LIFE STORY OF TERRY DONALDSON CHAPTER 1

CONAN THE BARBARIAN

They both seemed really out of it. Standing at the front door, the full warmth of the summer day right behind them. Bugsy was swaying from side to side, with his long auburn hair blowing slightly in the breeze. His eyes were rolling from side to side, his voice slurred. His friend, a darker haired version of the same thing, stood just behind him, smiling that slightly vacant smile of someone who has just beamed up.
‘Here, hold onto this for us for a bit, can you?’ he asked me, as he handed me a bottle of orange fluid.
‘It’s phy’ he said, as if that explained something. Like an idiot I took it off him, gaining a sense of importance at entering this secret circle. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with it, and something of this uncertainty must have registered into the dim dark recesses of his mind.
‘Phy’ I repeated, almost as if I was in a trance. Even at the time it sounded like the Greek letter phi. At the time, I thought it was an abbreviation of some other word, which it was. The full version of that word is physeptone, a brand name for methadone, a heroin substitute they prescribe for addicts, in theory to help them come off the stuff.In reality it compacts down the problem even harder. Withdrawing from heroin takes, say, about two to three weeks, all in. Whenever I’ve withdrawn from methadone, it has always taken much longer. Following my arrest years later in Barbados, it took all of six months to run out of my system.
Years later, in thinking about the world of drugs, I have come to the conclusion that this is exactly what people enter when they begin taking drugs. A hypnotic state where they become extremely suggestible to the influence of the person supplying them. In the mythic world of the addict, the supplier or dealer is a far more significant character than the corner store grocer is to normal folk. It is hard for them to get their heads around this.

I have always been drawn to stories from mythology. As a kid, I used to watch films like ‘Jason and the Argonauts’, ‘Sinbad the Sailor’, and ‘Hercules’, with Steve Reeves starring. Maybe it’s the Aries in me. The need for myth, to find a pattern which makes sense out of the chaos and confusion of life. From there, I graduated to the ‘Conan the Barbarian’ stories of Robert E. Howard, Lynn Carter, and Sprague de Camp.What especially intrigued me were all the different kingdoms he was able to travel through; from Vedhya in the east, a kingdom resembling India, to Vannaheim and Asgaard in the far north, snowy realms inhabited by Viking-types. Through into ‘The Hobbit’and ‘The Lord of the Rings’, till finally I come across Robert Jordan and his ‘Wheel of Time’ series.
I sometimes wonder if in all of this I have been attempting to escape reality, or just deal with it.
But Bugsy hands me the bottle, and then deep in his pinpointy eyes a kind of cunning appears, like your outside the front door, and eventually a little light comes on at the end of the passage. So there is someone in after all! Heaven’s name, the dealer is in after all! Liberation Day! Let’s hope all is well and he has got something to serve up!
‘OK’ says Bugsy, ‘You can take a sip out of it, but not too much’. I hadn’t even thought of taking a sip out of it. But there it was, out in the open, a secret shared is a secret halved. Bollox. Looking back all he was trying to do was get me started. Junkies are like that. Normal people don’t like to have to look at just how bad some people are. They have an instinct to hold onto the belief that there is some good in everyone, or that given the right conditions, even the worst criminals can be rehabilitated. And when something really bad happens, like a kid gets murdered, or innocent people blown up, there is always a knee jerk reaction.
It is as though all our nice preconceptions about the value of human nature get suddenly shredded, and we are made to feel as though we’ve been tricked. Desparate for reassurance that human nature is not really as evil as it seems, we look at anything other than the truth for comfort. Environment, poverty, past lives.
In astrology it is possible to see the influences which a person is under in this lifetime. What are their good points and their shortcomings. What are the crosses which they carry, the debts that must be repaid. And the roles which must be replayed, over and over again until somehow integration is achieved and liberation takes place.
I remember when I first began to teach myself the principles of astrology, in India on the banks of the Ganges in Benares, holy city of the Hindus, watching the dead bodies stacking up on the funeral pyres and their ashes cast into the waters, nodding off from the morphine which I was busy banging up, the tracks long my arms creating spirals and whirls that were turning purple and yellow. Then later in Greece, in Koridalos Prison in Athens, awaiting my court hearing on charges of robbery, a charge that was to stick and get me a 7 ½ year sentence. There the view from my cell was of the ancient Acropolis if I looked up and over the wall. If I looked down I would see into Alpha peripteron , or section, where the tennis courts were laid out, awaiting the imprisoned former Colonel Papdopolous to come out and play a game with some of his former associates.
Bugsy left me with something other than the bottle of methadone, though. After I had taken the bottle, and stashed it in my pocket, he then asked me if I could ‘hold’ some other things for him.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘These’ he replied, bringing out a strip of plastic syringes, all sealed in their little compartments, one after the other. I took them in hand, and stashed them for him down in the garden shed. A few days after that I knocked back the methadone. I think I drank it all, starting with a small sip, then finding I could handle it. I then hit the lot. I nearly passed out. Somehow I stayed put in my room and managed to avoid too much contact with anyone. How I did that I don’t know, but it never came to light. What did come to light though were the syringes.
My old man’s face was livid.
‘What the bleedin’ ‘ell’s this lot then?’ he asked me, his face tight with fury. Oh oh, I thought, I’m in for a right hiding. I told him I was stashing them for Bugsy. There’s no way I’m getting tied up in this. It amazed me that my old man should be so astute as to find where I had stashed the. Kids are like that, I suppose, always thinking they are outsmarting their parents. In many cases they might be right, but in this case I certainly wasn’t. He took away the needles and trashed them, but not before screwing up his face, in the way that he used to do and looking at me from one eye.
‘Are you usin’ these then?’
I shook my head.
‘No’ was all I said. Then he went off. My old man never really liked me. He might have admired what I accomplished in some ways, but there was never any personal ‘liking’ involved. The true love of his life was always his daughter, my sister Lee, four years younger then I, but also blonde and blue eyed. Not that I particularly sought out his friendship. Back in those times- it’s probably not much different now- the terrain between fathers and sons was very different to what it is now. There was never any real closeness between fathers and sons.
Or was there?

I felt I had gotten off light with the Bugsy thing. It wasn’t a good idea for Bugsy to come round after that, and I told him so. But I did continue to get occasional bottles of meth off him from time to time. The high was strange. A feeling of weightlessness, of entering a kingdom where I suddenly had not a care in the world. I have looked back and tried to work out why I started with methadone. I think the answer is that it is just the way it turned out, really. If it had been speed that had been available at the time I would probably have started with that.

But there was also the hash, freely available throughout Wood Green and, I suppose, north London in general. By now I was going to the London Nautical School, in Stamford Street, SE1. They still fly the red duster on the outside, the red flag of the merchant service in the top left hand corner of which is the Union Jack. The idea was that I was going to go into the merchant navy as an officer, and by going to this particular school it would help prepare me to do just that. There had been an interview for me to get into the school, and somehow I managed to swing it. Then there had been the trip to the uniform supplier. My old man was as proud as punch, I remember. He had been in the merchant navy himself, as a boy, and had been present at the Dunkirk landing, firing a heavy machine gun back at the Luftwaffe planes as they dive bombed and machine-gunned the British soldiers and seamen as they retreated. He had been out on the PQ17 and PQ18 runs across the Baltic to supply Soviet Russia, in which 23 out of 37 ships got torpedoed. Torpedoed himself several times, he was eventually awarded a series of medals. Now that I look back across the ocean of time that has passed since the day we all went out and I got measured up for my Miller Raynor uniform with its double breasted buttons, white peaked cap, and golden ships crest cap badge, that feeling of pride is something that I suddenly find in myself, for him. Like coming back full circle.

Really, in many ways, my old man has turned out to be the hero- not just regarding his wartime experiences- but regarding my family history. Just when I’d thought I’d finally laid him to rest as the villain he does a turn around on me and becomes the hero of the story. But that’s my old man for you.
Being brought up in the East End in those days wasn’t easy. The communities were very tight, closed to ‘outsiders’, not at all like they are today. The working class was a very closed club, and movement out of it or into it a rare and difficult thing. My old man had two brothers and a sister, but at the end of the day they had to go scavenging and collect vegetables that had fallen or been thrown on the side of the road after the markets closed down . His father had come down from Scotland, from Burnt Island, and had worked in the Aberdeen docks before finding employment in the then massive docks of London. But his alcoholism slowly but surely got the better of him, and often he would spend all his wages in the pub, and come home with nothing. It cost a half penny to get the bus from where he lived in Stepney to the docks where he worked, but before he left the pub he would have spent even that, choosing to walk the distance rather than get the bus. Often there was no work, and he would sit at home, with no radio, brooding morosely.
Several times my old man was put in the work house, the Oliver Twist-type place immortalised by Charles Dickens, where the children of the poor were placed when everything else had failed. There were stories of Old Jock throwing his wife Sarah – and daughter Mary- down the stone steps in his drunken rages, breaking the legs of the former and despite the latter suffering from debilitating MS, from which she eventually died.
In ‘our manor’ a number of well-known villains used to reside. The Duke of Depford, for instance, on his release from prison, went out that night and managed to bring back a safe, which he then dragged up over a dozen flights of stairs. There were no lifts in the tenement flats where I was born in that area back in those days. Getting to the top of the block, he hurtled the safe down onto the ground, in the little inside courtyard. With a great crash the safe spilled open. Through the air hundreds of one pound and ten shilling notes were flying, like confetti at a wedding. The Richardson family- second only to the Krays in London’s gangland- were also local, their scrap metal merchant yard just a few streets away from the Guernsey Street flats where we lived.

My mum was from a different kettle of fish. Her actual mother was from Ireland, and had given birth to her illegitimately after an affair with my grandfather, Old Man Clinch. He was one of the first bus drivers in London, and ran the route from Richmond, through Kew and beyond. From the same Irish lass he had another child, a son, Robert, who I knew as Uncle Bob, who used to walk around Richmond wearing a Bowler hat and short trousers, with a brolly in one hand and a dog on its leash in the other. But my mum never actually knew her mum. She and Robert were ‘given’ to the live-in partner of Old Man Clinch to be brought up, by her, and in Old Man Clinch’s house, in Richmond.
My mum never actually knew her mum. They never met. Although I think I might have done, once.

Come weekends I would often be taken down to Richmond to stay, while my sister went to my aunt’s at Teddington, nearby.
I loved the sights and smells of my grandparents’ house. They had a dog- Rex- with a curly tail. An open grate fire, with a coal bucket that had to be taken out the back and filled up every so often. My nan would make mince dinners, with boiled potatoes and peas such as my mum couldn’t. It was different to the egg and chips my mum whisked up, or the beans on toast or fish fingers which formed our staple diet.
Then, on Saturday, Uncle Bob would take me along with him and Rex along the Thames, by the side of Kew gardens up to Isleworth, where he would buy me some the Dandy and the Beano, and we would sit in a pub garden, him drinking beer, me with a lemonade shandy.
Old Man Clinch would come in from work every now and again, and have his dinner served to him. He ruled his household with an iron hand, but seemed to like me. After dinner he would make faces at Harold Wilson on television, thumbing his nose at him, making me laugh.
At night I slept with my Nan, next to her in her double bed. It was nice and warm to have someone there next to me. There were cars that went up and down the road, casting great swathes of headlamps along the ceiling from right to left, and left to right, as they moved slowly along the street.
Sometimes Nan and I would play dominoes, or a game of cards. I remember waking up one Sunday morning and creeping downstairs, quietly, to surprise her. Through the glass in the door I could see her in her armchair, holding up a copy of ‘The News of the World’, which she was quick to fold up and put away as I came into the room.
When she went out to the coal scullery to fill the bucket, I would take a quick peep into the world of scandal which emblazoned the pages of that celebrated newspaper. Even at that age, I could sense that there was a lot going on in the world of adults which we as kids weren’t supposed to know about.

I remember when the first foreign people moved into our area. They were Chinese, and as we were playing in our dead-end street, some of the other kids came racing round to tell us that some Yellow people had moved in to what had been, up till then, one of the three local sweet shops. There was a sweet shop on almost every corner, where we would be sent on errands several times a day for our mums, usually to get ten Embassy filters, or a box of matches. Supermarkets had yet to come in, but when they did, they brought prices right down, and forced out of business most of the little corner shops.
En masse we rushed round, none of us even having heard of such a thing as yellow people. The mind boggled at what they might look like. We all shinned up over their back wall, calling out for them to show themselves. This they did, putting on the garden hose and spraying us with water. It was a bright sunny day, and out clothes quickly dried. But in this they had immediately won us over, and we loved them from that day on.

Immigration was starting of around that time, too, and we began to see our first black people appearing in Britain. Nearly everyone was racist in those times, and I used to hear a lot of Alf Garnett-type diatribe from my parents. White people, especially the working class which I came from, had been through generations of brainwashing , with the history books full of how civilisation had been brought to the Blackman by whites. It wasn’t till years later that this all broke down and the full story of the ill-treatment and misery of slavery really began to come out, at least into the minds of the less well-educated.
But I had black friends. To me they seemed exotic, they smelled differently. Not bad, but just different. I think it was from the sweet-smelling black and Indian girls that I used to do gym with at my junior school that I may have first developed my desire to travel.
I remember one fight I had with what compared to me then was a gigantic black lad. Big Louis we called him, and he towered over the rest of us. He was as mean as kids of that age can be, if they think they can get away with it, always picking on those smaller around him, including me. One day it got to much for me, though, and I just lashed out and hit him. Right on the nose, and with all my strength. Blood gushed out, splashing all over the two of us. Big Louis went into shock, not believing that someone had actually hit him back. It was probably the first time in his life that someone had thrown one back.
My shirt was stained with blood. The rest of the kinds treated me like a hero, putting me on their shoulders and carrying me around the playground, until the headmaster came out and dragged me off up to his room.
The following day Big Louis wanted a repeat bout, which I gave him, knocking him down on the ground with the first punch. After that, we were the best of mates.

By now my family had moved up to Wood Green, and my dad had started his steeplejack business. I would rarely see him, as he would be driving all over the country, knocking down or sometimes erecting chimneys. He started off with a van, and we were the second family in the street to have a vehicle. The streets back in those times were almost empty of cars, unlike nowadays with barely a parking space to be found. Working class people in those times didn’t even have inside toilets. We certainly didn’t. Not even hot water on tap. Central heating hadn’t yet come in. We used oil heaters during the cold winters. On the floor was lino. It was a big thing to be getting a new piece of lino on the floor. So, imagine what it was like when we got a telly-we even had other kids in the street standing outside the window looking at the black and white telly when we had on.

It was round about the age of eleven when my mum and dad first started having their big rows.
It was really scary. My sister and would hear their voices coming up through the floor, and wait for it to blow over. Often it resulted in my mum getting hit. On one occasion he knocked out one of her front teeth. It made me hate him. Years later when I was bigger I was able to stand up against him and knock him flying with a right hook, something that surprised him and put blood all over the banister. Drink, in particular whisky, seemed to fuel the violence. But, be that as it may, business began to really boom for the two of them and we grew rich enough to actually buy our own house. These days people think nothing of buying property. Back in the 60s, though, for a working class family to buy a house was almost unheard of. I even remember my dad not wanting to do it.
‘It’s far better to pay rent. It’s what our kind have always one’, he said. But my mum was adamant. We were going to buy this house. It was valued at six thousand pounds. And so it came to pass, we moved into one of the houses at the top of the hill, in Wood Green, opposite the police station.
For my mum it was a dream come true. At last she had joined the ranks of the property-owners. It was round about that time she stopped supporting Labour and Harold Wilson and began to vote for the Conservative Party. It’s funny how people’s allegiances start changing as their circumstances begin to change.

I was now about eleven, and the rows were getting worse. For some reason I began teaming up with a couple of lads from the local school and we would go out on Saturdays for thieving. Down the High Street, in and out of the local shops, such as the Co-op, and Woolworths, our pockets brimming with cheap- but to us- gorgeous jewellery. Incredible butterflies with various multi-coloured stones flashing in them. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them. Maybe save them up for my Nan as a present.
This went on for a bit, and I had started smoking with my new-found friend, Stephen Biss. We would get together enough for a packet of Park Lane cigarettes. At first I found it difficult to inhale, but with practice I got used to it. All my life I had seen my parents smoking, so it didn’t seem that weird a thing for me to be doing. I thought it made me look grown up, to have a fag dangling out of the end of my mouth. Images on TV, advertising and films supported this image- the Marlon Brando look, you might say.
The thieving came to a head one night. I was just coming out from swimming. It must have been a Monday evening. Right next door to the swimming pool we used was my old school. As I looked at it, became filled with anger. All the old injustices which my former headmaster used to heap upon me came flooding back to me. How he used to make me bend over and slipper me, for no reason at all, or at least pretty flimsy ones. Even at that age you can tell when someone is taking the piss. I made my way into the school yard, and , finding the doors unlocked, crept along the dark corridors until I found his study. Amazing. It was actually open. Creeping inside, I began t throw all his stuff around, to smash everything up. I took my dick out and pissed all over his desk. Finally, I took a couple of items – I remember one of them was a stapler-into my kit bag, and made my way out. As I was leaving the building, the cleaner spotted me, though.
I didn’t care. Something in me, some kind of blockage or anger, had been freed, in that stupid, wasteful act of vandalism.
Well, a couple of days later I got home from school to find a man sitting in the kitchen with my mum. He introduced himself as a policeman, and said he was investigating something that ha happened on the Monday evening at my old school. I immediately started to deny everything, but my mum, being a nutty old cow, chimed in and told me to tell the truth. Which I did.
‘I did it’ was all said.
The next thing I knew I was being nicked, and my mum was crying her eyes out over the sink. The dashing young copper was doing his best to comfort her, putting his arms around her, as I recall. My mum was like that. Never miss a trick.
Things died down a bit after that, and after getting probation, I decided to give crime a miss.
I got on with my schoolwork, but come weekends would team up with the lads to turn into my alter ego, the skinhead. We would put our scarves on and bowl down t the Tottenham Hotspurs football ground, and pile in through the back doors. Up along the stand, we would reassemble, ready to start piling into the fans of whoever Spurs happened to be playing against. With my big cherry red bovver boots on, and with the steel toe caps they were fitted out with, I would make short work of the standing capacity of whoever I could get them to collide with. Many a big tough geezer went down like a sack of shit when my steelcapper collided with one of his shin bones. I developed something of a reputation for it.
I remember one evening when I was going out for a walk my mum asked for a kiss, which I duly provided her with. She felt something inside the lining of my overcoat nudge against her. When she insisted I take it out she discovered the rounders bat I had secreted into the lining there. In the ensuing search, she found the flick knife, meat hook, and cutthroat razor that I used to load up with prior to my evening stroll aroundtowns.
‘Terry, what’s all this for?’she asked me.
‘Insurance, mum’ was all I said.
In hindsight, I have come to the conclusion that I may well have been more troubled as a youngster than I ever knew.

During this time my sister was growing up, as well. I eventually got bored with the skinhead thing and although only 16 became a weekend hippy. This meant plenty of dope smoking, playing Jimmy Hendrix, and the film ‘Easy Rider’. My twp mates now were Second hand Pete, so called because of his second hand clothes, and Vic the Prick. Second Hand Pete we used to take the piss out non-stop, but he never seemed aware of it. His dad was a part-time copper, a ‘special’, but that didn’t stop us from going around Pete’s place using it as a smoking pad. Pete was a nice guy, and like ‘nice guys’ too nice for his own good. Vic’s name was derived from his reputation. He used to pull all the birds, even the married women in the street would call to him from their balconies for him to pop up and see them. When he came round to smoke dope at my place, even my sister started getting the hots. Eventually she started getting him up t her room for little bits of nooky. Fascinated in all things fleshly, as youngsters are at that age, I used to ask him what went on.
‘Not a lot Tell, I just got a wank,’ he said, quite chirpily, as if he had stopped off for a cuppa on a motorway caff.
In any event, Vic and I would have a good smoke of hash when he and I teamed up. My mind would switch off from everything and only after several hours would I return to Planet Earth.
My sister by this time was building up to become the Mother of All Slags. Although only thirteen, she would spend hours daubing herself with thick eye-lashes and warpaint to go out. People couldn’t do enough for her. Even a local friendly policeman, a sergeant from Wood Green nick John Rixon became sufficiently philanthropic to offer her free driving lessons. It was astonishing what was happening.

Eventually my sister became fast friends with Mandy Smith who lived round the corner, in the Commerce Road flats, and who went on to conquer Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones. Eventually she got together with Tony Vorkas, a Greek Cypriot who modelled himself on something from out of ‘The Sweeney’. Always a flash car outside, it was just that he had to ask us for the petrol money. In due time, my sister went off to live with him an, together, they opened up a sex shop.
But if you think it was like Anne Summers’, you would be wrong.

I actually went round there one day.
Grotty is not the word. It was in a dingy side street near Finsbury park underground station. Outside old newspapers were blowing in the street, and when you rang the bell it would take my sister about five sets of keys to open upto let you in.
‘Why so many locks, Lee?’ I asked.
‘Round here is a dodgy area’ was all she said, giving me a funny look. Maybe she thought I was part and parcel of that same dodginess.
As I entered two- not one, but two-huge Alsatian dogs bounded up to me. One was nearly as high as I was, or so it seemed at the time. It was like something out of ‘Narnia’, and so was- and is- my sister.
‘So, what’s up?’ I asked, keeping one eye on the two hellhounds that were staring fixedly at me from the corner. With the spare eye I spotted a series of what looked like second-hand dildos lined up in an amateurish way inside a display cabinet. There were only about four of them anyway. It looked like they had been tampered with from the way the packaging seemed to have been wrenched back, only to be plied back. It never occurred to me at the time that my poor little sister might have been trying them out first.
Or maybe not her; maybe Tony. Just then Tony himself appeared, with a pile of wankmags tucked merrily under one arm.
He looked like an Oxford don on his way to give a tutorial, the way the literature was stacked under his armpit.
‘Er, quit a place you’ve got here’ I said, pretending to be impressed by this desolation.
I have found in life that if you don’t let on, the other person usually won’t notice, either.
‘Yes, yes’ replied Tony, grinning what he thought was his winning smile.
‘I make a living’ he said, outstretching his palms upwards and slanting his head to one side.
I knew otherwise. For some unfathomable reason, Tony was always broke. He was one of those people that you could stuff full of money into from both ends, so to speak, and he would still be broke afterwards.
In hindsight, he may well have been hitting the coke, as many did in those times.
He was totally into my sister, though. She eventually realised that none of his business pans were ever going to work out. Whilst on a modelling assignment for Yves St. Laurent she met Garry, who was a Rover car salesman. Realising she was onto a much better bet, she got rid of Tony, and went off to wed Garry. They had to keep the church secret, for fear that Tony would find out and do ‘a Graduate’- a replay of the scene where Dustin Hoffman bangs on the glass.

My exams at school, came and went. I had applied to go to the London School of Economics, so imagine my surprise when I managed to get sufficiently high grades.
They had asked for two Bs- which I actually surpassed in my A level exams.
This obviously meant fresh crumpet coming my way.
So, out with the old, and in with the new.
Getting rid of the Greek Cypriot girlfriend was as easy as taking off an old durex.
Finding someone to replace her was a bit more difficult, I was to discover.

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