Chapter 18: After the ball was over...

Well, I did think they were going to raid the manor house after all this and I was quite prepared to sit outside our bedroom door with a pitchfork while all these aristos came running up the stairs in a state of reptilian, predatory anguish. It would have been like the end of Dance of the Vampires, where you realise that you are just two humans at their party, the only ones with reflections. They were trying to grab me back at the party earlier. I was physically manipulated, by many people. Women sat on my knees and photographs were taken just in case I was the next big thing. It all happened so quickly & I wasn't asked if I minded. I felt like a goddamn piece of meat! It was 'flash flash flash flash.' Some some really evil, horrible looking elderly lady in a very expensive satin dress grabbed my leg.

'You're will come back and talk to me, won't you?' she said. It was like she had a forked tongue. 'I'm not coming back here,' I thought. I could not even bring to mind the social formality of saying, 'you're very lovely, but I'm a bit busy.' I just thought, 'get the hell out of there.' Everything went very fish-eye lens.

When I delivered it to Redman, Jake and Gladys were within earshot. They were in one of the other living rooms. They could hear everything. We were shouting after all. So when I knew Redman had walked out, and after I had done a quick interview about how I felt and let the cameras follow me about, I went straight to see Jake and Gladys. By that time Jake and Gladys had become the most important people in mine and Kiran's life, in that environment. Jake came to get involved because he just had to come and see what was going to happen next.

'Look,' I said, 'my mum and dad are just like you two. I cannot believe what has happened here. You would all get on like a house on fire, but my dad would have this place burnt to the ground. What the hell's happening between you all?'

And I walked in and they were both looking up at me seriously.

'Look,' I said, 'I'm really sorry, you heard all that, didn't you? All the bad language, everything. I've completely and utterly humiliated Redman. I don't know what's going to happen next but I may have to defend my family physically from some of these bastards. How do you two feel about it? Have you gone off us?'

'No,' they laughed. 'No, no, no! They had it coming! They had it coming! And they can't see it when it happens either. They can't see it coming at all.'

'What are you going to do?' I said. 'You're their employees here. What are you going to do?'

'Well,' Jake said, 'we'll obviously see what happens after you've gone. It will certainly be interesting. They are not going to forget you in a hurry are they?'

'So what do you reckon?'

'Well, you know,' Jake said, 'maybe more people should talk to them like that, it might actually sort this out. It certainly shocked me. You've still got the spirit, haven't you?'

'Well, you had it once, Jake,' I said, 'and I dare say it's still in there somewhere. But I can't understand why you work for these people. They are utter scum. They tried to persecute and restrict everything you believed in. They disgust me, man.'

'They've treated your wife abominably,' Gladys said. She kept rushing to Kiran's aid. There was a lot of weeping and hugging and Kiran thought that she was becoming almost dependent on her for some kind of guidance and it was getting almost a bit scary really.

'Jake,' I said, 'I'm only doing what my mum wants me to do, yeah? I would imagine that my mum and you and your whole generation, you are not a million miles apart. You got bombed. My mum has violent, gory nightmares every night and has every night since she was a child because of the Blitz. People do not think about this. The people in this place, who employ you, are the people who are ultimately responsible for that kind of human activity on the planet, regardless of what causes are being used as an excuse. And then they paint me as a criminal!'

And I pointed out to Jake about the business about them saying "Craig was one of those joyriders," and "Craig would be able to break into this mansion without a key surely."

'I'm sick of it, man! Look at you with all of your dignity and all of your self respect, and your attitude to other human beings, so humanitarian, and they are lording it over you! I can't even think of an analogy that doesn't involve animals, which is rather upsetting, you know? It's like, completely the wrong way around, man. They should be looking to you for guidance.'

'We were a bit frisky, years ago,' he said. 'I can't say the Ted movement was particularly passive. There were a lot of right bastards involved.'

'Of course there were,' I said, 'and I'm not giving Punk Rock a clean bill of health either, but we knew the bastards were a minority. In this collection of human beings you work for, the people who are all right are in the minority! It's a complete Yin and Yang situation here. But anyway, history is re-written and I know you were a Ted based in Yorkshire and I know most of the violence and aggro was in London and one of the biggest reports about Teddy-Boys and Teddy-Girls in London was the carving up of cinema seats with razor blades...'

'I did hear there was a bit of that going on,' he said.

'There was certainly a lot of that going on, Jake,' I said, 'as my mother will attest to. In fact, I got bounced out of the Scala in London after a gig I played there a couple of years ago, I was wearing a drape. The Scala is a cinema in the middle of London that was famed for having its seats torn up by Teddy-Boys in the 1950s. It was one of the big moments of my life being thrown out of there, it was like revisiting an old haunt of a previous generation and I was wrongly ejected too...'

'Well, you can't say that tearing up cinema seats was appropriate behaviour, can you Craig?'

'I can,' I said, ' because my mother once told me why it was done. Has anybody stopped to ask why it started happening?'

'Well, no,' he said. 'It's strange that. The papers just said it happened.'

'I will tell you why it happened. It happened when the audience felt the film was shit and they had been ripped off!'

And Jake burst into laughter. There were literally tears running down his cheeks.

'I've been waiting to hear that for forty years!' he said. 'Of course people don't do something like that for no reason.'

'Come on mate,' I said, 'a lot of those old films in the fifties were just as shit as they are now and you've just paid half your week's wages to take your missus to the flicks and you've got some pompous, arrogant fucker from America, like John Wayne... But we're all told that everybody loved 'Big John', and everybody loved Robert Mitcham and everybody loved Richard Widmark, and everybody loved all these people... Of course they did not. We are fed the history that everybody was in love with these people, in fact it was more than that. They were their Gods. Of course they were not. Some of John Wayne's films were utter shit and if you were a self-respecting Teddy-Boy and you have got some great, ungainly wanker who walks like a woman trying to tell us that killing 'Red Indians' is fun... and they are thinking, "this doesn't hang right. That fight doesn't look realistic, and I should know, I only had one three hours ago." So, out comes the razor blade. I bet this all started when a group of them went down and said "Can we have our money back? This is shit!" and them going, "Well, we can't pay you your money back," and then, "Bingo! We're having your chairs, you bastard!" And then, before you know it, the Teddy-Boy is being demonised when really, if they had not been ripped off, they might have been more passive and is that not the history of the working classes?'

Jake was loving this. He was really excited. They were there far later than they usually stayed. The clock struck two. It had been a long night.