Johnny Cigarini Read Free

then had to be at school at 5.40am and were not allowed home until 8.20pm after prayers… quite different to today. During the war, the school had entrances to the network of tunnels running under Ramsgate, then used as shelter from the air raids. Most of the entrances have been covered up now, but you can still see a few on the lower playground. It was the 1950s and I would walk twenty minutes each morning to the bus stop and catch a bus the five miles down the Ramsgate Road to get to the school. In those days, eleven-year-olds wandered around on their own; quite a different time indeed.
    As I’ve mentioned, Granny was a great girl and I was now really settled, but she did border on the eccentric at times. She was a spiritualist and the house was filled with photographs of Native American chiefs in magnificent headdresses. My granny thought they were spiritual ‘beings’ and she would host séances each Monday night in the back extension room (under my room). I would always help her prepare for the séance by putting specially made frames covered in black velvet inside the windows to block out any light. She had a regular group of women who attended, like the doctor’s wife. I remember her as the poshest person we knew, and she would bring me comics and chocolate – my weekly treat. I remember being tucked up in bed with chocolate and
The Beano
and
The Dandy
before the séance would begin and the next day, Granny would always say bizarre things to me. “I spoke to your mummy last night” would definitely freak me out. Nothing to do with the séances, but similarly bizarre, she used to tell me that Mother died from eating tomato ketchup.

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    All my life, I have loved rock ‘n’ roll music. My first musical memory was of Bill Haley & His Comets’ ‘Rock Around the Clock’, which was a hit when I was little. But my favourite was Little Richard and his hits ‘Tutti Frutti’, ‘Long Tall Sally’ and ‘Lucille’. I remember when I went into the Great Ormond Street Hospital in Carshalton, at the age of twelve, to have my testicles dropped and I sang ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, Elvis’s current hit, in the hospital. At Granny’s, we had a Rediffusion radio, whose signal came down a wire. The box looked like a radio, but was in fact empty except for the speaker. I remember I used to go downstairs late in the evening and put cushions around it, lie on the floor so my granny wouldn’t hear me, and listen to Radio Luxembourg and my favourite song of all, ‘Cathy’s Clown’, by the Everly Brothers.
    With this fascination in music, Granny decided I should learn a musical instrument, and I was given the choice between a piano accordion and a guitar. At that time a guitar was quite an unfamiliar instrument to me, but more to the point, what would an Italian do in England other than play the accordion in Italian restaurants? Needless to say, I did not get to learn the guitar. Keith Richards and Eric Clapton were clearly more switched on than me, and were following Chuck Berry and the blues greats like Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley, but that kind of thing hadn’t really made it down to Margate – not to my knowledge anyway. I was soon practising the piano accordion every day for a good hour, and I became quite proficient. Had I done that with a guitar, I may have had a very different life, and my future friends Eric Clapton and Pink Floyd might have been totally different people to me. I’m not saying I would have turned out to be a great guitarist or that I was at all upset with my granny, for the piano accordion was itself a beautiful instrument. I suppose we all have our own journeys in life and mine was destined not to be a rock star, not quite anyway… I played that accordion at hospitals and old people’s homes and joined the Margate Children’s Piano Accordion Band! My band was even chosen to represent