The Man In The Seventh Row

by Brian Pendreigh

  Roy looked out of the window and ticked off different kinds of cows in the 'I Spy the Countryside' book that his father bought him every year at Waverley Station before they set off. His little brother Stephen looked at the pictures in his comic and told everyone he was going to be sick. He always was, somewhere near Drem.

  North Berwick became a second part-time home, for two weeks every year. The family was not adventurous, though they were more adventurous than the previous generation. Roy's grandparents had holidayed at Portobello, not Morgan the pirate's haven in Central America, but a seaside resort just three miles and a half-hour bus ride from Edinburgh city centre. Roy's father asserted his independence when he got married and turned his back on Portobello in favour of North Berwick. He liked North Berwick and they went back every year for ten years. Ordinary, lower middle-class families did not go abroad in the Sixties. There was something safe and certain about North Berwick's red and white and grey stone houses and its gardens of green and red, pink and yellow.

  'North Berwick suits me,' Roy's mother would say, as if the resort somehow complemented the blue of her eyes and she did not want to risk the colour clash that another resort might present.

  Dave and Doreen Batty would have disputed any accusation that they went to the same place every year. Although they went to North Berwick every year, they always went to a different guest house, sometimes on the east bay, sometimes on the west and sometimes in one of the newer streets up behind the town centre, staying with landladies called Mrs Brown, Mrs Hood and Mrs McGregor, middle-class, middle-aged women, whose sacred mission was to provide accommodation for paying guests and ensure no one ever learned their Christian names. Perhaps they did not have Christian names. Even their husbands would refer to them as Mrs Brown, Mrs Hood and Mrs McGregor.

  'Did Mrs McGregor mention that tea is served in the television lounge, so Sarah can lay out the tables for breakfast?' Mr McGregor inquired. 'No? Ah well then. I'm sure she'll be doing just that.'

  A TV lounge seemed an appropriate setting for tea. It should have been served with something beginning with V ... tea and vegetables. But it was served with biscuits so perhaps they should have called it the TB lounge. They were always Rich Tea biscuits.

  Bedrooms smelled of mothballs, and halls and stairs were heavy with silence, punctuated at regular intervals by the awakening of a stately old grandfather clock on the landing and shattered three times a day by the hammering of a gong as dramatic and significant as an air-raid siren. Children would congregate at the foot of the stairs prior to mealtimes and Mrs Whichever would choose one to thump the brass instrument with the little cloth-covered baton. Like the half-naked man at the beginning of the Rank films. Bong. Roy Batty Films Presents ... 'Mince and Tatties' ... A Meat and Two Veg Production.

  Each summer the Batty family would deliver their stiff square suitcases to their new guest house, meet the new Mrs Landlady, change Stephen out of his soiled clothes and wander through the town centre before unpacking, just to see what had changed. Nothing ever changed except the programme at the Playhouse. It normally changed three times a week, but films might play for anything from a single night to a whole week, in which case Roy would feel short-changed unless he saw two or three double bills in the other week of the holidays. He fidgeted impatiently while his parents discussed meteorological trivia with Mrs B&B and then ran ahead of them to see the display cabinets at the entrance to the red sandstone cinema in the middle of the High Street, just beside St Andrew's Church, the most prominent building in the town. Apart from a few Disney films and TV spin-offs like Batman and Dr Who and the Daleks, the titles were unfamiliar to Roy. The Lion of St Mark and The Vengeance of She suggested more excitement than Doctor in Love and something called Sex and the Single Girl, which sounded really soppy. Anything with 'adventure', 'guns' or 'swords' in the title would be considered reliable, anything with 'love' was deeply dubious. Roy was not sure what 'sex' was, but he knew it had something to do with love. He relied on the posters and lobby stills to give him a true taste of what he might expect in the coming days. The Lion of St Mark promised swords, costumes, pirates and action, while The Vengeance of She offered adventure, danger and exotic settings.

  Bon Voyage. What was a bon voyage? The pictures did not give much away, just a lot of people standing around. He had to dash round to the side of the building where there was another display cabinet with details of what was 'coming soon'. Cowboys. Four armed men in a line in a dusty, deserted street. Four men who clearly meant business.

  Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, read Roy.

  His father confirmed that it looked good, as if it needed confirming. The title was confirmation enough.

  'It's the story of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday,' said his father, 'so it seems like a suitable film to see on holiday. Doc Holliday. Ha-ha-ha. And it's directed by the man who made The Magnificent Seven, John Sturges.'

  His father was unusual in those days in that he not only enjoyed westerns and could name the stars, but could name the directors as well. He even went to see foreign films at the Cameo cinema and the film guild. Roy's mother went to the cinema once a week on a Wednesday with Betty, a friend from her single days, poring over the Evening News after tea to choose their film, largely on the basis of who was in it. Roy found out much later that Betty had gone out with his father before he met his mother. But obviously Roy's father could never have married Betty, otherwise she would have become Betty Batty.

  At the Seaview Guest House, or maybe the Buena Vista, named after Walt Disney's distribution company no doubt, Roy's parents unpacked and folded away the clothes in the chest of drawers or hung them up in the heavy mahogany wardrobe, while Roy wrote the names of films on squares of paper and positioned them beneath his 'Monday-Tuesday', 'Wednesday-Thursday' and 'Coming Soon' signs. He took up half the bedroom floor with his display. Gunfight at the OK Corral quickly progressed into the 'Monday-Tuesday' slot and he drew a picture of four men with guns and cowboy hats to accompany the title and heighten public anticipation. And, sure enough, he saw it on the second Monday and would have seen it again on the Tuesday too if he could have persuaded his father to take him. Roy had to content himself with re-enacting the film himself on the Tuesday, singing the catchy theme tune 'O. K. Corr-al; O.K. Corr-al' and attempting to accentuate the natural dimple in his chin to make him look more like Kirk Douglas.

  The Batty family spent most days of their holiday on the beach, changing into swimsuits in one of the decrepit bathing huts that stood in limping file along the west bay. Dad would spend most of the morning erecting windbreaks while Mum complained the wind was coming from the other direction. Roy pretended he was Robinson Crusoe, whose adventures he followed on the black and white television serial with the wonderful music that would suddenly sweep across the lonely island, or Robert Newton, hopping along on one leg in Treasure Island, or a French foreign legionnaire in Beau Geste, which he had watched on the television with his grandfather, and the windbreaks would become an Arab encampment. Roy was going to join the Foreign Legion when he grew up. Either that or be an artist. At noon his father would take the windbreaks down again and store them in the hut. Spades and buckets were shoved under the hut's bench seat, swimming costumes taken off.

  They set off across the putting green in the direction of the Seaview or Buena Vista, Sergeant Dad leading the way with the lemonade, biscuits, newspapers, paperbacks, suntan lotion, half-written postcards, boxes of tissues, box camera and other essential supplies, bundled into a deep tartan shopping bag. He might seem rather old and plump for a special mission behind enemy lines. His fluffy white beard more readily brought to mind Santa Claus than Sergeant Stryker, John Wayne's character in The Sands of Iwo Jima. But the jolly appearance masked a ruthless and highly experienced professional, a trained killer, nicknamed The Butcher. Yards behind him came the tall, thin figure of Corporal Mum in black glasses, which suggested either a serious Mob connection or a serious eye deficiency, for there was no sun about. Ten ya
rds behind her came Private Roy Batty, carrying a machine gun, cunningly disguised as a rolled-up windbreak. Behind him a tiny figure was crouched, with an inflatable rubber duck around his middle. Private (Second Class) Stephen would not last a week here. If Roy's father had known of the game Roy was playing in his mind he would have suggested Stephen was a sitting duck.

  But Roy was the only one who knew what was going on. Roy Batty was young, but he was the real hero in the platoon. Ever alert, he scanned the putting greens for Japanese soldiers. Suddenly he dropped to the ground, with one arm flinging an unseen grenade in the air. 'Kah-pooom,' it went and sent two yellow-bellied Japs into the air. At the same time a fat man in a white Fred Perry shirt sent a one-foot putt five feet past the hole. Private Roy Batty smiled at him and hurried after the NCOs.

  After lunch of mince and tatties, the family might go to see the stuffed birds in the poky wee museum in School Road or visit the trampolines in the Lodge Gardens. Occasionally Roy and his father might climb the Law, the hill behind the town, or go to Fidra or the Bass Rock, where Messerschmidt-gannets dived-bombed their patrol boat with millimetre accuracy. They would meet Mum and Stephen back at the harbour and buy ice-creams, a plain slider for Dad, an oyster for Mum, a cone for Stephen and, for Roy, a black man: a slider with soft nougat built in.

  It was just a question of filling in time until tea at 5.30 and then Roy and his father, and in later years the whole family, could be off to the Playhouse at the back of six to witness She's vengeance or Dr Who's battle with the Daleks. It mattered little that the battle for the future of the universe had begun just as the Batty family sat down to eat. As often as not, they would arrive in the middle of the film, sit through the trailers, a newsreel, a cartoon, adverts, and a supporting feature or a short with a title like 'Looking In On the Royal Navy', 'This is Jordan' or 'Exciting Times in Milton Keynes New Town', and when the excitement in Milton Keynes died down they would see Dr Who renew battle with the sinister exterminators or She revenge herself.

  The Batty family were still at their mince and tatties when Sean Connery announced himself to the Playhouse audience as 'Bond, James Bond'. By the time Roy and his father got there Bond had arrived in the Caribbean, from which Ursula Andress was emerging, with a knife and some sea-shells, and little else.

  Roy was already half-way up the stairs by the time his father bought the tickets at the little booth in the middle of the foyer.

  'An adult and a child for the circle, please.'

  The circle was more expensive than the stalls. The cashier pressed the appropriate buttons and two tickets, like snakes' tongues, shot out from a slot in the surface in front of her. An usherette tore their tickets in two and shone a light on the carpet to guide them to their seats. Roy stumbled after her and his father, his eyes already fixed to the screen.

  'That's Sean Connery; he's from Fountainbridge,' whispered Roy's father, as they sat down, as if the information that Bond was a neighbour of theirs was all Roy needed to know to make sense of the story.

  Watching the second half of films first was by no means a practice peculiar to the Batty family. Every few minutes they were disturbed by others whose schedules were dictated by the landladies of the town rather than the manager of its cinema. Disney cartoons were easy to pick up half-way through and there was no difficulty differentiating good from evil in Dr Who and the Daleks: the baddies looked like giant pepperpots and had a vocabulary limited pretty much to the single word 'exterminate'. And in Dr No, shortly after Roy and his father came in, Dr No explained his plans to Bond in detail, as Bond villains are curiously wont to do, enabling the Battys to catch up on the plot and Bond to undermine the cold and ruthless German-Chinese half-breed with the false hands. Roy subsequently had to sit through a western before he got his first sight of Bond through a gun barrel to the sound of Monty Norman's twangy theme tune and saw Bond's cleverest trick of all, throwing his hat onto the hat-stand in Miss Moneypenny's office, something Roy would practice for hours.

  Ursula Andress emerged from the sea once again with her knife and her shells, Bond introduced himself once more and Dr No's men strafed the beach.

  'This is where we came in,' Roy's father said.

  Roy said nothing, his eyes glued to the fire-breathing dragon that pursued them along the beach.

  'Time to go,' his father said.

  'Just another five minutes,' Roy pleaded as the evil Chinaman went over the plot one more time.

  'Come on,' his father said, rising from his seat. 'I want my poke of chips.'

  They always bought chips after the film and ate them as they walked back to the guest house. Roy liked the little crispy ones that had a habit of sinking to the bottom of the steaming poke, and he relished licking his greasy fingers clean of salt and vinegar when the chips were finished.

  Then one year something terrible happened. It was 1969, July 1969. Dave and Doreen Batty had decided to go somewhere different for their summer holidays, not just a different guest house, but a different place entirely, farther than anyone in the family had ever gone for their holidays before. They went all the way to the west coast and got a ferry over the Firth of Clyde to the seaside resort of Millport on the island of Great Cumbrae, where they stayed in the guest house of a Mrs McDonald. It started off alright. Roy imagined he was secret agent James Bond, travelling in disguise as a holiday-maker, to investigate what was happening on this strange unfamiliar island, run by the cold and ruthless Mrs McDonald and her sidekick, a German-Chinese dwarf using the unlikely alias of Mr McDonald.

  It was not long before Roy had uncovered the extent of the villainy – a town hall was posing as a cinema and, worse, much worse, it was showing only two feature films in the entire fortnight. Ring of Bright Water was a lovely story of a man and his pet otter Mij, with a very sad ending.

  'Did the otter really die, Mummy?' Stephen asked.

  'No, it's only a story,' said his mother.

  'But it's a true story,' said Roy. 'So it must have died.'

  Stephen looked as if he might burst into tears. 'But not the otter we saw in the film,' said his mother. 'It didn't die.'

  'It was just acting,' said his father.

  'You mean it wasn't really an otter at all?' asked Stephen, his eyes widening.

  But the film that Roy really wanted to see was the other one showing. A war film. Men in combat uniform with grenades on their belts and machine guns in their hands spitting fire into the blackness like the dragon in Dr No. One, two, three, four, five, six, Roy counted; seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve of them. In a line like the heroes in The Guns of Navarone. Lee Marvin, one of his favourite actors, was at the front, his features carved from rock. He had seen Marvin in the western The Professionals in North Berwick the previous year. He was tough. And by his side was Charles Bronson from The Magnificent Seven. With Marvin and Bronson at the forefront twelve should be enough to defeat Jerry. 'Damn them or praise them,' the poster said. 'You'll never forget The Dirty Dozen.' And Roy never did forget. He never forgot them, but he never saw them either. 'The Dirty Dozen,' the poster said, 'X.'

  'What does X mean, Dad?'

  'You have to be sixteen to see it,' said his father.

  'How do you mean you have to be sixteen, Dad? 16 what?'

  'Years old. You have to be sixteen years old to get in.'

  'Why?'

  'I don't know. Maybe they think there's too much fighting in it for children.'

  'But there was lots of fighting in The Magnificent Seven and I got to see that.'

  'Maybe there's too much blood in this.'

  'But I see loads of blood every day. You're a butcher. I really want to see it. It's the film that I most want to see ever.'

  'But they won't let you in.'

  'Who won't let me in?'

  'It's the law.'

  'You could tell them I'm sixteen, but I'm very small for my age because I'm a dwarf.'

  'No. You can see it when you are sixteen.'

  'It won't be on the
n.'

  'It'll come back.'

  'OK,' said Roy, but he sounded most uncertain. He reckoned no one ever stopped Lee Marvin going to see a film he wanted to see. That was why he was leader of the Dirty Dozen.

  Roy's father went off one night with another man from the guest house, without saying where he was going, but Roy knew. Neither Roy nor his father made any mention of dirty soldiers at breakfast next morning. Roy's father neither damned nor praised them. The family crunched their toast and said nothing. Roy looked at his lap and did not see the other guest approach their table until it was too late.

  'Me and your dad saw a great film last night, Roy. You would have loved it.'

  Roy could feel the tears well up in his eyes, but he did not cry, because men don't cry.

  It was the next day, when they were on the beach, that Roy finally asked his father to tell him the story of The Dirty Dozen, deciding that hearing the plot second-hand was better than nothing. His father told him how Lee Marvin was an army officer who recruits twelve desperate criminals from a military prison for a secret mission behind enemy lines. The mission is a success, though nearly all the men are killed.

  'Was Lee Marvin killed?' asked Roy.

  His father assured him that Lee Marvin survived.

  'Was Charles Bronson killed?' And over the next few days he renewed the conversation to clarify various details until he could recount the story better than many people who had seen the film.

  Roy's father was of an age to have served in the Second World War, but the Army turned him down because he was asthmatic. Listening to his father tell the story of The Dirty Dozen Roy imagined he was recounting his own war experiences.

  'He doesn't like to talk about it much,' he told his friend Jumbo at school as they exchanged Commando comics, 'but my father was in the war. He dropped into France and had to kill some top Jerries. Most of his men were killed, but he got back alright.'