Shoreham-by-Sea

I was raised on the south-east coast of England in a place called Shoreham-by-Sea. Shoreham is on the western outskirts of the Brighton and Hove metropolitan area, but unlike Brighton and Hove, back in the days of my youth it was a working town where many of the area’s larger industries were located. I can’t say I ever liked the place; in fact I’ll be honest, it’s been several decades since I left Shoreham and I still don’t miss it. The only thing Shoreham ever had going for it was that at least it wasn’t Worthing or Eastbourne. The word ‘boredom’ would probably best sum my life in Shoreham; it defined my teenage years and was the driving force behind my leaving as soon as possible. This was because there was never anything meaningful to do in the place; even as kids we had to devise our own entertainment—usually of the type that ended with us being chased by the local constabulary. ‘Skiving off’ school was a frequent occurrence, and on weekends we were regular troublemakers around Brighton and Hove: “Let’s go into Brighton and cause trouble” one of us would suggest, and off we’d go. Shoplifting and mindless vandalism was our usual stock in trade, although we weren’t averse to some burglary and bomb-making. We broke into newsagents and warehouses to steal cigarettes and pornography, stole booze from licensed premises, and ultimately blew up a public telephone box. We almost invariably got caught. My constant court appearances continually tested the patience of both my parents and the local police, but the root cause was never addressed: we needed excitement and there was nowhere for teenagers to go in the Shoreham of the mid-1970s, especially when you had little or no cash. With so little to do, the energy of youth was converted into adrenaline and being chased by the police provided a welcome break from the monotony.

Shoreham is a port, a busy port, but its large tides and shallow water at low tide has always limited the size of ship that can use it. As kids growing up in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s we spent many hours messing about and getting up to mischief down at the basin. If we weren’t trying to break into one of the bonded warehouses, one of our favourite activities was to harass the sunbathers that used to frequent the nude gay beach behind the two power stations known to us as ‘poofter’s lagoon’. This was a long stretch of pebble beach in the form of a shingle bar, fenced off with barbed wire that ran parallel to the sea. The fence was to prevent public access to the coal unloaders, power station buildings and high voltage lines that ran its length, and so access to this particular beach took a fair hike down from Hove seafront. But we had our own secret way into the power station complex, and from there we’d safely stand on the other side of the large fence, knowing that the sunbathers would never be able to catch us, and hurl large flint rocks or lumps of coal at them while taunting them and goading them into trying to catch us. Another favourite activity was to stand on the harbour’s East Pier and subject the passing ships to a barrage of rocks. The sailors would shake their fists and yell abuse at us, but like the old queer sunbathers could never catch us! We were horrible little sods!

Yet despite this yobbish behaviour I was always fascinated by the ships that came and went. Being smaller vessels, F. T. Everard’s ‘yellow perils’ were a regular sight in the Shoreham basin, along with the Soviet-flagged vessels that brought timber from Russia to the port’s numerous timber wharves and saw-mills, and the coal ships that brought coal from the northeast of England to feed the town’s two power stations and gas-works. Boredom would often lead me down to the lock gates at Southwick without my hooligan mates where I’d watch the ships pass through, following them by eye as they left the harbour and disappeared over the horizon; wondering where they were going and wishing I was onboard—off to some exotic foreign destination. But that was just a kid day-dreaming; reality looked to be much different and my destiny more mundane.

My working life began somewhat unexpectedly early in July 1976 when I turned up for school the day after my last exam. I was met at the front gate by the headmaster.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Coming to school” I answered nonchalantly, chewing on a piece of gum.

“No you’re not—your exams are finished now and we don’t want you here anymore”, he said.

“Suit yourself” I replied.

It was a fair call I suppose, given that I’d been a time-wasting troublemaker and all-round bad influence while there—when I could be bothered to turn up. I slowly and deliberately lit up a cigarette in front of him and walked out; my time at school was at an end. A week or so later, my final school report arrived. It made sorry reading:

“…he has, throughout his school years, continued to demonstrate a dislike of those in authority and this has been reflected in his attitude to school in general” it read.

It didn’t surprise me, I hated school and I hated authority. Years before I read Ivan Illich I instinctively knew what they were up to. It was all about conformity and deference to authority—and that was never me! I especially hated calling the male teachers ‘sir’, and indeed refused to do so. There’s no doubt whatsoever that school was wasted on me, and it would have probably been much better for all concerned if I had been at work. It wasn’t that I was stupid: much later in life I obtained a first-class honours degree and won the university medal before going on to complete a doctorate—all on scholarship, but in my teens and twenties my priorities lay elsewhere, namely in having fun and living life to the full!

Anyway, at that point I was at a bit of a loose end and had no real idea of what I was going to do with my life—but of one thing I was certain: I didn’t want to work in some stuffy office with a bunch of wankers in suits! I also knew that I wasn’t going to hang around Shoreham forever, I just hadn’t quite worked out how I was going to get out yet. Most of the people I grew up and went to school with went on to marry local people and settle down into a nice, safe, steady local job and raise a family. Not me! The very thought filled me with horror. I wanted to experience the unknown, explore what the world had to offer, and experience the distant and exotic. Where most seemed to want the reassurance of the familiar, I wanted the excitement of the different: to explore, to get away—to sail off the edge of the world! I hated living in Shoreham, really hated it; indeed, one of my most vivid memories of 1976 is of having an underage pint in the Royal George as the long, hot summer faded into autumn, listening to Chicago’s If You Leave Me Now as it played for about the tenth time on the pub juke box. It was awful; I hated the pub, I hated the song, I hated the town, and remember thinking “God…I’ve got to get out of this dump!” Escape, however, was to remain some two years distant.

I couldn’t do too much, however, until I got my exam results. Unfortunately when I did get them they were every bit as bad as I knew they would be—hardly surprising given the amount of effort I had put in. I was an intelligent lad, and for that reason those around me kept pushing me to study—but I hated it; I just wanted to mess about with machinery and get my hands dirty. Even so, despite a complete lack of interest in education on my part, my concerned parents enrolled me at Worthing College of Technology in September in order to re-try for better GCE grades—and I agreed to go on the proviso that my dad would get me a job with him in the meantime. And so I began my working life as a machine-tool operator working on lathes, milling machines, radial drills, and the other machinery that made up the average engineering workshop. I also did a bit of fitting work and loved it. In fact I loved working on the shop floor so much that I didn’t want to leave when it was time to go to tech. By now my focus had shifted away from Brighton and my old school friends—with whom I soon lost touch—westward towards Worthing, my job, tech, and new friends. It was also around this time that I met my first real girlfriend, Clare. She was from Worthing too. A very attractive girl with beautiful light-olive skin, long black hair and a fantastic little figure, she made me the envy of all my friends. I still think of her today during the odd reflective moment, picturing her in my mind as she was then—an object of perfection in those skin-tight jeans. But it was one of those typically brief yet intense teenage relationships that lasted all of three months and by the time I started at Worthing College it was all over. It was my fault I’m afraid: I didn’t pay enough attention to her, preferring to spend my time larking around with my idiot mates instead. I guess I was still a long way from growing up.

It was with great reluctance that I left work to return to the tedium of study and as a consequence I remember little of my year at Worthing Technical College. Outside of study was different altogether: this was the year that punk burst onto the scene when the Sex Pistols caused a furore on their first TV appearance. It was what many of us had been waiting for, and the vibrant movement that they helped ignite formed the backdrop to my entry into adulthood. The boredom that had defined my early teenage swiftly evaporated and suddenly it was exciting to be alive: the world was changing, and we were changing it—or so we thought! The punk explosion saw me once again spend time in Brighton, which was developing quite a lively scene. 1976-78 were fantastic years for music and fashion, and in this respect I’m grateful that I lived through them as I came of age. Yet by the end of 1978 this explosion of youthful energy had lost its originality and punk had become part of the conventional corporate music business. To be a punk after ‘78 you had to buy into the hype and all the accessories, which wasn’t me at all. The original crazy and anarchic scene had become uniformed and regimented. With the originality gone and a load of second-raters and hangers-on—mostly interested in the money or fame for fame’s sake—hijacking the scene, I soon lost interest. I was never one to follow the rest of the sheep!

By October 1977 I had finally had enough of education and wanted to return to work. After getting much better GCE grades I was able to gain entry to an Ordinary National Diploma course in mechanical engineering at Worthing Tech with the objective of becoming a development technician at a company called Ricardo in Shoreham. The trouble was that I hated every minute of it and was rapidly losing interest; I was never going to last the two years and I knew it. It was dry, really dry—all theory and no practice. I loved mucking around with machinery and finding out how it worked, but there was none of that. Instead it was just a load of boring theories and formulae—one of those courses where you could go the full two years without ever setting eyes on a proper machine! So I spent most of my time in class daydreaming, and I think it was obvious to everyone that I was wasting my time. I lasted about two months before reneging on the deal with my parents and quitting the course.

Finding a job in 1977 was relatively easy—even as a seventeen year-old with little or no experience. I went to the Jobcentre in Shoreham on the Wednesday, had an interview that afternoon, and started work as a machine operator the following Monday with a company called DM Mechanisation at their works in St Peters Road, Portslade. It was great to be back on the shop floor, even if it was a dirty job. The work involved machining cast-iron worm-boxes and aprons for Colchester Lathes and the idea was to work as fast as possible so that you would rack up a decent bonus payment as the basic wage was pretty mediocre. Of course the more you knocked out, the sloppier the work became—but like most places, the people on the shop-floor counted for very little and as a consequence didn’t care too much about the quality of their work as long as the ‘first off’ passed inspection. Much of the time was either spent skylarking—men shouting obscenities to each other or hurling lighted paraffin-soaked balls of rag at each other, that kind of thing—or else checking out the girls that worked at the Kayser pantyhose factory next door. Lugging all those heavy castings around also built my arms and shoulders up a fair bit, so I was a pretty fit and muscular lad after a couple of months. On my first day the shop steward asked me if I wanted to become a member of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. I joined up straight away.

I know that factory work is often denigrated, but I loved it. The factory was divided into different areas depending on the type of machining operation being carried out. As you walked in from reception, to the left were the large CNC lathes that machined the various shafts and gear blanks. To the right was the gear-cutting section, where the blanks had their various gear profiles cut into them before being placed in the induction heaters that hardened them. There was then a passageway that led through to where the radial drills and two large CNC drilling machines were housed. At the back of the factory, facing the A259 and the Aldrington Basin, were the milling and boring sections. I began work in the milling machine department where the raw castings were first faced off before being sent to the Snow grinders. But having proved quite quickly that I was a capable lad, I was moved to the radial drilling section. Here the operations were more complex and you were given much more autonomy and variety. Each section had its own foreman and most of the time if you were working OK the foreman would leave you alone, but sometimes if the job you were working on was a bit behind schedule you might be hassled by a person known as a ‘progress chaser’. I felt sorry for the progress chaser: he was a decent enough fellow, but his entire working life seemed to consist of being told to “fuck off”.

After a short time at the firm a man whose name I have long since forgotten approached me. Originally from Manchester, he was a quiet, serious-looking man who worked in a different section of the factory and seldom mixed with the others. He and I were on nodding terms in the canteen at lunchtime but until that moment that was as far as the relationship went. He told me that he had had his eye on me for some time and that even though I was just a kid, I was “smarter than the rest of the wankers in this place”.

“Here we go again”, I thought, “another poofter about to try it on”.

I know it sounds conceited, but I was developing into quite a good-looking and fit young man, and growing up in Brighton—the homosexual capital of Britain—meant that there always seemed to be some sleazy old queer trying it on; “chicken hawks” we used to call them. The place is probably better now that everything is out in the open, but mid-1970s Brighton had this really dirty, sleazy, and often quite violent undercurrent. Back then, a fairly good-looking young bloke like me couldn’t take a piss in a public toilet without getting accosted by some sleazy old poofter and to be honest you got fed up with fighting them off.

Anyway, I was just getting ready to give this bloke some of the usual verbal when the admission came, not that he was a homosexual, but that he was a ‘Red’. According to this fellow, the rest of the blokes at DM were too ignorant or stupid to understand their world. They devoted far too much time to football or other pointless pursuits, which suited what he called the ‘boss class’ right down to the ground. All the while they watched the bosses’ TV, read the bosses’ newspapers, or wasted time talking about football, the bosses were robbing them all blind. He was an advocate of the labour theory of value, and argued that the entire economy was built upon the labour of those who worked in manufacturing, construction, mining or agriculture because theirs was the labour that made all of the material items upon which the modern capitalist economy was based. Yet far from being recognised as the most important people in society, they were denigrated and put at the bottom of the heap—and what was worse was that the workers themselves played a passive role in their own subjugation through their ignorance and apathy. As a consequence he was a man contemptuous of his fellow workers whom he considered to be semi-literate, ignorant dolts that deserved their lowly status through their total indifference to politics and economics.

I found what he had to say very interesting and became an eager student, even though I thought he judged his fellow workers a bit harshly: after all, most were good people doing the best they could with the hand that fate and the universe had dealt them. Over several lunch breaks I was thus introduced to the ideas of Marx and the other socialists and as the ideas crystallised in my mind they indeed seemed plausible. But I never wanted to make revolution; just better understand my world. Quite frankly I couldn’t see the point in making a socialist revolution, because it seemed to me that whatever the social system in place, the greedy, ruthless, and power-hungry will always assume positions of power and use that power to their advantage—the medieval popes, Robespierre and Stalin being cases in point. I guess I should never have read Animal Farm. Besides, at the end of the day I was far more interested in travel and adventure than politics.