my sweet tooth ...
No surprise, then, that my prodigious consumption of confectionery in the early Sixties started to wear away at the enamel on my teeth. So my mother would often have to march me off to the school dentist at the Town Hall.

This wasn’t exactly a modern, touchy-feely experience, complete with soothing mood music, aromatherapy candles and overhead TV monitors. It was more like being committed to a Victorian mental institution and subjected to a frontal lobotomy.

The Town Hall itself was intimidating enough: a serious, soaring, Gothic-columned, between-the-wars edifice that dominated the main drag.

From what I recall, the dentist was in the basement at the back of the building, down some stairs and a long corridor. It was like being led away to jail, or to the gallows.

The surgery stank of floor polish, Jeyes Fluid and naked fear. As for the dentist’s chair, it was an intimidating piece of equipment that looked a bit like the barber’s chair in Sweeney Todd. I shouldn’t have been surprised if it had a trapdoor which dispatched naughty children with tooth decay into a dark pit below.

I’d like to describe the dentist’s appearance, but all I can recall is his evil eyes peering over a mask, like a diabolical mad scientist from the silent movies.

He had only two types of therapy - drilling and extraction. And he figured that, while you were there with a specific complaint, he might as well drill a few more teeth at the same time.

You had the option of local or general anaesthetic. Or no anaesthetic at all, unless your mother asked for it. The dentist favoured option three: ‘Be over in no time - you won’t feel a thing.’

Presumably, the sooner he could relieve you of the offending tooth, or drill a quick hole and bung in a bit of molten mercury, the sooner he could get back to the important business of carrying out some hideous medical experiment on a local virgin, or injecting himself with monkey glands.

He did have a dental nurse, of sorts, but we’re not talking Barbara Windsor in immaculate starched whites, with a winning smile and a tantalising glimpse of cleavage. This one was built like a prop forward: more Hattie Jacques’s ugly sister than Babs Windsor.

Her job wasn’t to reassure, or to soothe fevered brows. It was to hold down the dentist’s victims by force while he did his worst, and then to mop up the blood. It was rumoured that she had a second job, swabbing the floors of the Co-op abattoir.

On my first visit, my mum recommended that I opt for the local anaesthetic, so that I’d know exactly what was going on.

Clearly she didn’t appreciate that I wanted to lose consciousness, to be completely oblivious to this entire ordeal and wake up in my own bed the next morning when this bad dream was all over.

It didn’t help when I realised that the local anaesthetic was to be administered with a contraption which looked as if it had - in a previous incarnation - been used for the artificial insemination of farm animals.

This was no surgical strike, it was a thousand-bomber raid on my jaw. Christ, it was excruciating.

Maybe the injection wouldn’t have been so bad if it had actually worked. But the mad scientist was so eager to get stuck into this irritating schoolboy, who was standing in the way of him disembowelling a drugged virgin, that he set about his task before the anaesthetic had taken hold.

Fortunately, the noise of the drill drowned my screams, otherwise the local nick would have scrambled the murder squad.

My mouth was wedged open with one of those devices they use in maternity hospitals for forceps births. The drill itself was about the same size as the one used to tunnel out the Jubilee Line extension under London.

In the event, I passed out. The anaesthetic didn’t start to kick in until it was all over and I was bundled out of the surgery, biting down hard on a swab of cotton wool to staunch the flow of blood.

By now, the side of my face was frozen solid. It felt as if someone had surgically inserted a coconut in my lower jaw.

The terrified looks on the faces of the children next in line, sitting petrified in the waiting room anxiously clutching the hands of their mothers, is etched in my memory.

Next time - and there was a next time, since the experience clearly didn’t deter me from stuffing my face with sweets - I was allowed to opt for the general anaesthetic. This, too, was a mistake.

A giant cylinder of gas was wheeled into the surgery by a man in a rubber apron, face mask and wellington boots. I assumed he worked in the same slaughterhouse as the dental nurse.

While the anaesthetist adjusted the levels of the gas, the dentist readied a mask with an expandable hose which looked just like those worn by the pilots in Bomber Command.

I was marginally reassured, as I was familiar with these masks from Sunday afternoon war films on TV, such as The Dam Busters. If it was good enough for Guy Gibson, it was good enough for me.

Frankly, I was horribly misguided. I’d have felt safer flying solo into the teeth of German flak on the approach to the Eder dam.

As the dentist forced the mask over my mouth, I was overcome with waves of nausea and blind panic.

Then it seemed as if I was spiralling downwards into a bottomless well of death and despair. There were flashing, swirling lights in front of my eyes, like a kaleidoscope designed by Satan himself, before I blacked out completely.

When I came round, I was puking violently into a bucket at the side of the dentist’s chair. The only good news was that my face wasn’t frozen numb. The bad news was that I felt as if I’d done 15 rounds with Cassius Clay, and blood was running down the back of my throat.

I was helped from the chair, barely able to place one foot in front of the other. As I was dragged away through the waiting room, I must have looked like Albert RN, the prison-camp dummy used to fool the guards in another of those wartime films.

By the time I left school, my mouth resembled a war zone, entire neighbourhoods destroyed by enemy shelling. There were gaps top and bottom, left and right, although my front teeth somehow survived unscathed.