Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints

by Simon Doonan

  I must emphasize that these recollections about the Butlins of my formative years should not be construed as a commentary on the Butlins of today which, I might add, remains a perfectly marvelous vacation option.

  The gastric agonies eventually subsided, and we both made full Piaf-like recoveries. We had no regrets. Our time at Butlins had been positively life-changing.

  Biddie and I had discovered Camp.

  Butlins did not seem to have this effect on everyone. Not everyone at Minehead was posing in doorways or bursting over the side of the swimming pool with such studied enthusiasm. This perplexed us. Biddie and I did not understand how people could be so utterly doltish and boring in such an environment. How can you dive in an artless, doltish, ramshackle kind of way into a swimming pool which has been painstakingly festooned with plastic birds and flowers? It is insulting to the swimming pool itself and to all the good people who have tried so feverishly to give you the Esther Williams experience of a lifetime.

  You must walk to the end of the diving board, suck in your stomach and your cheeks, raise your arms like Evita, and dive with the self-consciousness and panache of somebody who understands that life is a stage set, a really tacky, faded stage set.

  Thanks to our two weeks in Minehead, Biddie and I now acted exactly like the people in the Butlins postcards and brochures. We had found ourselves, or at least the waving, posing brochure versions of ourselves.

  CHAPTER 7

  GUTS

  Everywhere I looked there were sets of rose pink dentures soaking in mugs or drinking glasses. False teeth were a huge part of my childhood and of the landscape of the twentieth century. No slapstick movie or TV comedy sketch was complete without a set of chattering dentures. It is no exaggeration to say that false teeth were culturally central.

  Having all one’s teeth pulled out was not just inevitable, it was positively de rigueur! When Betty, still in her thirties, announced that her denture days had arrived, nobody in our house batted an eyelid. We saw it as a happy happenstance: soon our already glamorous mother would have a fabulous new smile. How could it be anything other than a totally life-enhancing change?

  We were woefully unprepared for the overwhelming hideousness of the whole ordeal. When Betty returned home from the dentist, a cerise-colored chiffon head scarf wound tightly around her head and jaw, she looked as if she had been in a car accident. Not only did she look dreadful, but she also carried about her the sad and hopeless air of a broken woman. What on Earth had happened? Where was that glamorous Lana Turner confidence we had all come to know and love?

  Betty shuffled to the sideboard and poured herself a glass of gin. She took a halfhearted sip. The liquid dribbled out of her mouth. She abandoned her glass and then lit a cigarette. It fell poignantly from her unrouged lips. She was Lana Turner all right, only it was the downtrodden Madame X she was playing as opposed to the upbeat assertive Lora in Imitation of Life.

  Betty collapsed on the couch and stared at the ceiling. Her lips caved in slightly. She now resembled the hideous toothless gypsy hags who banged on our front door once a week and menaced us into buying their malfunctioning clothespins.

  Simultaneously, my sister and I burst into tears.

  So began a gruesome and interminable period of toothlessness while we all waited for Betty’s gums to heal and for the arrival of her new choppers.

  Though bloody and bruised, Betty received little sympathy. I was unapologetically furious with her for looking so horrid and unattractive. My sister shared my indignation and continued to weep openly and reproachfully. Narg and Uncle Ken and Aunt Phyllis and Terry had all gone through same thing. They had received sympathy. But Betty was different. She had an obligation to us. Glamour was part of her contract.

  Eventually the new choppers arrived. Betty, with a gleaming set of movie-star white teeth, was back to her old self again and then some. We breathed easy.

  A minor challenge now presented itself. The new Hollywood teeth did not seem to fit as well as they might. It took only a light sneeze to send Betty’s gnashers flying across the kitchen. I can still recall the poignant noise they produced when they hit various hollow surfaces and rattled to the floor.

  Flying dentures were a common sight back then. Nobody in our house seemed able to keep choppers in place for any length of time. Sneezing and coughing were the most common cause. The sequence was as follows.

  “Achew!”

  Rattling sound.

  “Oh, Christ!” (Spoken in toothless voice.)

  Whenever Betty’s teeth flew out, we looked away until she popped them back in. If Terry was the culprit, we gave ourselves full permission to enjoy the slapstick. I still chuckle when I recall the day his choppers landed in the oil under his motorbike.

  Undeterred by Betty’s oral crucifixion, I began to crave my own set of dentures. My reasoning was simple. Once I had dentures, I would no longer be obliged to visit Mr. Porter. He was our large and terrifying dentist, whose unmarried, one-armed sister functioned as his assistant. He drilled our teeth, sans anesthetic, with a device which looked like a vintage Black & Decker. While the sadist drilled, his sister held us down with her one arm.

  The agonized shrieks which rose from his chair caused much weeping and sighing among adults and children alike as they trembled in the adjacent waiting room.

  When my sister and I expressed any fear of Mr. Porter, Betty became rather uneasy. She could not cope with the idea that she might be raising children with low pain thresholds. Cowardice of any kind was absolutely unacceptable. She would have preferred that we become drug addicts or shoplifters. Anything was preferable to being yellow.

  Betty’s side of the family was very, very butch. She came from a tough clan of pain-loving Northern Irish Protestants.

  “Your grandmother just had her varicose veins cut, and she refused painkillers,” she proudly announced one day, daring us to react. Her reasoning was as follows: anesthetics were for weaklings and English people. The Northern Irish had a higher tolerance for pain because they had endured suffering and because they were much, much, much better people.

  When my grandfather wrote to Betty informing her that he and his wife had just removed what were left of each other’s teeth with electrical pliers, Betty waved the letter aloft as if it was a winning lottery ticket.

  I began to be slightly concerned. What would happen if I ever got drastically sick? I could just imagine Betty holding back the anesthesiologist as I underwent an appendectomy or a heart transplant. “Don’t be ridiculous! Of course he doesn’t need any Demerol. He’s of Northern Irish descent!”

  * * *

  Once a year we had the opportunity to visit the primordial slime from which all this tough-guy stuff emerged. Every July we decamped to strife-torn Belfast to visit Betty’s father.

  David Carson Gordon was a member of an unusually butch species. He is long dead and his species is now extinct, but it used to be quite common. I saw specimens on every street corner in Northern Ireland.

  I guess you could call them Irish working-class boule-vardiers. They were easy to spot because, like Amish or Hasidim, they had a very specific personal style. Their jaunty appearance was an amalgam of country and city style, reflecting the contradictions of their formerly rural lives.

  Having come from the wilds of County Antrim, D. C. Gordon was a prime example of this genre of small-town tough guy. Attired in a collarless shirt and a mud-flecked, thick wool, pin-striped, three-piece suit, he cut an impressive figure as he squinted down at the gold watch and chain which dangled from his waistcoat. His trousers were tucked into a pair of dark green, poo-spattered rubber wellies. His meticulously combed, center-parted hair—very Edwardian—was covered by a flat farmer’s tweed cap. It was all very proto–Ralph Lauren.

  These dandies were not to be found in England. I saw men like D. C. Gordon only in Northern Ireland. The fellows back home were, by comparison, quite wimpy and pathos-drenched. They wore thick glasses and depressing cardigans from Ma
rks & Spencer—very Mister Rogers—and their hair was Brylcreemed into stripy comb-overs. They could often be seen meekly accompanying their wives on shopping trips up the local high street.

  Compared to these neutered males, D.C. and his cronies were swashbuckling pirates or libidinous musketeers.

  There were invariably gaggles of these gentlemen lurking outside the Belfast pubs and betting shops. They had the air of men who were charged with making important, world-altering decisions. As they chatted, glancing up and down the street, they gave the impression that deep thoughts and momentous ideas were being exchanged, as opposed to, for example, racing tips.

  These tough guys had their own florid and scary language. They entertained each other with hilariously creative similes and euphemisms. If he thought somebody was tightfisted, D.C. would say of that person, “Him! He’d drink beer out of a shitey rag, as long as someone else is payin’.”

  If a male friend was married to a harridan and that friend happened to drop dead, D.C. would sum up the situation with a laconic “He preferred the boards.” These kinds of remarks were usually followed by toothless cackles of auto-amusement.

  While the men were thus engaged, the womenfolk bustled to and fro, doing pointless, self-indulgent things like child rearing, food gathering, ignoring their aches and pains, and generally depriving themselves in order to make ends meet. No wonder Betty had run off to join the Air Force and married a bloke who rubbed her feet and listened to opera.

  In D.C.’s world, men had a full monopoly on recreational activities. While the women scrubbed and toiled and baked without so much as an ass pinch or a thank-you, their menfolk seemed unable to function without a steady flow of time-honored pleasures and rewards. They were hardworking, but only in sporadic bursts. The rest of the time they gambled on the horses and drank Guinness and cultivated audaciously high expectations of their womenfolk. They were completely and utterly heterosexual.

  I have a great snapshot of D.C. sitting proudly in a horse-drawn cart with his name emblazoned across the front. This image recalls Charlton Heston’s chariot-racing scene in Ben-Hur. At the time of the snap, D.C. was the proprietor of a thriving milk delivery business. This enterprise—the apotheosis of his career—eventually failed. According to Betty, the reasons were twofold: first, and commendably, good-hearted D.C. had a hard time collecting money from the poor and gave away much of the milk. Second, and less fabulously, what little profits were made went straight to the betting shop or the cash register at the Woodman’s Arms.

  The life of a Northern Irish boulevardier was not without its challenges. On one occasion, while sauntering home from the aforementioned Woodman’s Arms after an evening of conviviality, a sixty-five-year-old D.C. plunged into a construction hole, breaking a leg and losing a great deal of dignity. He was carted off to hospital, where the fractured limb was encased in plaster. Painkillers were ostentatiously declined. D.C. was then told that he must rest for two months. The phrase “never walk again” was used.

  Poo-pooing these warnings, D.C. discharged himself and staggered home. Heading directly to the toolshed, he set about removing the massive cast with a hacksaw. It was thirsty work. Free of the cast, he hobbled back to the Wood-man’s Arms. Propping himself up at the bar, he regaled his cohorts with his adventure. The Guinness flowed. Everybody, Betty included, marveled at his unmedicated bravery.

  Within his community, D.C., the handsome widower, was considered to be not only gutsy but eligible. Various local ladies had their eyes on him. Coiffed and perfumed, they would drop by to flirt and partake of tea. His favorite way to discourage this kind of behavior was to lie on the floor with the lights out. My sister and I enjoyed this charade. We had read Anne Frank’s newly published Diary of a Young Girl. We knew what to do.

  If the widows caught us all in the front yard, D.C. would switch to Plan B. This entailed making tea and feeding the unwanted visitors ancient slices of bread from his chicken feed bin. My sister and I took great delight in watching this ritual.

  “Davey, is this bread no’ a wee bit moldy?” his coquettish lady friends would ask as they stared anxiously at the small, furry, gray-green blotches.

  “Notatall! Sure, it’s fresh the daaay!” he would reply, daring them, with his handsome dark brown eyes, not to partake.

  These moments of hilarity were few and far between. Most of the time D.C. was a grunty and remote vacation host.

  This is probably a good moment to reflect on the tour de force that was Betty Doonan née Gordon. Most of her year was spent toiling, mothering, cutting up blind Aunt Phyllis’s food, and contending with Narg and Ken, our schizophrenic live-in relatives. The only respite from this routine was our annual vacation, out of the frying pan and into Northern Ireland. While we frolicked in the icy, oily waters of Belfast Lough, Betty cooked and scrubbed and attempted to alleviate the squalor of her eccentric and demanding parent. Well-coiffed, maquillaged, and uncomplaining, she confronted these familial challenges head-on.

  My mum had long since reconciled herself to the fact that relatives were nothing but trouble. For Betty they were synonymous with dreadful goings-on, drudgery, and emotional turmoil. If she ever heard that a friend or colleague was expecting a visit from an in-law, there was always a sharp intake of breath followed by a sympathetic glance and the offering of a consoling cigarette. I inherited this trait. To this day when people announce the imminent arrival of grandparents or cousins, it’s hard for me to restrain myself from saying, “Oh, God, I’m really sorry. Let me know if there is anything I can do, and know that I’m there for you during this dark and horrible period.”

  The role played by nicotine should not be underestimated. Betty’s coping skills were bolstered and sustained by a heavy and not unreasonable reliance on cigarettes. Betty’s complex life was never going to afford her long stretches of thigh-slapping fun. She took her releases and recreations in small, wry increments. These lasted about as long as it takes to smoke a cigarette. Woodbines were her preferred brand. Like Betty herself, Woodbines were short, strong, and tough. Once she was back on Irish soil, her Woodbine consumption quadrupled.

  * * *

  More often than not we arrived for our annual vacation to find D.C. going to or coming from a wake. Funerals loomed large on D.C.’s calendar. He took them seriously. They were the only time he bothered to wear his false teeth. These occasions became increasingly frequent as he got older. “Guess who’s dead?” he would say upon returning home from a day at the pub, indicating that those dusty dentures were due for an outing.

  After the initial guarded but warm hellos—there were no California hugs or Euro air kisses back then—old resentments would eventually float to the surface. D.C. had never quite forgiven Betty for leaving Northern Ireland and, worse still, marrying an Englishman.

  Betty had barely stubbed out the first ciggie before D.C. began to assert himself. His favorite method of control involved blood and death. Strolling casually into the backyard, he would murder about three or four chickens in quick succession. The fowl in question ran around freely. He would wring their necks and shove them into an oil drum with the same nonchalance that other people straighten their ties or touch up their lipstick. He would then disappear to the pub. Betty was left to pluck, gut, truss, and cook them in the ancient, tiny, malfunctioning oven which raged in D.C.’s closetsize kitchen.

  When he returned from the pub, he would kill another one.

  “He’s murdering them faster than I can gut them!” lamented Betty with her hand up a chicken’s bum, à la glove puppet.

  D.C.’s chickens were the focus of much of his daily life. He ate their eggs raw every morning, tossing the shells with chilling accuracy over his shoulder and directly into the fire. He also reared pheasants and ducks and grew his own veggies. The only thing he seemed to buy from a store was bread. Everything else was grown or raised in his guano-filled urban backyard. He built wire enclosures for his birds with his bare hands and dragged home heavy feed bags in the pouri
ng rain. Even in his seventies he remained tough and invincible. Normal men seemed unbelievably nelly when compared to D.C.

  D.C. was the antinelly. He was the opposite of me. I found him unbelievably intimidating and kept my distance. We had nothing to talk about. His lack of teeth and his heavily accented, grunty speech kept communication to a minimum. I could never have shared with him my burgeoning love of fashion and decorative accessories. His Guinness-addled world-view did not encompass the Beautiful People. We existed in separate dimensions of time and space and beauty.

  When I reached the age of ten I noticed a marked change. D.C. started to look at me differently. He began to size me up as if he was planning something. I felt uneasy. Maybe he was going to throttle me or take me to market.

  One day he brought me and my sister, Shelagh, to visit a friend of his who kept ponies. We spent an afternoon cantering and trotting around his paddock, observed by D.C. and his cohort. They admired our form and complimented us on our skill. When I fell off, D.C. gathered me up and plonked me back in the saddle. Here at last were the glimmerings of the kind of rapport which all my friends seemed to have with their grandparents. My sister was definitely a better rider than I, but for some strange reason, D.C. was focusing his attention on me.

  All was revealed when we got home.

  “The wee lad would make a fine jockey, so he would!” announced D.C. to Betty, who as usual, had her hand up a chicken’s bum.

  He was right about one thing. I was definitely wee.3 And I wasn’t getting any taller. But those weren’t doting grandfatherly glints of commiseration in his eyes. They were dollar signs. Suddenly I felt the cold draft of exploitation blowing up my wee jodhpur leg.