The Wicked Cahoots of Bedford Park

David was born a Londoner at the tail end of a street to the west of the city called Goldhawk Road, and his first home was a modest 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 entered the world two and a half years later, by which time his father, who’d been working as a Classical violinist since the war, was in a position to buy his own home in Bedford Park in what was then the London Borough of Acton.
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 Charles de Gaulle, situated in the fabulously opulent West London area of South 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 who became a lifelong friend. 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 they were dressed in lederhosen with their heads shorn like convicts, so that they be distinguished from the common run of British boys with their short back and sides.
At some stage in the early 1960s, David 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.
The era’s famous social 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. One day, Rick finally flipped and gave David a rabbit punch 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, which she did, while hugging him, kissing him, on the forehead, eyes, nose, cheeks:
"Carl didn't do a thing,” she lied, “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.
There was a point in the mid 1960s when David was dubbed "Le Général" by a long-suffering form teacher at the Lycée in consequence of what she must have perceived as his dominance in the playground with respect to a tight circle of friends, and his tongue-in-cheek superciliousness in the classroom. This typically saw him at the back of the class leaning against the wall pretending to smoke a fat cigar like a Chicago tough guy.
One thing is certain is that he was not above organising elaborate playground deceptions. 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. 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. Shortly afterwards, Dane arrived home, and he too was in tears, having doubtless been roughed about a bit for having loyally stuck up for his chicken-hearted brother.
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 gambol 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 Christiansen 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 ultimately succumb to a life of crime. She was not alone in thinking this...that one day, David might end up on the wrong side of the law, which seems incredible given that he was little more than a mischievous little imp causing mayhem in a leafy London suburb, not some feral kid prowling a sink estate. But times have changed since '65, when to some extent, England was still under the sway of Victorian values. It was another world altogether, long ago and far away, never to return again.
In 1968, David went away to military boarding school in Berkshire, and by the time he came back from holiday following that first Michaelmas term of ’68-’69, Paulie had somehow vanished form his life and he never saw him again. By January ’70, the Cristiansen family had moved from Bedford Park even deeper into the western suburbs of London to a little blue collar community called West Molesey.
However, Paulie’s ghost came back to haunt the Cristiansens just once more…just the once it was…when the doorbell rang one afternoon in Esmond Road, and Mrs Cristiansen answered it to be confronted by a gang of youths who told her of their intention to “get” David for having terrified one of the kids’ mothers by screaming at the top of his lungs in the block of flats she lived in…which of course he did in tandem with Paulie.
Perhaps it had been she who’d told them:
“I’ll get the police, I’ll…”
Wicked cahoots.