Not Dead Yet: The Memoir

Or: my beginnings, my childhood and how my

relationship with my dad was a bit tidal

We think mums and dads know it all. But in fact they’re making it up as they go along. Every day, busking it, winging it, putting on a brave—sometimes false—face. It’s something I suspect throughout my childhood, yet it’s only confirmed in adulthood, and only with a little help from the Other Side.

One gray autumn evening in 1977, I go to see a medium. She lives in Victoria, central London, round the insalubrious back of Buckingham Palace, in a flat near the top of a tower block. It’s no gypsy caravan, but I suppose it does mean she’s nearer the heavens.

I don’t have a particular affinity for spirits—that will come much, much later, and be less an affinity than an addiction—but my wife, Andy, is somewhat that way inclined. My mum, too, is no stranger to the Ouija board. At our family home on London’s suburban western edges, my mum, nana and auntie, along with my so-called uncles Reg and Len, enjoyed many a happy late-fifties and early-sixties evening summoning the dearly departed from beyond the veil. Better that than the meager monochrome offerings flickering from the newfangled television set.

The reason for my and Andy’s visit to this high-rise Madame Arcati: a naughty dog. Ben, our beautiful boxer, has a habit of dragging from under our bed a pile of electric blankets. We’re holding on to these for our kids—Joely, five, and Simon, one—for when they stop wetting the bed and need a bit of extra warmth. It has not dawned on me that the folded electric blankets promise more than a toasty bed—bent filaments can break and catch fire. Maybe Ben knows this.

Andy comes to the conclusion that there’s a supernatural element to Ben’s nightly ritual. He’s probably not clairvoyant but there’s clearly something we humans don’t know.

At this time I’m manically busy, touring with Genesis—we’ve released our album Wind & Wuthering and I have only recently taken over singing duties from Peter Gabriel. I am, accordingly, often an absent husband and father, so I feel perennially on the back foot when it comes to matters domestic and familial. I duly offer no opposition to this unorthodox course of action.

So off to a medium we go. Into bustling Victoria, up in the tower-block elevator, a ring on the doorbell, small talk with the husband, who’s watching Coronation Street. It couldn’t be any less spiritual. Finally he pulls himself away from the TV and gives me a nod: She’ll see you now…

She’s an ordinary-looking housewife, perched behind a small table. No sign of any other-worldly virtues. In fact she appears totally normal, in a matter-of-fact way. This completely throws and somewhat disappoints me, and my skepticism now comes with a topspin of confusion, and just a shade of grumpiness.

As Andy’s I Ching readings have informed her that it’s the spirits on my side of the family that are the dog-botherers, I draw the short straw and enter the chamber of the supernatural. Through gritted teeth I tell the medium about Ben’s nightly antics. She nods gravely, closes her eyes, waits for a meaningful length of time, then finally replies, It’s your dad.

Pardon?

Yes, it’s your dad and he wants you to have a few things: his watch, his wallet, the family cricket bat. Do you want me to ask his spirit to speak through me? Then you could hear his voice. But sometimes the spirits don’t want to leave and that becomes a bit awkward.

I splutter a no. Communication with my father wasn’t at its best when he was alive. Talking to him now, nearly five years after his death at Christmas 1972, via a middle-aged housewife in a disconcertingly drab domestic setting in a tower block in the heart of London, would just be weird.

Well, he says to give your mum some flowers, and to tell her he’s sorry.

Of course, being a fairly rational twenty-six-year-old who likes things to be down-to-earth and regimented—I am a drummer, after all—I should have discounted this as mumbo-jumbo con-artistry. But I agree that our dog habitually dragging electric blankets from beneath our bed is behavior possibly not of the mortal plain. On top of that, Madame Arcati has said some things about my dad that she couldn’t possibly have known, not least that stuff about the cricket bat. That cricket bat has been part of the Collins clan’s meager sports equipment for as long as I can remember. Outside the family, no one would know about it. I wouldn’t say I’m convinced, but I am intrigued. Andy and I depart the anteroom of the afterlife and re-enter the real world. Back on terra firma I tell her the news. She replies with a look understood on both sides of the veil: I told you so.

The next day I phone my mum and relate the previous evening’s events. She is blithely spirited, and unsurprised by both the message and the medium.

I bet he wants to give me flowers, she says, half laughing, half harrumphing.

This is when she tells me everything. My dad, Greville Philip Austin Collins, was not a faithful husband to my mum, June Winifred Collins (née Strange). Having been recruited at the age of nineteen, he was a lifelong employee, like his father before him, of the London Assurance Company in the City of London. Grev had used his quotidian, bowler-hatted, nine-to-five suburban commuter’s existence to maintain a secret life with an office girlfriend.

Dad was not a particularly obvious heart-throb or lady’s man. He was a little tubby round the middle, and his RAF mustache topped off his patchy head of hair. I got all my looks from my mum, clearly.

But it seems that behind that mild-mannered insurance-man exterior lurked something more Lothario-shaped. Mum tells me about a particular incident. Alma Cole was a lovely lady who worked with my mum in the toyshop she managed on behalf of a family friend. Alma was from the north of England and there was always a conspiratorial tone to whatever she said.

She and my mum were close, and one day a slightly miffed Alma sniffed, I saw you with Grev in the car on Saturday and you didn’t wave back to me.

I wasn’t in the car with him on Saturday! The passenger, patently, was Dad’s lady friend, being taken for a romantic spin in our black Austin A35.

Now, nearly five years after Dad’s passing, while I find it wonderful that my mum is confiding in me in this manner, hearing these revelations makes me simultaneously mad and sad. I now know that my parents’ marriage didn’t so much dissolve as fizzle out, partly due to my dad being, shall we say, distracted elsewhere. His infidelity was very much news to me.

But why wouldn’t it be? I was a very young boy back then and, to me, my parents seemed deliriously happy. Life at home had appeared normal and quite calm. Straightforward, simple. To my mind, Mum and Dad were happily in love for all their long married life.

But I am very much the baby of the family, almost seven years younger than my sister, Carole, and nine years younger than my brother, Clive. Certain, grown-up aspects of home life would have gone straight over my head. Now, when I consider the facts before me this evening in 1977, I think I can divine an undercurrent of unrest in the house, something to which I was completely oblivious at the time. That said, perhaps I felt it in my water: I was a chronic bed-wetter to an embarrassingly old age.

When I later relay this earth-shattering news to Clive, he gives it to me straight. All those sudden long walks I was taken on by my siblings? Those lazy, hazy strolls past the post-war prefab housing on Hounslow Heath with my brother and sister? Not the cheerfully nondescript norm of a simple late-fifties and early-sixties suburban English childhood. In fact I was being unwittingly complicit in the papering over of cracks.

My father acting a little fast and loose with his marriage vows is something I still have trouble coming to terms with. His disregard for my mum’s feelings is beyond me. And before anyone steps forward to state, That’s a bit rich coming from you, Collins, let the record show: I hear what you’re saying.

I am disappointed that I have been married three times. I’m even more disappointed that I have been divorced three times. I am considerably less bothered by the fact that these resulted in settlements with my ex-wives to the order of £42 million. Nor am I fussed that those sums were widely reported and are widely known. In this day and age, nothing is private anymore. The internet has seen to that. Additionally, while three divorces might seem to suggest a casual attitude toward the whole idea of marriage, this couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m a romantic who believes, hopes, that the union of marriage is something to cherish and last.

Yet certainly that trio of divorces demonstrates a failure to coexist happily and to understand my partners. It suggests a failure to become, and to stay, a family. It shows failure, full stop. Over the decades I’ve done my diligent best to make every aspect of my life, personal and professional, work like clockwork—although too often, I have to acknowledge that my best just hasn’t been good enough.

Still, I know what normal is—it’s in my DNA; I grew up with it, or at least the semblance thereof, in the London suburbs—and that’s what I strove for while trying to make a living playing music.

I have endeavored to be honest with all my children about my personal history. It involves them. It affects them. They live with the consequences of my actions, inactions and reactions every day of their lives. I try to be as straight and forthright as it’s possible to be. I will do the same throughout this story, even in the parts where I don’t exactly come out smelling of roses. As a drummer I’m used to giving it some stick. I’ve had to become used to taking some stick, too.

However, to return to my mum: her stoicism, strength and humor in the face of my dad’s straying (to use that very English word) says a lot about a wartime generation who would go through thick and thin to maintain their marriage commitments. It’s something we all could learn from, myself very much included.

All that said: when I consider my childhood from the vantage point of my advanced age, perhaps close-to-the-bone emotional upset and turmoil seeped into my young self, without my even knowing it.

—

I was Born in Putney Maternity Hospital, southwest London, on January 30, 1951, a belated—and by all accounts surprise—third child to June and Grev Collins. Apparently Mum initially entered West Middlesex Hospital to have me, but they weren’t very nice to her, so she crossed her legs, left and headed to Putney.

I was the first London child, as both Carole and Clive had been born in Weston-super-Mare after the entire family had been relocated there by London Assurance prior to the Blitz. Carole was not best pleased by my birth. She’d wanted a girl. Clive, though, was over the moon—finally, a little brother to play football with, wrestle with and, when all that got a bit boring, to pin down and torture with his smelly socks.

With Mum and Dad aged thirty-seven and forty-five respectively, my arrival made them, for the times, old parents. This didn’t bother my mum in the slightest. She remained a generous and loving woman her entire life, without a bad word for anybody until the day she died on her birthday in 2011, aged ninety-eight. That said, she did once call a London policeman a dickhead when he chastised her for driving in a bus lane.

Dad, born in 1907, came from then-fashionable Isleworth, a riverside neighborhood on London’s western edges. His family home was big, dark, musty, quite imposing, not a little scary. Ditto his relatives. I have no recollection of my paternal grandfather, a time-served London Assurance man just like his son would become. But I do have vivid memories of Grandma. She was warm, embracing and very patient with me, but seemed stuck in the Victorian period, and as if to prove it was permanently clad in long black dresses. Maybe she was still mourning Prince Albert, too.

She and I were very close. I spent a lot of time in her constantly damp below-stairs rooms, watching her paint watercolors of boats and the river, an enthusiasm I’ve inherited.

Dad’s sister, Auntie Joey, was a formidable woman, armed with a cigarette holder and a rough throaty voice, a little like the baddie in Disney’s The Rescuers: "Dahling, doooo come in…" Her husband, Uncle Johnny, was also a case. He had a monocle and always wore heavy tweed suits, another Collins from the land that the twentieth century forgot.

Family history has it that a couple of Dad’s cousins had been incarcerated by the Japanese in the notorious Changi Prison in Singapore. Great store was put by them—they were war heroes, men who survived the pitiless Far East campaign. Another cousin was apparently the chap who first brought launderettes to England. In Dad’s family’s eyes, they were all, each of them, somebody. Or, in other words, toffs. H. G. Wells was said to be a regular caller on the Collins household.

Clearly Dad’s family formed his attitudes, not to mention his working life—although after he died I discovered that he had tried to dodge conscription into London Assurance by running away to become a merchant seaman. But the ocean-going rebellion was short-lived and he was told to snap out of it, pull himself together and fall in line under the insurance-salesman yoke imposed by his own father. Conformity was the order of the day. With this in mind, it could be suggested that Dad was a little bit jealous of the freedom the sixties offered Clive, Carole and myself in our chosen fields: cartoonist, ice skater, musician. Call them proper jobs? Dad didn’t.

There’s little proof that Grev Collins ever got used to the twentieth century. When North Sea gas came on stream and all the boilers in the U.K. were converted, Dad tried to bribe the Gas Board to leave us out of the conversions, convinced that somewhere there was a gasholder that would provide fuel just for the Collins family.

For some reason, Dad loved washing-up, and he insisted on doing this on Sundays after the family lunch. He preferred to do this alone as it got him out of socializing at the table. All would be well until a crash exploded from the kitchen. All talk would cease, and Mum would go to the French windows and close the curtains. Within a few moments of the crash, Dad could be heard swearing hard, and then would come the sound of crockery being swept into a pan. The back door would be loudly hauled open and the crockery scattered noisily into the garden, whereupon Dad would kick it around outside the window, accompanied by more loud swearing.

Your father’s killing the plates, Mum would wearily explain as us silent children found something profoundly interesting to stare at on the tablecloth. Just your traditional British family Sunday lunch.

Dad wasn’t ignorant of home improvement, but he had no real interest in it. So far as he was concerned, if things were working OK, then everything was fine. This especially applied to electricity. In the early fifties, the plugs were brown Bakelite and the wires had a woven cord covering. They were somewhat unreliable, and in the back room, where the radio was kept, the main plug at the skirting board would often feed five or six other plugs. Electricians would refer to it as a Christmas tree. Ours was habitually fizzing, which isn’t ever a sound you want to hear where domestic electricity is concerned, and, as the eldest, Clive was always the one chosen to place a further plug into the already overloaded socket. Carole and I would watch with mischievous fascination as he invariably received a mild shock that ran up his arm like a violent tickle.

That means there’s power there. No problem with that, Dad would comment before settling down with his pipe to listen to the radio or watch TV, oblivious to poor Clive and his smoking arm.

Prior to my arrival the family didn’t have a car, as Dad didn’t pass his driving test until 1952, one year after I was born. It was only his seventh attempt. If the car didn’t behave itself, Dad would swear at it, believing the malfunctioning motor was part of a plot against him. The iconic scene from Fawlty Towers with John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty apoplectically thrashing his disloyal Austin 1100 Countryman is an accurate glimpse into our family life.

It was around this time that, armed with his first car, Dad decided to take Carole and me out for a spin in Richmond Park. He also thought he’d use this opportunity to carry out some random safety checks on his new vehicle. I was standing in the back of the car, and all seemed to be normal. Suddenly, without announcement, Dad tested the brakes. I flew forward over the seats at some speed. Luckily the dashboard and my face broke my fall. I still have the scars on each side of my mouth.

Dad was so rutted in the past that, when decimalization was introduced in 1971, he declared that it would be the death of him. The nation’s new coinage was a new threat. Taking the long view, I have no reason to doubt that the demise of the shilling did actually help to kill him with worry.

Mum was another time-served Londoner. She grew up in North End Road, Fulham, one of three sisters who were seamstresses. Her brother, Charles, was a Spitfire pilot who had been shot down and killed in the war. One of her sisters, Gladys, lived in Australia and we always exchanged audio tapes at Christmas. She, too, died before I could meet her. Mum’s other sister, Auntie Florrie, was lovely, and as a youngster I’d visit her once a week at her flat in Dolphin Square in Pimlico. My maternal grandmother, Nana to me, was a sweetheart, another strong, formative female influence on my young self.

In the early thirties, when Mum was in her late teens, she danced with Randolph Sutton, the music-hall star of On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep fame, before finding a job in a wine store. Dad’s family would always make it clear that he had married beneath him by wedding a shop girl. But after they met on a boat trip at St. Margarets on the Thames, it was love at first sight. They were married within six months, on August 19, 1934. Mum was twenty, Dad twenty-eight.

By the time I came along, just over sixteen years later, the Collins family were living in Whitton in the borough of Richmond-upon-Thames. Then came a large, three-floored Edwardian house at 34 St. Leonards Road in East Sheen, another corner of southwest London.

As Mum was working full-time at the toyshop, Nana looked after me while Clive and Carole were at school. Nana adored me and we formed a wonderfully close bond. On our pram perambulations she’d push me along the Upper Richmond Road, where she’d routinely buy me a penny bun from the baker’s. The fact that I have vivid memories of this daily treat speaks volumes about my closeness to my nana.

Dad clearly wasn’t one for progress or upheaval, on the surface at least, so much so that when Mum asked if we could move from St. Leonards Road to a slightly bigger, slightly better, slightly less damp house, Dad replied thus: You can move if you want. But you’ll have to find the house for the same money we sell this place for, I’ll leave for work in the morning from this place, and I’ll come back the same day to the new place, and everything will be moved in. And so it came to pass that Mum, bless her, managed to do that.

Which is how, aged four, I find myself in 453 Hanworth Road, Hounslow—the house that my resourceful mum found and moved us into in the course of one day.

As is the norm, the house you live in when young seems enormous. Visiting it years later can be a shock. How did we all fit in there? Mum and Dad have the master bedroom, obviously, with a small room next door for Carole. Clive and I are at the back of the house, in bunk beds. Our room is so poky we have to go outside to change our mind. By the time I am a teen, there is barely room to conceal under my bed the collection of girlie mags that have somehow come into my possession. We share those quarters throughout my childhood until 1964 when, aged twenty-two, Clive leaves home.

Being born in the early fifties means growing up in a London still recovering from Hitler’s hammering. Yet I have no memories of bombsites or devastation of any kind in our neighborhood.

The only time I remember seeing anything like the aftermath of bombing was when the family ventured into the City for Dad’s office shows. London Assurance put on plays with their dramatic society, and the family dutifully made the long trip from Hounslow, via Cripplegate, to London’s financial district. My memories of those journeys are studded with images of flattened wasteland around the old London Wall, like the scenes in the 1947 Ealing comedy Hue and Cry, complete with street urchins playing among the rubble.

In fact the London of my childhood was just like that of those Ealing films, or of my comedy hero, Tony Hancock, inhabitant of the fictional London suburban address of 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam. No traffic to speak of, even in central London, and certainly no jams or parking problems—I have home-movie footage taken by Reg and Len of the Great West Road, and you can count the cars that pass by. Droves of bowler-hatted gents trudging over Waterloo Bridge. Teeming football crowds, the supporters flat-capped to a man. Holidays by the seaside—in our family’s case, Bognor Regis or Selsey Bill in West Sussex—with the menfolk getting into the beachside swing by perhaps slightly loosening their shirts and ties. At home, the Saturday 4:45 p.m. family ritual of sitting around the telly, tea and toast and dripping to hand, listening to the football scores come in. Glimpsing the wider world via Disney’s 1955 film Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier, a revelatory moment that launched a lifelong interest in the Alamo.

It’s an idyll, of sorts, one that’s very much of a time and a place. My time, my place, my tightly defined patch.

Hounslow is in the outer reaches of Middlesex, where capital city meets Home Counties. The westernmost extreme, the last stop, on the Underground’s Piccadilly Line. Nowhere near the hub of anything. A 45-minute train journey to the West End. London, but not London. Not quite this, not quite that.

How do I feel growing up at the end of the line? Well, everything is a walk, and then a bus, and then another little bit of a walk, and then a train. Everything is an effort. So you make your own fun. For some kids, unfortunately, their fun is no fun for me.

At Nelson Infants School I seem to be habitually bullied by Kenny Broder, a pupil at St. Edmund’s Primary, which is unhelpfully situated right across the road. Like me he’s only ten, but he has the face of a boxer, with high cheekbones and a nose that’s already seen some action. I dread Broder emerging from his school gates at the same time as I exit mine. He’ll eyeball me the whole journey home, silently threatening violence. It seems to me like I’m always picked on—and, it seems to me, always for no reason. Is there a target on my forehead, a kick me sign on the back of my shorts?

Even my debut experience with the opposite sex is warped by the prism of schoolboy violence. I take Linda, my first girlfriend, to a funfair on Hounslow Heath, my pockets bulging with the hard-saved coppers that will buy us passage on the helter-skelter of love and/or the dodgems, whichever has the shorter queue. No sooner have we arrived than a chill runs up my neck. Oh God, I think, there’s Broder and his gang.

Thinking I’ll be safer on higher ground, I mount the carousel with Linda. But as the galloping horses rotate, each time I pass the gang are giving me the hard stare, and each time they seem to swell in numbers. As sure as eggs is broken legs, I know I’m in for a kicking. Right enough, as I dismount, Broder swaggers over and wallops me. This cowboy tries not to cry. I go home from the funfair with a blackening eye. Mum says, What happened to you?

I got hit.

Why, what did you do?

Like it was my fault.

Still, aged twelve, I manage to break my fight virginity in the park beside my mum’s toyshop. We generally congregate here, near a hefty horse trough from days gone by and a slip road where the 657 trolley buses turn around. Because this, remember, is the end of the line.

The park, then, is our territory. I don’t belong to a proper gang; we’re just a group of young would-be toughs dedicated to guarding our turf. Especially if there are some bigger local lads around to provide back-up.

One day the park is invaded by another group of kids. Some vicious words are exchanged: ’Oo you screwing, moosh? ’Oo you calling moosh? It’s like the Sharks and the Jets, with less blaring jazz. The baiting goes on, and before long I’m rolling and punching and pulling at another lad. After a bit we just stop. We’re not getting anywhere. A score draw. A nose may have bled.

We both feel we’ve stopped with honor. But then the older lads arrive and insist on pressing home our advantage. They prize out of me the location of the infiltrators. Big Fat Dave—not usually called this to his face, especially by me—sets off to sort him out. He’s oblivious to my cries of Stop, we agreed it was a draw! I feel terrible because, from a distance, I see Big Fat Dave jumping up and down on my adversary’s bike, parked opposite, just outside the sweet shop. Oh well, at least they won’t be messing with Hounslow for a while.

Out here in the suburban sticks you find enjoyment where and how you can. On the downside, this means common-or-garden inter-schoolboy argy-bargy, violence wrought by boredom. On the upside, my mum runs a toyshop, which means I have the pick of the new toys when they arrive. No freebies, just great access. My interest lies in making model airplanes, so when each new Airfix kit comes in, I’m all over them like a Lancaster over the Ruhr.

The environs of the local pub, the Duke of Wellington, soon become a haunt, and I befriend the son of the landlord. Charles Salmon is a couple of years younger than me, but we become fast friends. In our adolescent years we develop shared bad habits, liberating alcoholic drinks from the pub’s on-site off-license and, when Charles’s big sister Teddy is behind the counter, pilfering cigarettes by the fistful. We repair to his garden shed and smoke till we’re sick. I puff my way through cigars, cigarillos, French cigarettes, everything. By the time I’m fifteen I’m smoking a pipe like my dad.

I also become good friends with local lads Arthur Wild and his younger brother Jack. The lives of Jack and me will later entwine: as child actors, we share a West End stage, him playing Charley Bates, best mate to my Artful Dodger in the first staging of Oliver! the musical. He will, however, trump me by going on to play The Dodger in Carol Reed’s Oscar-winning 1968 film.

So this is my life, here at the end of the line. I don’t know what happens even a short way farther up the road. Hounslow ends and then…London? It seems another world. The City proper, where Dad works, doesn’t feature in my mind at all.

As with any young boy, football looms large in my life. In the early sixties I’m an ardent fan of Tottenham Hotspur, worshipping goal-scoring machine Jimmy Greaves. I can still name the team, such is my affection. But Spurs are a north London club, and north London might as well be Mars. I’d never dare venture so far out of my safety zone.

Brentford FC are the closest big club to Hounslow, so I attend their matches regularly. I even sit in on training sessions, getting known around the ground. Sometimes I go to see Hounslow FC play, but that’s very low-key. So low-key that one match day the other team simply don’t turn up.

My horizons are broadened somewhat by the Thames. My dad might not display much in the way of passion, but what enthusiasm he does have is focused on matters riverine.

Grev and June Collins are both keen boat folk, and help to run the newly formed Converted Cruiser Club. They’re part of a wide, river-loving social circle, which includes Reg and Len Tungay, the so-called uncles mentioned earlier. The brothers have their own boat, Sadie. She’s another war veteran, a member of the Dunkirk flotilla, and is a craft big enough for us to sleep on, something I do on many a happy occasion.

Most weekends, and many a Thursday (the designated meeting night for club members), are spent in the company of others with boats: hanging out at a temporary clubhouse, or a mooring somewhere, rowing around for pleasure, the proverbial messing about on the river. Or, most of the time, just talking about messing about on the river. Soon I share Dad’s love for the life aquatic.

There is an annual event, held at Platt’s Ait in Hampton, where the club members gather for a weekend with their beloved boats and have rowing races, tug-of-wars and a knot-tying competition. I handle a rope and row a dinghy from a very young age, and am never scared of the water. For a little chap like me this is heady stuff, fostering a great feeling of bonhomie. In today’s world it might sound a bit dull, but not in my youth. I even feel it a point of honor that I attend Nelson Infants. As a sidebar to the water and its influence on our family: my dad never learnt to swim. His dad instilled in him a fear of ever being more than waist-high in water. Anything more, and he’d drown. He believed him. And this is the man who tried to run away and join the merchant navy.

One way or another, the Thames plays a big part in my early years. Most weekends, even from a very young age, I’ll take out a rowboat and potter between bridges. At this time the Converted Cruiser Club lacks its own clubhouse, so for meetings and socials we use Dick Waite’s Boatyard on the riverbank at St. Margarets, where Dad moors his small motorboat, Teuke. Eventually Pete Townshend buys the place and converts it into his Meher Baba Oceanic recording studio. I have an old photograph of me in my mum’s arms on the very spot, so I made him a copy. Pete, ever the gent, wrote me a lovely, tear-stained letter, thanking me. The photo hung in the studio for many years.

By the late fifties the club is renting a plot on Eel Pie Island for a penny a year. I spend a good deal of my early years first helping build the permanent clubhouse, then joining in the shows and pantomimes put on by the members. I can lay genuine claim to have played this famous venue in the middle of the Thames—the sixties seat of the British blues explosion—long before The Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart and The Who.

Apart from that, I’m still just messing about on the river. But these regular boat-club revues do, eventually, give me the opportunity to play drums publicly for the first time. Footage exists of a ten-year-old me performing as a member of the Derek Altman All-Stars, led by the squeezebox-playing maestro. Carole and Clive are involved, too, performing comedy sketches. Mum also does her bit, singing Who’s Sorry Now? with some feeling.

In fact, the whole family are part of the waterside troupe. Dad regularly wheels out his evergreen song about a farmer, deploying lots of rude noises to impersonate the animals. I entertain my youngest kids with this song even now: "There was an old farmer who had an old sow…" (insert various raspberry and fart sounds).

These occasions are the rare times Dad slips off the bowler, suit and tie and becomes a lovable rogue. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough detailed memories of my dad, happy or otherwise. What images I have, I later put in a song, All of My Life, on my 1989 album …But Seriously: Dad coming home from work, changing out of his suit, sitting down to dinner, and then an evening watching TV with just his pipe for company. Mum’s gone out; I’m upstairs playing records.

Recalling that scenario now, I’m overwhelmed with sadness. There are so many things I could have asked my dad; if only I’d known I’d be just twenty-one when he died. Simply, there wasn’t much intimacy or dialogue between us. Maybe I’ve blotted out the memories. Maybe they don’t exist.

Something I do recall vividly is my bed-wetting, and sleeping with a rubber sheet under the cotton one. If I do have an accident, the rubber sheet simply prevents the wetness from spreading, leaving me to sleep in a small pool of trapped wee. What do you do in this situation? You go and sleep with your mum and dad and then wet their bed. This must truly endear me to my father. We have no shower in our small semi-detached house, and early-morning baths are not normally taken, so I fear that for a good few years Dad goes to work every day with a slight hint of urine about him.

Perhaps inevitably, no matter how much he loves the river, Dad can’t help but revert to the occasionally insensitive action. I have cinematic proof. A home movie shot by Reg Tungay shows me and Dad by the water’s edge on Eel Pie Island. I’m about six. There’s a fifteen-foot drop below me into the Thames.

I know now, as I knew well then: this is a very dangerous river. There are fantastically strong undercurrents, and many tidal ebbs and flows. Quite frequently bodies are washed up by the sluice gates at the half-tide bridge at St. Margarets. As all good members of the Converted Cruiser Club are aware, you don’t take risks with the Thames.

In this old cine camera footage, you see my dad abruptly turn and walk away. He clearly says nothing to me, offers no warning or concern. He just leaves me teetering on the edge. It’s an ugly drop onto the water-lashed, stony foreshore. If I fall, I would badly hurt myself, if not be swept away. But Dad just abandons me there, without so much as a backward glance.

I’m not saying he didn’t care, but I believe he sometimes just didn’t think. Maybe as he left me hanging on the edge of the Thames, his mind, his emotions, were elsewhere. He was making it up every day.

In adulthood I’d do that, too. Partly in a positive, creative way—I’m a songwriter and performer, and making things up is at the heart of the job description. But also, partly, I concede, in a negative way. As I toured the world incessantly for almost four decades, in Genesis and as a solo artist, I was constantly shoring up a fiction: that I could maintain a solid family existence of my own while maintaining a career in music.

Us mums and dads, we don’t know it all. Far from it.

Or: a starry-eyed sixties youngster’s adventures hitting the stage and hitting the drums

It’s all Santa’s fault.

Yes, I’m blaming the big red beardy fellow in a bid to explain the roots of a lifelong passion, an instinctive habit that will have me hitting things with varying degrees of relish until