Personal Blogs

This is more 'local history' than blog, but hopefully of interest even to those who don't live in my particular neck of the woods.

The following is a true story. Only the names have been changed, to protect the innocent...

Chances are, if you associate the above with that transitional phase between primary and secondary and you grew up anywhere around Grosvenor Rec in Tunbridge Wells, that you’ll also associate that period with an ugly, white brick and asbestos building - 'The Satellite' - that used to stand at the top of the hill by the Auckland Road park entrance and swings. That being the case, you may well be one of the innocents referred to above. Or possibly one of the guilty they needed protecting from. I’ll take the fifth on that one, and hope you’ll give me the benefit of the doubt.  

The Satellite was a youth club running when youth, as opposed to ‘Yoof’, was itself seen as a transitional phase between childhood and adulthood rather than a cut-off point, and when children between the ages of, say, twelve and fourteen might have wanted everything the adult world seemed to offer, but for the most part didn’t really have any expectation that it would be handed to them on a platter. Consequently, they had a little bit more time and space to manoeuvre, and places like the satellite offered them a venue for some of that manoeuvring. The following episodes are some of the things that I got up to.

Whether I actually went with him or just had the misfortune to run into him there I don’t recall, but I do remember the presence of my brother, whom we shall call ‘Boris’ for the sake of this exercise (heehee), on my earliest visits to the club. He’s either three or four years older than me, depending on the season, so it’s a fairly safe assumption that I was still in primary school at the time.

From that period I mostly remember playing snooker and table tennis, or, rather, trying to, in the face of stiff competition from older and bigger boys who would monopolise the rather oversubscribed tables. I was doubly disenfranchised in this regard because even when a group of us younger kids did pluck up the courage to ‘dob in’ the bigger table hogs – risking life and limb on the walk home – the house rule of ‘winner stays on’ would be applied, which would effectively mean sitting on the sidelines watching others play as I had all the coordination and dexterity of a drunken Douglas Bader. If I had any table-based sporting skill at all it was in Foosball™ ‘throw-ins’, as this was effectively just marbles, which I practiced constantly in the school playground. On the downside, I hated Foosball™, and throw-ins aside was useless in all aspects of the game, regularly skinning my knuckles by trying too hard in a confined space while paying too little regard to the close proximity of the roughly textured high-broom’s-brick walls.

‘Boris’, meanwhile, would have been standing in the darkest corner of the dance floor, drooling at girls and indulging in ball games of a very different nature through the linings of his trouser pockets – a hobby he’s kept up to this day.

Thankfully the spectre of Boris was soon to be exorcised from the club after he acquired a huge Imperial typewriter from the club office, under the pretext of wanting to write a Christmas show for the group to put on. I can’t remember anything about the show other than that it was supposed to be a series of short sketches, but that is probably because it didn’t get written. I do remember contributing one sketch myself, which was based in the changing room of a football team. It had one joke, a visual gag where one of the team came on stage (probably ‘entering stage left’ as I knew this to be a legitimate stage direction from watching ‘Snagglepuss’ cartoons) wearing just a pair of shorts with a pink balloon, partially filled with water, peeking out of one leg and asking if anyone had seen his jock-strap. This was definitely before I made the transition to secondary school, so I’m amazed I even knew what a jockstrap was, but it does reveal an early penchant for scatological humour that has marked – some might say marred – my output to the present. Having said that, I feel vindicated by the inclusion of a very similar scene in a recent episode of E4’s ‘The Inbetweeners’, and take this as conclusive proof that my writing then, as now, was significantly ahead of its time. In 20 years people will be pissing themselves reading this. Heavens to Murgatroyd, even.

Whatever the fate of the Christmas show script (I suspect my own contribution may have been ‘not quite what they were looking for’) I do know that the typewriter itself ended up in a local second-hand shop and that Boris spent the money on fireworks, fags and sweets, and possibly a copy of ‘titbits’ magazine, which sometimes featured ladies in bras and was easier to hide than mum’s Littlewood’s catalogue when sneaking to the toilet. This act of petty larceny effectively saw Boris debarred from the Satellite, so the secretary’s loss would have been my gain. He probably continued to lurk around the rec from time to time (it had its share of lurkers) but as far as the club itself went he would have been on the outside looking in. I just hope they had frosted glass in the window of the girl’s toilets.

I remember a further Christmas non-event from a year or two later, when one of the group’s leaders proposed cooking and serving a meal for the elderly in the community. This may have harped, in the organiser’s mind, back to the days of ‘The British Restaurant’ – a function the building had fulfilled in the years of wartime rationing – and I can remember being very enthusiastic. I’m not sure what the main course was going to be – though I would hazard a guess at chicken – but the starter was soup and the dessert baked Alaska! None of the kids had heard of baked Alaska, of course – ice cream was cold stuff you bought in a block and ate with tinned cling peaches, and meringues were the brittle white things they sold in the penny-bun-shop – but we were mesmerised by the description of it. My guess is the organiser was a keen fan of Fanny, ‘cos it has all the hallmarks of a Craddock Culinary Centrepiece, but as a dish potentially cooked by eleven and twelve year olds it seems, in hindsight, more of a disaster waiting to happen. I remember discussing this with one of the other kids on the walk home: Cold ice cream covered with warm meringue? She must be mental. Sadly, the old people didn’t get their dinner that year, because we couldn’t get the funding (same old same old, eh?). Having said that, I suspect that might not have been a bad thing given the standards of hygiene practiced by most Satellite regulars; the diners would have dropped like flies, in much the same way as those unfortunates who plumped for the oysters at the Fat Duck in 2009.

Another huge attraction of the Satellite was the record player there, and the chance to hear music in the ‘cafe’ area. When I first started going it was all about reggae. Whether this was down to the organisers bringing in their own collections or a reflection of the kid’s (or maybe their parent’s/elder sibling’s) taste I don’t know, but I do remember picking up the rudimentary elements of what I like to refer to as ‘dancing’ while listening to orange and white labelled vinyl singles with titles like ‘Return of Django’ and ‘The Liquidator’. My musical tastes have broadened and diversified over the years, but the opening bars of those songs can still send a shiver down my back and get me skanking like a good ‘un. Those simple, stripped back rhythms and staccato chords opened the floodgates for me, and music in all forms rushed in, so I owe the Satellite a big thank you for that. Thank you, Satellite.

The next big thing music wise was ‘Glam’, and while I wasn’t Satelliting quite so regularly by then (a long story) I do remember somebody bringing in the first Roxy Music album and playing ‘Virginia Plain’. They played it all night, and I had my ear up to the gold coloured mesh covering the single paper cone of the record player’s speaker for the duration. A year later I saw the inner sleeve of the second Roxy Album and remember feeling as excited (not in a sexual way) by the sight of Eno in his platforms and feathers as I was half a decade later when I saw a grainy black and white picture of the queen with a safety pin through her nose. I recently bought Eno’s Drums Between the Bells, and after all these years he’s still making new music that can make me shiver with...... anticipation. The same, sadly, cannot be said for Johnny et al, though Devo give it a good college try every now and again. As Porky once said ‘The music’s in the plastic’, and Mr Eno made the transition from vinyl to whatever sort of plastic it is that I-Pods are made of in a way that punk just couldn’t follow.

I also remember a band playing at the Satellite. I’m not certain they even had a name, but I’m pretty sure it was the first public outing for a great local boy who never quite made it as good as he should have by the name of Gary Barden. Best known, probably, for his years as vocalist in the Michael Shenker Group and with Gary Moore (and still making albums as a solo artist, I’ve just seen on Wikipedia), Gary did his thing in various bands in and around Tunbridge Wells for years, and a very good thing it was too, if it was your kind of thing. But I digress. What I remember most about the band that played at the Satellite was that they had just saved up their pennies for either a ‘wind machine’, or some sort of synthesiser/keyboard with a ‘wind’ preset. With the same spirit and determination that ‘We’ve Got A Fuzzbox & We’re Gonna Use It’ applied to their, erm, fuzzbox, the ‘Windjammers’ as I have come to think of them (about 30 seconds ago) got their money’s worth and more from their new acquisition, using it for every intro and outro of their four song set, as well as for ‘atmospherics’ on the (what I seem to remember as rather extended and somewhat ‘proggy’) middle-eights and solos. Just as well they couldn’t afford a dry ice machine; we would have all been choked to death.

Blimey. I’ve just realised I’ve written far, far more than I intended. So I’ll stop. I’m really only leaving out the severe beating I took at ‘Summer Club’ after catching out in rounders someone who went on to be quite famous in the field of football hooliganism. At the precise second I caught the ball I was both stunned and pleased, considering it a little gift from lady luck for a child who could usually be relied upon to drop anything. I realised about fifteen minutes later, while receiving a very thorough kicking from the extremely large football fan and about a dozen of his mates in the woodland retreat that is now, I think, designated a nature reserve, that lady luck is a fickle mistress who rarely takes what she is owed in money. I remember looking up just before unconsciousness took me to see the face of someone I had previously considered quite a close friend gleefully joining in. He subsequently explained that this was more a case of ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ and a prevailing sense of self-preservation rather than any personal grudge, but I never quite felt the same way towards him after that...

And on that cheery note I’ll say adieu, and thanks again, Satellite Club and Grosvenor & Hilbert Rec, for these and many other (mostly) happy memories. It was, as they say, real.