I cry and my mum buys me an ice cream. We go on the Ghost Train. There are signs saying ‘No Petting’, but I don’t know what petting is. We go to the Winter Gardens to see Val Doonican. My mum loves Val Doonican. I think he’s a bit soppy but laugh at the one that he does about a goat.
There is a pitch-and-putt course near our hotel and the three of us go and play a round which I call a tournament. My dad wins but I’m annoyed with my mum for not taking it seriously, not doing it properly. She leaves me to what she calls ‘have a paddy’.
My mum says I should sit on a bench on the pier and wait for the performers (‘the turns’) to walk down to the theatre. That way I’ll be guaranteed an autograph. I wait for hours to see Jimmy Clitheroe, but don’t see him until we see him that night on the North Pier stage. My mum watches me whilst I go on the trampolines. She won’t let me buy a hat with a ‘suggestive’ slogan, says I’m too young, that there’ll be plenty of time for that.
Why do I cringe, shuffle with discomfort, as I recall these golden (mile) years of my youth? Is it the genre that is inherently self-satirizing, all those poor-but-honest, grim-up-north parodies coming home to roost in the inside of my skull? Or the memories themselves, tainted with time, co-opted by a million compilations of BBC nostalgia fests? Maybe: but there’s something more. It is something about class, something about working-class memory having been scripted by someone else (novelists, documentary film makers, sociologists).
Writing about my working-class childhood feels like slipping on hand-me-down clothes. The cut and the cloth are non-negotiable, neatly tailored. It is my story, my body in history, that doesn’t quite fit. My memories are tight across the chest, their sleeves hang down over the fingers. In her book Landscape For a Good Woman, Carolyn Steedman writes about how working-class childhoods are denied any complex subjectivity or unconscious conflict, and made instead to carry the weight of other people’s interpretations, metaphors, analyses. She makes the point that ‘It would not be possible, in fact, to write a book called “Middle Class Childhood” (even though) the shelves groan with psychoanalytical, developmental and literary accounts of such childhoods.’ She’s right. Childhood is middle class unless specifically stated otherwise.
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‘No improper books have come my way. And I am too young to read anything suitable for me. If I don’t have to hide my books from my mother, I can’t take any interest in them.’
Ivy Compton-Burnett, Men and Wives
I didn’t know I was working class until I met people who weren’t, and I met people who weren’t when I went to grammar school. When a mate sneered that I was going to become a ‘St Mary’s Bum Boy’ I reacted in a very bum-boyish way, I cried. It had never occurred to me before that Being Clever and Doing Well were anything other than laudable and wonderful things. Isn’t this what you were supposed to do? If going to school wasn’t going to make you clever, then why go to school? And if St Mary’s RC Grammar School was the best school then why didn’t me going there make me the Best Boy, not a Bum Boy? It was all very confusing.
My dad bought me a dictionary (I still have it: I used it to check the spelling of the word ‘laudable’) and joked that I had to be careful not to swallow it. My grandfather bought me a fountain pen, a Parker, silver-nibbed. Mum took me shopping for the regulation school blazer. I remember there being a debate about whether they could buy the school badge separately and sew it onto an ordinary blazer, and whether or not this would mark me out as different (poor) or get me (them) in trouble.
Then came the day, my first day as a Stuck Up Think I’m Clever Too Good For The Rest Of Us St Mary’s College Bum Boy. And I was terrified. It was the school equivalent of the Saturday morning pictures: a mob (a ‘berserk’?) of children, all of whom seemed to have internalized a manual labelled Boisterousness 101. And me. They play-fought and scuffled and made fart noises with their armpits; they had silver segs on the bottom of their shoes, making them sound like hooligan tap-dancers. They all seemed to know each other too, a series of Venn diagrams consisting of older brothers, sporting fraternities and the mysterious allegiances to be found in Playing Out.
Need I say that it was in books that I took refuge? I certainly had all the symptoms: introversion, solitude, hypersensitivity. And so bookish boy it would be.
Not that being recognized as a Type in any way deadens the pain; quite the opposite. I now work in a bookshop and deal with them daily, my heart never ceasing to bleed a little for every awkward one of them who comes through its door. Intense young men – of all ages and genders – who can’t quite make eye contact, in search of the troubled poets whose troubles will liberate them from their own. I love them as only a bibliophile can love the similarly afflicted – homoeopathically. ‘Try this,’ I say, offering a volume of Sam Riviere to a gothy girl clutching her collection of Anne Sexton. Or – for the kid with holes in his jumper who is just coming down from a Burroughs binge – ‘You need the new Ben Marcus.’ Somehow we get through the transaction, less seller to buyer than reader to reader, facilitating each other’s progress through a day that will somehow have been saved by the books that have populated it.
I don’t remember the earliest books I read. It was Kathleen’s boast that she had taught me to read before I started school. I do remember the pride in her voice when she would mock-scold me for always having my nose in a book, and the brief flurry of panic about what all this reading must be doing to my eyes. I never saw her read a book, not even one that Her-Graham-Who-Went-To-St-Mary’s-College wrote. Maybe there was the sense that, much though she was enthralled to the world of books and grammar school (‘He does Latin!’), it was certainly not a world for her (Latin?). She had, as we say, done her bit. She had taught me: she had sacrificed for me; she had helped to get me there. Now it was up to them, the teachers and the priests. And the priests who were also teachers.
My dad, on the other hand, read like a demon. His weekly trips to Accrington Library saw him return with four, sometimes six books a time. I guess that the northern weather left its groundsmen with time to kill, time that could be spent with James Hadley Chase, countless histories of the Wild West and biographies of American movie stars. He managed to read whilst watching TV – a feat which I remember being half-impressed by and half-suspicious of (and still am). He read Titbits magazine and the Reader’s Digest, how-to manuals and novels by the Jameses Herriot and Herbert. He read in the same way he watched David Attenborough documentaries – a mixture of curiosity and mild self-improvement.
Like many an autodidact, it was inconceivable to him that any book could be wrong. When I was older, I would try to get him to see that historians (say) had disagreed with each other, that one book might directly contradict another book and that what we thought of as being ‘facts’ were often only opinions – politically charged opinions – that had been handed down to us in such a way as to make them seem for ever true. He didn’t like that. Books had served him well and he didn’t want to be told that their foundations were anything other than solid. Or maybe he just didn’t want to be told this by his son.
It was thought that I ‘got’ my bibliophilia from my dad, as though pleasure in books was a genetic predisposition, like diabetes. I can’t remember any of the fairy tales or monster stuff that I’m sure there must have been. It was only really with the discovery of Enid Blyton that I received my diagnosis as a Reader.
I would love to report that my experience of Blyton was tempered by suspicion of her relentless class prejudice and racial stereotyping. Not a bit of it: I adored them. The Famous Five books explored peer-group friendships in a way that seemed exhilarating and liberating to me. Here were kids forging identities outside of the adult realm, semi-grown-ups (growing-ups?) who not only found ways of standing apart from the authority of their elders, but often talked back to that authority. I found in these books a group of people who were exploring the world on their own terms. The fact that these terms were not those of my class or background mattered n
ot a ginger-beered belch compared with the fact that they were doing it at all.
I am not unaware that these books were underpinned with what we might call ideological difficulties. Did she really throw the term ‘golliwog’ around as though it was just some harmless Farage-ean banter? Yes she did. And was the school that the Five attended an exemplary model of comprehensive meritocratic inclusion? No it was not. On the other hand, the ‘tomboyish’ Georgina famously bent a bit of gender, making her if not the Lady Gaga of children’s fiction, then certainly its kd lang. And, reactionary blue stocking or not, Blyton’s books showed me that reading was about forging emotional connections with other worlds, not just having your own reflected back to you.
They did something else as well. In the library and local Wardleworths they would be filed next to other books, books that were similar but different, a combination which suggested that even when these particular alternative realities had been exhausted, there was a possibly infinite number of others just waiting to be explored. Books led to other books: they came mob-handed.
Is it over-stretching the point (over-cressing the egg sandwiches?) to say it was thanks to Ms Blyton – snob, purveyor of privilege and xenophobe extraordinaire – that I ended up reading the books which would enable me to take these cheap shots at her? Probably. But it is certainly true to say that it is thanks to Enid Blyton that I discovered Books, and for this I take off my non-PC Noddy hat to her, racial epithets and all.
There may not have been a connection, but my first English teacher got nicknamed Enid. A quiet, bearded lay teacher, Mr Lawrence always seemed to be apologizing for himself. Head down, he would enter the room and swallow his first hesitant instructions, which meant that they weren’t instructions at all, they were requests. ‘Er . . . OK . . . um . . . if you . . . no . . . could you? Right. Stop it.’ But it was too late. We already smelt blood. ‘Enid clap clap clap . . . Enid clap clap clap . . . Enid . . .’ and on it went, a brooding relentless monotone. ‘Enid clap clap clap . . . Enid clap clap clap.’ He is, in that brilliant phrase, beside himself. He is almost literally hopping mad. ‘Enid/Enid/Enid’, faster now, building to a frenzied climax.
‘Please. Stop . . . No, please.’ Don’t beg, Mr Lawrence, you will only make it worse. ‘EnidEnidEnid’ – a full-blown chant, no pause between each taunt, as though we are the possessed, intent on conjuring up the devil. He starts to cry and we stop. Mission accomplished: the sound of a grown man’s sobbing, thirty guilty bottoms shuffling.
Mr Lawrence wanted us to be equals in a situation that could never be one of equality, to befriend us in a world where we could never be friends. I felt sorry for him, although my pity never stopped me from joining in his torment.
His successor, John ‘Jock’ Roland, changed my life. He was the first man I can recall making a conscious attempt to emulate. He had Mediterranean good looks, a gliding graceful walk and – my first encounter of this – a Southern accent. A lay teacher, there were even rumours that he was an atheist, a Catholic atheist of course. His gift to me was in making me see that books were not (only) an escape from the world, they were an enrichment of it.
He used to run his own small bookshop at the back of the prefabs and it was there that I spent every lunchtime. When I told him – red-faced at my childish taste – that I was reading Frank Richards’ Greyfriars books, he gave me a copy of Orwell’s essay on ‘Boys’ Weeklies’. That a writer could write seriously on such topics seemed to me daring, even scandalous.
Orwell was a fully-fledged Penguin-published Author, and yet here he was writing about the kind of books I was reading. He was taking them – and therefore me – seriously. I’ve just re-read that essay, and I’m struck by its audacity, by Orwell’s ability to combine lit crit and political journalism twenty even thirty years before such things became norms of cultural studies.
I’m not sure if I knew the word ‘iconoclasm’ when I was thirteen and standing gob-smacked in Jock Roland’s bookshop, but it is what I experienced, in all its genre-shifting frisson. Not only were there stories, but there were stories about those stories. There were even stories hidden away in those stories that they didn’t seem to know about; stories that got told despite themselves; stories waiting to be uncovered. I was discovering that writers read other writers, that they were also readers. There seemed to be much more at stake in this business of word-making than an imaginary school or a fat boy’s postal order. ‘Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable,’ wrote Orwell about the world of Frank Richards’ fiction. ‘Everything will be the same for ever and ever.’
John also taught poetry. One of his party pieces was to recite Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Tarantella’ from memory, no small feat for anyone who has come across the feverish metre and rhyme schemes of its ‘Do you remember an inn, Miranda? Do you remember an inn?’ He gave us the inevitable Wilfred Owen, the inescapable Ted Hughes and the predictable Philip Larkin.
Yet he also gave us ee cummings (‘to reassure those of you who can’t spell proper’) and Dylan Thomas. He read us Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Tell Me Lies About Vietnam’ and I remember wishing that we were still at war so I could protest against it. He gave us W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson and William Blake. He could do a po-faced William McGonagall and a straight-faced Rabbie Burns. He gave us Shakespeare (‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’) without telling us it was Shakespeare and teased us for liking it before we’d found out who it was by. He gave us D. H. Lawrence and told us that the mucky bits weren’t always where you’d expect.
Next
‘I say shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame Shame on you’
Shirley & Co., ‘Shame, Shame, Shame’
I’m in the cloakroom with a boy my own age and he has me in a headlock. His name is Sean. He wears his blue-black hair in a feather cut, his tie fashionably thin, top botton undone. His forearms are strong and lightly cushioned by a soft pubescent down. He has me in a headlock and I am slowly being forced to my knees. He has black brogue shoes and red cotton socks, even though the latter are banned by the school dress code. His eyes are an intense brown that borders on yellow. They are victorious eyes, cruel eyes.
He will win this fight as he has won every fight we’ve had. He will win it because I want him to win it. I must never speak of this – these ‘fights’ – to anyone else, him included. Him especially. Those are the rules.
Is ‘love’ the right word for an adolescent same-sex crush? Probably not. Though ‘crush’ seems right for everything else about it – demolished, compressed, reduced to a pulpy mass. I’ve found my very own David Watts, the eponymous hero of a Kinks song, soon to be covered by The Jam.
I watch him in lessons: he’s not too bright. He struggles with Latin, with declensions and the placing of the verb. I can see his pretty-boy face blanch with fear when Father Stuart calls on him to translate some archaic nonsense. ‘“This is the agreement” . . . You, boy.’ ‘Hec . . . er . . . est . . .’ (C’mon, Sean, concordia. You can do it. Say it. Concordia.) ‘. . . concordium . . .’ No. Fuck. Next. ‘We bequeathe by this charter these manors to the lord.’ ‘You, boy, again.’ ‘Confirma . . . ah . . . hec manerium . . . gulp . . . ah . . .’ Wrong again. Class laughs as though it has never heard this joke before. Caveney: ‘Confirmamus hac carta hec maneria domino.’ Correct.
Such were the reasons that swots got placed in headlocks by boys with eggshell-coloured eyes.
What seems strange to me now is that I never considered this mania as even vaguely homosexual. In my mind there was nothing same-sexual about my attraction to him, partly because we were so obviously not of the same sex. Look at him: Captain of the team, of pure and noble creed. Now look at me: Dominus et domina terram Deo et ecclesie confirmant. Exactly.
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‘Jesus loves you more than you will know’
Simon and Garfunkel, ‘Mrs Robinson’
I put the disc onto the spindle in the middle of the turntable. It is a satisfying ritual, one
that rewards you with a click. I lift up the arm, it is like a dragon’s head with one sharp tooth. I put the needle on the vinyl’s thicker, raised, outermost edge. The inner circle is the colour of mustard. I have to be precise, delicate. There is a ccrrrrssssrrrsssccc and then it starts, a gently insistent bassline: de-dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum melting into my abdomen.
What sounds like cellos but are probably synths surge up through my stomach and gently waltz around in the lining . . . ‘Well she’s my woman of gold / And she’s not very old / huh / Yes she’s my woman of gold / And she’s not very old / huh huh . . .’ It is ’74 or ’75. My cousin Helen is becoming a Tartan Roller, as fans of The Bay City Rollers were known. She wears white Oxford bags with a tartan scarf stitched down the side of each leg plus a scarf tied around her wrist.
Her undying love for Marc Bolan has proved to be not so undying after all, and so, three, four years after it first became Number One, I become the default owner of T. Rex’s ‘Hot Love’. At a conservative estimate I probably play the song fifteen, twenty times a day. My dad buys me a pair of headphones to stop himself from killing me (or himself). I can’t quite work out everything that he’s singing, and I don’t understand the bits that I can work out. Who is this woman who twitches even though she’s not a witch? Is she the same one who lives by the coast? Is that why she’s faster than most? Why does he say ‘and’ as though the two things naturally follow, as though it makes sense when it so obviously doesn’t?
And then there’s those noises, the grunted sighs, the slurry whispers, the girlish squeal which doesn’t sound like any girl I’ve met. I think he must be American, that would explain (some of) it. Kathleen quite likes him, buys me some of his other records. They come with pictures of him on them – blue and red not-quite drawings not-quite photos which emphasize his hair and eyes. He wears makeup and a top hat, a combination that makes him seem both shy and arrogant at the same time.
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness Page 4