Where Did It All Go Right?

by Andrew Collins

  2. ‘King of the Cops’ by Billy Howard, a novelty record to the tune of Roger Miller’s ‘King of the Road’ which to my Yarwood-raised delight included impressions of all the main TV cops: Kojak, McCloud, Columbo. It reached Number Six in the charts, although I remember it as a Number One, likewise CW McCall’s ‘Convoy’, which in fact reached Number Two a month after Howard peaked. (Funny how nostalgia idealises even mundane points of commerce like chart positions in its quest to smooth all the corners.)

  3. A special public relations use of the adjective ‘brilliant’, meaning bloody awful. I hated rugby, it was a brute sport.

  4. I was angered recently to hear a link on Channel 4’s Top Ten TV Families (a strand I once wrote links for myself) stating that Butterflies was Nicholas Lyndhurst’s debut TV appearance. Bollocks. He played the title role in The Prince and the Pauper and we used to watch him every Sunday (not to mention The Tomorrow People, Heidi and Going Straight, in which he played Fletch’s 17-year-old son Raymond). Do people who make TV programmes about TV know nothing about TV?

  5. Hours of fun with this simple toy, a benign version of the pre-computer police identikit, with assorted eyes, ears and mouthparts to place on a selection of head shapes. No batteries required.

  6. ‘Libraries gave us power’ – opening line from the song ‘A Design for Life’ and family motto of the band who wrote it, Manic Street Preachers. My childhood was punctuated by regular trips to the town library, where I would crick my neck over the varnish-smelling shelves, coughs echoing round the place. I can’t say I read Marx and Engels at Northampton Library, but I did fill my head with natural history, drawing and the cinema. And the complete works of cartoonist Norman Thelwell. It’s power of a sort.

  7. ‘Make A Daft Noise For Christmas’ by The Goodies (probably my then-favourite band; Number 20, December 1975), ‘In Dulce Jubilo’ by Mike Oldfield (one of Mum’s, twinned with the softly spoken ‘On Horseback’; Number Four, December 1975), and ‘El Bimbo’ by Bimbo Jet, a French ‘male/female vocal/instrumental group’ according to the Guinness, though neither record nor artist mean a damned thing to me now (Number 12, July 1975).

  8. The Organisation of Anti-Mob (the ‘Mob’ being the staff of Abington Vale Middle School), a Molesworth-influenced ‘secret society’ conceived by myself and Milner at breaktime to amuse ourselves. We turned our paranoid fantasy into a file, a loose collection of cartoons based on the idea that we were on to their game and with various gadgets and cunning would expose the Mob as sadistic torturers of innocent pupils. I was agent ‘X’. Milner was ‘Z’ (I think). It was hugely creative fun.

  9. See note 3. Who was I trying to convince?

  10. Milner moved to Dorset that year, my first experience of losing a friend, although we kept in touch (my first pen pal) and I even visited him on the south coast. He started the Poole branch of O.O.A.M. He’s one of the only schoolfriends I have actually met in adult life; he now lives in Tunbridge Wells with wife and two daughters. His dad returned to shore from the banana boats and became harbourmaster at Poole.

  11. Yet another home-made comic, this time in conjunction with Nigel Wilson. He was very much the passenger, artistically.

  12. I rather ungratefully fail to mention the black and white portable telly in my otherwise exhaustive Christmas present list for 1975 – perhaps because it was a ‘joint’ present, ‘for all of us’. If you ask me, I think Mum and Dad were way too generous in giving us this luxury item, especially as it was kept in our bedroom. Simon and I knew that it was more than our lives were worth to watch it after lights-out, although we did later develop a method for doing so: with the sound turned completely down and with a squash racket poised to turn it off without getting out of bed if we heard footsteps (you pushed the knob in). I know.

  13. White plastic cube filled with multicoloured square notelets which became the O.O.A.M. File. Funky in those days, now given away by insurance companies and car dealerships with their logo on the side.

  14. These actually were paints.

  15. Got it wrong.

  16. As close as he could get to a green uniform at this early stage. Si was in the Cubs from age nine, then automatically became a Scout at 11 and waited until he was old enough to join the Royal Anglian Regiment Army Cadet Force (Salamanca Platoon) at 13.

  17. Actually The Jaws Log, published in 1975 and written by Carl Gottlieb. ‘It’s an easy read, energizing and with some of the zest of the movie’ – Pauline Kael. Not that I would know, as I didn’t see the movie until March 1977.

  18. The famous long hot summer of ’76 led to nationwide water shortages and a deluge of cracked-reservoir footage on the news – although I’m surprised to see measures in place as early as April. The only appearance of Northampton in the mighty Chronicle of the 20th Century comes on p. 1107: a photo of Pitsford Reservoir and its ‘parched, cracked surface’. Fame at last.

  19. All this talk of Warlords (guns, badges) derives from a comic called Warlord.

  20. Nickname of Paul Givelin, lithe younger brother of barrel-chested Andrew Givelin, sometimes referred to as Taff, as they were … Welsh. Dad was a bank manager.

  21. Boys next door, opposite side to the Edwards, the Hannas. Their dad John was an amateur photography enthusiast and once lent me a grown-up SLR camera.

  22. Monster Fun Comic, published by Fleetway. It ran for a total of just 72 issues from June 1975 to October 1976 when it was merged with Buster (subsumed being a more accurate word). Probably my favourite childhood comic, its stars were Kid Kong, Creature Teacher and Gums, the sublime Jaws spoof. Frankie Stein was ‘Editor-in-chief’, a refugee from the recently nixed Shiver & Shake, my second favourite comic.

  23. Kev Pilbrow, whose surname I have just this minute recalled by sheer force of memory, as he is logged simply as ‘Kevin’ when he joins our school mid-term in April ’76. His nickname was Nivek (geddit?). Within two weeks of his arrival Nivek was ferociously sick in maths ‘all over his book, desk, floor, briefcase and blazer – it was red’.

  24. Simon Suttle. I hope, in adult life, he is not obvious.

  25. A variant on the colloquial claim ‘bagsy’. This innocent game involved moving methodically through the toy section of ‘the club book’ (the Kays catalogue, the bible on Mum’s side of the family), taking it in turns to choose one item each per page. And that’s it. My heart aches in admiration for my younger self here: content merely to fantasise about what toys we might like to own, with no hope of ever getting them, and yet whiling away happy hours in the act of looking at pictures. It’s surely what Tiny Tim would have done, had the Cratchitts access to a club book.

  26. Plastic 1/32 scale figures that came attached to a series of fancy, collectable chopper bikes, possibly made by Matchbox – we named them Devlins after stunt-rider Ernie Devlin, star of the short-lived Hanna-Barbera cartoon Devlin, conceived solely to cash in on the Knievel dollar (and featuring the voice of Mickey Dolenz as Ernie’s mechanic brother Todd). I have just watched a QuickTime movie of the opening titles on a website devoted to H-B cartoons, maintained by an unhinged US enthusiast, as are all the best sites.

  27. Wheelies, after the famous driverless VW.

  28. What’s with the fickle attitude to Kim? One minute he’s in O.O.A.M., the next he’s in Coventry. I shall have to put it down to the vagaries of pre-teen loyalty, or the fact that Kim was an enormously clever and confident boy – perhaps it rubbed us up the wrong way with our deficiencies (although Jes was, I note, form captain this term). As the Anti-Kim Campaign hots up, drawings appear in my diary with the hapless doctor’s son dispatched in inventive ways: bodily encased in cement; sliced in two with a cutlass; pinned under an upturned bed of nails with myself, Angus, Jes and Nivek standing atop. Nothing worse than ignoring him actually took place in the real world. (Irrational this may have been, but I can assure you it had nothing to do with the colour of Kim’s skin. See Chapter 13 for more candid details on that score.)

  29. Paul Bush, the one with the cruel
name for Nigel Wilson. Became a huge pal of mine this year and stayed that way beyond the end of middle school, even though we went to different upper schools. The years 1976–78 were our salad days, characterised by supreme Pythonesque silliness, sleepovers and daft drawings (such as the off-colour bone-through-nose native he’s etched in my 1978 diary, followed by the rudimentary Wookiee). Paul, who sucked his thumb like I chewed my tongue, lived in a village outside Northampton, Earls Barton, but we managed to bridge the physical gap. His family had a summerhouse in their back garden (the kind that revolve, as seen in the climax to the great lost 1969 Dad’s Army episode ‘The Battle of Godfrey’s Cottage’), and he later introduced me to the pleasures of Peter Gabriel.

  30. Look I’m sorry. The War Papers were complete, loving reprints of newspapers from the Second World War, they came out weekly and no doubt stopped coming out after about two months, as is the way of all things that build up week by week into a collection you will treasure. The early editions gave away free repro posters, and the Hitler one, a famous portrait, went on our poster board. We pinned him up with the very finest historical intentions.

  31. Wyn Murphy; Welsh lad, another thumb-sucker.

  32. Two things about Mrs Moxham. One, she took me out of class regularly at this time in order to do ‘tests’ on me (no electrodes, just patterns and numbers in books) as part of a paper she was doing on ‘gifted children’. Fans! Autographs later etc. I was just happy to get out of lessons. Two, after Jonathan Bailey had an ‘epo’ (an epileptic fit) while we were on the school trip to France in 1978, a rumour went round that Mrs Moxham slept in the vacant bed in the boys’ dormitory after we had all gone back to sleep, and a boy called Keith claimed he had seen her undressing. Yeah, right.

  33. See Chapter 4.

  34. Pea-shooters? Where are we, Bash Street School?

  35. David Hemery actually, British athlete, famous for being one of the few white record-breakers at the 1968 Olympics.

  36. Britains made fine quality painted plastic die-cast figures, including a superb range of cowboys and Indians. All our zoo and farm animals were Britains.

  seven

  Supermousse

  In the 70s, foreign holidays broadened British culinary tastes.

  Frozen foods responded by giving families a widening

  range of recipes every day of the week without the need

  to find the ingredients or special skills to cook them.

  ‘50 Years of Frozen Foods’, the British Frozen Food Federation website

  What do I smell?

  I smell home cooking

  It’s only the river

  It’s only the river

  Talking Heads, ‘Cities’ (1979)

  THEY SAY YOU are what you eat, and of course they’re right. (They also say it’s not the end of the world, and you can’t always get what you want, and they’re right again.) As a kid growing up I was shepherd’s pie. Or, to qualify that, I was shepherd’s pie on Thursdays, which is when Mum made it and when I ate it. Here’s her recipe, handed down, we may assume, from more frugal times than the seventies:

  Line the bottom of a lightly greased oven-proof dish with slices of corned beef or ‘bully beef’ as Pap Collins would call it, recalling the war years, much to our delight. Spread with tomato ketchup or, if preferred, brown sauce. Cover with generous layer of pre-cooked, mashed potato. Drag fork across surface to create ridges, add knob of butter and bake until golden and sauce is bubbling.

  Mmm-mmmm, pie! The tomato sauce was the secret ingredient. Likewise, the currants in Nan Mabel’s famous treacle tart (again, nowhere to be found in any fancy recipe book – and don’t even think about sultanas). It was more of a treacle pie than a tart, in that it had a pastry lid, but what the hell, I’d eat one now if Nan were here to make it.

  I mention these two significant home-made dishes of my childhood – what do I smell? I smell home cooking – as a reminder to myself. Because it’s tempting to look back and see only packet food and processed crap on the Collins family dinner table of my youth. (With a box of those bright orange ‘breadcrumbs’ and some hundreds and thousands standing by.)

  I cling to the nostalgic conviction that we ate better in our pre-McDonald’s world than the kids of today, but it’s a close run thing. Given the choice, children of any era will instinctively choose the brightly coloured food with a picture of Mr Tickle on the side of the packet over the home-made organic flapjack in a Tupperware tub. I was alarmed recently to discover that kids today – the urban, Western variety at any rate – don’t even know how to open and eat a boiled egg. This ancient art is in danger of dying out, like lace-making or walking, gradually eroded to a stump by progress. Pretty soon, the only place you’ll be able to see the dipping of bread soldiers into a runny egg is one of those ‘living history’ folk villages. A young relative of mine once explained that he likes his eggs ‘flat’.

  Their pop music’s not as good as ours was either.

  But hold hard! What if my gastronomic superiority is misplaced? Sure, we had boiled eggs when we were yesterday’s kids – having them ‘flat’ was for special occasions and holidays only – but an egg was still as close as we sailed to healthy eating. A balanced meal for us meant something out of a box, something out of a tin and something out of a sachet. It was all stuff: baked beans, spaghetti hoops, luncheon meat, Dairylea, Cheese Singles, beefburgers, fish fingers, Sugar Puffs, Frosties, Golden Syrup, Rise & Shine,1 Angel Delight, Instant Whip, Dream Topping, Smash, Supermousse or a Mini-Roll.

  During our annual self-catering holiday in North Wales, 1976, I helpfully recorded many of the meals we ate. Nutritionists look away now.

  SUNDAY

  Beans on toast, Dimple, cup of tea, Mini-Roll, cheese + biscuits

  TUESDAY

  Fish fingers, rolls, fried potatoes, half bun, choc cake, cuppa tea

  WEDNESDAY

  Beans, sossies, pineapples, choc cake, cuppa

  THURSDAY

  Beans on toast, treacle tart, Melissa’s mousse!!2

  SATURDAY

  Chips, fish fingers, sossie, tomato sauce, Mini-Roll, Club, cuppa

  TUESDAY

  Beans, bacon, pineapple mousse

  A Dimple was a cake, in case it’s not ringing any bells. An individual chocolate-coated piece of chocolate sponge filled with chocolate cream (named solely to mock my face). Probably Lyons. Now bear in mind we were on holiday – holiday! it was supposed to be fun! – and then return to your first thought: what a lot of fried rubbish and shop-bought confection we subsisted on. A strike at the Heinz factory would have killed us off.

  We ate this food not because Mum was lazy or unimaginative, but because everybody did. It was the Seventies, the decade of convenience. New parents could still taste post-war austerity and wouldn’t wish it on their kids. They could still hear the ghostly clucking of the hens in the back yard as they threw their tins of ‘chunky chicken’ into the shopping basket. (The joke of chunky chicken, which came in a nondescript glutinous sauce and just needed warming through, was that it was more stringy than chunky, but it was bloody convenient.)

  Mum tried us on vegetables (including the harvest festival specimens Pap grew up his allotment), but to little avail. I wouldn’t even eat the kiddy-vegetables, carrots and peas. I was against them.3 They tasted suspiciously of … what they actually were, roots and seeds. I preferred my food processed, rendered, shaped, flavoured, enhanced, dehydrated and reconstituted. And when the food scientists finally got their tardy arses in gear and invented Ice Magic, a chocolate sauce that set when in contact with ice cream, I wanted some of that on top.

  I know for a fact that Mum and Dad ate vegetables.4 They were brought up that way. Dig for victory and all that. Plus, let us not forget, Mum and Dad were adults, with palates sophisticated by experience and dinner parties – in other words, they’d eaten gammon with a pineapple ring on top. If they didn’t at one point attend a fondue party, I’ll eat my hat.

  Presumably to make us
grateful for what we were, or weren’t, about to receive, Mum and Dad actually boasted about the dripping sandwiches they enjoyed as kids – just as I might now boast about drinking orange from a cup, rather than an individual carton with a bendy straw glued to the side. Mum even ate sugar sandwiches in her youth, and carried a yen for banana sandwiches into adult life, which was a bit unnecessary – we got the picture. We junior gourmets – Simon and Melissa were equally complicit in the great vegetable boycott – had already been spoiled by the individual Supermousse in a plastic jelly-mould-shaped tub, and the Dracula ice lolly (black, with ‘blood-red’ jelly filling). There was no going back for us. Only if there was a war would we eat dripping.

  I know Mum and Dad ate vegetables because we saw them do it at least once a week: namely at Sunday dinner. (You have to understand that ‘dinner’ means lunch where I come from, and ‘tea’ means dinner. Think of it as Sunday lunch if helps you picture us eating it in the middle of the day.) For Sunday dinner, while Mum and Dad tucked into sprouts and crinkle-cut carrots, peas and broad beans, I would have the meat, the potatoes, the gravy and the Yorkshire pudding, and that was it. Meat and one veg. And if truth be told, it was only the meat I was interested in: I would methodically (and annoyingly) eat everything else first, as if ticking off chores, saving the beef/lamb/pork/chicken till last. Sometimes – if Mum was feeling munificent – I was allowed to put it between two slices of bread and margarine. (Try saying ‘melted hydrogenated vegetable oil’ without saying, ‘Mmmmmmm’.)

  Sunday was the only completely traditional dinner we ate in a normal week, with everyone present in the same sitting, and no getting down from the table until Dad was finished. (Dad, perhaps aware that it was his job, ate loads more than anybody else, including the pieces of fat, skin, gristle and rind we’d wimpily left on our plates – the time-honoured ‘best bit’. Well, it’s hungry work in the police.) The reward for our obedience and for not sitting on our legs at the table would be some fabulous Sunday dessert, such as a trifle – made by Mum’s own fair hand but using reassuring, packet-based ingredients: Swiss roll, jelly, tinned fruit, custard – or, when the convenience food industry really started to get into its stride in the mid to late Seventies, packet cheesecake (which was so easy to put together with its numbered astronaut sachets, Dad sometimes made it).