Thursday, 13 October
Usual lessons. No homework. Before Carl mended his wooden skateboard and gave it to me, he wrote off to the company. Today, they sent him back some new wheels so he gave them to me. Now my board really goes.
Wednesday, 19 October
Played hockey. In the game I came tearing down the wing, burning up the track. I did a 20mph hot shot which burned through the air at the speed of sound and tore through the back of the net and made an eight foot crater in the grass bank. To put it in a nutshell, I didn’t play very well.23
Monday, 24 October
This morning I went round Watto’s and we had an ace H0/00 war game. I had another war game with Si in the afternoon. Watto gave me an unfinished Buffalo Amphibian H0/00 Airfix model. He also lent me a Mad Don Martin book. It is brill. Dad went to London. Uncle Brian baby-sitted while Mum went out.
Tuesday, 25 October
This afternoon we went to Auntie Margaret’s new big house.24 They have got a baby retriever called Jack. He is really nice. Saw Charlie’s Angels wiv a new Angel – Kris.
Wednesday, 2 November
Another stupid power cut. For two and a half hours. Power cuts are bum. So is Simon. He keeps playing with this loony friend of his: Paul McBride. What an idiotic pouf.
Monday, 14 November
Nothing happened today. Well obviously something happened but it’s so boring it’s not worth putting in. I mean, you would not be interested if I told you that we studied the industrial areas of France in geography or that we started to talk about Edward III in history. Or was it Edward II?
Tuesday, 15 November
I have finished making my skilful teddy in needlework. He is called Arthur.25
Saturday, 17 December
Went shopping. Angus came in the afternoon. He gave me a Christmas present: a Honda CB450 motorbike Airfix model. It is ace. He also gave me a ginger beer plant. Nan C baby-sitted again. I am mad.
Tuesday, 20 December
Wrapped up loads of presents. So did Dad. I started making my Honda model. It’s so fiddly I feel like smashing it up. But I won’t because it is too fabulous.
Saturday, 24 December CHRISTMAS EVE
Magic. Dad took me to Binleys and got me all the skateboard padding (helmet, elbow pads and knee pads) for a Christmas pressie to go with my skateboard. Went to the park after dinner. It’s Christmas tomorrow! Magic.26
Sunday, 25 December CHRISTMAS DAY
I got: £18.00 Newporter plastic deck skateboard, all the padding, Boeing 747 model, drawing book, Goodies Disaster Movie book, model knife, glue, 11 model paints, 64 Crayola crayons, Krazy annual, Gambler, Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book, Psycho, mini-stapler, Concorde model, Bugatti model, Lifeguard model, loads of pencils, diary, rubber, RAF refuelling set model, two monster jigsaws, Quality Streets. Magic! Magic! Magic!
Friday, 30 December MUM’S BIRTHDAY
More skateboarding. Dad bought me two good paint brushes. Dad took me with him when he played squash. It was a brill match. Dad lost against Les Hull 3–2. Dad played magic.
1. Nan M. and Pap R. had a home bingo set, pre-war, which would frequently come out at family gatherings and keep us all transfixed like the decent working-class people we deeply were. (We called out ‘House!’ – or ‘Hace!’ in Northamptonian – what further proof do you require?) The set consisted of a metal board (metal!) with all the numbers etched in by Pap himself in his old job, a cloth bag containing 100 wooden numbers, and a good thick book of paper bingo cards. It was all there. Just add a motley clutch of pens and half-pencils. The old ones are the best.
2. That’ll be Mike Yarwood in Persons, the first of four series he did under that imprint for the BBC between ’77 and ’81 (plus specials). Then he crossed the floor to Thames, where, like Morecambe & Wise before him (’78), his decline began. Why do they do it? Can the money matter so much? Or is it just a comedians’ graveyard, a resting place to which all dying stars are drawn? (I don’t blame Thames, that lovable warren by the river in Teddington: the Goodies went not to Thames but to LWT the same year as Yarwood defected and the diminishing effect was the same.)
3. Buster & Monster Fun Comic, whose merger was as easy to swallow as its new title. I read in the paper this morning that there’s an advertising agency called Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO. If you insist.
4. Possibly (I have no sources) a regional magazine programme. We certainly seemed to like it. (I even bothered to reproduce its logo in my diary: concentric circles.)
5. I think we know what I’m getting at here. I learned a valuable legal lesson while coping with the evident theft of my two Parker pens (I think one must have been a propelling pencil – I wouldn’t have had two ink pens): you must never accuse anybody, not even an unnamed pen-thieving ghost. Crime investigation is entirely euphemistic: my pens have gone missing; I have lost my pens.
I also learnt a more practical lesson: to use biros and Pentels at school in future. Pens are not meant to be of sentimental value. There should be no whodunit after the loss of a pen. Not even the ‘loss’.
6. Our maiden brush with the painted whore of television. Swaporama, the town-hopping roadshow part of Swap Shop, always looked enjoyably chaotic on TV, with battered toys being passed across the crowd for barter – but it was only when Simon went down to Abington Park the week the circus came to Northampton that we discovered just how unenjoyably chaotic it was. I remember the call-out at the start of Swap Shop that morning: Keith Chegwin up the familiar, nay iconic climbing frame shaped like a space rocket. At that delicious moment I tasted the thrill of seeing a piece of playground apparatus I’d ascended, on telly, with Cheggers up it. The Swaporama may have been local that Saturday – less than a mile from where I was sitting – but for me, at home, the experience remained remote: clean and annexed. For Simon it was mud-caked and humiliating, and when he got back and related his woes, the screen came down: the real Wizard of Oz was revealed.
7. New arrivals in Winsford Way: the popular Mills family, from the West Midlands. Mel (bald and gregarious), Margaret, elder son Martin (went to agricultural college where, one hopes, he was able to properly cultivate that bum-fluff moustache) and daughter Sarah (had a lot of problems with her legs or was it her back?). We liked them so much, when they moved away to Crowborough in East Sussex, we went to visit them. I fell in a river, possibly the Ouse, and Mel entertained us with a road sign he’d spotted locally bearing the place-names BALLS GREEN and BLACOMBE (which doesn’t exist, so perhaps he’d misread BALCOMBE, or tweaked it for comic effect).
8. First sighting of ‘onset teenage ennui’.
9. I have by now seen Jaws (18 March with Dad, Simon and Angus). Though an ‘A’ certificate, it is by far the most frightening film of my 12 years on earth, and thus, I am now obsessed with it.
10. Some of these names are just that: B Jnr, Ally, Westy, Argy, Chris, Gibs. Who were these abbreviated souls? I can identify the following: Dash is definitely Chris Dashfield (who also had a Soda Stream); Kate possibly Katy Prout (but I wouldn’t put money it); Taf and Gibby the aforementioned Givelin brothers; Roobarb – Paul Roberts; and Hirsty – David Hirst. And that’s ignoring ‘etc. etc. etc.’ whoever in God’s nickname they were.
11. The epithet ‘maddo’ is so me and Simon. I don’t think anyone else has ever said it.
12. Self-styled nickname for John Lewis, tenuously derived from the fact that John is ‘Johan’ is Dutch. I never understood it either, but I idolised the long-haired Lewis so much at this stage I would have called him anything he’d asked me to. Daddy, Sir, anything.
13. Another incomprehensible nickname, this time for Stephen Tite, tall blond kid with bee-sting lips. (Often shortened to Dobs.) He and Lewis had come from the same ecosystem at another lower school where these bizarre names had originated. At least Dave Watson was just Watto.
14. Another disappointing but inevitable slide into proto-adolescence. Dad kept his frankly tame soft porn mags – Mayfair and Penthouse, none of your tat – in t
he garage. Mum wouldn’t have them in the house, but she seemed to know he kept them, which is interesting. (For instance I didn’t have to smuggle the Penthouse he bought in Bournemouth into the house inside my Mad Super Special.) Poring over these soft-focus, undressed but mostly knees-together ‘rude ladies’ – as we called them – was certainly a necessary voyage of anatomical discovery, but I was more interested in Mayfair’s monthly comic strip ‘Carrie’, in which the heroine would lose her clothes in a variety of inventive ways. These gave me my first ‘confused’ feelings.
15. I’m looking at a photo taken on Jubilee Bank Holiday, 7 June. We seem to be in the spirit of this great royal occasion: Mum, Simon and I are wearing identical red, white and blue ‘Jeans’ T-shirts with Union Jacks on the sleeves, and Jubilee-styled party hats (Simon has fixed an Action Man Union Jack to his and it is hanging down over his eyes, the wag). Melissa is waving a flag. Not a trace of irony here, but it’s difficult to convey to people how royal the nation was in 1977. Winsford Way’s ‘street party’ took place not in the street (it was a through road) but in a large tent in Jean and Geoff’s back garden. I have decorated my diary by writing each letter in alternate red and blue Tempo. As I write it is the Queen’s Golden Jubilee year and I feel I am in good company not giving a fuck.
16. Irony and sarcasm have arrived, like unwanted, boorish gatecrashers at a party. There’ll be trouble.
17. I’d wanted one of these ever since seeing The Punch and Judy Man (1962), in which Tony Hancock and child actor Nicholas Webb methodically devour a ‘Piltdown Glory’ each, one rain-soaked seaside afternoon: ‘two scoops of luscious vanilla, two scoops of tasty chocolate, a succulent slice of banana, juicy peach fingers in pure cane syrup, topped with super-smooth butter-fat cream. Oh – and a cherry!’ (Mine wasn’t that elaborate but it was good enough for me.)
18. A tragic tale of unrequited interest. Becky was Rebecca Warren, befreckled, buxom star of the choir and in the year above. I took a shine to her, mistook her polite reciprocation for encouragement and bought her fudge from Wales. She accepted the gift gracefully but I was simply not ready for boy-girl friendship with the new undertones of pre-teenhood ‘confusion’. It was awful, like something out of Mike Leigh. I became obsessed with a small hole in her jumper as we sat there in her mum’s front room, eyeing the time. She looked better in school uniform I thought. I never went back. Married to a man called Tim now.
19. The 16th annual Abington Park Art Exhibition, a pleasant diversion in any year. Anyone could enter a painting, and red stickers were applied to those that had been sold. In later years, I entered pictures of my own, slightly inappropriate caricatures of film stars that always got hung inside the museum in a dark corner (1980: the cast of The Poseidon Adventure; 1983: Donald Sutherland and William Atherton from Day of the Locust – which I actually sold to someone whom I was heartbroken to learn hadn’t a clue who the two men were; 1984: a pair of Marlon Brandos, as Vito Corleone and Walter E Kurtz).
20. Fame at last. The issue was dated 13 August (‘Prog 25’, as they called them in 2000AD) and I received a letter of notification from the editor Tharg with the traditional salutation, ‘Borag Thungg, Earthlet’. It came of course from Kings Reach Tower in Waterloo, London, the home of publishers IPC – where I would later work.
21. The most significant thing about my love (at first sight) of Happy Days was the fact that I didn’t realise it was set in the 1950s. I just thought it was what America was like – and in terms of high school and ice cream parlours I was right. Happy Days must have been into its second ‘season’ by now, having taken two years to cross the Atlantic. (It began in 1974 in the States after the success of the film American Graffiti convinced ABC to pick up the rejected 1972 pilot Love and the Happy Day.)
22. I wonder if the terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 caught this TV movie? It starred Patrick Wayne (son of John) and Christopher Mitchum (son of Robert); also Lloyd Nolan and Sid Caesar for disaster movie ballast (Airport and Airport ’75 respectively).
23. I actually discovered a moderate ability for hockey, quite out of step with my Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards performance in every other school sport. Never played for the team or bought my own stick or anything but the fact that I wasn’t bad is worth noting.
24. As coincidence would have it, two of my uncles are called Alan (one of them spelt Allen). Both are self-employed builders; both built themselves big houses in posh streets. Uncle Alan and Auntie Margaret (Dad’s sister) did it first.
25. After the Fonz, Arthur Fonzarelli.
26. Blame Selwyn Froggitt for this, eponymous Scarsdale halfwit off the Yorkshire TV sitcom, by now into its third rip-roaring series. I don’t know why it took this long to start using his catch-phrase.
ten
Big Boys Don’t Cry
– Is it bad?
– It’s a fire. All fires are bad.
Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, The Towering Inferno (1974)
HOW MANY PEOPLE can honestly say that Roger Whittaker gave them nightmares? I can. By the time I’d turned ten – and this seems to be a pivotal year for me, fearwise – anything could put the frighteners up me. Not that I was walking around in a constant state of paranoia, jumping out of my skin every time a car backfired or a dog barked, it’s just that fear definitely set in at this time. I expect it was all part of growing up.
Roger Whittaker’s ‘The Last Farewell’ was the song that broke him in America in 1975, though he was already well established in Europe. A moving declaration of love from a sailor about to go to war,1 it has the heartfelt chorus, ‘For you are beautiful, and I have loved you dearly/More dearly than the spoken word can tell.’ But never mind that.
I heard the song for the first time on Radio 2 at Nan Mabel’s during one of my special-relationship jaunts. I expect Jimmy Young was playing it. For some reason, the following couplet caught my ear, almost without me knowing:
‘I’ve heard there’s a wicked war a-blazing/And the taste of war I know so very well.’
And the taste of war I know so very well …
That very night I had a bad dream. About war. This line from the song kept repeating in my dream like a mantra or the quote at the start of a chapter in a pretentious book. It was otherwise an abstract canvas, this dream, the thrust of which was me being alive during wartime. Jackboots marching past in the street outside, sirens, searchlights, that sort of thing. In my dream, I knew the taste of war so very well, and it frit the life out of me (as they say in Northampton). It was as if actual war had been declared that night.2
There’s no doubt about it, a trigger had been pulled. The phoney war was over. From that moment onwards, I somehow realised that war was real. World war had happened twice, maybe it could happen again and if it did, this time it would happen to me. None of this was based on information, simply intuition. Black storm clouds had suddenly gathered on my horizon, signalling the end of the age of innocence. All thanks to Roger Whittaker. Bastard.
Now, I enjoyed my black and white war movies on TV – Ice Cold in Alex, The Wooden Horse – never missed an episode of Colditz or Dad’s Army, and of course we lived for Action Man, but war up to that point was a setting, not a reality. It was not a problem. Even the grave and devastatingly non-fictional The World at War, which we would gather around every Sunday before tea, seemed remote, grainy, boxed-off, defused. The footage of the concentration camps chilled my blood, but it was all so surreal – bodies in a pit, bodies in a cart – my mind wasn’t capable of being scared by it. Amazed, appalled, but not directly worried. This was clearly never going to happen to me, or my family. It was unthinkable, so I didn’t think it. The little boy’s haunted face at the end of the programme’s credits gave me the willies (as did Carl Davis’s solemn theme music and Sir Lawrence Olivier’s narration), but only in the same way that Dr Who did. A plate of crisp sandwiches and a piece of haslet3 would soon banish my unease.
We had been watching Dr Who since 1972
, much of it through our fingers, so the thrill-ride aspect of fear was well known to us. It was a good game. My preferred comics were ones with a ghostly theme, Shiver and Shake and Monster Fun. One of my favourite Shiver stories was ‘Scream Inn’, about a haunted hotel. ‘We’re only here for the fear’ ran its tagline. That was me.
However, this new post-Whittaker insight, vague as yet, that some scary things were real, marching past in the street outside, was truly head-turning. We didn’t really believe that Dr Who’s Silurian foes the Sea Devils were going to rise up out of the surf at Pwllheli – although Simon and I teased one another that they might – and we didn’t really think that the Jerries were coming.
But what if they did? What would I do if they did?
This horrible, dawning realisation was some kind of early, unconscious acceptance of mortality, even though it wasn’t death that scared me but suffering, disruption and sirens. I suspect it’s a trait I have partly inherited from my more anxious mother’s side – just as I’m certain my hoarding and cataloguing come directly from my dad. But I also suspect it’s programmed into us somehow. Perhaps all ten-year-olds have a lucid moment of understanding: we’re doomed.
I didn’t exactly see dead people all the time from the moment I heard Roger sing, ‘the taste of war I know so very well’, but it definitely marked the onset of the spooked years.
* * *
Simon’s birthday is on 29 May. However, in 1975, when he turned eight, I was the one who got the gift that goes on giving. The gift of mortal terror. Dad took us, as a treat – ha! – to the ABC in town to see a double bill. A perfectly mismatched double bill as it happened, and a sign of those random, pre-video times: Please, Sir! and The Poseidon Adventure. A tenuous big-screen adaptation of a popular sitcom4 and the godfather of 1970s disaster movies, both enjoying a second run (Please, Sir! had originally come out in 1971, Poseidon Adventure in 1972). I expect Dad fancied seeing them – or else they were simply ‘what was on’ at Northampton’s only cinema – and Simon and I were up for it, as going to the pictures meant Disney and James Bond up to that point, and we had yet to be disappointed.
Where Did It All Go Right? Page 20