Let’s kick off with Sonny Boy Williamson’s ‘Good Morning, School Girl’, a blues standard from the late thirties that has been covered by everyone from Van Morrison to ZZ Top, The Yardbirds to the Grateful Dead. It’s easy to despise Gary Glitter, his preening ‘do you wanna touch?’ stomps were halfway to the ugh-bin even as they were being recorded. But Sonny Boy Williamson! On Bluebird records! That’s another story, a story that complicates our ideas of acceptability and edginess (not to mention guilt and race).
As long as paedo-poems are confined to the naff or produced by the guilty, then it’s a simple matter of adjusting our sneers accordingly. Disliking bad music isn’t difficult. Neither is ridiculing ridiculous people. It’s when the offensive stuff is so embedded in the great stuff that it becomes difficult, when we selectively listen to our heroes because, we – I – somehow believe that there are musicians that are so talented they are beyond our reach. ‘Tell your mama and your papa / That I’m a schoolboy too’. Never mind the politics, just listen to that harp.
Let’s pass over the simply odious – The Vandals’ ‘Fourteen’ – or the deliberately provocative – Sublime’s ‘The Wrong Way’ (and ‘Date Rape’ as well, guys. Wow, weren’t you the bad boys of junior high?). Let’s cut Chuck Berry some slack and say that his ‘Little Queenie’ was at least ‘a minute over seventeen’ when he saw her on the aisle. Let’s even sidestep the whole issue of Jerry Lee Lewis’ marriage to Myra Gale Brown, the thirteen-year-old cousin. (He claimed she was fifteen. As a defence.)
And it would be churlish to dwell too long on Gary Puckett and The Union Gap’s creepy classic ‘Young Girl’ with its poignant evocation of the self-restraint needed when encountering a girl who has kept her youth a secret (‘You had me believe you’re old enough / To give me love / And now it hurts to know the truth.’)
The paedo-aesthetic is so ingrained in popular music that it becomes almost rude to single out individuals. If rock is the libido of adolescence and pop its breathless courtship, should we be surprised when its stars want to go all the way? And is it fair to harp on about, oh I don’t know, Ted ‘Bring ’Em Young’ Nugent and his ‘classic’ album of 1981, Intensities in 10 Cities, with its equally classic tracks ‘Jailbait’ and ‘I Am A Predator’? And it would be particularly shooting-paedos-in-a-barrel-ish to re-tell the story of him becoming the legal guardian of the seventeen-year-old Hawaiian girl who he’d been dating and was too young to marry.
And we certainly don’t need to re-visit Bill Wyman’s relationship with a fourteen-year-old Mandy Smith (he was forty-seven) any more than we need to dwell on those ‘just-a-bit-of-fun-pranksters’ who set up a ‘countdown clock’ website for Charlotte Church’s sixteenth birthday.
All of which goes to show . . . that I’m a judgemental prick (tick); that older rock stars like younger women, which is why they keep on being rock stars (maybe), and put a few hooks around a cutesy-kitsch version of your daughter/niece/schoolgirl and the airwaves will lap it up in between broadcasting news reports of ‘stranger danger’ (almost certainly).
It also shows that when I was looking for a refuge from regular sexual assault, rock wasn’t just a haven, it was also a reminder. As if being fucked wasn’t complicated enough.
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‘I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became.’
Franz Kafka, Diaries
My mum tells me to preface – though she never says ‘preface’ – my remarks to teachers with a ‘please, sir’. I tell her, that’s a throwback to her own schooldays when teachers were omnipotent, although I never say ‘omnipotent’.
We sit and watch Billy Liar, me and my dad. It’s that terrifying moment towards the end, when Billy’s dad confronts him about the missing bloody calendars and the missing petty cash and that missing bloody monkey wrench. He tells him that he should be bloody grateful, that it’s a chance he never bloody well had. ‘And don’t we bloody know it,’ says Billy. Wilfred Pickles’ face is a masterclass, every one of its lines a lesson in the proximity between hope and frustration. He is desperate to reach out to his son but hasn’t the bloody language to bloody do it. He wears a cardigan over his shirt and tie, his one concession to this thing called ‘leisure’.
We watch it in silence but I can hear Jack’s conflicted loyalties. They come out every time he clears his throat, every time he flicks his ash into one of our green glass ashtrays. He’s on Billy’s side, obviously. But. Doesn’t the dad have a point? Isn’t that what this parenting lark is all about, hoping your kid will have a better life than you? And trying not to hate them if they don’t? Or not hate them if they do? Too bloody right it was.
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‘It isn’t Jesus . . . It’s just a fella.’
Charlie, in Whistle Down the Wind
Accrington in 1981 was not Bradford in 1962 and I am not William Terrence ‘Billy Liar’ Fisher. I am Graham Can’t-Afford-A-Middle-Name Caveney and I am going to Greece.
And I don’t want to go. Don’t mind that your grandma has given you five pounds from her pension which she can’t afford, or that your Aunty Mary has found a few quid which she hasn’t really got, or that we’ve been staying in every weekend scrimping and bloody scraping so that you will have the chance of a lifetime. No. I am not Billy Fisher, machine-gunning his parents at the breakfast table. I’m better than that. I’m Lord Byron in search of his haunted holy ground. I’m Henry Miller dedicated to the recovery of man’s divinity.
A priest who isn’t abusing me drives the one who is, me and two other boys to Manchester airport. (Two priests, and three boys: what could possibly be wrong? People then thought the exact opposite of what people think now.)
Was the priest who wasn’t abusing me abusing either of the others? The question has only occurred to me now, thirty-four years after the event. There’s no reason to assume he was. Then again, there was no reason to assume that my abuser was abusing me. And did the one who wasn’t abusing me suspect that the one who was was? Without a language to think about abuse, we don’t think about abuse.
I look around Manchester airport and the world seems impossibly big. From Accrington to Manchester seemed far enough, but Paris? Tokyo? And where the hell is Stuttgart? I have a rucksack, several pairs of Marks and Spencer’s underpants, BHS socks, jeans and a collection of T-shirts (collective noun: a sweatshop of). I have acne gel, sun cream and a toothbrush and toothpaste, because Kathleen’s not convinced that they sell toothcare products in Greece. I have novels by Henry Miller.
I don’t really know the two other boys. They’re a year – two? – above me, sixth-formers, Dean Gilliver and Paul Hudson. Need I say that Dean was called ‘Gilly’ and Paul ‘Huddy’? Of course not. These lads were from Accrington, a place whose idea of male nomenclature was first to shorten your surname and then soften this circumcision with an infantilizing Y. They were wary of me, interpreting my inability to speak boy-speak as swottish stand-offishness (surely not).
We arrive in Athens late at night and Kevin tells us to enjoy the stillness, says it won’t last, that Athenian traffic is like no other traffic on earth. We find the hotel, two rooms for four people. I instantly know how this is going to work.
And then something beautiful happens. Gilly pukes up. It’s the heat. Heat and excitement. And all the crap he’s been eating on the plane. It’s the kind of puke that begins life at the end of your toes and shoots up like a geyser, a fully-blown, Regan-in-The-Exorcist vomit. I offer to help look after him, and me and Huddy take it in turns to do the ‘Do you want water?’ ‘Are you all right mate?’ version of looking-after that is as close to compassion as adolescent boys are likely to come. We stay in the one room, the three of us.
My memory of that time is hazy, yet I do remember realizing that Dean being ill had given me a useful escape. If only he’d keep on puking for the next three weeks my holiday would be fine. He didn’t, of course. A few days later we are on a ferry on our way to Crete. Yet it seems to
me now that I’d worked out that two rooms / four people didn’t always have to be split down the middle. Or if it did, there may be ways of making it flexible. There was a chance of a way out.
The other two don’t seem to mind sharing with Kevin as much as I’d expected. Maybe it’s because he isn’t fucking them. Or maybe it is the two-year age gap, or the fact I’ve shown myself to be willing to help clean up Gilly’s puke; but when I suggest that we should take turns sharing with the Rev Kev they seem happy enough to do so.
And so is he. Voyeurism? The chance that one of them might . . . ? I don’t think so. I think that he enjoyed the proximity of young male flesh. He was vampiric. The sex wasn’t a consummation of his desire for adolescent boys – it wasn’t about pleasure, so much as diffusing that desire. He needed to keep us close, be around us, be one of us. I can easily imagine that his sharing a room with Dean, a shower with Paul, was as erotic (more?) to him as the cock-grabbing relief that he exacted from me when he could. The holiday was the real sex. The company of boys.
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‘So coldly sweet, so deadly fair.’
Lord Byron, The Giaour
My parents have kept the postcards I sent them. They became their postcards. And now I’ve kept the postcards they kept. How do I separate out what I was telling them from what was happening? What kind of record are they? Was I really ‘having a smashing time, eating well, walking miles and missing you’? Maybe I was. What else could I have said? ‘Trying to avoid sexual assault, cock sore, wish you were here’? I remember a walk amongst the ruins of Heraklion, and a weepy moment about St Paul. I remember baroque-style bread in a taverna in Knossos and a huge argument about us three boys staying out all night at a nightclub. I remember Gilly joking about how Cretan women had a better moustache than Kevin, and Huddy storming off because ‘not every fucking meal needs to go swimming in fucking olive oil’.
I was amazed that there were tavernas in churches and going to a wine festival in Rethymno; Kevin disgusted at us for getting pissed on free hooch. And there was washing underwear in the sink, sand in the bedsheets and every three or four days there were sexual assaults that I was now used to and the writing of postcards assuring Kath and Jack of what a brilliant time I was having.
Years later my lawyer will ask me for dates and places and the only thing I can tell him with absolute certainty is that it was the summer of 1981 and that I clearly remember walking up the Gorge of Santa Maria and hating the way he cleared his throat.
I’m in a hotel room, eloquently drunk on retsina and Coke. It’s just me and him. There’s a television in the corner. I’m explaining to him that Pere Ubu aren’t just a band, they’re a whole thing, a way of life. And I bet he didn’t know that it was the name of a French writer who . . . What? He did know. Oh, well I bet he didn’t know, because he doesn’t know everything . . . And that Tom Verlaine is a French writer but an American as well. And . . . No. I didn’t say that Verlaine was American. I said – if he’d just listen – that Tom Verlaine was American. No I am not drunk actually. I am telling you something here about ME. About my . . . thing, about Television about Tom Verlaine. Pop Music? No. It isn’t pop music. It’s music but it’s not pop music. It’s music that’s better than music. It’s not like all that shit that you pretend to like, Love grows up somebody’s nose lalalala . . . This is music that makes you want to fucking die. No, I don’t want to die. But yes, sometimes I do want to die. But that’s not the point. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that there’s this music – these people – and they’re like . . . just . . .
He clears his throat in that way that he has, as though he’s mildly distracted and has to compose himself for some tedious chore. It’s indulgent and mocking and irritated. He says something about grow up and fucking pop stars and no idea what I’m talking about.
And I say, quietly:
I hate you. Do you hear me? Hate. You. I can’t bear it. Any more. I can’t fucking bear it. When you . . . touch me. Don’t . . . OK? Just, don’t . . . fucking . . . Touch me. Ever. Again. I don’t. It’s. Please. Listen. Fuck. Not hate, but . . . I don’t. Can’t. If you’d . . . Fuck it. Fuck you. I want to . . . not. Do Not. Touch me. Ever, ever. Again . . . OK . . . ?
Ad Infinitum.
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‘“No,” said the priest, “you don’t need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary.” “Depressing view,” said K. “The lie made into the rule of the world.”’
Franz Kafka, The Trial
So, go on, ask me. I won’t blame you. I’ve asked myself often enough.
If . . . ?
If you could summon up the courage to say No to him on holiday, then why the hell couldn’t you do it earlier? Was it really that difficult?
(Look, Kevin, Father, I appreciate the attention you’re giving me, I really do. I enjoy our talks about books and appreciate those trips to the theatre. But this spunking on my stomach thing . . . ? Well, it’s just not doing it for me. I’m sure your cock’s fine and all that but if you could just keep it to yourself and let me keep my cock to myself then that would be just the ticket. I knew you’d understand. Thanks. What can we go and see next . . . ?)
I guess I could say what Julie says, that being with the other lads gave me confidence, safety in numbers. That Dean and Paul somehow made me realize that I too was a boy, not a mini-adult being indulged in a fantasy of equality within a dynamic that hid every shred of its structural inequality.
I was not his lover, best friend, soul mate, saviour, confidant, therapist and sex worker. I was a sixteen-year-old boy in the company of two eighteen-year-old boys and I had more in common with them than I did with him. I liked Gilly’s swearing, and agreed that ‘un-be-fucking-lieve-able’ was indeed a fucking unbelievable word. I loved the way he wouldn’t eat any Greek (‘foreign’) food in Greece and so survived on a diet of ‘mia patatas’, all the while spending his time yearning for Cornish pasties and sausage fucking rolls.
I loved Huddy’s singular commitment to the well-being of his bowels, the constant monitoring and detailed reports on the effect that ‘the change in the water’ might be having. When Kevin made a crack at how he must have had a difficult time being potty trained (‘Freud would have loved you!’), he came across as being sneering and supercilious, not the wise old bird he was styling himself as. (And did you really have to keep talking about the wine-coloured sea and Homer and how the Greeks didn’t have a concept for blue?)
So, yes, Julie’s right; in the company of boys I had a taste of what boy-hood could mean. And not mean. It wasn’t just bad poetry, Beckett and dread. It was also nightclubs and doing stupid voices. It was crappy discos on the beach and failing to chat up an American girl who’d never heard of Talking Heads (really?). And somehow within this shift of emphasis I saw the possibilities for a different story, an alternative version of myself.
In being away from school Kevin had surrendered his power-base. He never once said mass. Or prayers. There was no classroom, no office with Head written on it, no row upon row of easy-to-impress students. I remember wondering – for the first time – just how old he was. He had always been cagey about revealing his age, evading the question with a show of mock vanity which was nevertheless as real as his Brylcreemed hair or regularly trimmed moustache.
I had always thought of his age as being Grown Up – some netherworldish state between thirty and sixty wherein all numbers were pretty much the same. But in Crete I saw him as the forty-something man that he was, a man with sagging tits and a slight paunch.
Yet there’s another reason why I said no when I did, and it’s nothing to do with Gilly, or Huddy, or the legitimizing structures of power. It’s not even to do with Henry Miller novels, much though I’d like it to be.
It’s simply this: I’d had enough.
I’d had the kind of enough that drunks have when they finally get sober. The kind of enough that the victims of domestic violence have when they leave their violent
partners. Or smack addicts the smack. It’s an enough born out of weariness, helplessness and a despairing kind of hope. It’s an enough that says, ‘I don’t care how bad the results of stopping this are, they simply can’t be as bad as this carrying on.’ It’s the enough that makes people kill people. Or themselves.
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‘. . . she had had an increasing sense of unreality, as if her existence had been broken off like the reel of a film.’
Antonia White, Beyond the Glass
Kathleen’s relieved, if truth be told. She says, I wasn’t going to say anything but all them school trips were taking it out of you. And if he thinks that you need to concentrate more on your studies then that’s what you’ll have to do. And deciding not to choose religion as one of your A levels? Well, she can see the sense in that too. Religious study A level? It doesn’t seem quite right somehow. It isn’t as though you are going to be a priest (too good-looking, would be a waste, laugh) and, besides, there’s no need to study religion: you’re a Catholic. But what about Father O’Neill? That’s one of his subjects, isn’t it? Won’t he be disappointed? No need to bite my head off.
So politics instead, and ‘British Government’? What, all together? Fancy! Jack, our Graham’s going to be the next Denis bloody Healey.
And English, obviously; goes without saying. One day, luv, them books are going to see you right. They’re never wasted, time well spent. Just think, you could be the next . . . You could be an English teacher.
And history too?
You know what Mary McCarthy says, Mum? History, up to Henry VIII, is Catholic history, and, after that, it becomes anti-Catholic history.
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness Page 13