I was a pre-teenage Sex Pistol.

      It  was decided, when I was about ten that I would go and live with my Auntie Agnes in Shepherds Bush. I had become too much for my long suffering parents and to spare any further suffering on both our parts I was to be exiled west for a dose of Auntie Agnes' unique brand of nephew husbandry.                                  She was a fearsome woman, but she was as equally loving and affectionate and swung between these polarities like a metronome; one minute she could be admonishing me for not eating all my dinner and next, with  a deft shift of her psycho/emotional gear box she'd pooter into the calmer and infinitely  pleasanter lay by of auntie hood while her demons - for the time being - raced by in souped up arctics.                                 

     In the days when the moustache was (Jason) King, we kids would gather round the rented Decca T.V set and watch Auntie Agnes harangue and intimidate referees and wrestlers alike on World Of Sport. There she'd be at the front (always the front) trading insults and expletives as her "man" was knocked and bashed in the contrived dance of the contrived bout; her piece de resistance however was her appearance in the ring itself wherein  my father would let out a long sigh and utter: "She's gone  Agnes again," at which we kids would whoop and holler at this latest spectacle - willing ante to, as it were, up the ante. However this would be difficult. Short of actually committing murder, acts of violence where were well within her repertoire, she'd think nothing of wielding her patent leather handbag with a robust windmill motion that would have had Pete Townsend questioning his own technique. Eventually she was barred from all venues  in the country and consoled herself with Gin and the on off button. Saturdays took on a rather dull pallor; we loved her.
  And so I  found myself - to use a wrestling metaphor - in the bear hug embrace of Auntie Agnes.
  Home was a two bedroom cube on a typical estate: concrete piled on concrete leading to concrete, with a view of more of the same. A warren of alleys and passages coursed through it's body like mold through  a smelly Stilton.
  We got on well A.A and I (as Agnes will be here on in referred to as) She seemed interested in me and how I felt about things. "Schools going OK  No one's bullying you,? coz if they are I'll come down that school and fucking tan some arses, so I will.."  She actually DID come down to my school on one occasion, apropos of nothing in particular. I spotted A.A's shock of blue black hair rising above the school yard wall, a morbid beehive like burnt nylon, or smoke from a burning tyre. My friends thought she was cool because of her appearances on World of Sport and I gained  kudos from my peers for this, I basked somewhat in the afterglow of her infamy.                                                                           

 It was about this time that I became interested in punk particularly The Sex Pistols, and A.A - not adverse to following the fickle moods of fashion, positively encouraged me in this. A.A however was stuck somewhere in the early 60's and with the beehive, was Divines mother to Divines mother in John Waters Female Trouble only a vastly dieted specimen and with a greater grasp of the wonderful potential of the word: "fuck" and  the much maligned: "fucking," which punctuated her discourse as frequently as she was able.                             
We sat together on the edge of the sofa  with our meal of "crispy pancakes"and watched with much mirth as the Pistols actually swore on T.V, goaded as they were by the toad Grundy, who for his part was quietly shunted off - probably in the manner of a drunk being thrown from a pub - to a retirement home for past there sell by date(never) has beens. We loved it; A.A said that if that, " fucking fucker as much as looked at me, I'd fuck his arse with his own leg..!" Which was quite restrained for A.A.
Sometimes we'd go up the Kings Road, she with her backcombed, backdated hair and me with my Sid t.shirt and junior Doc's hoping to see someone famous - but we never did; although A.A swore to me that she saw Rotten going in- rather incongruously - a cake shop, which is not that impossible I suppose, he's not called "Rotten" for nothing.