David Cristiansen King Size Loser

In early 2011, it occurred to David Cristiansen, and not for the first time, that he was a loser, in fact not just loser but a king-size loser, a loser among losers, a loser supreme. The contemplation that he was the best at what he did afforded him some satisfaction at those times of the day when his status in life meant the most to him, such as in those last few hours before he turned in for the night. But when all's said and done, this was scant consolation to him. Yet, it could have all been so different.
He'd been born a Londoner at the tail end of a street to the west of the city called Goldhawk Road, his first home, a little workman's cottage in the long-demolished Bulmer Place in Notting Hill. You'll search in vain for this poky little street in any London map, although you’ll still be able to locate a Bulmer Mews tucked away some yards away from the main road of Notting Hill Gate.
His brother Dany was born two and a half years later, by which time his parents had been able to afford their own house in Bedford Park in what was then the London Borough of Acton.
Built by Norman Richard Shaw, Bedford Park was the world's first Garden Suburb. By the 1880s, it was a Bohemian centre for intellectuals and artistic free-thinkers its residents going on to include most famously the great Anglo-Irish poet WB Yeats. The painter Arthur Pinero was another resident; as was the actress Florence Farr, who like Yeats was deeply involved in mysticism and the occult.
Some time after the dawn of the next century, the area had declined to the extent that bus conductors would apparently shout out "Poverty Park!" when their vehicles came to a halt at the local stop. However, the foundation, in 1963, of the Bedford Park Society led to the listing of 356 houses by the government, and so, much of the estate becoming part of the Bedford Park Conservation Area. During David’s boyhood it was still demographically mixed, yet well on the way to becoming completely gentrified.
Future Who front man Roger Daltry had relocated there from inner West London when he was 11 years old in 1955 or '56. A few years later, he formed a group in the Skiffle style called The Detours. Once it had shape-shifted into The Who, its furiously hedonistic music and philosophy would go on to make a permanent impression on the Western psyche and help fuel the British Invasion of the American Pop charts.
David’s father Pat had been born Patrick Clancy Cristiansen in Rowella, Tasmania, and raised in Sydney as the son of a Danish father, Carl David Christiansen, and an English mother, whom David always knew as Mary, while David’s mother had entered the world as Angela Jean Watson in the city of Brandon, Manitoba on the 13th of November 1915.
However, while still an infant she'd moved with her parents and four siblings to the Grandview area of East Vancouver.
Many of Grandview's earliest settlers were in shipping or construction work, and largely of British origin, and Angela's own father James Watson, was a builder and electrician from the little town of Castlederg in Tyrone, Ireland, while her mother hailed from the great industrial city of Glasgow, Scotland.
Angela was the youngest of six siblings, and while alone among her immediate family not to have been born in Britain, she was the only one to seek permanent residency in the mother country.
And within a short time of doing so, she met Pat Cristiansen through their shared profession, and they married in the summer of 1948. Seven years later, they decided to have their first child, whose mortal existence began at 3.50 in the afternoon of the 7th of October 1955.
David was an articulate and sociable kid from the word go, walking, talking early just like his dad before him, but agitated, unable to rest, what they might call hyperactive today.
His first school was a kind of nursery school held locally on a daily basis at the private residence of one Miss Henrietta Pearson, and then aged 4 years old, he joined the exclusive Lycée Francais du Sud Kensington, where he was to become bilingual by the age of about four years old.
Almost every race and nationality under the sun was to be found in the Lycée in those days... and among those who went on to be good pals of David's were kids of English, French, Jewish, American, Yugoslavian and Middle Eastern origin.
His first two closest playground pals were Esther, the dusky scion of a successful Norwegian character actor and a beautiful Israeli dancer, and Craig, an English kid like himself, and for a time, they formed an unlikely but inseparable trio:
“Hi kiddy”, was Esther’s sacred greeting to her beloved blood brother, and David would respond in kind.
Unlike many Lycée fathers, David’s was far from wealthy, but he was determined that Dane and he enjoy the best and richest education imaginable, and to this end, he worked, toiled incessantly in the London session music world to ensure that they did.
And so that they be distinguished from the common run of British boys with their short back and sides they were dressed in lederhosen with their heads shorn like convicts. These boys would be different; and David certainly set himself apart himself from the outset.
For at some stage in the early 1960s, he became a problem both at school and home, a disruptive influence in the class, and a trouble-maker in the streets, an eccentric loon full of madcap fun and half-deranged imaginativeness whose unusual physical appearance was enhanced by a striking thinness and enormous long-lashed blue eyes.
Less charmingly, he was also the kind of deliberately malicious little hooligan who'd remove a paper from a neighbour's letter-box, and then mutilate it before re-posting it.
The era’s famous social and sexual revolution was well under way, and yet for all that, seminal Pop groups such as the Searchers and the Dave Clark Five - even the Beatles themselves – were quaint and wholesome figures in a still innocent England. They fitted in well in a nation of Norman Wisdom pictures and the well-spoken presenters of the BBC Home or Light Service, of coppers, tanners and ten bob notes, sweet shops and tuppeny chews.
Beatlemania invaded David's world in 1963, and he first announced his own status as a Beatlemaniac at the Lycée in that landmark year. It was in that year that he took an intense dislike to an American kid in his class called Rick. He used to attack him for no reason at all other than to assert his superiority over him.
Until one day, Rick finally flipped and gave David a karate chop in the stomach, which caused him to bawl so loudly that his little girl friend Niña felt moved to escort him to the safety of their teacher while hugging him, kissing him, on the forehead, eyes, nose, cheeks:
"Carl didn't do a thing,” she protested, “and Rick came up and gave him four rabbit punches in the stomach.”
But Rick wasn't punished, because the teacher knew full well it David who had started all the trouble in the first place.
By the end of the year, a single new group had started threatening the Beatles' position as David's favourite in the world. They were the Rolling Stones; although an initial reaction to what he saw as a rough and sullen performance of Buddy Holly’s "Not Fade Away" on TV, was one of bitter disappointment.
But before long, he'd become utterly entranced by these martyrs to the youth movement, and during a musical discussion he had in about 1965 with some of the new breed of English roses, who may or may not have been flaunting mod girl fringes and kinky boots, David proudly announced his undying fealty.
One of the girls was a Fab Four loyalist and had the requisite seraphic smile, while another preferred a certain Geordie combo, and acted cooler than the rest, as if these British Bluesmen were somehow superior to mere Pop acts like the Beatles and the Stones. As if irked by her snobbery, David felt compelled to ask her a question about her favourite band, while casting aspersions upon the physical appearance of one of their number, which provoked a shocked response from the flustered Pop fan.

During this golden era, David divided his time between the Lycée and his West London stomping ground, and from a very young age, took Judo classes in South Kensington. Some of the other kids knew him as Alley Cat, which was a pretty apt name for such a feral child. And it was there that one of his teachers, a former British international who’d fought in the first ever World Judo championships in Japan, once despairingly confessed:
“I always know it’s Saturday when I hear Cristiansen’s voice.”
Later, he took classes in the somewhat less ritzy London suburb of Hammersmith. But if he thought he was going to raise Cain there he had another thing coming, given that its owner was a one-time captain of the British international team who'd served as an air gunner with No 83 Squadron RAF during World War II. He later held Judo classes in Stalag 383.
David resumed his Karate classes with him in the early ‘70s, until he got it into his head that he no longer wished to have anything to do with anything martial, precious blooming aesthete that he was.
For all that, though, he was rarely happier than on those Wednesday evenings he attended the 20th Chiswick Wolf Cub pack, and he was less of a menace there than pretty well anywhere else.
Memories such as the solemnity of his enrolment, and being helped up a tree by an older cub to secure his Athletics badge remained with him for many years afterwards…as did the times he won his first star, and his swimming badge, with its peculiar frog symbol, as well as the pomp and the seriousness of a mass meeting he attended, with its different coloured scarves, sweaters and hair.
And then there was the Saturday afternoon when, following a soccer match between rival cub teams during which David dirtied his boots by standing around in the mud and his elbow by tripping over a loose bootlace, an older cub offered to take him home. So they made their way to the bus stop through underground passageways teeming with rowdy kids, both white and West Indian, all shod in black plimsolls with elastic side strips.
"Shuddup!" shouted David’s new protector,
“Where exactly are you taking me?” David queried anxiously.
"The bus stop at Chiswick 'Oigh Stree' is the best plice, oi reck'n. You be awroigh’ deah, me lil' mite."
David became convinced he’d never see his home again, and so started to loudly wail, his cherubic little face contorted into a hideous mask of anguish ; and as they mounted the bus, faces both white and black suddenly turned towards him in concern, and what a strange sight he must have made, this imp in distress, surrounded by a bevy of older wolf cubs.
After a few moments, David’s new found friend, his brow furrowed with concern, as if he’d done his frail young charge some unspeakable wrong, assured him:
"Oim gonna drop y’orf where yer dad pu’ y’on."
Then, David saw a street he recognised, and promptly left his seat, grinning uncontrollably:
"This'll do," he announced.
"Wai', Dave!” his friend cried out, “are you shoa vis is awroigh'?”
"Yup!" David replied, as he stepped off the bus, which then moved on down the street and out of his life forever.
There was a point in the mid 1960s when David was dubbed "Le Général" by a long-suffering form teacher at the Lycée.
And she must have done so in consequence of what she perceived as his commanding attitude in the playground with respect to a tight circle of friends, and his tongue-in-cheek superciliousness in the classroom, which characteristically saw him at the back of the class leaning against the wall pretending to smoke a fat cigar like a Chicago tough guy.
Certainly he was not above organising elaborate playground deceptions; and one of these involved his pretending to banish one of his best friends, Bobby, from whatever activity they had going on at the time. Bobby played along by putting on a superb display of water works, which had the desired effect of arousing the tender mercies of some of the girls. They duly rounded on him for his hard-heartedness, but he refused to budge, and of course it was all a big joke, and Bobby and he had never been closer.
If he was "Le Général" at the Lycée, back home he saw himself as the leader of the kids whose houses backed onto the dirty alley that ran parallel to his side of the Esmond Road in those days, but which has almost certainly vanished by now.
One fateful day, he crossed the road to announce a feud with the kids of the clean alley, so-called because it was concreted over rather than being just a dirt track. It was to cost him dear. Soon after the feud had thawed, Dane and he went over to pal around with some of the clean alley kids who he now saw as his allies, but there must have still been some bad blood because before long, a scrap was under way and he was getting the worst of it.
“Hit him, David,” his brother urged above the chilling din of the clean alley loyalists baying for his hot young blood to flow, but he was no fighter, and the best he could manage was to briefly get his antagonist into a headlock.
Finally he agreed to leave, and as he shamefully cycled off, one of the clean alley kids kicked his bike, so that it squeaked all the way home in unison with great heaving sobs.
If David’s good mate Paulie had been with him on that afternoon in the clean alley, it’s unlikely he would have had to suffer as he did. He lived virtually opposite the Cristiansen family in Bedford Park, but he was from another dimension altogether, a skinny cockney kid with muscles like pure steel who seemed to have been born to wage war on the bomb sites of post-war London.
When he’d made his first personal appearance in the dirty alley on someone else's rusty bike, screaming along in a cloud of dust it rendered all the denizens of the dirty alley speechless and motionless. Yes, despite his grey-faced surliness, he was very affable, a bully with naïve and sentimental heart. He was so happy to discover that David liked his old dad, and that David’s mum liked him, and that he was always welcome to come to tea with the Cristiansen family at five twenty five...
Their wicked cahoots included howling at the top of their lungs into random blocks of flats, and then running away, as their echoed screams blended with incoherent threats of:
"I'll call the Police, I'll..."
For some reason, Paulie was devoted to David; "Davy", he'd always cry when he wanted his friend's attention, and he'd always be welcome at the Cristiansen household, even though this brought the family some opprobrium within the neighbourhood. One of his mother's closest friends warned her of David's association, as if genuinely concerned he might end up going to the bad. She was not alone in thinking this.

He left the Lycée in the summer of 1968...before spending a few months at a crammer called Davies so as to become sufficiently up to scratch academically to pass what is known as the Common Entrance Examination.
Taking the CE is a necessity for all British boys and girls seeking entrance into private fee-paying schools, including those known as public schools, which are the traditional secondary places of learning for the British governing and professional classes. And the vast majority of those who go on to public schools begin their academic careers in preparatory or prep schools, and so for the most part leave home at around eight years old.
The school his father had selected for him was the Nautical College, Welbourne, and somehow, he managed to pass the CE, so that at still only twelve years old became Cadet David Cristiansen 173, the youngest kid in the college, and an official serving officer in Britain's Royal Naval Reserve.
Founded at the height of the British Empire, Welbourne still possessed her original title in ’68, while her headmaster, a serving officer in the Royal Navy for some quarter of a century, wore his uniform at all times. However, in ’69, she was given the name Welbourne College, while the boys retained their officer status, and naval discipline continued to be enforced, with Welbourne serving both as a military college and traditional English boarding school.
The Welbourne David knew had strong links to the Church of England, and so was marked by regular if not daily classes in what was known as Divinity, morning parade ground prayers, evening prayers, and compulsory chapel on Sunday morning.
Later in life, he felt indebted to her for the values she’d instilled in him if only unconsciously, even though, by the time he joined Welbourne, they were under siege as never before by the so-called counterculture. While failing to fully understand the implications of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, David was to passionately celebrate its consequences, and take to his heart many of its icons, both artistic and political. Edited 22/1/18.