I wander back to my rabbit hutch on campus and go past the Arts Building where my tutor keeps saying how we are all unwitting victims of the Romantics and how their emphasis on spontaneity has made us enslaved to a spurious idea of authenticity, and how ‘authenticity’ is no more authentic than any other conceit and how we need to appreciate that ‘artifice’ doesn’t mean artificial.
And I can’t remember if I wondered then as I wonder now about what twentieth-century English Lit would be like if, instead of all that phallic rain pounding and pounding into the thirsty loins of an awaiting mother earth, David Herbert Lawrence had been repeatedly nonced by his headmaster? Or if the complaint that Portnoy was so famous for was that every time a woman touched his dick, he flinched as though someone had tasered his groin? And if Henry Miller’s celebration of his thrusting Self would in any way be diminished if his couplings with Anaïs Nin had been shot through with the memories of a priest’s moustachioed mouth bearing down on him from a single-bedded room in Blackburn?
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‘Every day is like survival . . .’
Culture Club, ‘Karma Chameleon’
I return to Accrington for Christmas. It feels like one of those spooky stories, an episode of The Twilight Zone, where a place has been transformed into an exact replica of itself, the inhabitants all replaced by lookalikes. It wasn’t just me; something really had happened, something so deeply unimaginable that hats were still being eaten as I stepped off the coach.
It had happened on the 9th of June 1983 to be exact, a time during which I was lost to a regime of A-level revision. More exactly it had happened during the early hours of the 10th, when, after six recounts, and by a majority of twenty-one votes, the returning officer announced that the new Member of Parliament to represent the Hyndburn and District Constituency was one Joseph Kenneth Hargreaves (Conservative).
A Tory. In Accrington: a place that was such a Labour stronghold that, so the joke went, the Party could (and often had) put a goat up for election and still be assured of victory.
And not just any Tory. Ken Hargreaves was a Conservative who was loud and proud of his Catholic values.
And not just any Catholic. A Catholic whose Catholicism had been forged in the loving embrace of St Mary’s College Blackburn, my alma mater, home to my very own alma abusive pater.
I know without asking that Jack and Kath have voted for him. I know it the same way I know they will be going to midnight mass, or that we’ll be having fish on Friday; or that my mum will cross herself whenever she passes the church, or make sure her headscarf is on when she goes inside. In their mind, Jack and Kath hadn’t voted Tory, they had voted Catholic.
And as if a Tory MP in Accrington wasn’t enough, I go home to find that a phone has been installed. For the last ten weeks I have had to phone Aunty Mary (remember, Graham: no need to say ‘my’) on a Saturday, 12.30. Kath will be there for her dinner. The problem was that Mary never really got the pips-money-talking equation. She’d answer the phone as though she had only just discovered it, baffled and suspicious, as though there was no connection between the fact of its ringing and her having picked it up and holding it in her hand. She’d be amazed to hear my voice, even though she knew that I’d be ringing, and would then launch into a series of non-sequiturs about her dermatitis and the weather forecast and ‘her up the road’ and did I still watch Star Trek? By the time Mary’s monologue was finished I would have thirty seconds left to fib to Kath that I was eating well and to discover that no one had died.
So a phone-owning household we became, though not much of a phone-using household.
I think that my parents found something disreputable about spending time on the phone. It wasn’t a medium for pleasure or friendship, it was an unpleasant necessity, like the first-aid box. It was kept on a shelf in the hallway as you came in, away from the living space, private, but a privacy that was always on the verge of being interrupted. Any call that lasted more than two minutes would bring Jack’s head round the living room door and he’d pointedly look at his watch. I tried explaining to him that it wasn’t costing him anything if people rang me, but he either didn’t believe me, or this wasn’t the point. The point was, I think, that he didn’t like the blurring of categories; talking that wasn’t circumscribed, the intrusion into his home of other voices.
Yet their modernity was not confined to the buying of a telephone. Keep walking down the hallway and go into the living room, look at the rug which used to serve as my stage when I put on my air-guitar concerts, look at the three-piece suite that my parents had bought on the never-never (which is why, if anyone asked who the man was who came round on a Friday collecting money, I’d to tell them it was the man from the Pru). Look at the colour telly that we got in the late seventies because Jack ‘liked them nature documentaries’. Look underneath the telly and you’ll see a silver rectangular box. On its front is a black panel with small grey buttons which control the numbers that are displayed above it. There is a small slide door that reveals tiny sockets and tinier diagrams on its inside that say things like ‘tracking’. Push a button on the panel and a metallic mouth shoots up out of the box, announcing itself with a no-nonsense Ta-Da. It is a Panasonic (I think) VCR Top Loader, rented from Ken Clegg (because buying was too big a risk). It is a time machine.
Here was proof that there would be a cure for cancer, that all them moon landings weren’t so daft after all, that the working class had indeed become cosseted by the technological indulgences of the modern age. Kath’s argument was both pragmatic and saintly. She wasn’t that bothered about the telly herself: so long as she watched Corrie and Emmerdale and maybe Crossroads. But you and your dad were always squabbling, always falling out about what films to watch. Now it was simple. Take it in turns, watch one, record the other. And so it came to pass, Jack would watch Cagney assault women with grapefruits, and I would watch Isabelle Huppert smoke and stare out of windows.
What the bloody hell’s going on here . . . ?
It’s called a jump cut. It’s a way of disrupting temporal linearity and . . .
Well, it’s giving me a bloody headache. Record it and let’s watch White Heat.
White Heat is on tape. We can’t record this and watch White Heat at the same time. Stick with this, there’s only another two hours and twenty minutes to go . . .
The corner shop now has a video section; the man on the market who used to sell me my James Herbert books now sells second-hand videos: ‘Classic Movies’, ‘Action’, ‘War’, ‘Westerns’ and a category for anything arty and/or mildly pornographic: ‘Foreign’. I go foraging for Kath, return home armed with dramas featuring Bette Davis and her broken heart, or Lana Turner breaking hearts, or Barbara Stanwyk pretending not to have a heart at all.
Having a video makes us feel bohemian. On the weekends we now have breakfast with Dana Andrews or a late lunch with Linda Darnell. Last night’s too-late-to-stop-up-for-movie becomes the next day’s guilty pleasure. There’s a frisson of scandal at closing the curtains during daylight: it is, as Kath remarks, a good job that people know us. Otherwise they’d think we were getting up to all sorts.
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‘Only two English words rhyme with culture, and these, as it happens, are sepulture and vulture.’
Raymond Williams, Culture Is Ordinary
I thought I’d chosen my moment well: the day after Boxing Day, the third Christmas dinner in a row, Jimmy Stewart waiting for us to stop him from killing himself. It’s something I’d been building up to saying since I got home, something that was obvious I should have said after the first three weeks at Warwick. It would have been fairly easy not to say anything, to simply do it and tell them afterwards. But, as they always reminded me, they’d raised me right, and being raised right meant that if I was going to do it, I needed to tell them first.
I take a deep breath and say what I always say when I say something that I know will make them worry. I say, I don’t want you to worry. But I’ve been thinking .
. . I want to change my course to Film Studies. I’m not sure if . . .
Someone has just told Kath that God does not exist. Worse, He does exist but has decided that her last eight years of sacrifice have been worthless, that all the ambitions she had for her son – a teacher! – are being thrown away because he wants to be an actor, or a director, or some such bloody nonsense. And it’s her fault, all them hours spent watching Joan Crawford. She bloody knew it.
Jack is more circumspect. He tells me that it’s my decision, obviously, but that I should know that there’s lots of people all trying to ‘make it’ in film; he has a cousin (really? Who?) who trained to be an actor down in London (years, it took him) but it didn’t work out and now he’s doing (horror) odd jobs, living from hand to mouth.
If there’s one thing guaranteed to enliven any family Christmas, it’s a lecture on cultural relativism from your nineteen-year-old son, the son who’s just told you he wants to walk away from the chance to be an English teacher (and all them holidays). I tell them it’s not about wanting to work in the film industry, it’s about looking at (did I really say ‘reading’?) films in much the same way I’d been looking at books (did I really say ‘texts’?), and that anyway that distinction between popular and literary (please tell me I didn’t say ‘a hierarchy of’) cultures was not one that I found useful.
Apparently it was a distinction that Jack and Kath had found useful. They knew that there were things that you liked on the one hand and things that were good for you on the other. Film may have given them untold pleasures over the years, fed their rites of courtship, offered them a medium through which they could map their inner lives. But there was one thing it hadn’t done, and that was to get either of them a decent job. Just the opposite, hadn’t going to the movies been a way of escaping, getting up to all sorts, doing something you shouldn’t? Weren’t they about sex and smoking and this thing called glamour, glamour being a thing, like playing the trombone, that was fine to look at but not something you’d want in your home.
Literature – English Literature – on the other hand was noble, truthful and wise. They believed this without having read any. Because they hadn’t read any. It seemed that Leavis was going to be more difficult to shake off after all. Literature was life, and books were wonderful. Whether you liked them or not.
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‘. . . it’s not at all unusual for a manual worker to study so hard in his spare time, and make such good progress, that he’s excused from practising his trade, and promoted to the intelligentsia.’
Thomas More, Utopia
I’m reading Dante that Christmas, continuing my state-funded whistle stop tour through the European Epic. I view my fellow Accringtonians through his descriptions of the damned, joyously casting them into whatever circles of Hell I see fit. I wander around the market with a bag of broken biscuits and bemoan ‘these wretches, who had never truly lived’. I eye-up passers-by for tell-tale Hargreaves-voting tendencies and sentence them to be stung by hornets for eternity, maggots collecting in the pus.
Not uncoincidentally, I’m working in a factory that Christmas; a two-week, six-days-a-week, twelve-hours-a-day gig at Asda dairies.
At one end of the production line stands a burly man unpacking boxes of cartons of milk and juice onto a conveyor belt. Along the length of the belt stand half a dozen women sorting out the juice from the milk, getting rid of any damaged cartons and putting them back into the right boxes. I stand at the other end and seal up each box with brown gaffer tape and stack them onto a nearby pallet.
Sorry, were those last three sentences boring? Did they sound flat and monotonous as though they were trying to just get the job done and move on to something more interesting? Do you want to read them over and over and over again from seven in the morning to seven at night with a half-hour break for lunch and a company-bought fish and chips tea that you got in lieu of proper overtime?
Brecht once said that putting a factory on stage will tell you nothing about the nature of capitalism. He’s right. Factories are the last place you want to be if you want to understand capitalism. They’re noisy for a start, so you can’t really think. And you can’t have conversations with people; they’re too busy and, besides, they hate you. They hate you because you’re taking a holiday in their misery. And when you’ve finished working you don’t want to talk about working. You want to go to the pub. And talk about other stuff, exciting stuff, like shagging, drinking, and fighting.
My diary entries about Asda make me cringe more than those about sex. They say things like:
‘These people have to do this job all the time’ (with ‘all the time’ underlined so emphatically that the pen has scratched through the paper)
And:
‘Why does everyone there not go mad?’ (with six question marks underscoring my outrage)
I’m reading critics like Terry Eagleton and learning about how capitalism alienates us from ourselves, reduces its workers to an abstraction. I think my foreman had been reading him too because he kept saying I ‘was a good, safe pair of hands’, as though he was employing my hands, and they were nothing to do with me. Which he was. And they weren’t.
After work I go to the Railway, sit there in my overalls, performing my version of the working man in his scruff. I see Gary and Sara, who tease me that they’re going to start a paper sale at my factory, a special edition of Socialist Worker calling for a general strike to get Asda’s fish and chips for tea policy to include portions of mushy peas. I tell them about Dante’s Inferno and how there’s a section in which middle-class lefties are forced to explain dialectical materialism to haggard old men sat on toilets reading copies of the Sun who explain that said lefties have never done a bloody day’s work in their life.
We’re all three of us trying to be OK with each other, which is probably a sign that we’re not. No mention of religion or abusive priests or drunken rows that we regret. They’re no-go areas and I can hear their silence straining the laughter, making our jokes sound more barbed than they’re meant to be. Gary’s a student himself now, a place at Ruskin, a trade-union college down in Oxford. Sara’s off to Sheffield, going to train to be a mental-health nurse, a job she will be great at. In a few months the miners will go on strike, an event that will bring us back together in lots of ways, and wrench us apart in others.
I leave the pub and call Lisa from a phone box on Blackburn Road; get her to call me back. We don’t talk about me freezing every time her hand touches my genitals, about how I have no more control over it than I do my knee jerking when a nurse used to tap my knee with a toffee hammer. We don’t talk about how me going down on her has become a way of us not fucking and how we both collude in the idea that this has something to do with feminism. We don’t talk about the fact that women need sex as well as men, but maybe need it for different reasons and/or in a different way. Or that the way in which heterosexual women need sex is bound to be folded into ideas about how heterosexual men need sex. And I definitely don’t say, I’m sorry but I’m too damaged to have a girlfriend, even a non-girlfriend girlfriend. Or I need a girlfriend because I’m damaged. And that’s probably the worst reason to have one.
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‘Pictures came and broke your heart’
The Buggles, ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’
Hayley Mills has seen Horst Buchholz shoot his wife. He’s just back from sea and he suspects – no, knows – that she’s been having it away with another man. They’ve been arguing. In Polish; having a right row. We can’t speak Polish but we know it’s not good. Hayley is watching through the letter box, horrified, fascinated.
‘Bitch, bitch, bitch!’ His missus (Yvonne Mitchell, moving between hysteria and contempt) is not having any of it. ‘Yes, and your bitch has had enough of it. Crrrraaaaawling every time you come back to her. No more. Sailors shouldn’t have real women to play with . . .’
Then, bang, bang, bang. Dead. Hayley is looking. She has some gun caps in her hand, been given them to p
lay with by her auntie. She drops them: bang. She needs to hide; there, a cubbyhole. Where Bruno has hidden his gun.
Jack presses the pause button whilst Kath goes to make some tea. And tea means biscuits, and biscuits mean fags. Do you like it? (I do like it). Tiger Bay. We saw it when it first came out, ’58. No it wasn’t, ’59.
Re-start. Best thing we ever got. Amazing what they can do now.
Hayley is going to be late for mass. She’s an altar boy; even though she’s a girl. She puts the gun in her cassock, shows it to the snot-nosed boy standing next to her in the choir. He’s impressed, starts singing stupid words to the hymn: ‘chocolate spread’ instead of ‘righteousness’.
Hayley is dynamite. Dynamite wrapped in cotton wool. She is pitched perfectly between angelic innocence and calculated devilry. She’s an angel with a murder weapon, but she does it so nonchalantly that you wonder why all angels don’t carry round loaded revolvers in their cassocks.
Kath is beaming. Her boy is home for Christmas. Jack has even done his bit, whipped the cream (strong wrists), washed up. We’re settled down.
Kath says, ‘Remember when you were on the altar?’ She’s been doing this ever since I got home, flights of nostalgia prompted by whatever we’re watching. It’s a version of a thing she used to do when I was a kid, which was to address strangers by talking loudly to me. If we were in a supermarket and someone pushed in, she’d say, ‘Some people have no bloody manners, do they, luv?’ And if the person said anything in return she would haughtily tell them that she hadn’t been talking to them, she’d been talking to me.
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness Page 22