by Kim Newman
Clement Attlee
Labour Prime Minister; defeated Winston Churchill in the first post-war election and established what became known as the welfare state before the word had any negative connotations. Attlee’s legacy includes the National Health service. See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/timelines/britain/post_lab_power.shtml
Wilson
Harold Wilson. Labour Prime Minister in the 1960s, famous for wearing raincoats and smoking a pipe. His speech about ‘the white heat of technology’ was one of the touchstones for the ’60s image of a progressive, exciting Britain as represented by Concorde and cross-channel Hovercraft. He resisted pressure from America and refused to commit British troops to Vietnam; no prizes for guessing what Tony Blair would have done under the same circumstances. See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/timelines/britain/post_wilson.shtml
Margaret Thatcher
Tory Prime Minister from 1979 and throughout the 1980s – therefore a major figure in this book. See notes on the Falklands War, the miners’ strike, the Big Bang, Black Monday, etc. Succeeded messily in 1990 by John Major. See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/timelines/britain/post_thatcher.shtml
James Callaghan
Harold Wilson’s successor as Labour Prime Minister after Wilson’s resignation in 1976. Defeated by Thatcher in 1979, beginning nearly two decades of Tory rule.
David Steel
Leader of the Liberal Party in 1979; later leader of the Liberal Democrats.
Screaming Lord Sutch
Pop star David Sutch, who cut macabre rockin’ numbers in the 1960s (‘Jack the Ripper’, ‘She’s Fallen in Love With the Monsterman’) along the lines of his obvious idol Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and later performers like the Cramps. He was for many years a surreal fixture of general elections, standing for the Monster Raving Loony Party (later the Official Monster Raving Loony Party). He committed suicide in 1999.
Sedgwater
Other works set in or near this town include the flashback sections of my novel The Quorum and the ‘Where the Bodies Are Buried’ cycle of stories. It’s roughly analagous to the real town of Bridgwater.
http://www.bridgwater.net/
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~smedlo/Bridgwater/Bridgwater.htm
valve set
Vacuum-tube set.
infant
In UK English, the term ‘infant’ can refer either to a baby or a grade-school (US: primary school -Ed.) age child.
Somerset
A county in the West of England, known for King Alfred’s defence against the invading Danes, Glastonbury (famous for the Tor, a ruined Abbey, the pop festival and John Cowper Powys’s novel A Glastonbury Romance), a very strong cider, still-surviving novelty band the Wurzels and the birthplace of Sir Arthur C. Clarke.
http://www.somersetgateway.com/aboutsom/index.htm
Paddington Bear
Hero of Michael Bond’s A Bear Called Paddington (1958) and sequels.
Stingray
Gerry Anderson-produced puppet TV series (1964-5), a half-hour colour show made between Anderson’s Fireball XL5 and Thunderbirds. Set in the future, it follows the adventures of Troy Tempest and his sidekick Phones who crewed the wonderfully-designed super-submarine Stingray.
Michael Dixon
See also: The Quorum.
‘off-ground touch’
A children’s game, a variant on ‘tag’ in which you couldn’t be made ‘it’ if neither of your feet were on the ground.
Israel Hands
A historical character, better known for his walk-on in Treasure Island.
Man From U.N.C.L.E.
US television series, 1964-1968; first seen on UK TV June 24, 1965 – which doesn’t quite square with the dates here. Then again, Stephen King blithely lies about the US transmission of The Prisoner in Hearts in Atlantis and apologises in the end-note and nobody writes him whiny letters about it. If anything, the show was more popular in the UK than America, perhaps because one of the leads (David McCallum) was British. The BBC screened two seasons of Man and one of Girl From U.N.C.L.E. inside a year and a half.
http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/mfu.htm
Napoleon Solo or Illya Kuryakin
My friend David Cross told me that gangs really did ask this question on his school playground and beat up kids who gave the wrong answer (which, for the record, was Napoleon Solo). A more common fight-starter was ‘who do you support?’, meaning which soccer team – and not following football was no excuse. The reason I fudge the dates is that David is year or two older than Keith Marion.
THRUSH
The recurring villains on The Man From U.N.C.L.E., a bad guy organisation whise name might have been an acronym for Technological Hierarchy for the Repression of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity. Or it could have been a Cold War way of saying ‘Th’Russians’.
shorts and a cardy
Shorts = short trousers, not underpants. Cardy = a cardigan, the woolly garment named after the Crimean war general.
Janet and John
The UK equivalents of Dick and Jane in reading primers.
Falklands war
A conflict in 1982 (not a declared war) that rose after Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands (or Malvinas), a British dependency in the South Atlantic. Then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher despatched a naval task force that retook the islands, not without controversy. The upshot was the fall of Argentine dictator Galtieri and a resurgence of popularity that helped the Thatcher government survive a shaky first term in office.
Robert Hackwill
See also: the Where the Bodies Are Buried collection, which gives more background on his mundane villainy and monstrous reputation.
Trilby Hat
A homburg or fedora-like hat. Though worn mostly by men, the name comes from the heroine of George du Maurier’s novel.
PE
Physical Education = Gym Class.
Biggles
Created by Captain W.E. Johns, James Bigglesworth - Biggles – first appeared in The Camels Are Coming (1932), in which he is a fighter pilot in the First World War. Johns wrote nearly a hundred books in which Biggles and his pals flew into dangers in subsequent conflicts and as peacetime adventurers in the ‘air police’. Biggles also appeared in a brief 1960 TV series and a weak 1986 film, but may now be best-remembered for a Monty Python sketch lampooning the jargon-filled ‘banter’ of Johns’s dialogue. The first science fiction novel I remember reading was Biggles and the Blue Flame.
http://www.biggles.nl/en/
Sergeant Rock
DC Comics character, created by artist Joe Kubert and writer Robert Kanigher in 1959. I’ve always wondered if Kanigher and Kubert were thinking of the same-named character played by Gene Evans in Samuel Fuller’s 1951 film Fixed Bayonets.
‘White Horses’ by Jacky.
This was the theme to a children’s TV series popular with girls in 1968. It was a girl-and-her-horse show. The hit theme song, sung by Jackie Lee under the name ‘Jacky’, is breathily evocative.
http://www.jackielee.freeserve.co.uk/index.htm
http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/whitehorses.htm
Dan Dare
British comic strip space hero, created by Frank Hampson, featured in the Eagle from 1950 to 1957. A square-jawed, crisp-uniformed ‘pilot of the future’, he is sort of a sexless Battle of Britain version of Flash Gordon; his arch-enemy is a Venusian tyrant called the Mekon. See: http://www.dandare.org/index.htm
Hornet
A British weekly comic; unlike American monthly comic books, British comics were until recently newspaper format, unstapled (a nightmare for collectors), mostly in black and white (with a colour cover feature and maybe centre-page spread) and ran multiple ongoing series or serials. The Hornet was a rather staid effort concentrating heavily on sports heroes, war stories and imperial adventures.
Fantastic
One of several British black and white weeklies (Power Comics) that reprinted Marvel material, with individual issu
es parcelled out in five-page sections. Fantastic ran X-Men, the Hulk, the Avengers and Thor.
Dr. Marling’s
See also: The Quorum.
Reg Jessup
See also: Where the Bodies Are Buried
Dr. Cross
See: Jago. The character is named after the friend of mine who told me the childhood anecdote that inspired the ‘Napoleon or Ilya’ choice.
Susan
See: Jago.
A Jag
A Jaguar. With three syllables. (Something along the lines of ‘jag-you-ah’ -Ed.)
The Scam
This London listings/alternative magazine also appears in Bad Dreams and The Quorum. It’s roughly analagous to the real-life 1980s publication City Limits, which I worked for.
Clare
Appears briefly in Bad Dreams.
Anne Nielsen
The heroine of Bad Dreams; also appears in The Quorum. Those books reveal a lot more about the ‘complicated pain’ in her background.
Abba
1970s Swedish singing group, weirdly fashionable again thanks to a tribute band (Bjorn Again) and a West End musical (Mama Mia).
http://www.abbasite.com/start/
The Bay City Rollers
Early 1970s boy band. Remembered for tartan trousers and unfeasable mullets, they mostly covered standards like ‘Be My Baby’. Recruited to fit a pre-decided sound (few of the band performed on their first single), they were a forerunner to today’s entirely manufactured pop groups. One member of a later incarnation became the British porn star/director Ben Dover.
http://www.baycityrollers.de/
the miners’ strike
In 1984-5, this was a major battle between the trades union movement and Margaret Thatcher. The strikers were defeated, after much acrimony, and the government set about dismantling the British mining industry unimpeded. It forms the backdrop to the successful British movie Billy Elliott.
Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp
An anti-nuclear weapons protest around the site of an American air base in Britain. It ran from 1981 to 2000.
http://www.iwm.org.uk/online/greenham/
The Belgrano
Argentine warship, controversially sunk by the Royal Navy during the Falklands conflict, prompting the famously tasteless Sun newspaper headline ‘Gotcha!’
Lord Carrington
Foreign secretary at the time of the invasion of the Falklands. Admitting that he had misjudged the situation leading up to the conflict, he resigned his office.
Little Jimmy Osmond
Child star of the early 1970s who had a UK hit with ‘Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool’. There wasn’t a lad in Britain who wouldn’t happily have punched him in the face, but our sisters were big fans. Yes, he has a web-site: http://www.jimmyosmond.com/
Eleven Plus
Until the early 1970s, the British state educational system depended on the Eleven Plus exam, which children took in their last year at primary school (ages 6-11, roughly the equivalent of American grade school). Those who passed went on to Grammar Schools and those who failed to Secondary Modern Schools; in theory, the former were more academically-inclined and encouraged pupils to go on to further eduction while the latter were to prepare children — who would probably leave education at sixteen — for life in the workplace. The Eleven Plus was essentially an IQ test, designed to measure aptitude not knowledge — but, of course, the fact that kids sat mock exams in preparation for the Eleven Plus meant that the format could be learned and mastered. Wealthier parents could (and still can) opt out entirely by sending their children to fee-paying public (ie: private) schools. The Eleven Plus was theoretically discontinued in the mid-1970s (it still persists in many parts of the country) and Grammar and Secondary Modern schools were amalgamated into Comprehensive Schools (roughly the equivalent of American High Schools), which practice ‘streaming’ of pupils with different aptitudes under the same roof, without the stigma of labelling two-thirds of them failures at eleven. It could be argued that I am stretching a point in giving Keith the choice of passing or failing, and that the reader should sit an actual exam to decide the rest of the course of his life, but the unacknowledged fact was that most children could be taught to pass the Eleven Plus (and weren’t). The issues raised here were debated among kids, many of whom (rightly, to my mind) thought Grammar School sounded a lot worse than it needed to be. If you want to play fair, you can download the modern 11+ equivalent from http://www.elevenplus.com/ and see how you do — though this isn’t quite what we had to sit in 1970.
Rugby
Rugby is a contact sport resembling American football, only British boys don’t feel the need to wear all that sissy protective gear when playing it.
Football
Football in Britain=soccer or association football.
Prefect
At Grammar Schools, certain boys or girls in the Upper Sixth Form (the equivalent of high school Seniors in America) were invested with powers as prefects – rather like trusties in prisons or kapos in concentration camps. In the 1970s, outside the private school system, prefects couldn’t inflict corporal punishment, though they were entrusted with the power of dishing out other punishments to younger kids.
Jennings
Schoolboy hero of Anthony Buckeridge’s novels for children, from Jennings Goes to School (1950) onwards. The character debuted on BBC Radio in 1948.
http://histclo.hispeed.com/lit/uk/auth/ecla-buck.html
Billy Bunter
Created by author Frank Richards in 1908, Billy Bunter — ‘the fat owl of the remove’ — was the break-out character of a series of stories published in the periodical The Magnet about the fictional Greyfriars School. Part of his appeal was that, unlike the straight-arrow decent sorts who were the heroes of the series (and who seem insufferably priggish), Bunter was gluttonous, cowardly, devious and feckless. Bunter appeared in novels until the mid-60s, and paperback reprints were still read by children well into the 1970s, though the Edwardian public school setting had become bizarrely alien.
http://www15.brinkster.com/hiamie/greyfriars/greyfriars.htm
Chalet School
A series of girls’ school stories written by Eleanor Brent-Dyer, first published between 1925 and 1970. If you think the worlds of Greyfriars and Chalet School, and the numberless other boarding school adventures published in the 20th Century, are gone forever, consider that J.K. Rowling is writing essentially the same stuff. If Keith and Vanda were eleven now, they’d be reading Harry Potter.
http://www.rockterrace.demon.co.uk/FOCS/main.html
‘pointing percy at the porcelain’
Hackwill is indicating that he needs to urinate.
the bog
The men’s room.
The National Lottery
Recent UK institution, a national random-number prize-draw. Government-sponsored, it raises money that theoretically is ploughed into good works.
http://www.national-lottery.co.uk/player/p/home/home.do
http://lottery.merseyworld.com/Info/Diary.html
estate agent
US: real estate agent
comprehensive education
The tripartite educational system, current in the UK from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, established three different types of secondary schools - Grammar schools for those who passed the Eleven Plus exam, Secondary schools for those who didn't and Technical schools for some arcane reason no one quite worked out before they were done away with.
Marie-Laure Quilter
Also appears in Jago.
the slipper
Corporal punishment with an item of casual footwear.
The Bash Street Kids in The Beano.
Naughty children in a popular comic-strip created by Leo Baxendale. The Beano was, and still is, a British weekly comic specialising in irreverent humour.
http://www.paulmorris.co.uk/beano/strips/bashstreetkids.htm
http://www.beanotown.com/index2.htm
Bottom
s Up!
Spun-off from the 1950s TV series Whack-O!, which had a brief 1970s revival, this peculiarly British 1959 school comedy does indeed feature an emphasis on corporal punishment jokes. Recently, it has vanished somewhat from the afternoon TV slots in which it used to be telecast.