Gerry's (and Glenn’s) first brush with authority (aside from the universally loathed Mrs White, of course) came as a direct result of their father’s growing passion for what was to become the ‘Beat Music’ phenomenon. What may well have been the spark that lit the flame of the Grundig TK-12 tape recorder’s appearance in the family home was the emergent ‘fad’ of electric guitars and the popular ‘beat-combos’ that surfaced from the early Rock n’ Roll craze. Even Elvis was considered too wayward in the late ‘50s for the Hood household, but the arrival of the clean-cut and handsome Cliff Richard and his extravagantly applauded ‘backing-band’ the Shadows captured the collective imaginations of successive generations.
Lindon, in 1960s Britain was so conservative in its outlook that it possessed not one jukebox in its drinking establishments, and the sudden and dramatic growth of electric music, fuelled by ever cheaper ‘record-players’, gramophones and now tape-recorders, ensured that what had previously been a cult was to become a mainstream cultural revolution. The boys’ father, himself politically inclined to Conservatism - his hatred for Harold Wilson’s Labour Government was about to become a dominant theme of not only his conversation, but his identification with the popular, and inflammatory sit-com ‘til Death us do Part - suddenly did something uncharacteristically odd. He took the boys off from their infant school for the day and together they went to the cinema for the very first time where they experienced Cliff and the Shadows’ latest film Summer Holiday. The cinema, which could accommodate well over a thousand people, was crammed with perspiring citizens of all ages. After the trailers, and an entirely forgettable B movie, Cliff and the Shads, aided and abetted by the widely admired Una Stubbs, set off in a London bus on an odyssey across mainland Europe arriving, via various improbable adventures, in Greece. Their seeming ability to perform renditions and pop-ballads, at the drop of a trilby hat, won them friends wherever they stopped off on their journey, and Gerry was not slow to notice, the admiration of beautiful and exotic young women.
They left the cinema with a new fervour for modern music and the melodies and riffs of the jangling guitars (red American Fender Stratocasters) reverberated in their ears for decades thereafter. Mrs. Sowerby however did not share their enthusiasm for this new musical genre, and they were collectively rebuked, along with other unnamed offenders, and warned against any further absences on account of their moral weakness at the next school assembly. Bill Hood however was not subjected to this admonition and his next extraordinary act occurred soon after. Gerry was astonished to see his father waiting at the school gates one afternoon at ‘home time’, clutching an irregular cardboard carton, about two and-a-half feet in length, shaped like an isosceles triangle, but with the top pointed part removed. He couldn’t remember his father ever meeting him from school before and assumed, in his anxious way, that there was something wrong, an assumption which soon proved to be wrong. His father bore his broad grin - usually reserved for attractive members of the opposite sex - and as Gerry arrived at the gate his father handed him the oddly-shaped carton, impatiently imploring him to open it up, without further delay. Inside Gerry was astonished to discover a half-size acoustic, steel-strung guitar. Somewhat taken aback by this unexpected gift, Gerry’s father motioned him to play something on it, assuming that somehow one trip to the cinema was all the tuition he would require. Other children had gathered to gape at the instrument and its luck recipient, some of whom appeared less bashful and more willing to try their own luck, but Gerry’s father wasn’t yet ready to allow any sharing of this prized possession, which had cost him four pounds and ten shillings, an unheard of act of generosity, and one that would cause no small amount of conflict with his wife who had many other plans for such an outrageous amount of cash.
Neither Gerry or Glenn’s immature hands were equal to reproducing as much as a note of Hank Marvin or Bert Weedon’s repertoire, in spite of the Play in a Day text book that Bill had laid-out good money on, and the art of tuning the instrument remained a mystery until the ingenious elder brother discovered that by dialling one’s own telephone number (on the Bakelite telephone that the family’s prosperity had recently seen installed) a natural G note could be obtained. Further experiments and snapped strings revealed the secret code for tightening the strings into relative pitch, but the crude construction of the Russian made guitar rendered the holding down and playing of chords impossible to the young boys’ immature and soft hands. Bill’s disappointment was profound that the boys, far from mastering Apache were unable to recreate a single melody by his favourite artists, and he seemed to take it as a personal affront when their individual efforts bore no immediate fruit, just the discordant strumming that his own calloused and artisan’s hands were able to manage himself.
Nevertheless, heedless of Mrs. Sowerby’s warnings, the boys had yet another day off school in their father’s company where they were treated to their first experience of James Bond in Goldfinger. Gerry spent his entire pocket money that week on a Corgi model of the hero’s Aston Martin, which featured a pop-up bulletproof shield, twin machine guns which would emerge from underneath the headlights, and best of all, an ejector seat which would launch a plastic model of Oddjob into the nooks and crannies of the family household from which it was eventually retrieved by the family’s newest acquisition, a Jack-Russell terrier called Tess. Tess, who had a similar disposition to Oddjob, was a furry set of teeth on legs. She lived in a plywood box, which Bill had constructed for her within the legs and under the top of the family’s television table, from whence she would emerge snarling aggressively whenever anyone except Gerry’s father ventured near the table to change between one of its two channels. She was not to be trifled with and the boys sustained several nasty bites from her before their respective boundaries were established. His father, as pack leader, never experienced any such behaviours but his repeated efforts to persuade the dog toward a more civilised approach to his children - by giving the beast a ‘good hiding’ - were never to bear fruit, so the boys regarded her as a hostile annoyance, like a dangerous cuckoo-clock, and skirted around her territory with considerable adeptness.
The television’s three channels, BBC and ITV, provided a small but endless variety of broadcast programmes. By far their favourites would be Watch with Mother which from time to time would consist of The Woodentops, Andy Pandy, and, by far their most favourite Bill and Ben. The antics of the verbally challenged ‘flowerpot men’ were somehow, when combined with their dialogues with Little Weed, considered hilarious and they became avid fans. Twice a week, the boys’ mother insisted that they watch BBC Cymru, a programme broadcast entirely in Welsh (the land of her father’s as she would remind them) but aside from teaching them how to read the English subtitles adroitly, the boys never managed to apprehend a single syllable of her unpronounceable mother tongue. Vision On provided some practical diversion but Gerry much preferred to watch the many ‘Western’s’ which proliferated at the time, a diet which he occasionally supplemented with a trip to the cinema on Saturday’s where in the company of hundreds of screaming and shrieking children, dark and sinister ‘bad-guys’ would eventually and inevitably be defeated by the ‘good-guys’ to the accompanying cacophony of incensed minors. Gerry could never hear so much as a word of the dialogue and therefore took to writing his own in his head, the better to put the world to rights. He always loved the part in the films where, having carried out many perilous and improbable heroics, the hero would settle himself down at the campfire, and producing a previously unseen guitar, serenade the beautiful young woman heroine, captivating her with his performance and winning her tender heart. Occasionally he would return to his dormant instrument and mime his own similar scene, an ability which would later reap many rewards.
It was the appearance on their screen of Doctor Who and the Daleks which really captivated both the boys’ incipient imaginations, though it was the episodes with the Zarbi’s and their equally creepy slaves the Menoptra that sent Gerry scurrying for cover behind the family’s moquette sofa in real terror of their imaginary existence. Thursday evening brought Gerry’s real favourite, a French language dramatisation of the Tales of Robinson Crusoe, the theme tune to which insinuated itself into his unconscious. Tales of piracy, and most particularly cannibalism, fascinated the young boy and he was moved to read the book by Daniel Defoe which his father had somehow won as a prize on one of the days he did bother to attend school. He’d won quite a few actually and Gerry and Glyn read them all assiduously preferring the tales of Long John Silver and Treasure Island, perhaps a throwback to their later discovery of their mother’s family’s piratical ancestry. They shared their father’s love of words and fuelled their minds and memories with obscure facts from the encyclopaedia their parents thoughtfully provided as Christmas presents along with the clockwork wind-up toys and Empire Made products of the time.
Yet another odd phenomenon of the time was the social acceptance of tobacco based products and an unhealthy trade in chocolate replicas flourished in these uneducated times. Whilst their father, and to a much lesser extent mother, puffed their way through Park Drive, Woodbines and latterly Embassy cigarettes by the score, the boys could look forward to a stocking filled with chocolate cigars and pipes, wrapped in gold and silver foil, and labelled ‘Smoker’s Outfits’ by their uncaring confectioners. Packets of chocolate filled cigarettes, wrapped in edible papers and branded after luxury American brands, were readily available in all sweet shops and thereby entire new generations were inculcated to the deadly trade of the tobacconists throughout the land. Time was when Player’s and Will’s really were household names, as entire generations puffed their way to bronchitis, emphesyma and ultimately untimely deaths, under the watchful eyes of their tobacco promoting and using physicians.
It was rare not to see film stars of the time without a fag in their mouths and it was considered entirely fashionable to chain-smoke socially from a very early age. Cigarettes were regarded as some right-of-passage, though the age at which it was allowed in one’s children, entirely arbitrary. Gerry could not remember one single attempt to educate him and his contemporaries during his time at school, though to be caught smoking in school usually commanded some of the toughest sanctions, sometimes delivered in the form of physical beating by a chain-smoking adult! Gerry couldn’t remember Cliff Richard ever smoking, but he was exceptional in many respects, however, Sean Connery only stopped smoking for fights and Una Stubbs was exceptionally well named!
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