Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon Read Online Free Page A

and motor fitter for Wembley council (though far from prestigious, it was a ‘job for life’, and indeed Alf worked for the borough until the very end), Kit took on part-time work as a cleaning lady once the two children were both in school. Keith became best friends with a boy called Michael Morris, one of ten children from a family across the street. “Thick as thieves,” Linda remembers them. The boys attended Barham together and after school would play at the Morris household or in Barham Park across the Harrow Road, catching newts among other standard boyish activities. (Michael Morris would die in a motorbike accident in the late Sixties.) Family holidays were invariably at the Kent seaside where Alf and Kit first met; they rented the same caravan in Heme Bay every year, Keith playing with cousins from neighbouring Whitstable, trolling for cockles and whelks in the shallow coastal waters. Still Keith’s restless nature had already manifested itself. “I’d say he was a bit of a loner,” his mother noted. “And he did get bored with things easily. His train set and Meccano didn’t interest him for long.”

    Primary schools like Barham provided many British schoolchildren with some of the best, certainly most innocent memories of their lives, but the state schools’ system to which they belong forced them for many years to wield a cruelly dictatorial role in their children’s future, in the shape of the dreaded 11-plus. Sat by all pupils upon the conclusion of their primary education, the 11 – plus was the greatest test many of them would face, leading to a fork in the road of life, the route of which could rarely be reversed. Passing meant graduation to grammar school, with ‘O’ levels to follow (even A’ levels and a possible university place for the very brightest) and some guarantee of a secure, well-paid, white-collar job as a result. Failing meant consignment to the local secondary modern, schools that were seen as little more than dumping grounds for a community’s rejects and cast-offs, a holding pen for four years with so little concern for their pupils’ futures that no final exams were deemed necessary. 4 Products of secondary moderns were destined for the factory floor and the service industries with little chance of making it into white collar professions.
    Keith had the odds stacked against him from the beginning. He had been born nine days short of sitting the exam a whole year later – one’s age on September 1 determines one’s school year in the UK – and was therefore only ten years old when he took his 11-plus. Furthermore, the local grammar school was sticking rigidly to its limited intake despite the enormous bulge from the baby boom; this meant a significant raising of the threshold at which Wembley pupils ‘passed’ an 11 -plus, and those whose ‘borderline’ abilities might have seen them scrape into the grammar school five years earlier were now almost guaranteed to end up in a secondary modern. These initial disadvantages were compounded by the fact that Keith’s exuberance and short attention span had not yet been identified as anything other than childish high spirits.
    Finally, however young he may have been, he was aware of, and at least partially affected by, the various cultural changes that seemed to be taking place all at once in British society.
    As was the case in America, when the first cluster of war babies reached their adolescence in the mid-Fifties, they did so at a time of increased prosperity. The result was that they found themselves with ‘disposable’ income the likes of which their parents, who had suffered through depression, war and post-war rationing, had never experienced. There was even a new term coined to describe them – teenagers. In the inner cities of Great Britain, this new consumer group spent much of its cash on clothes, and so emerged the ‘Teddy boys’ as Britain’s first real youth cult, immediately inducing panic among the