Free Radical

by Cable, Vincent

  My appetite for terror and my flight from boredom were both met in the fantasy world of films, radio and books which filled my childhood. Television did not arrive until my mid-teens. It was the vivid images from the weekly visit to the cinema that lingered in the imagination. My dreams and daydreams were long haunted by the early scenes from David Lean’s Great Expectations, which my parents unwisely judged to be the best occasion for my cinematic baptism, aged six. The misty marshes of the Thames Estuary seemed uncannily like the familiar river-scape of the Ouse, and I could all too easily envisage a Magwitch-like convict emerging from the fog to snatch me. I progressed to the comfort zone of Westerns, where the good guys in the cavalry always managed to wipe out the Indians, and war films, where heroic Englishmen could be relied on to blast the Hun out of the skies or the seas. Some films had a profound influence: Where No Vultures Fly, which graphically captured the cruelty of ivory poachers in Kenya; Humphrey Bogart fighting off leeches in The African Queen, before a kamikaze attack on a German gunboat on Lake Victoria; and later, Simba, a horrifying depiction of Mau Mau oath-taking rituals and murders, also in Kenya. I had decided at an early age that, unlike my contemporaries, who were preparing to be train drivers, motor-racing drivers or spacemen, I would become a Big White Chief in Africa, ruling over the natives.

  By the time I was eight, my father was on the move again to a bigger and better semi in New Lane, overlooking Holgate Park, near the rapidly expanding suburb of Acomb, our upward mobility underlined by the fact that our new neighbour was a bank manager. Our move was at least partly precipitated by our noisy neighbours, the Smithsons, who, these days, would probably have been in line for an ASBO. My father’s main retaliatory weapon was to place our radio against their wall at full volume, covering it with blankets to dull the sound on our side. He failed. We moved.

  For me the new home in New Lane sat in the middle of a vast adventure playground. Opposite were the woods of a park opening up to playgrounds and playing fields. The road itself led into a country lane lined with hedgerows, which led in turn to the wilds of Hob Moor. In the other direction was a disused windmill surrounded on three sides by a wilderness of scrub and trees, which were a perfect setting for Custer’s last stand and for ambushing the Sheriff of Nottingham. Though I understood nothing of economics at the time, the country lane and the wilderness were becoming prime sites in the post-war scramble for development land, and they gradually disappeared during my childhood. But these were the happiest years of my early life: friends (all boys), boundless space, and a freedom to roam that would be inconceivable today. It is tempting to romanticize the days before family cars, televisions and expensive toys, but even in the more protective and disciplinarian homes like mine there was a degree of trust – in neighbours, in strangers, in the safety of roads, and in the common sense of children and their instinct for self-preservation – which has largely gone. We somehow survived without protective helmets and without encountering predatory paedophiles or murderous gangs. Occasionally there was a really serious treat: a day in Leeds on the trams and trolleybuses; or a week in Scarborough or Filey, by train to a dreary boarding house and the hope that the weather would permit the use of buckets and spades. But it was treat enough to own the streets and the wide-open spaces.

  A couple of years later, when I was ten, a series of events occurred in quick succession that radically reshaped our lives. My mother bore another child, Keith, and, like many unplanned, younger children, he was adored by his parents and elder brother. She succumbed, however, to what is now called post-natal depression but was then seen simply as a form of madness. She was taken to York’s mental hospital – what my friends called the ‘the loony bin’ – and my brother was fostered for the best part of a year. The breakdown was not difficult to explain: her mother had just died; her sister, whom she loved dearly, had emigrated to Australia with my other Uncle Reg and my cousin Susan; her factory friends were no longer suitable company. Marriage had produced suffocating tedium and isolation, cooking and cleaning, serving three meals a day to a bad-tempered husband working off the slights and frustrations of the staff room in the technical college where he was now teaching, a clever but ungrateful son – and now a baby. Something also snapped in the relationship between my parents and I saw, or was aware of, violence for the first time (my brother, who witnessed episodes later in his childhood, recently reminded me of this, something I had managed to erase from my memory). When my mother returned from hospital she gradually put her mind together again with the help of adult education classes, but for the rest of my childhood and adolescence she was a damaged and diminished figure, usually found talking to herself in the kitchen.

  Shortly after my mother’s breakdown there was the eleven-plus. I had done well at school, but nothing was guaranteed. I was, moreover, becoming a vehicle for my father’s frustrated ambitions. He might well be a mere craftsman amid the graduates in the technical college staff room, but his son was smarter than theirs. He was no fool, and understood long before Britain’s educational establishment that intelligence was acquired, not innate. So I was set to work on practice IQ tests, as well as English and maths, progressing from initial bafflement to marvellous fluency. I passed easily enough, along with most of the top stream at Poppleton Road. But there were some casualties, like the pretty girl on the next desk, who collapsed sobbing when the results were announced in class and disappeared through the trapdoor of education into a secondary modern school. I never saw her again. That episode more than any other persuaded me that, although I was a beneficiary of it, there was something fundamentally wrong with the eleven-plus system of selection.

  My father discovered, from his contacts in the education department, that not only had I passed but that I had gained the highest marks in the city. This entitled me not merely to a grammar school place but to compete for a single place at the cerebral Quaker public school, Bootham, or for one of five places at the posh and ancient St Peter’s. I went for Bootham, my father having been advised that admission was a formality. Only an interview stood in the way – on my interests and my reading – with the distinguished head, Mr Green. I was extremely well prepared, with a compendious knowledge of the world’s capital cities, Test match results, and the full sequence of English kings and queens. I was a well-travelled young man, having explored northern England with my friends, looking for rare train numbers in engine sheds, as far as Gorton in Manchester and Blaydon in Newcastle. I had read voraciously: the complete Biggles series of Captain W. E. Johns and two comics a week, which kept me fully up to speed with Dan Dare’s battles with the Mekon and the fish-and-chip-eating running-track genius, Alf Tupper. It soon became clear, however, that Mr Green was neither excited nor impressed by this knowledge. He asked me to read a passage from Milton’s Paradise Lost. I floundered, desperately trying to read, let alone interpret, this ancient gibberish. A few days later I received a letter confirming that I would not be going to Bootham but to Nunthorpe Grammar School. My father had, however, learned from this disaster and when he later repeated the eleven-plus success with my brother Keith, he was better prepared. Keith went to St Peter’s, but detested the snobbery, underperformed, and always envied me my failure. Meantime, I flourished as a big fish in the smaller pool of a grammar school, along with my friends from Poppleton Road.

  Chapter 2

  You’ve Never Had It So Good

  The 1950s saw my family firmly established in the lower reaches of the English middle class. And post-war prosperity brought a stream of new objects into the home: a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine, and eventually – and most reluctantly – a black-and-white TV, then a (shared) telephone and a Morris Minor. These purchases were all approached with great circumspection and we lagged behind the Joneses. My friends, whose fathers worked in the railway carriage works, and our poorer relatives were not sure whether to put this down to the Cables’ snobbery or meanness, especially when I was reduced to knocking on their doors, asking plaintively to see Billy
Bunter or The Lone Ranger. In truth, my parents were puritanical, never drank or gambled – my father’s pipe being his only vice – and they resisted new-fangled acquisitions until abstinence put them at risk of ridicule.

  In general, I added lustre to the family’s achievements and upward mobility. Every prize-giving at Nunthorpe yielded another addition to our collection of encyclopedias and dictionaries. Occasionally, however, I brought shame. I discovered an air rifle and ammunition hidden in a bedroom cupboard. With my friend Duncan, our games of white game hunter were transformed once we discovered that we had the weaponry to hunt and terrorize the cats and dogs of New Lane. We progressed to being Second World War heroes directing sniper fire at Nazis hidden in the bedrooms of our neighbours. After local chatter disclosed a rash of broken windows and airgun pellets, someone traced the angle of fire back to my bedroom and, before long, a policeman appeared at the door. We were duly hauled off to York police station, but contrition, a blameless record, and my father’s references to his influential connections in the city, got us off with a caution. This brush with the law was especially shocking to my parents, and also to me, since I had never previously shown much inclination towards criminality beyond such peccadilloes as pelting elderly people with snowballs. I was part of an orderly society in which we deferred even to such minor authority figures as park keepers and bus conductors, let alone the police.

  With my mother relegated to baby-minding and household chores, my father superintended my teenage upbringing, and with rather closer attention after the episode with the gun. In many ways he was an exemplary father who kept me motivated at school but gave me space to play. He took me to London and regularly to football matches, including the 1955 cup semi-final when York almost achieved the impossible feat of beating Jackie Milburn’s Newcastle at Hillsborough, having earlier disposed of Stanley Matthews’s Blackpool.

  He was a dominating personality, with great drive. He was also a bully who crushed weaker spirits, like my mother, but energized others, including many of his pupils. He was known at the college as Hitler, on account of his moustache and his reported ability to invest the teaching of even the most recondite corners of building science with the fervour of a mass rally. He married the skills of teaching and communication with those of a fine craftsman. His technical drawings were almost works of art, blending precision with elegant form and colour. Later, in retirement, he sketched with remarkable accuracy, and in detail, all of Britain’s cathedrals. In the staff room, however, where he inhabited a twilight world somewhere between the graduate lecturers and the technicians, his confidence evaporated and he suffered years of indignity and real or imagined snubs.

  He saw part of his parental duties as introducing me to political ideas and the art of debate. There was, however, little scope for reasoned debate, since his views had all the flexibility of the reinforced concrete he tested to destruction at work. He was unswervingly Conservative, his philosophy built on unquestioning loyalty to the monarchy, the army and the police, the sanctity of property, rewards for thrift and hard work, hanging and flogging for criminals, Britain’s imperial glory, the innate superiority of white people, and the ingrained subversiveness of socialism and trade unionism. The last was particularly difficult to understand since at Rowntree’s, and at his wartime aircraft factory, he had been a union shop steward and was apparently trusted by his workmates. Later in life he became President of his union, the National Association of Schoolmasters (NAS), compromising his hostility to collectivism because of the cause it served: fighting equal pay for women. Women were, he believed, steadily destroying the teaching profession, dragging down pay and undermining discipline at the chalk-face. Married women did not need full pay because they had husbands, and single women did not have a family to support. The NAS, a powerful union led by one Terry Casey, grew up around those doing battle with the feminist-and communist-dominated National Union of Teachers. The NAS eventually merged with a rival women’s union to become the NAS/UWT, and I suspect that it has buried the politically incorrect misogyny that inspired it and so attracted my father.

  Trade unionism was but one of the perverse subtleties of his Toryism. He was also fiercely class-conscious and detested ‘toffs’ like York’s MP, Sir Harry Hylton-Foster, who had once brushed aside a problem my father had brought to the constituency surgery, patronized him and addressed him as ‘my good man’. Like the middle-class man in the John Cleese–Ronnie Barker–Ronnie Corbett sketch, my father looked down on the working class but also resented being looked down upon by his social superiors.

  Eventually Nirvana arrived, courtesy of a grocer’s daughter, Mrs Thatcher, and though he only lived to see three years of her earthly paradise he lived every minute like a Bolshevik revolutionary who has glimpsed the promised land. Even after a heart attack, aged seventy, he rushed out into the snow to deliver more Conservative leaflets, contracting the pneumonia that killed him. He died fulfilled and, though I did not altogether share his passion for Mrs Thatcher, I saw, then, what I loved in him.

  My political education consisted of listening to rants directed against his many bêtes noires. Chief among these were the colonial upstarts who expressed their ingratitude to their mother country by demanding independence. India had been abandoned without a fight by the socialists, and now even the Conservatives were having to negotiate with uppity natives like Nkrumah and Makarios, while evil communists like Jomo Kenyatta lurked in the background. But it was the Arab upstart, Colonel Nasser, who brought him to paroxysms of rage. When the Suez crisis arrived he registered his anger at hearing Nasser’s voice on the BBC by hurling shoes at the radio. He would calm down the following morning when our newspapers, the Daily Mail and Sunday Express, provided what he regarded as a more balanced assessment than the unpatriotic BBC. Suez confirmed all my father’s worst suspicions: Britain had been stabbed in the back by socialists and pacifists at home and the United Nations and the Americans overseas. Only the plucky Israelis emerged with any credit. For someone with anti-Semitic prejudices, my father had a strange infatuation with Israel and it was the only country he ever expressed any interest in visiting: the product, I think, of his Old Testament religion combined with relief that someone was giving the Arabs the thrashing they deserved.

  Suez and the Hungarian uprising, both of which occurred around my thirteenth birthday, triggered in me a first stirring of interest in politics. I devoured the newspapers and numerous books on current affairs and began to see through the fallacies and factual inaccuracies of some of my father’s arguments. I ventured to contradict him, which usually angered him further but occasionally prompted a bemused respect. I could even begin to see the limitations of my father’s favourite tracts – like the dyspeptic column in the Sunday Express written by John Gordon, aka John Junor (the Richard Littlejohn of his day), exposing humbug and hypocrisy on the left – which, since he no longer went to church, had come to fill the gap left by the Sunday sermon.

  Like most adolescents, I was emotionally and intellectually confused, very dependent on my parents, but increasingly rebellious, especially towards my father. I had two role models, both close friends, who in their different ways represented the zeitgeist of 1950s youth and sought to attract me into their respective orbits.

  One, Duncan, was my fellow delinquent in the airgun incident. He was a rebel without a cause. He was the only son of a quite elderly couple who had befriended me, taking me on their family holidays, which left me with an abiding love of Britain’s fells and moors but bored Duncan to tears. He experimented, at an early age, with the joys of cigarettes (then the recreational drug of choice), sex, motorbikes, and the garb and companionship of Teddy boys. He left school at the first opportunity, without O levels, to earn money to finance his motorbike, which almost killed him in a horrific accident, and progressed rapidly to early marriage and parenthood, then early divorce. We gradually drifted apart, having only a passion for Elvis in common.

  A bigger influence was rebel with a cause
, David. David’s father was a left-wing shop steward at the nearby carriage works, where many of our neighbours were employed. Specifically he was a Tribunite: the Tories were the Devil; Bevan was God; Gaitskell was Judas; and Michael Foot was the chief apostle of this sect. His son expounded this brand of true socialism with the same didactic, uncompromising certainty as my father showed in the opposite political direction. We had a third friend, John, whose father had a white-collar job and read the Daily Telegraph. Aged fourteen or fifteen, we wandered the streets of York in the evening, stopping for bags of scraps (bits of cooked batter) with salt and vinegar at the fish shop, while my two friends aimed ideological broadsides at each other and I tried to arbitrate a ceasefire. I already understood John’s Conservatism, from home, but David introduced new concepts, like nationalization of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the class struggle, which seemed to me of little relevance in a quiet, increasingly prosperous place like York, but which were announced with such conviction that it seemed churlish, as well as unwise, to contradict him.

  David introduced me to more than socialism. He was a genius with cars: by the time he was sixteen he had built his own fibreglass sports car, and took me to see future Formula One heroes like Jim Clark and Mike Hawthorn racing on the aerodromes around York. He was a fine artist, passionate about Impressionist and post-Impressionist art and, since I was his favourite captive audience, educated me in the works of Picasso, Klee, Modigliani and Dalí. Most remarkably, he was a womanizer of discernment and considerable experience. Despite his unprepossessing appearance – spotty face, horn-rimmed spectacles, hunched back and scruffy duffel coat – he pulled girls of, to me, remarkable beauty. When my friends and I doubted his sexual escapades, he would produce nude portraits of his latest girlfriend. He tried to introduce me to members of his harem, but while I could cope with socialism and Fauvism, women were altogether more alarming. David had what is now called charisma, and plenty of it.