I Don't Want to Go to the Taj Mahal

Charlie Hill
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Published by Repeater Books
An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd
Unit 11 Shepperton House
89-93 Shepperton Road
London
N1 3DF
United Kingdom
www.repeaterbooks.com
A Repeater Books paperback original 2020
1
Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.
Copyright © Charlie Hill 2020
Charlie Hill asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
ISBN: 9781912248988
Ebook ISBN: 9781912248995
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
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Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd
It’s all a muddle in my head, graves and nuptials and the different
varieties of motion.

How hideous is the semicolon.

Samuel Beckett
 Contents
Chapter 1

Acknowledgements
I was born in a hospital in the Black Country while my family lived in
a house in Birmingham; not quite one thing nor the other then, a
state that neither mattered nor was the half of it. My elder sister
resented my presence, my younger brother had blue eyes and curly
blond hair.
On Sunday evenings, before or after tea, we’d all sit in front of the
fire and watch a BBC serial with bonnets and sideburns and Mum
would provide us with plates of pilchard sandwiches. She was the
daughter of a vicar who sent his sons to private school — with the
aid of some sort of subsidy — and was always defending herself
against attacks on the middle class. The ongoing discussions were
rarely edifying and often a source of confusion. “We were poor,” she
said once at a family do, “so poor we couldn’t even afford a
television.” And then, “I’ll always remember the vicarage at
Taddington. It had this enormous staircase with these great
sweeping banisters that we used to slide down.”
Dad, who was the first of his family to go to university and whose
grandad worked in an abattoir punching cows, had always been
sporty when beer was involved and tried to instil in my brother and I
a love of walking. In this he was equivocally successful. Sometimes
we went in the summer, to blue hills on the Welsh border, with
heather and bilberries, and we’d use a walking stick to play golf with
dried-up balls of sheep shit.
One February, we went north to mountains. The Honister Pass
was wet and laceratingly cold and there were boulders looming and
duplicitous underfoot. “OK, I think it’s time to check the map,” said
Dad, an unheard-of turn of events. He opened one up with some
difficulty and it dissolved in the wind and the sleet, and although he
fed us a tin of sardines, we continued to cry.
One year we won a goldfish at the Mop. The Mop was a fair, or
fayre, held in once-proud Kings Norton since Medieval times, with
bumper cars and merry-go-rounds and pop music. There were men
in blousons with perms and earrings smoking cigarettes and we
were lured by a spit-roasted pig. We didn’t get any of the delicious,
unctuously fatty pork — in a floury bap with crackling and apple
sauce and stuffing — and neither Mum nor Dad trusted the men in
the blousons; by the time we got it home the goldfish was dead.
I read Billy Bunter as a boy, so was pleased to pass the eleven-plus
and go to Camp Hill Grammar School, where they still played fives. It
didn’t work out. My declensions were ropey, my maths even more
so. In the second year, I opened a book on a fight between the cock
of my junior school — in a dukes-up style — and a kid from Alum
Rock. Alum Rock was deprived but I’d never heard of it so I made
my man 1-4 on and the other kid 8-1 against, odds for which there
were many takers. The fight lasted as long as it took for the kid from
Alum Rock (look it up) to walk up to my man and drop the nut on
him, a simple enough gambit that left me one shortly-to-follow
indiscretion from being asked to leave by mutual consent.
Another school, an enormous comp in Sheldon — Tacchini, Farahs,
Wham!, Durannies — where my dad taught and could ‘keep an eye’
on me (best of luck with that). As an ex-grammar school boy from
the other side of the city, who had a posh name and a dad at the
school, I was frequently involved in fisticuffs, but the school was
mixed which was better, at least to a point. A girl in the year below
provided a bedroom for friends of hers who wanted to do it. She
sorted me out but it wasn’t satisfactory; I wanted to take her ice
skating at the Silver Blades and she never knew.
In 1983, aged thirteen, I campaigned for the Labour Party, shinning
up lampposts and schlepping round the council estates of Northfield
espousing unilateral nuclear disarmament, a fool’s errand. I read An
Introduction to Marxism, which I bought from a shifty looking
comrade at The Other Bookshop in Digbeth and went on lots of
marches and rallies — Digbeth, Clapham Common, Hyde Park — to
register my disapproval of the continued imprisonment of the
Birmingham Six, apartheid and weapons of mass destruction. When
the miners went on strike, I threw my lot in with them too and wore
a ‘Coal not Dole’ sticker to school. I was delighted when a teacher
asked me to take it off, bemused by the indifference of my fellow
students; when I gave cup-a-soups to people collecting outside the
Sainsbury’s in Kings Heath some people looked furious, which was a
lot better.
In Northfield, after treading on a six-inch nail, I considered my
injury a wound of war. I was, I suspect, insufferable on the quiet.
For a while I played league basketball in a team full of twenty-
somethings, run by a drinking mate of my dad. Every outfit in the
league was sponsored by GKN or the University of Birmingham or
somesuch, whereas we got by with home-stitched kit and a free
monthly shish from the Grand Tandoori on the Stratford Road. We
played in an old school gym in Sparkbrook. There were a couple of
Rastas in the team, a jailbird and a black Muslim; they lived in
Sparkbrook and Highgate and called their home the ghetto. At
thirteen I qualified as a referee and whistled the England captain at
a tournament in Caister; later, I smoked my first weed, bought Rudie
and People Get Ready from Don Christies up the market and told my
dad in the middle of a row that “I-Man apologise to no one!”, a
mercifully short-lived horror.
The Grand Tandoori kept getting promoted — the University of
Birmingham didn’t like playing jailbirds in a Sparkbrook school gym
— until we were two divisions away from the Birmingham Bullets,
then I was made Treasurer and we folded.
At fourteen or fifteen I was on a number 11 bus coming back from a
meeting organised by Trotskyists at the Summerfield Centre on the
other side of the city, when a girl got on. She was my age or
thereabouts and was wearing a sweater dress in brown and yellow
stripes, not that I notice clothes. She sat opposite me and I glanced
at her, then stared and she stared back, I mean sometimes I’d have
a look at some heartfelt papers in a folder and sometimes she’d half
turn away but we both kept staring. After twenty minutes, I had to
get off the bus. I smiled at her and she smiled at me. I got off the
bus. The bus carried on. I sprinted across the park and up the hill to
the next-but-one stop, desperate to get back on the bus — what had
I done? — and got there just in time to see it pull away.
I needed to toughen up a bit as I liked my hair long, so I joined a
boxing club in Kings Norton where I sparred with the area champion
— Wayne of Wayne and Dean Beach fame — to no avail; after I hit
him in the face with a perfect jab I apologised and had to stop
going. Later, I went to a youth club in Pool Farm which was rough as
old cocks and razed to the ground by ungrateful Pool Farm youth.
Another bus — a 45 maybe, or 47 — and I reconsider my
involvement in organised politics. Our local Labour Party Young
Socialists branch, which comprises half a dozen committed arty
types and meets upstairs at the Dog and Partridge in Selly Oak, is
run by Socialist Action, a coterie of the earnest and intellectually
compromised. Recently, it has been infiltrated by two members of
Militant, who have travelled down from Liverpool in smart clothes.
We don’t like Militant — we consider them earnest and intellectually
compromised — but we are flattered by their attention.
On this particular afternoon, the bus is full and me and the
Militants are standing in the aisle. They are talking, quietly but
firmly, about how our branch needs to be restructured. I sympathise
cheerily — “Still! After the revolution, eh?” — and they look over
their shoulders, consumed by fury, and hiss at me to keep my voice
down, like someone is remaking Doctor Zhivago.
When I was supposed to be seeing a careers advisor, I drank Pernod
with a mate because I didn’t believe in them. He played me the
Smiths, which I didn’t get, and The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear
Shades by Timbuk 3. Although he lived just up from the Radleys, in
Sheldon, he was a vegetarian except for Worcestershire sauce which
he put on his cheese on toast, a compromise I simultaneously
understood and didn’t (“What’s an anchovy?”)
Later, I spent time in the library, playing poker for money with a
Sikh who used to steal perfumes from his parents’ shop and sell
them on. He had a fancy sports bag — Lacoste — and could afford
to lose, whereas I was smarter than he was and a bluffer and skint
and considerably down when we were suspended.
I leave school at sixteen and get a job in the fish market and my
granny thinks I’ve found my niche. We drink tea out of tannin-tarred
mugs and soak them in bleach until Monday. An old fella passes our
stall most days, puts his hand in his trouser pocket and jiggles it
about a bit. “Guess which band?” he says, “The Rolling Stones!” I
am taught to shout “Ee ar then, let’s have a go!” at anyone who
wanders into earshot and to match a demographic to a fish: old
people like cod’s roe, people with cats buy coley — “Hello love! Have
you got a cat?” — posh women, salmon. On my way home after
work, my fish-gut-fish-head-old-fish reek clears the top deck of the
bus. I am on a Youth Training Scheme which only pays a packet of
Superkings on top of my dole — and there are no Saturdays off —
but at least I am part of something: Fish is the Future! I am also A
Worker, not that I talk about such things — my fellow YTS’ers having
little interest in the idea — until I am sacked for taking a Saturday
off.
At the Stirchley Co-op I sometimes worked in the warehouse with a
fella who liked a smoke and wished he’d been old enough to fight in
Vietnam, but mainly I played a lot of pool. When I was younger my
paternal grandad built us a table-top table out of chipboard, and I
was good. During our fifteen-minute morning break, me and Al from
Fish used to get through three games: a break, a grannying; a
break, a grannying, a break, a grannying. Al was one of The Lads,
with whom I did the gallon at the Red Lion. We ate at Yassers and
travelled to Amsterdam in a minibus, at least until we fell out after a
fancy dress party at a working man’s club, where Big Daddy broke
up a fight between Stevie Wonder and an alien and Yogi Bear kicked
Zorro in the bollocks.
One of the part-timers who worked on the tills was a girl who
went to university. She had an Irish name and wore black tights and
I had something to prove so I asked her, “Is that with a dh at the
end?” It took me some time to realise that the look on her face —
which I had taken to be hauteur and a challenge — was in fact
disdain.
Up the road, in a terraced house, someone’s parents weren’t in and
they were having a party. Instead of getting things out, they’d put
them away and the living room was empty except for a singular
atmosphere. We sat on sofas and there was a rug in the middle of
the floor and a girl started kissing me. “Do you want to do it right
here?” she said, and I didn’t know what she meant. Then I realised
she meant right there and I didn’t so I left, not that anyone was
happy about it.
I spent a year drinking in the Breedon Bar in Cotteridge, a biker’s
pub where everyone took the labels off their Newkie Brown, so
they’d know which bottle was theirs. My mate was Jock Rob, who
came from Gorebridge, a village just outside Edinburgh. He had no
front teeth and used to play in the sewers. Another friend was
planning a job and asked me if I knew anything about safe-breaking,
not that I believed him, although he was subsequently nicked for
something to do with an acetylene torch and did some time.
Aroundabout then, acid house reached Birmingham. Rob drank
cider with speed and took me to the Hummingbird in Digbeth for an
all-night party to which I wore my basketball boots as I thought they
looked cool. I didn’t understand the music — it seemed a bit
repetitive — and couldn’t work out why everyone else was spending
so much time dancing and not taking advantage of the all-night bar.
I drank until I fell asleep in front of an enormous speaker stack, and
woke to find that someone had tied my laces together.
I start playing cricket for a pub in Moseley — the Prince of Wales —
and meet a fella from Glasgow who dresses like Lenny Kravitz and
can bat a bit. Despite eating pickled eggs and drinking beer before
we start, we take things seriously: we play in public parks against
teams whose opening bowlers play for Pakistan International Airlines
and are shit-off-a-shovel, and eventually we win the league. One of
our number is a Yorkshireman with a short fuse who I discover, thirty
years later, was a mate of Jean Baudrillard and translated him into
English.
At Peter’s Library Service, where I entertained school librarians
buying children’s books — in clothes bought with a credit card from
Jeff Banks off the Clothes Show (a boom! a boom!) — I wasn’t on a
lot of money. When I’d taken what I owed from my take home, I
rarely had enough for beer, food, travel and rent, so one month I
devised an investment plan and put what I had left on the horses,
eight bets spread throughout the day. My chosen nags were not
electrifyingly quick and seemingly oblivious to my financial acumen:
by the last race I had won nothing. Then Hinari Televideo came in at
20-1 — I had a fiver each way — so I went down the pub.
This went on for a year or so, then we moved premises. The old
place was bought by the Royal Ballet and knocked down. Shortly
before it was decided by Peter’s Library Service that my vocation lay
outside library supply, I went drinking with the unpackers — a
member of the BCFC Zulu firm who drank up the White Hart in
Chelmsley Wood and talked of ‘generals’, and a fella obsessed with
the penises of Hemingway and Fitzgerald — broke into the building
site and tried to start a crane after dark.
Working in a Victorian factory in Digbeth that made pelmets and
curtain accessories, I bet every day with poor Irishmen in Bartletts
bookies. During my first shift, I noticed a strong smell of almonds so
I asked the gaffer, a bull of a man with mildewed suit cuffs and dried
egg yolk on his tie, what it was. He pointed to two enormous open
vats in the middle of the floor and said, “Those are cyanide baths,”
and I heard them hissing.
I worked with a Brummie who supported Lincoln City — “Because
you can get closer to the action than at a First Division club” — and
he was astute. Seeing that my heart lay in something other than
counting tunnel brackets, he bet me a fiver he could count more in a
day, a challenge I accepted, once at any rate.
Later I volunteered to drive a forklift, because it was the best of
a shit job. All of the weight in a forklift — the battery, the engine —
is at the rear end. Like a child in a toy I reversed it down a ramp,
the weight took it out of my control and it toppled slowly off the
edge. The only thing that stopped the forklift from going over on its
side, with me underneath, crushed bones into concrete, was a metal
post that bent to 45 degrees and left it balancing on the edge of the
ramp like a metaphor, not that I had much time for metaphor at
Harrison Drape.
I am a Christmas temp at H. Samuel, the high street jeweller, where
a fella called Tahir puts me straight about the low quality of Pakistani
gold and someone with blond hair and blue eyes — who looks after
the Raymond Weils but is lacking in certain deductive skills — tries to
sell me a part-share of a holiday apartment in Fuengirola.
Another temp lives in a tower block in Five Ways. I go back to his
and am told that people who use rolling tobacco in their spliffs are
amateurs. At lunchtime I see him in the store room, filling a sports
bag full of watches and alarm clocks which he later passes to an old
woman, hard-bitten; if I hadn’t been stoned I might have said
something to someone, though I think, in retrospect, that’s unlikely.
Interviewed for a Registered General Nursing Diploma, I have a plan
to show I’m under no illusions about how hard I’ll have to work and
that I haven’t decided to do it just so I can get a qualification,
although this is certainly uppermost in my mind. “I know it’s a very
dirty business,” I say, “and I’m perfectly happy clearing up shit.” And
then, “I mean I don’t mind clearing up shit at all, I know that’s a big
part of the job. The shit.”
“Any questions?” they ask at the end, perplexed. “Not really,” I
say, persevering, about a week before I don’t get an offer because
they think I have some sort of shit fetish, “I just want you to know
that I don’t mind wiping bottoms and I’m prepared to get stuck in
with the cleaning up of all the shit.”
New Year’s Eve, after the pub, I am escorted round the back of an
independent bakery —Lukers, in Moseley — by a woman
uninterested in pastries. I am being forced up against a pile of
pallets when the security lights come on and she bails, a
circumstance that leads me to question my hitherto rock-solid
antipathy to the nascent Surveillance State.
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