Skin
I was about to write, “I can’t tell you the date I first became a Yeovil Skinhead” but … well … I can … if I break off from this sentence and check out when Dave and Ansell Collins had a music single called Monkey Spanner in the UK top 20!
Actually, I was already a skinhead by then, (late May 1971), because I hold an audio-visual memory of riding a fairground waltzer with fellow skinheads following the chapter of a story I intend to relate about my first skinhead encounter with visiting Portsmouth fans shortly. (Below).
Intriguingly, in my endeavour to set the scene and eventually tell you about my first ever contact with a
This period of my life was a fascinating time for me for several reasons though it is only with hindsight, now, that I use the word fascinating, as I rewind time back 50 years.
It wasn’t quite so engaging back then and, like any adolescent, even now, I would have been experiencing puberty, beginning to take an interest in the opposite sex and dealing with all the mysteries, angst and emotions of fathoming out just who I was.
On the cusp of turning from boy to man.
Pushing at and examining the envelopes of authority, (from father, school and state), I had begun testing the world … and myself … with the aim of discovering just where I, as a fledgling young adult, might place myself, jig saw like, into some valid social machinery.
Anyway … If we take the 1st May, 1971 as a reasonable datum point, (when Dave and Ansell Collins’s previous song, Double Barrel, had just reached no 1), I would have been 14 years, 6 months and 16 days old!
I add, as a disclaimer, that these dates are approximate.
Caves Fashion Store
Levi jeans, Levi jacket. Oxblood Dr Martin boots.
Mother leaves home
9th – 19th Feb 1972.
Blackouts and power cuts.
I assisted my mother when she left home, carrying suitcases for her, while we walked from home at Buckler’s Mead to Mabel’s Dress Agency. Mabel was a friend of my mothers and she intended to stay with her friend that night over Mabel’s shop situated at the bottom end of Yeovil town.
Complete with pet beagle, Greg, we completed the journey in utter darkness due to a power cut and blackout that occurred that evening.
I was 15 and a ¼.
Under instructions from my mother, who, (back then), I adored, I was to tell my father that my mother had decided, on the spur of the moment, to visit her own family in Scotland.
At the time, the only other living soul that knew the truth, that my mother had left home for good, was John P, my closest school friend.
Contact. A Dating Club
January 1973.
Barbara
Unlike many though, I had further unwelcome emotions to deal with due to my mother having abandoned the family home some months prior, with her having poison my mind against my father before she left. (Read Moon Landings if you wish to enlighten yourself of that disturbing and lamentable phase of my childhood)