O F W S F Y

D Y F F M

Copyright Information ©

Ellie Russell (2019)

The right of Ellie Russell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528920018 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528962162 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2019)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5LQ

Chapter 1

Starman

I will begin my story with the time when I first fell in love. My sexual awakening, as it were. The year was 1972 and I was twelve. I lived with my mother and stepfather, two sisters and brother, in a large three-storey house, in a small town on the south coast called Lee-on-the-Solent. My elder sister, Sarah, and I both went to the local grammar school. I was in the last year to sit the Eleven-plus. My brother, James, was seven and my other sister, Annie, was six.

Before we moved to Lee-on-the-Solent, we lived in a rented cottage in a small village called Isfield, in Sussex. James and Annie were born there. The cottage had no bathroom and no indoor toilet; we used a galvanised iron bath and a portable chemical loo. My stepfather had the unenviable task of regularly emptying this into a cesspit, which was located at the far end of the garden. Sarah and I loved sharing the bath in front of the fire. It can’t have been much fun for the adults though. There was an outside toilet, but it was rarely used. It was a long way from the cottage and it stank. It had a large square wooden seat and was full of huge black cobwebs. Some of the spiders were as big as your head.

Sarah and I attended the local primary school. There were only two years, with about six pupils in each class. We could both read by the time we went to school and having such small classes gave us an excellent start. In those days, we used to be given little bottles of milk at morning break and I distinctly remember that in winter it would freeze solid in the bottles. In summer, the milk became unpleasantly warm, and the cream on top would congeal. Another vivid memory was marching in a line round and round the classroom whenever we sang Onward Christian Soldiers which, needless to say, was a firm favourite. I remember getting up at the crack of dawn to hunt for mushrooms on the village green, finding a dead snake (someone had decapitated it) in the lane behind our house and remember nearly killing my sister. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but she was badly hurt and it did entail a trip to the hospital. We were on the see-saw in the park, which was merely a long plank of wood balanced on a central support made of iron. There were little iron handles to hold on to. Although well weathered, the wood was untreated and we often came away with splinters which mother had to dig out with a needle. The whole play area was concrete. There was no soft rubber matting or thickly spread woodchip. Anyway, Sarah was up, and I was down when I suddenly thought it would be a splendid idea to jump off, which I did. She came crashing down, and the fall split her chin open. You have never seen so much blood; chins can sure bleed. She had to have several stitches and still has a scar. For days afterwards, you could clearly see the trail of blood leading from the park to our cottage.

My stepfather’s mother and older brother lived just up the road from us. There was only one road running right through the village. They were simple country folk. There was always a dead rabbit or a brace of pheasant hanging from a hook outside the back door. My uncle was a man of very few words. He loved his allotment and grew masses of fruit and vegetables. He also kept chickens for eggs. I remember walking with him round the garden. He would point things out to me, patiently answering my never-ending questions and proudly showing me the plants in his greenhouse. He had a huge nose, like the beak of a parrot. He smoked a pipe and always wore dog-tooth check jackets with leather buttons and leather patches on the elbows. He was rather like Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor to look at, only with a much bigger nose. Unlike Edward, he never found his Wallis. Apparently, he was engaged once—for 10 years! She obviously got tired of waiting or didn’t like veg.

Every weekend, we used to make the long trek up the road for Sunday afternoon tea and a ‘proper’ bath. We ate in the cosy living room where there was a small black range fuelled by coal which provided what little heat there was in the house and in which Nan cooked their meals. There was a larger sitting room or parlour, but it was only used for wakes, important visitors like the doctor or at Christmas. It was very cold and full of over-stuffed chairs with chintz covers. A large ornate clock ticked loudly on the mantle and chimed every hour on the hour, making us all jump. Upstairs were four large equally cold bedrooms. The beds all had huge feather pillows and each was covered with a plump eiderdown. Underneath every bed was a china chamber pot. Tea never varied. It was always salad with cold ham. In those days, salad consisted of lettuce (the floppy kind), cucumber and tomato. Invariably, you also got a slug and a good spattering of greenfly, sometimes a caterpillar. If you crunched on something, you had got a snail. There were none of the fancy salad leaves available now and no salad dressings. We used to sprinkle a little vinegar over the lettuce. There was no garlic to make a French dressing and olive oil was only available in tiny glass bottles from the Chemist. It was never used for cooking. Mother always had it handy for earaches. She would pour copious amounts into our ears and then plug them with a golf-ball size wad of cotton wool to prevent the oil from running out. To go with the ham, there was Pan Yan pickle (which you can still buy today). It was proper ham, lean and dry with an orange breadcrumb rind. The accompanying bread was homemade with a thick crust and was yeasty and delicious. Afterwards, there would be cake, also homemade, and tea poured from a large teapot into little china cups with saucers. I hated having a bath there. Nan was merciless with the soap and flannel. She would scrub us nearly raw paying particular attention to our ears which may go a long way to explain our frequent bouts of earache. She always had large bars of green Palmolive soap. The towels were thin and really rough, which removed a further layer of skin. The bathroom was absolutely freezing. All bathrooms were cold back then. There was no heating, unless you had a paraffin stove. Then you would be nice and warm but had to be a bit lively with your bath, lest you be overcome by the fumes. But all in all, they were halcyon days.

Sarah and I were born in Canada. Mother was a professional ice skater when she met and married my father. He was working for an insurance company. He was Jewish and was born in Czechoslovakia. At the beginning of WW2, the German army marched into Czechoslovakia and established a Slovakian Protectorate. My father and grandmother were interned at Sered, a forced labour camp about 60 km from Bratislava. He was seventeen. At some point, my father and a number of other male prisoners broke out and lived as partisans in the forest. It must have been truly awful for him having to leave his mother behind. Near the end of WW2, she was transported to Auschwitz and killed. It’s poignant to see footage of old film, of Jews being herded into cattle trucks and peering through the barbed wire of concentration camp fences, clips we have all seen a thousand times and knowing that one of those women could be my actual grandmother. I don’t know what happened to my grandfather, he may have survived the war. I do know that he was a doctor.

My parents’ marriage was only ever going to fail. My mother was a spoilt rich kid brought up in a large house with a maid and a tennis court in a green and pleasant land and my father had seen hell up close and personal. When they separated, mother came back to England with my sister and me and moved to Sussex where my nan and gramps owned and ran The Laughing Fish Pub. Sarah and I adored the pub. We weren’t allowed in either of the two bars, but I remember sneaking a peek and being fascinated by the stuffed fish in huge glass cases which were mounted on the walls. We would sit outside and gramps would bring us Coca-Cola in a bottle with a straw and some cheese and onion crisps. Sometimes, he would slip us a few maraschino cherries. The cola bottles were made of thick glass and were very ornate, and the crisps tasted so much better than they do today, although, they did go soggy more quickly. For a while, Nan and Gramps had a Lassie Collie dog called Scampy. He kept chasing sheep, and the local farmer threatened to shoot him on sight next time he did it, so they found him a new home. At least that’s what we were told. I expect somewhere in Isfield, there’s a farmer with a stuffed collie in a glass case mounted on his wall. A man called George helped out in the grounds. He always carried a dirty string mop and a metal bucket. You knew when he was coming, you could hear the clanking. He smelled strongly of Jeyes Fluid. It was here, helping out behind the bar, that my mother met my stepfather. The pub eventually became too much for my grandparents and they relocated to Lee-on-the-Solent on the south coast. When I was five, the house next door to them came up for sale, and we joined them there.

Like most fourteen-year-olds, Sarah was pop music mad and never went anywhere without a radio. Every morning, we had our breakfast to the accompaniment of Radio 1’s Tony Blackburn Show. He featured a record of the week, which was always played at the same time each day and I would race downstairs to hear Starman by David Bowie. I loved that song; it stirred my very soul. I had no idea who David Bowie was or that he would shortly be stirring more than my soul, but I knew I loved that song. The sound of Tony Blackburn and the sight of my mother at the sink, furiously scraping charcoal from our toast was what I remember most fondly about the getting ready for school routine. I remember with less affection trying to warm a freezing cold cotton shirt over a single bar electric fire before putting it on over a vest and voluminous fleecy-lined pants. They were seriously big pants; Bridget Jones would have been proud. The shirt collar was so stiff that it was like a neck brace, the school tie making for added reinforcement. A bottle green sweater and a pleated skirt completed the ensemble. I also had long white socks and ‘sensible’ shoes. The other girls mostly wore straight skirts which hugged their hips and emphasised their figures, but mother insisted on pleated, and no amount of pleading would budge her. I used to roll the waistband over a few times to make the skirt shorter, but it just made the pleats fan out like a tutu. If mother was stressed, which she nearly always was, having our hair done was murder. She wielded the hard bristle brush and steel comb with more than a little malice aforethought, and don’t get me started on the elastic bands. We had no nice soft scrunchies and hair ties back then. Our pony tails would be hauled so high and banded so tight, it gave you an instant face lift. Then metal hair grips would be rammed in to hold it all in place, carving a bloody furrow in your scalp. At the end of the day when you took the elastic band out, half your hair would come away and your head would feel tender and bruised for days. And there was always the burnt toast.

A must for my sister and me was Top of the Pops at 7.30pm on a Thursday. Sarah would turn up the TV and dance to every song, she was a great dancer. It was on TOTP that I first saw Bowie. Strumming his acoustic guitar, Mick Ronson playing the electric, their heads together as they harmonised and I fell absolutely and completely in love. He really was like someone from another planet with his thin face, bright red hair and those strange eyes. I thought he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen and I thought a lot of other thoughts as well. From that moment on, I was Bowie obsessed. I loved everything about him (except Angie of course. I loathed her with passion). I bought everything he had ever recorded and played it over and over. Our upstairs landing reverberated to the sound of Space Oddity and The Man Who Sold the World, clashing with Curved Air and Cream coming from my sister’s room. I covered my bedroom with posters of him and generally mooned around. I remember getting The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars for Christmas, and my friends clubbed together and bought Hunky Dory for my birthday. I had my straight blond hair, cropped and dyed. Of course, one couldn’t buy the fabulous hair colours available now or the gels and putty. Maybe it was available in London and other big cities, but in Lee-on-the-Solent, it was Harmony Auburn or nothing. For wimps, there was ‘Hint of a Tint’. I soon discovered henna which was a pain to apply but resulted in lovely bright orange hair. Imagine plastering your head in thick mud which smells of spinach and that’s what applying henna was like. I managed to get it everywhere, up the walls, on the paintwork, over the floor, on all the towels—the whole bathroom was splattered with orange stains.

It was great having my grandparents living next door. They occupied the bottom half of the house adjoining ours and my aunt, uncle and cousins had the top half. My aunt was a real character. She trained as a ballet dancer but had mostly worked in the theatre either touring or in the West End. For a time, she worked at the famous Windmill Theatre in London. She could do the Can-Can, and that was more than enough to earn her my undying admiration. My uncle was her third husband, and father of two of my three cousins. He could kick a football into the air so high it was almost lost from sight. We kids never tired of watching him perform this feat, and whenever he was in his garden, we would produce a ball and pester him until he did it. Both my aunt and uncle liked to drink. A lot. Most nights they would amble round the corner to the pub, all smiles and bonhomie. Come closing time when they staggered out, things were not quite so cordial and the ensuing rows were loud enough to wake the dead and certainly the neighbours. Many times, mother would send my stepfather in to intervene before they did each other real damage. As soon as he left, they would start up again. I honestly think they enjoyed it.

Nanny had been a primary school teacher and was wonderful with children. She was intelligent and interesting and always fun to be around. She could read music and played the piano brilliantly. She could make dolls’ clothes and fancy dress costumes. She could knit jumpers and slippers and make woolly pom-poms. She read us wonderful books and showed us how to make long paper chains of dancing men all joined together by their tiny paper hands. She taught us to crochet and do French knitting. She gave us slices of milk loaf, thickly spread with Lurpak butter and greengage jam. She would spend hours in her garden and knew the names of all the plants. She was especially fond of hostas and ferns. I loved her with all my heart. Living