The Toy Maker

Alternative title: - "Guitars to The Stars (The other side of the Screwdriver)"

- two wooden cars for my nephews...

The Toy Maker (banging in nails and voices in the head).

(This chapter's a mess and needs a lot of work - I'd ignore it for now if I were you). Or not...

It was all wrong. The primary school I attended from 1952 until 1958 was nominally a "C of E" (Church of England) instituion. It was pretty average in many ways for post-war England at the time but the name was fundamentally a lie. St. Mary's primary School had a head teacher who ran a conspirational plot to seduce the pupils over to Catholicism, without their knowledge and without the knowledge of their parents.

Actually what was properly the curriculum by law would not have included the pupils bowing of their heads "at the name of Jesus" (sheer insanity, obviously, to any rational person) but that was just one of the insidiously subtle wedges constantly being driven into the pliable young minds given into Mrs. Hersee's charge by the education authorities. Naughty lady! But not everything she did was wrong...

One of her saving graces was her insistence on many hours of the kids' singing musical tonic sol-fa scales every week. It's my guess that nearly every one of those children who attended that particular school at that time was imbued with a good musical ear and sense. Not all, of course. Just a few were labeled "Groaners" and, when smacks with a ruler to the backs of the legs failed to improve the musical quality of their renderings, they were confined to the back rows in the classroom, discouraged from making any noise at all.

My generation was lucky enough not to have witnessed WW2 but the psychological damage inflicted by this practise (and also the religious brainwashing) for those concerned must have been substantial. It certainly would not be tolerated today.

If you've read other parts of this site you may well be aware that I consider it wrong (and I'm in very good company here) to indoctrinate children with any kind of religious dogma but back in the 1950's it was very common practice to shrink the minds of and deeply intimidate and traumatise children by the insistence upon the kind of theological claptrap to which I and my fellow pupils were then subjected.

Richard Dawkins puts it extremely concisely when he says: - "Adam (who never existed) bequeathed his "sin" in his bodily semen (charming notion) to all of humanity. That sin, with which every newborn baby is hideously stained (another charming notion), was so terrible that it could be forgiven only through the blood sacrifice of a scapegoat. But no ordinary scapegoat would do. The sin of humanity was so great that the only adequate sacrificial victim was God himself. That's right. The creator of the universe, sublime inventor of mathematics, of relativistic space-time, of quarks and quanta, of life itself, Almighty God, who reads our every thought and hears our every prayer, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God couldn't think of a better way to forgive us than to have himself tortured and executed. For heaven's sake, if he wanted to forgive us, why didn't he just forgive us? Who, after all, needed to be impressed by the blood and the agony? Nobody but himself."

It was the late 1950s and television had shown us the weapons of mass distraction. We were utterly mesmerized by rock music on TV. These new fangled machines were now the de rigeur living room entertainment for those lucky enough to be able to afford them (or as was the case here, those whose fathers ran a TV and Radio repair business). The guitarists in the rock bands seemed to wield the ultimate power. Their pointy-horned twanging machines seemed like unattainable treasures but the lad in our story has made up his mind. It was absolutely essential to the heart of his very being that he would have, hold and twang one of those things, even if it meant heavy forced labour forever in a salt mine to attain that goal.

A guitar must be born, no matter how crude. At eight years old our "Desk Lid Thief to be" can pitch a mean note by ear. This makes things fairly straightforward when it comes to marking out the notes "Doh-Re-Me-Fa-Soh-La-Te-Doh" along the stick nailed to the old kitchen drawer, across which is stretched a piece of green fishing twine. There's a hole at the end of the stick to take a shaved-down clothes peg for tensioning and thus tuning the string. This wondrous one-stringed instrument is capable of producing a perfectly recognizable tune and many happy hours are spent just twanging. "Oh Shenandoah" becomes a favourite and can be easily picked out. Fender Stratocaster, no - but the kid has made a start - and he is about to learn a very important lesson in music string mechanics. When too much energy is expended in excited plucking and twanging, there is a sudden almighty deafening "BANG" and the bridge, a small piece of wood standing up on its edge has fallen over. The boy stands it up again and re-tensions the string but the tune of "Oh Shenandoah" now sounds completely wrong. What can have happened? Everything is back together as it should be but this time the tune sounds truly horrible! What has changed? The only thing that's different is that the bridge is in a slightly different place on the box and the realization sets in that~

Back in the garden shed, other, more sophisticated instruments are to follow. There is a four stringed cigar box ukulele and a biscuit tin banjo, which causes some loss of blood in the making. There is an orange-box-and-floor-linoleum-with-tintacks-and-drawing-pin special, then there is a "custom made" hardboard box with a strangely shaped sound hole in the front which takes a whole afternoon to bash through with a hammer. Some of these epic constructions even have six strings (albeit six of the same gauge of fishing line) and they all play tunes when suitably coaxed. Although truly beautiful tone could certainly not be ascribed to them, it is wonderful music to the ears of the young player.

The twanging has certainly begun but let's move on to the adventure with the desk lid. There is a vivid recollection in the kid's mind of what had been an important day from several years before - one that will change the shape of the rest of his life. The school music lessons have served to sharpen his ear but he has found it hard to take on board the flip-chart pictures of long-robed disciples, sheep and wide-eyed children at the feet of a kindly faced and bearded "Saviour". To the kid, this is patently obvious claptrap but he has to go along with it for the sake of peace in the classroom. He recalls the moment when his focus on the day's lessons has drifted and a kind of dream-state has descended upon him, sat at his desk. A warm, friendly voice is speaking softly in his subconscious ear, as though from behind: -

"You will grow up to be the man who makes toys for the children who will ride in spaceships"

The message seems crystal clear and unmistakably meant for him, even though the content appears to be unusual and odd in the extreme. From where or from whom it has come is somehow not important - he just accepts it as a perfectly natural occurrence. For some reason, up to that point, he had wanted to be (of all things) a dentist! This toy-making proposal is far more exciting; what a great idea! Dan Dare is the current space hero in the "Eagle" comic book and rocket ships are playing a key role in many kids' fantasies at that time. Sputnik One is beeping like a muted Roadrunner on helium in orbit around the planet.

"Toy maker for kids in spaceships! That'll do nicely" he thinks. I should know - I was that boy.

Having successfully removed the desk lid from school premises, the next task was to cut out the body for the proposed electric guitar. A fretsaw, dear reader, is intended for cutting out curvy shapes in thin plywood or veneers, not for attacking one-inch thick oak planking - it's completely the wrong tool - but nobody had told me that fact. A week of hard slogged and tedious evenings' relentless sawing on the bedroom table resulted in an approximation of a solid guitar body, vaguely pointy-shaped but hardly what anybody else but myself would refer to as sexy. Maybe I should have got out a bit more, do I hear you say? But this was going to be my key to getting out a bit more - and it certainly wasn't going to happen any other way...

Most young boys in the United Kingdom, by the age of eleven, are (and were then) right into football and other traditional stuff. This could not have been much further from the case with me. Being the only kid who knows absolutely nothing at all about football in a Grammar School with 850 pupils in attendance comes with its own unique set of problems. Primary School education for me had been intellectually full and pretty thorough. In terms of reading, writing and arithmetic one couldn't have done much better but "Sports" had exclusively meant the game of "Rounders" (a kind of tamed down Softball or Baseball). At a push, occasionally, in summer, it could also briefly mean swimming in a freezing and dirty leaf-strewn pool on the other side of town; but definitely no football or cricket.

Football in particular was completely alien to me; I had no skills in the game (and still don't) and as a result of this, upon arrival at Grammar school, I was weeded out and put into the "chuck-outs" team. As if that wasn't humiliating enough, the only place I could be of any use at all (even to that miserably inept team) was in goal, there purely to absorb the impact of balls kicked seemingly unerringly straight at me with maximum force. What fun! It was so exhilarating I even broke an arm without any training whatsoever. It was so very depressing to be on the outside of where apparently everybody else was having such a good time. Those hand-me-down, very old-fashioned football boots that didn't fit were not at all conducive to the development of football skills, either. In those days, the studs on the soles were made up of several layers of leather, nailed on. If those studs were allowed to wear down (and there were no plans for expensive repairs or new boots), the nails would poke through into the interior of the boot and hence into the soles of the wearer's feet. My feet. Cross-country running (ordered on rainy days) with such abysmally hopeless footwear was just horrendous but unavoidable torture.

There were other complications inherent with inhabiting the box labeled "odd one out" at Bromley Grammar School for Boys, Hayes Lane, Bromley in 1958. No bones about it, we were by no means a wealthy family. Cue Monty Python sketch… "Paper bag? - Luxury!!!". "Poor" adequately describes our family situation compared to the families of most of the other kids in school with me. Among my contemporaries right through my years of secondary education, it used to feel like I was entering a palace of some kind when visiting school friends' homes. The truth was that even those occupying post World War Two council housing seemed to me to be living in the lap of luxury. It was possible, I remember, to pick the bricks out of the side wall of our run-down slum. School chums who visited were incredulous of its condition, just as much as they were of my father's condition upon his often-belligerent staggering return from the pub (which fortunately for him was just a few paces away, across the road).

He (my dad) had started a radio and TV repair and sales shop and "showroom" in Bromley, having left the RAF as a radio engineer after WW2. To be honest, I don't know how well I would have coped with the war experience so I can't really criticize his approach to our family's well being but it didn't appear to be too caring, to say the least. The pub landlord and bar staff collected the majority of the shop's income directly it came in, such as it was. My mum was obviously a very skilful juggler and we never went hungry but I really don't know how she did that.

So for me, guitar was a means of escape from the complete and utter unbridled dogshit that was childhood. Making balsa and tissue flying model aeroplanes was OK but the electric guitar, as I saw it, was going to be my key to everything. If I could only get my hands on an electric guitar, I could learn the rock and roll thing, join a "beat group" and maybe even overcome the monstrous inferiority complex I was dragging around with me. Perhaps I might even eventually get a girlfriend (although I have to confess that at the time this seemed extremely unlikely). There was, as I have said, absolutely no way anybody was going to buy me an electric guitar, so the desk lid project was pretty important to me. Locally, other kids, notably a certain David Jones (later Bowie) and my Primary School best mate, George Underwood (now internationally famous painter) were getting the real thing. This they funded through Saturday jobs or similar but I wasn't allowed to take even a paper round. That kind of thing was for working class people, not Good Conservatives like my father's family ought to be seen to be. Oh, dear.

To be fair, after my dad had seen me struggling with orange boxes and fishing string for five years, he'd bought me a ukulele and then, a bit later, acquired a cheap acoustic guitar for me; it was actually a 'swapsy-cum-barter deal' for some electronic repair he'd done for a customer. That customer also ran an electrical goods and music shop at the other end of town. The guitar had allegedly belonged to the guitar player with Acker Bilk's jazz band so it was a real musical instrument and not just junk. It was of Russian origin and had an adjustable tilting neck. This meant that I could make it more playable than it had been when it arrived. ss

LThat was the first of countless thousands of guitar adjustments, fine tunings and major re-builds that were to become the mainstay of my professional self-employment over a thirty-year period, around the industry that can cause so much pleasure (and more often, so much pain). What a racket but we love it.

A stick nailed to an old kitchen drawer, across which is stretched a piece of green fishing twine.

The arrival of this first factory-produced (proper) guitar also meant that I now had a reliable set of data for reference that would allow me to get accurate crucial measurements (such as for fret spacing) to copy onto my new desk lid electric guitar (when it finally sprouted a neck). Other technological advances had also been made since the fishing string and kitchen drawer days. Whereas I'd been using rows of drawing pins or carefully inlaid pieces of curtain rail for frets, I'd now discovered that one could buy something called "fretwire". That's like, wire for making frets with! Amazing! - And no more telephone receivers or gramophone pickups would be needed to be sacrificed in sforlorn attempts to amplify my string-laid planks and boxes; at last one could, in those newly-enlightened days, buy a proper magnetic guitar pickup to fit to one's creation. Best of all maybe were the geared tuners - this meant no more shaved-down clothes pegs pushed and wedged into holes in sticks for tuning. All of these things had existed before, of course - just not in my corner of the world - but now it was all starting to happen for real.

Apache! The Shadows had recorded the track that was perhaps responsible for more people taking up the electric guitar than any other tune had been (or has been since). Apache! It still raises the hair on the back of a million necks. It's common today for guitarists all over the world to confess to this. That record simply had to be learned; it was the keystone in the repertoire of every "beat group" member.

The neck I made for the desk lid guitar was a sad affair fashioned from 2x1" softwood and very badly lap-joined to the body right at the point where it should have been strongest. The positive aspect of this mistake was that I was forced to invent a kind of adjustable truss-rod mechanism in order to counteract the marked resemblance to an archery bow that the whole construction had taken on when first strung up. Pieces of curtain rail bent around Meccano nuts and bolts, coupled to a sack-full of Anglo Saxon expletives seemed to correct the worst of the problem. Then, as long as I only tuned the thing up to five semitones flat of concert pitch, I could get the action down to less than an inch. This was OK since obviously nobody ever played above the fifth fret anyway, did they? Good enough for "Apache"…

The paint job was like a disaster in a treacle factory on acid. The thicker you put the paint on, I figured, the better and smoother and shinier it would look. This really isn't the case. It doesn't actually work quite like that. The deep green three-dimensional puddle of paint that was clinging to my desk lid creation took months to dry but I wasn't about to wait. The early days of attempting to coax music from this monster were fraught with unusually colourful clothing...

You couldn't buy a conventional electrical jack plug anywhere in Bromley at that time so a television aerial socket and plug (from my dad's box of spares) served to connect the instrument to the back of the old valve radio with matchsticks and hope. It was a magical moment when those first amplified notes emerged from the speaker. Girlfriend, World, Cosmic Space, Fame and Fortune, here we come!

What's really needed at this point of the story is an orchestra playing something sombre in the background. A Requiem, maybe. Some of the slower movements of Mozart's would be particularly well suited and might blend nicely with the mood of storm clouds gathering on a menacing horizon…

Truth is, in retrospect it's easy to see that I was and probably ever will be a psychological disaster area. Post WW2 kids were, I'm sure, entitled to be a trifle confused, possibly as much or more so than many other generations. Follow the process through. Add the typical primary school education of the time, with its hopelessly crass and illogical religious brain soaking, to a mixture of a United Kingdom still on food and clothing rationing, believing they'd won a great victory against an inherently evil race, with an alcoholic, completely self-righteous and abusive father who believes he is a great genius and what you get is a mess. A quivering self-loathing mess.

Alternative title: - "Guitars to The Stars" & "The other side of the Screwdriver".

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