Boy Wanted on Savile Row (eBook)

1

The Apex

Every Thursday, a tailor used to set up a stall at Canterbury Market and for £5 you could commission a pair of trousers to your exact build and fit. As I think back to the genesis of my burgeoning fascination with clothes, my Thursday jaunts to Canterbury were what they refer to in astrophysics as the singularity – a context within which a small change can cause a large effect. I was obsessed with trousers. At that time, high-waisted trousers, three-button jackets with patch pockets on the side, platform shoes and tank tops were all the rage.

I used to wear those high-waisted trousers – all the way up to my armpits. The rise was accentuated even further because of the platform shoes, my very long legs and disproportionately small torso. This earned me the nickname ‘Mini BOD’, which my father would call me whenever I walked into the room.

Fashion, along with the music scene, would move very fast. You could follow the looks of the day through the prism of the music. My taste in clothes was always informed by the music movements and what people would be wearing to the clubs. And the late 1970s were a great time for music. You had disco (the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson), you had punk rock (the Clash, the Stranglers), and electronica was really taking off (Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream). Part of going out was always dressing up and being able to put your look together. You had to be a chameleon. One night you might be wearing ripped Levi’s and studded jean jackets snarling ‘God Save the Queen’; the next, you’re wearing sequined jumpsuits and thrusting your hips to ‘Night Fever’.

I was living in Kent at the time, and with my education already going down the plughole, my parents had reluctantly resigned themselves to the fact I was going to be a dropout. Fashion and music aside, the only other thing that captured my attention growing up was the world of motorsports. Fundamentally, I had huge aspirations to be a racing driver.

A couple of my close friends and I saved up enough money and each bought the same silver CB 250N Honda Super Dream; the reason being, in a Honda Super Dream one could go from a 50cc to a 250cc straight away without having to take your driver’s test – thus, enabling the driver to go from 40–50mph to 100mph, which resulted in many unfortunate deaths.

Mine was a TKT 314T. Our model numbers were sequential. My friends’ were 312, 313 and I was 314. We roared around with reckless abandon, tearing through the local parishes and pockets of small villages that encircled Kent, trying desperately to reach the magical 100mph down the Thanet Way. Always in vain, however, as Super Dreams would max out at 96mph.

Racing around like lunatics with my friends merited me a sense of freedom. I took great pride in my Super Dream and meticulously cared for its upkeep. As I sped (quite literally) through the barriers of adolescence into adulthood I developed an enormous sense of independence.

However, my burgeoning career as a juvenile delinquent was drastically truncated when my mother, bless her, gave me two weeks to get a job – or else. I went to work in a shop called Lenleys, a deconstructed department store composed of little shops scattered around the butter market outside Canterbury Cathedral. Lenleys were suppliers of fine furniture and soft furnishings. There was a gay couple that used to run the soft furnishings department and there was more innuendo dished out by these two filthy minds in a morning’s work, than in an entire series of Are You Being Served?

It was hilarious and I loved every minute of it.

The fun was soon curtailed as my parents decided it was time to move to Wales and start a new life running a restaurant. My grandfather, who was an underwater demolition expert, helped facilitate the move by transporting my Super Dream in the back of his van, along with all my other hopes and aspirations. Part of the deal of my parents buying the restaurant was securing a job for me as junior sales assistant in a company called Barretts, in Portfield, near Haverfordwest.

Six months later, it was an early summer’s day and I was out on my Super Dream, ripping down a country lane and speeding in my usual feckless manner when disaster struck. A local teacher in a quite beautiful gold Ford Granada was overtaking an Electricity Board van around an apex where all the grass had grown high.

What happened next was a blur of swerving, tyres screaming, and the horrible ‘GUTHUNK!’ noise that can only be made with the sharp impact of large metal hitting large metal at high velocity. The obligatory somersaults ensued as I was catapulted into the long grass, rolling ungracefully before coming to rest a foot from a lamppost. My Super Dream was in bits, its metallic guts splayed across the asphalt like one of those disembowelled badgers you’d see that had fallen victim to roadkill. The teacher’s car was also written off, I’d later learn, but assumed as much at the time. My knee suffered severe lacerations, and it must have looked pretty grim because when my mother arrived at the crash site, she took one look at it and burst into tears.

At the hospital they stitched me up. It needed fifty-two stitches in all. During the following months my spirits were high but my movements were quite restricted, to put it mildly. My knee and ankle locked up so badly it was as if the ligaments and thin tissue that binds the two had signed a secret treaty that an irreparable, implacable position would be for the greater good. To this day, I still have problems with my foot, but I’ve always considered myself fortunate to limp away from a crash of that magnitude. I’ve had friends who also believed themselves indestructible come off second best in those kind of situations with amputations or worse.

While I was busy doing very little but convalescing, I got a message through from my Great-Uncle Douglas that they were looking for a sales assistant in Hepworth’s. Hepworth’s was a thriving national chain of men’s ready-made and made-to-measure suits based in Leeds. Back in those days, if you were looking to purchase your first suit, Hepworth’s was one of the first places you would think to shop. Alongside the Fifty Shillings Tailor and Burton Menswear, Hepworth’s ruled the roost as far as accessibly priced men’s clothing was concerned for close to a century. They were beginning to reach the end of their rule, however, when I joined the business, and were to be absorbed entirely by Next plc by 1985.

Initially I thought it would be a bit boring. Tailoring in an old man shop? I’m not really into that.

‘They’ll pay you about £2.50 more a week than in your other job at Barretts,’ my great-uncle said.

‘That’s quite good,’ I replied, itching my ankle down the thin aperture of my ankle cast with a sewing needle. ‘That’ll buy me a lot of petrol for my new motorbike.’

‘Fine, just don’t repeat that crap to your mum. She’s scared you’ll end up like your Uncle Andy.’

My Uncle Andy had suffered a terrible motorcycle accident on the Guildford bypass twenty years before, breaking nearly every bone in his body. My grandmother was given the arduous and thankless responsibility of returning him back to Wales and nurturing his broken body back to health over the course of eighteen months.

Unfortunately for my dear grandmother’s ticker, Uncle Andy had the racing bug. Once he was back on his brittle feet, he went straight down to the racing track in his souped-up Angular, nicknamed the ‘Jangular’ (a hybrid of the Jaguar Angular). The Jangular was a 1100cc with a straight-six E-type brace engine. The only drawback was it lacked the torque and dexterity to manoeuvre efficiently, if at all, around corners. Uncle Andy would often be seen careering off the track at 100mph when attempting to apex the corner at a complete opposite lock.

His death wish was not exclusive to car racing. In 1973, Uncle Andy saw the film Live and Let Die and was profoundly influenced by the scene where James Bond escapes Kananga’s crocodile farm on a Glastron speedboat and is subsequently chased by Kananga’s henchmen through the watery plains of Louisiana. This proved to be a transformative encounter in his evolution of thrill-seeking adventures and, together with his mate Rob, he bought the same Glastron speedboat days after watching the film.

He would hitch the Glastron to his Plymouth Barracuda, which he sprayed white with purple pinstripes to match the colour scheme of the boat, and with me and his girlfriend in the backseat, we’d tour the west coast of Wales, the soundtrack to Shaft blaring out of his eight-track stereo.

Once that novelty subsided, he got into racing karts. Initially, Uncle Andy showed some reluctance because racing karts had the reputation of being something kids would be forced to do before they were old enough to race proper cars. While that has some semblance of truth even today, karting is one of the purest and most economical forms of racing. With karting, you get to race four times. Three of those will be...