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'brothers', whose reasons for being seemed to hinge on the existence of clear demarcation lines between them and other 'brothers'. One day, after being called in to head office for a disciplinary hearing, I told the personnel manager he could stuff his poxy job.
        I remember this time in the mid-to-late '70s as being highly politicised, shaped by anger and conflict. In the West Midlands, hatred of immigrants, particularly blacks and Asians, seemed part of the air that many white people breathed. A working men's club near the Wolverhampton Wanderers football ground enforced a strict 'whites only' policy.
        In 1978, a new Indian restaurant opened in Codsall. My friends and I welcomed it with abuse and vandalism. The owner placed outside the entrance a 7 ft statue of a maharajah, an Indian prince. One night, we kidnapped it, drove it in a van several miles away and dumped it in the middle of a paddling pool. Within days, the maharajah had returned to his position outside the restaurant. This time, we snatched him, ran a little way down the street, threw him in the gutter and chopped off his head with a machete. The waiters heard the commotion and gave chase, but we escaped into the night, screaming with laughter and confident we'd destroyed the statue beyond repair.
        To our surprise, the maharajah reappeared a fortnight later, looking like new. We decided to attack again. One of my friends backed his van up to the restaurant. I pushed the statue into the back and we drove away at speed. A few hundred yards down the road, we stopped. We pulled out the prince and, using axes and machetes, chopped off his legs and right arm as the waiters ran towards us, shouting in fury and despair.
        As they got near, we picked up the amputated limbs and waved them above our heads tauntingly. Then we threw them down, jumped in the van and drove off. Victory, we thought, was ours.
        A week later, the local newspaper, the Wolverhampton Express and Star, pictured the owner standing outside the restaurant with his newly repaired statue. The accompanying story, headlined 'Maharajah - no Indian takeaway', read:
        >>>>> The much-aligned Maharajah of Codsall has regained his usual pride of place as living proof that it takes more than a bunch of yobs to keep a good Indian prince down.
        The life-size statue has been subjected to a spate of ordeals since he was bought to stand guard outside the new Indian restaurant in the village near Wolverhampton.
        He has been stolen three times since being installed in January - the first time, he was found in the middle of Tettenhall pool.
        The second time, he was found with his head chopped off and he has just had to undergo major surgery after he was found a third time with both legs and right arm hacked away.
        Now, owners at the Rajput Tandoori restaurant in the
    square have decided to keep a closer watch on their Maharajah and have chained him to the spot. <<<<<
        Chained or otherwise, we decided the maharajah had to go. We waited a few weeks, then one evening a friend and I struck. I doused the wire-mesh and fibre-glass statue with petrol and my accomplice tossed a lighted match. Flames engulfed the prince. He was taken away, never to return.
        The late '70s was also the time of punk rock. I used to pogo regularly at Wolverhampton's Lafayette club, where I saw all the major bands of the time, from hard-core punk to the more melodic New Wave. The Sex Pistols, The Clash, X-Ray Spex, The Jam and Blondie all played the Lafayette's tiny stage. I never became a punk - I wasn't one for dressing up, no matter what the cause - but I loved the scene's chaotic anti-authority, 'destroy, destroy' mentality.
        After their early shows and TV appearances, no council in the land would grant the Sex Pistols a licence to play. So they toured a handful of venues undercover as 'The Spots' - the Sex Pistols on Tour. In Wolverhampton, their