Dreadlocks Tony | Close To The Bone Publishing

It wasn’t a sophisticated plan: steal the picture, sell the picture, spend the money.  What – as they say – could possibly go wrong?  One of the reasons it wasn’t sophisticated is that we weren’t sophisticated; I was sixteen and my best friend, and accomplice, was seventeen.

The irony was that we really didn’t need the money.  Yup, sorry, I don’t know what to tell you: we were posh boys from wealthy families, privileged in every way.  And nothing we were into would have been improved by having more money.  We wouldn’t have known what to do with it.  At that age, we only really wanted girls.

It was 1978 and I was what was called a ‘weekly boarder’ at Westminster School, an exclusive, private school in the heart of London.  My parents were abroad, so I spent weekdays at school and weekends with my gran.  A tiny, white-haired widow, she lived in a mews house in posh Maida Vale; a life of delicate cups and saucers, and Radio 4, and unwavering routine, and never swearing (the worst anyone ever heard from her was “I hope you have bad dreams!”).  She had a genteel Edinburgh accent that neither my parents nor I had inherited.  Needless to say, she only knew the fake version of me, the paragon.

Anyway, Westminster School backed on to Westminster Abbey.  In fact, our morning assemblies were in the abbey itself and my ‘house’ – the school was organised into Hogwarts-style houses – sat in a transept next to Poets Corner.  Every morning, I was surrounded by memorials and busts of writers like Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Dickens (dead old white guys), and loomed over by pale marble statues of other, be-robed, literary luminaries, usually with an open book in one hand, the other hand limp, in a kind of flounce of indifference, as if writing was almost too easy.  Back then, of course, I didn’t give a shit about any of that.  I say “every morning”: in truth, most days I skipped Abbey to join my mates in a local greasy spoon.

Westminster in those days was a very white school.  Which, I should point out, is pertinent to this story (by the way, remember the word pertinent, it’ll come up again later).  There was one boy whose mum was Jamaican, a couple of Indian boys, and one Sri Lankan, but most of the rest of us were white Londoners.

I don’t know if I was racist back then.  Come to think of it, I still don’t know if I’m racist.  I don’t think so.  I mean, I hope not, obviously.  I don’t want to be.  The thing is, I’m actually slightly suspicious of anyone who proudly proclaims themselves not to be racist.  Anyway, I regularly try to test myself, and correct myself, when necessary, on any unwitting prejudice.  But back then, I had no way of knowing whether I was racist or not, and no way of testing myself either.  My life was ‘monoracial’.  I’m blonde and fair-skinned and my best friend Cam was ginger-haired and freckled.

Then, along came reggae and, specifically, Bob Marley.  It wasn’t that girls liked reggae – if anything, the opposite – but it was important to have a ‘thing’; to be the fencing guy (yup, no surprise that Westminster had a fencing team), or the hat guy, or the ham radio guy.  Having a ‘thing’, Cam and I thought, any ‘thing’, would attract girls.

It turned out that one of our house prefects had been to the concert at the Lyceum Theatre in London that was recorded and became the iconic Bob Marley Live! album.  One day he played it for us, while providing a vivid commentary of the whole experience.  By the time we got to No Woman, No Cry, we were gone!  That bass, that weird organ, that voice reaching out to us, and those cool-sounding lyrics!  We’d found our ‘thing’.

Only prefects were allowed record players at school, which neither Cam nor I were, so we had to play our reggae albums at my gran’s house on the record player that she called a gramophone, and that had settings for 33’s, 45’s and 78’s.  Gran insisted on calling it ‘jungle music’.  It didn’t matter how many times I told her “Gran!  You can’t say that!”

So that gran wouldn’t be able to make out the lyrics, we played the music at a low volume.  But we needn’t have worried.  One morning at breakfast, as she was cutting the crusts off my toast, I realised she was quietly singing International Herb by Joseph Hill, except she was singing: “I love it, I love and I love it, man, the international-err.”  My fear was that one day she’d ask me what an ‘international-err’ was.

We started off with albums, but soon we were going to concerts: Aswad, Steel Pulse, Burning Spear…   Every weekend.  Usually small concerts in out-of-the-way venues, pubs mostly, sometimes university bars.  It could be a little scary when you first walked in, but then your eyes grew accustomed to the fug of weed smoke, and the cagey stares, and you loosened up.  We were tourists in the reggae world: timid, respectful and curious, and I guess that showed.  If anything, we were a novelty: young, white (uber-white) and possibly, even, a couple.  Certainly no threat.  And, anyway, almost everyone was stoned and mellow.  Including us.  To explain my recurrent red eyes to gran, I invented an allergy to Cam’s mohair jumper.  And to pollen.  And, on one occasion, to horses (I was still stoned that time).  As a result, she bought antihistamines for me, and eyedrops.  She was a dear.  After one night, when I came back in the wee hours and demolished an entire packet of Ritz crackers that would usually have lasted her months, she started making sure that there were always Ritz crackers in the cupboard.  As a show of gratitude, I’d make sure she regularly caught me snacking on them.  I didn’t even like Ritz crackers.

Then, one night, Cam and I went to see a reggae artist called Dillinger at Dingwalls Dancehall in a cobbled corner of Camden Lock.  We’d made our way to the bar, and I’d just squeezed to the front – it was always a toss-up who’d order (Cam was older but I was taller) – when a Rastaman thrust a huge, conical joint at me, freeing up both hands so he could reach through and gather an improbable number of Red Stripe lager bottles.  Cam and I tracked him as he wobbled off and delivered the beers to his table, before returning to retrieve the joint.

“Thanks, man.”  He looked us up and down, then, as he took the joint: “Ya want a toke, man?”

Cam was cool: “Sure.”

I wasn’t: “Yes, please!”  As if I’d been offered jelly at a birthday party.

The Rastaman laughed.

“Come.”

He led us to his table and introduced us as his “young friends”.  A couple of the group disinterestedly acknowledged us, but mostly they’d already turned their attention to the stage where Dillinger had just started his set with Cocaine in my Brain.  I started mouthing the words and, again, our Rasta host smirked.  Then someone else arrived with more beers, including a couple for Cam and me and, somehow, we were in.

It turned out that the Rastaman was called Tony.  I guess he was thirty-odd, with sharp cheekbones, tidy dreadlocks, and a warm Jamaican accent.  We soon came to refer to him as ‘Dreadlocks Tony’.  At the end of the night, we went back with him to his squat in swanky St Johns Wood; a huge, detached, Moorish-styled house called Alhambra Cottage (a cottage it wasn’t!), with horseshoe-arched windows and arabesque motifs, probably commissioned by one of those Victorian adventurers who’d plundered the ‘orient’ for artefacts and an exotic new aesthetic.  There must have been six or seven bedrooms, as well as various reception rooms converted into bedrooms, and a population that fluctuated between five and twenty.

For a period of a few months, we hung out there a lot.  I don’t know exactly what it was that Tony liked about us.  Cam could roll a very decent spliff, and we laughed at Tony’s jokes, but also, I guess, we had some ‘book learning’, and that seemed to intrigue him.  Plus, we knew our stuff about reggae.  To impress him, we showed him Cam’s copy of Prince Buster’s 1968 single Take it Easy (Cam’s pride and joy), and my precious copy of Bob Marley’s Catch a Fire album in the original cover that was shaped like a Zippo lighter, and that also hinged open like one.

Tony’s job in the house was to cook: mountains of white rice topped with a dollop of corrosively spicy, meat gravy.  He liked to call it goat curry, even though it was most often chicken.  “Soul food, because,” in Tony’s words, “you can’t fuck on an empty belly.”  Cam and I nodded sagely, hoping to convey that we’d done loads of fucking, on both full and empty bellies, and agreed that full was definitely the way to go.  Anywhere between eleven at night and three in the morning, the squatters in residence, and their partners and friends, magically started to drift into the kitchen to be fed: guys (mostly) and girls; black (mostly) and white; all more or less stoned and in various states of dress and undress.  Night and day didn’t have quite the same boundaries in this house as elsewhere.

Meanwhile, back at Westminster we were showing off to our greasy spoon tribe about ‘Dreadlocks Tony’ and squat life.  Judging by the interest they showed, it seemed that maybe reggae wasn’t our ‘thing’, maybe ‘Dreadlocks Tony’ was: the palatial, Moorish-style house, the goat curries, the half-naked girls, the musicians jamming in the sitting room, the shopping bags full of weed.  I’d taken to wearing a wristband in the Rasta colours: red, yellow, and green, signifying blood, gold, and nature.  As gran, put it: “Very snazzy, I’m sure.”

At the same time, we were also showing off to Tony about the rarified families that our school friends came from: one was the son of a cabinet minister; another was the son of a household-name Hollywood producer; another was from a dynasty that owned a bank that bore the family name.  But the one that really stood out to Tony was Cam’s friend Donny Kleinveldt, whose father owned platinum mines in South Africa and who lived in a mansion on The Bishops Avenue, also known as Billionaire’s Row.  In truth, Donny wasn’t a member of the greasy spoon crew, but we did sometimes hang out with him, and swim in his pool, and play on his grass tennis courts.  His father also had an art collection that hung throughout the mansion and that even included a couple of paintings I recognised (a Picasso and a Monet), as well as – and central to this story – a lesser-known, but just as valuable, Rubens drawing; a reddish-tinged sketch of a naked woman coyly twisting away from the artist.  It looked to me like it was done in crayon, but was, apparently, something called gouache.

I don’t remember who first suggested the idea of stealing the Rubens, but I could hazard a guess.  This was the seventies, the height of apartheid, and all white South African men were Tony’s enemy.  Yup, just as reductive and blinkered as any prejudice.  Just two years earlier, Tony Greig, a South African who’d somehow become captain of the England cricket team, had boasted that he was going to make the West Indies team grovel.  “Grovel”!  Over that summer, the West Indies pummelled England, but the word used by their South African captain, that had been widely perceived as a racist slur, had already passed into legend.  In support, my schoolfriends and I were doing our bit for the anti-apartheid movement by occasionally, when we remembered, boycotting South African oranges and grapes.  Meanwhile, Tony hatched his own course of retribution.  We had the book-learning, but Tony had the street smarts, and we were in thrall to him.  Cam maybe even more than me.  So we were easily led.  Tony and Cam were going to do the real dirty work, while my role was to make a copy of the drawing from a folio in the British Library (so that they didn’t nab the wrong thing), then, once it was in our hands, to store it in a luggage lock-up at Euston station.  Our roles pretty much reflected our personalities: Tony assertive and first-in; Cam the enthusiastic follower; me the peripheral observer.  A Dobermann, a Labrador and me, a collie, dancing around the edge of the action.

Anyway, the great heist went down like this…

On the allotted evening, when we knew Donny’s parents were going to be out, Cam spent an awkward couple of hours at the swanky Bishops Avenue mansion pretending he got on better with Donny than he did, smoking weed (ironically, that Tony had supplied – we had a chuckle about that), listening to records and watching Donny’s dad’s porn VHS’s.  Then, at eight o’clock, the doorbell rang, and Donny and Cam answered it together.  Enter Tony!

I’m glad I wasn’t there to see Tony swing a pantomime punch at Cam’s stomach, or to witness Cam doubling up and falling backwards, which would have been over-acting straight out of a school play.  Tony then pushed past Donny and strode around the house as if he was looking for any random treasure to take.  Again, I have no doubt that the pretence would have been cringe-inducingly hammy.  Eventually, Tony lifted the Rubens off the wall, popped it into his backpack and left, leaving Donny and Cam to call the police.

I mean, it was no Ocean’s Eleven, but we didn’t think it needed to be.  Job done!

Or not…

Maybe the police’s initial suspicions were raised in that very first interview with Cam whose performance, again, would have been less than Oscar-worthy.  Although maybe they knew in the first instant that it was both and inside job and the work of amateurs.  Either way, the next day two officers came to Westminster, commandeered a room and, along with the headmaster, summoned the greasy spoon crew one-by-one.  By the time it got to me, they already knew all about ‘Dreadlocks Tony’: the only black person who any of us knew, and who was known by a sobriquet that was the only description that Donny and Cam had provided.  Every one of them had pointed the finger at Cam and me.  They’d had no choice.  We’d been so public about our exciting new friendship.  Our ‘thing’.  So full of ourselves.  We had, as the saying goes, been hoisted by our own petard.  The officers seemed to find our ineptitude wearying.

Donny was immediately, and rightly, exonerated, then his father’s people were brought in and a deal done with Cam and Tony to return the Rubens.  In exchange there would be no criminal charges, but Cam would be asked not to return to Westminster after the summer holidays that were just a few days away.  Meanwhile, Tony was given an official police caution.

After the robbery, my efforts to keep a low profile consisted of ditching my Rasta wristband and removing from my bedroom wall the poster of Bob Marley smoking a giant spliff.  Gran was pleased.  “Smoking!  It’s not a good role model for young men.  And how those people wash that hair..!”

Meanwhile, having surrendered the Rubens (it never made it to the Euston lock-up, only as far as the back of his cupboard) Tony went missing.  In the following weeks, Cam and I visited the Alhambra Cottage a couple times, and rang the doorbell, but there was never any answer.  From anyone.  The house seemed empty.  The last time we went, we saw two big men trying to lever open the front door with a crowbar.  They didn’t look like coppers.  We walked on, casual as you like, crossed the road and hurried away.  We heard later from one of his fellow squatters whom we ran into at a gig, that Tony had pre-sold the Rubens to some Dutch criminals, who now wanted their money back, or the Rubens, or Tony’s head on a pike.  He told us that Tony had gone to lie low in Jamaica.  We never saw Tony again.  Our first black friend.  Or maybe ‘friend’ is overstating it.

Cam was duly expelled, but, like the proper pal he was, he never said a word about my (albeit minimal) involvement.  Meanwhile, Donny’s dad moved him to a different school and, after an uncomfortable, private dressing down from the headmaster, I was warned off contacting him ever again.  Or Cam.  Though that one didn’t stick; he’s still, to this day, my best friend.

I’d never been explicit to gran that Tony was black.  It just wouldn’t have been worth it.  I don’t know if she was actually racist.  I suspect technically she was, probably, but only in the same way that most grannies probably are – it’s a ‘different era’ thing.  Our family had got used to her go-to euphemism for black people: describing someone behind the counter at the Post Office, or a new doctor, as having a “lovely smile” (similarly, she described fat people as having “beautiful skin”).  When we’d all tut and roll our eyes, she’d get exasperated: “I don’t know what we’re supposed to call them nowadays!”

“Well not ‘them’ for a start, gran!”

“Is it… ‘coloured’?”  She asked.

“No!  And you only ever need to refer to someone’s race if it’s pertinent.” (That word, again.)

And that’s the moral of the story, if there is one.  If only we’d just called him Tony.

Or, to paraphrase our hero Bob Marley: “the colour of a man’s skin should be of no more significance than the colour of his eyes.”

 

[Image Credit : Photo by Lawless Capture on Unsplash]

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