![\"Cream](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.gingerbaker.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/CreamAndGB.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWhen I came to write my father\u2019s autobiography Hellraiser in 2009 I was transported back to our sixties world and so was he. The following paragraph (from Chapter Five) sparked my recollections.<\/p>\n
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\u201cBack at our little ground floor maisonette [<\/em>recounts Ginger Baker], life seemed normal and happy. I bought a load of timber and constructed bookshelves and cupboards. We had a small back garden where I grew lettuce, carrots, radishes and large cannabis plants among the runner beans. Liz<\/em> [my mother] was aware of my <\/em>[heroin] habit but had accepted it and to all intents and purposes we were a happy couple with a beautiful young daughter.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n My first feeling when writing that was the conviction that the statement was in fact quite far from the truth as far as I was concerned! We were short of money, or as Dad later put it to me, \u2018when I was twenty-one I had a wife, child and heroin habit to support\u2019 (not necessarily in that order) and he often got paid \u00a33 a night and would walk all the way back from London in order to save his bus fare.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In no way would I ever have described my parents as a \u2018happy couple\u2019 and in truth neither would they after about 1959! \u00a0As we shall see, Ginger Baker had insecurities like the rest of us, the existence of which had led him to seek solace in drugs in the first place.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The 1960\u2019s sun did indeed shine brightly on the tall rows of runner beans twisting up their bamboo canes with their bushy leaves and scarlet flowers and the harvested cannabis, cut and dried, resided in a square red biscuit tin with multi-coloured balloons painted round the sides and on the lid. My very first memories are of 154, Braemar Avenue Neasden, but let me tell you briefly how I got there.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My parents were young and they had married young, when they were both nineteen on 17th<\/sup> February 1959. Dad definitely married \u2018up\u2019 you might say and my mother\u2019s Auntie Dorothy on asking her if Dad was \u2018nice\u2019 and receiving the reply \u2018yes of course\u2019, countered that with \u2018I mean OUR kind of nice\u2019 (which of course he wasn\u2019t)! They were too poor to become parents when Mum fell pregnant in the Spring of 1960 and had abortion been legal I certainly wouldn\u2019t be here now but that doesn\u2019t upset me at all. Their relationship was all consuming and volatile to them.<\/p>\n