Canvey qualifies as an Island, separated from the Essex County mainland by creeks spilling out into the Thames Estuary and is a flat landscape close to sea level, of seaside holidays, petrochemical storage and today, more pleasingly, nature reserves. Canvey was also the location of my Grandparents timber framed bungalow in the 1970s. Next door to the more prosperous Southend-on-Sea, Canvey Island is the Deep South East of England, a Blues Delta next to the North Sea – as described by Wilko Johnson in Oil City Confidential, a 2009 Julian Temple film about Canvey’s renegade rockers Dr Feelgood.
I would feel a buzz of excitement when, at the end of the school week (or term), my Dad would drive us to Canvey Island for the weekend. There’d be a nervy, anticipated knock at the door, then I’d slip out with a few packed things, my Dad waiting by the elevator. My Mother preferred not to greet my Dad. These were awkward moments for them, long since divorced and now strangers. However, as an 8-year old my thoughts were focused on the adventure ahead and riding a Raleigh Tomahawk all over the island, with stop-offs at Canvey’s amusement arcades.
My Grandparents kept a spare bedroom for me and on arrival I’d find a tobacco tin on the dressing table, filled with loose change – a few pounds, but a small fortune.
Parents today might go crazy at the thought of their children roaming free, often a mile or two from home. It’s even harder for single-parent families, like my own, to control the movements of their offspring, particularly when they can’t afford child minders – my grandparents did their best. I was not a difficult child, but I was eager to explore and hated being cooped up for too long, especially in a small high-rise council flat.
My Dad’s parents were more liberal than my Mother’s. I could get away with more so naturally I pushed my luck when visiting them on Canvey Island. Adventures became riskier as I teamed up with a local boy. We became a kind of pint-sized Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper from Easy Rider on kids bicycles.
Naturally, we got up to all kinds of mischief, everything you are instructed not to do in the public safety films of mid-1970s Britain. We did it all, throwing a frisbees over electricity pylons, climbing into disused military bunkers and talking to strangers. But we became street wise, could smell trouble and had bikes to escape. My buddy on Canvey had the reassurance of a solid family unit while I was hardened from living on an urban housing estate in London. Canvey Island became an adventure park with few dangers from speeding traffic.
A popular song of the day was Rock Your Baby by George McCrae, which I can still hear echoing around the seaside amusements as fairground workers switched on the dodgem cars. We’d empty most of our pocket money into Penny Falls machines. By the time the seafront began bustling with holidaymakers or clubbers later in the afternoon, we were homeward-bound for supper watching Starsky & Hutch.
Sunday afternoon signalled home-time, a return to school life with Mum and London estate buddies. My Grandad would hand me a fifty-pence piece, as Dad ran me home in his Austin Healey Sprite.
Oddly I have not owned a bicycle since those days, when I was rarely without one. But I lost the habit very quickly, it was easier to catch a tube or bus later when carrying a guitar case around London. I returned to Canvey Island briefly in the mid-1990s to claim a modest amount of inheritance money kindly left by my late Grandmother. By then I’d experienced a degree of poverty, but spent most of the money on a Marshall guitar amplifier. The leftover change went on a stack of vinyl I had not been able to afford.
My Canvey Island Grandparents were practical with their gifts, even in death. They and my Dad bought me bicycles, with the foresight that I’d use them for exploration and adventure. And later, with their help from afar, I now owned a powerful piece of guitar equipment that took me on new adventures in music.