Instead, I was carried indoors, bruised, noisy and smouldering from the conflagration in the garden, and sent to my room to recover. Luckily there was an unopened Jamboree Bag and a pile of comics up there, and I took consolation in them, knowing that I would never again attempt anything involving nails, saws, gas or wood. I was not, to put it mildly, a practical boy.
In 1960, when the accident happened, I was seven years old. Born during Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, I had been presented with a heraldic mug and a crested spoon, both of which my father had used in the course of repairing his Triumph motorbike, and therefore ruined. I did not hate my father, because to hate someone you have to understand what they are up to. Rather, it seemed that Bill was wired differently from me, like a Continental plug. We had no idea about what made each other pleased or angry, and as a consequence we could only communicate through a common element: my mother, his wife. Bill had a range of subjects he felt comfortable with: car engines, the War, boats, hardware shops. When Kath spoke, it was often to continue an abstract thought that had started in her head some time earlier, so that her conversation could border on the surreal. I happily related to that.
Low-evening sunshine heated the thin curtains in my bedroom. The air outside the window was alive with mayflies. My mother said they only lived for a day, but childhood seemed intent on lasting for ever. The sunset warmed the lincrusta wallpaper above my bed to a welcoming orange. Another hot suburban day tomorrow. In my memory it was always summer, except for the bits that were like living in a bowl of filthy water – there were still smogs. In December 1952, just before I was born, the worst of them had killed four thousand Londoners.
My mother came up to see me. ‘Back from Treasure Island?’ I figured she was referring to Long John Silver and my possible loss of a leg, because she liked all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s books except Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. ‘I suppose it hurt.’
‘I could have lost it.’
‘It’s a miracle we can find anything in that garden.’
She seated herself on the end of my bed, smoothing out the racing-car bedspread. Nobody dramatized cuts and bruises in the Fowler family; they were the medals of childhood, and not to be fussed over.
‘Your father is ready to kill you. I don’t know why you go so far out of your way to annoy him. Perhaps you need more fresh air. Why don’t you go with Percy to Greenwich Park?’
Percy lived next door and had to walk very slowly because he had TB. He had spent part of last year in an iron lung and wasn’t allowed to play cricket in case the ball hit him in the chest. Plus, he had to go through life being called Percy.
‘It takes too long. By the time he gets there, the park will be closing.’
‘You spend an awful lot of time indoors. You’re very pale.’
‘You feed me too much tinned food.’
‘Your father doesn’t enjoy market produce. He prefers to be constipated.’ My mother knew that things in tins weren’t fresh, but thought that things in jars were. Her first sighting of fresh ginger root gave her quite a fright, because she was used to seeing it floating in brown liquid. We never dreamed you could get fresh beetroot. She continued to buy tins until a scandal occurred involving poisoned tins of Fray Bentos corned beef.
‘I’ll cook you fresh if we can get it. It doesn’t make any difference to me, I get no pleasure from eating because I have no taste buds. I damaged my mouth in a bicycle accident when I was seven. But you’re a growing boy.’ She narrowed her green eyes at me, preparing to sum up. ‘Well, there you are, more outdoor pursuits, eat things you don’t like, make some friends, try not to annoy your father.’
She straightened the cornflower-blue apron she wore every day for the first fifteen years of her marriage, and quietly shut the door behind her. My mother had a way of closing herself off from difficult conversations.
There was a time when all lower-middle-class English families were this emotionless. I remembered seeing a Victorian cartoon in a very old issue of Punch4 magazine, in which a lady’s maid was calling to her employee in great distress.
Maid: ‘Oh Ma’am! I’ve just swallowed a safety pin!’
The lady of the house (drily): ‘Oh, so that’s where all my safety pins go.’
As far as I could tell, there were three classes of people living in England, sandwiched together like the flavours in a Neapolitan ice-cream brick. People who were ‘not like us’, ‘people like us’, and people who were ‘not for the likes of us’.
The first lot were common; they exaggerated their vowels, especially the letter ‘a’ (as in ‘Haaang Abaaaht!’) and shouted at each other in the street. They laughed all the time, voted Labour, said rude words and drank bitter or stout. One of them, Mr Hills next door, took his teeth out and hung a teaspoon on his nose when he was tipsy.
The middle ones were bemused, genteel white-collar workers who put on airs and graces even though they didn’t have two halfpennies to rub together. They helped out at Tory party headquarters and admired the royals. They were always shushing each other and worrying about being embarrassed, or ‘shown up’. They were obsessed with the cleanliness of their shirt collars, and although they moaned all the time, were pathetically grateful when posh people deigned to acknowledge them. Most middle-class men stayed in one job for fifty years, at the end of which time they were presented with a carriage clock and packed off home to die.
The ones in the top bracket liked telling everyone else what to do but were generally invisible, only appearing on fête days to talk loudly about once meeting ‘the radiant Princess Margaret’.5 They attended street parties for the poor, but never organized them. The ladies wore white gloves and the men never knew what to do with their hands.
Naturally, none of these groups spoke to each other unless they absolutely had to – i.e., when their houses fell down.
Class was an endless source of fascination. Another ancient Punch cartoon I recalled showed an upper-class young lady cutting up a hansom carriage in her motor-car at Piccadilly Circus.
Cabman: ‘Sound your ’orn!’
Lady driver: ‘Sound your aitches!’
It was a mysterious world all right, and better to stick with what you could understand. After nursing my wounds by removing a knee-scab with surgical precision, I lay on the bed and opened my Jamboree Bag, so-called because it had a poorly printed picture of Scouts on the cover.
Inside were:
A handful of tiny round pastels as hard and tasteless as coat buttons.
Two of the ugliest, most utilitarian toffees in the world, wrapped in thin wax paper that proved impossible to separate from the toffee.
A sherbet fountain with a bunged-up stick of liquorice in it to act as a straw.
A toy so poorly assembled that it was impossible to figure out whether it was a submarine or a farmyard animal.
A joke. Sample:
Q. Where does Mr Plod the policeman live?
A. 999 Letsby Avenue.
The only quality the Jamboree Bag possessed was its mystery, and it therefore remained far more interesting if left unopened. Things invisible to the eye contained hope.
My bedroom was filled with reading material: books salvaged from dustbins, books borrowed from friends, books with missing pages, books found in the street, abandoned, unreadable, torn, scribbled on, unloved, unwanted and dismissed. My bedroom was the Battersea Dogs Home of books. Unfortunately, none of them were books I would have chosen for myself. I did not want to learn about dentistry, rope-making, the Museum of Bricks or the Shropshire Evangelical Guild, and I certainly did not want to read the Condensed Books of the Reader’s Digest, not just because the novel of the month was usually a heartwarming chronicle of a Brooklyn family who had relocated to the Italian countryside, but because it was obvious that ‘condensed’ meant ‘censored’. I rescued them because I could not bear to see them thrown away. It seemed wrong to leave words unread, even when they were incredibly, staggeringly boring. I read the boring bits
first just to get them out of the way, and this proved so arduous that I often failed to reach the good bits.
I would be left alone here until dusk, which at this point of summer was around nine p.m. I loved reading. When I was reading, I could not hear my parents sniping at one another. Kath had a subscription to the Reader’s Digest, which was filled with snippets of triumph over tragedy, girls choking back tears, brave guide dogs, recovery from secret illness and other wholesome toss in which I had no interest.
The family also owned a set of ten blue cardboard-bound volumes from the 1930s entitled The Arthur Mee Children’s Encyclopedia. These volumes included such fascinating and useful items as:
How to Stalk a Deer
Keeping Guinea-Pigs as Pets
The History of Tunnelling
Proficiency Badges of the Boy Scouts
The Wonderful World of the Worm
Crocheting a Pot-Holder for Empire Day6
Fun and Amusement with Stops and Commas
How to Cultivate a Monastery Garden
The Right Way to Slide
The Cheerful Black Folk of Africa
And ‘What Is Wrong with this Picture?’
(Answer: ‘The gentleman has buttoned his waistcoat incorrectly.’)
In an article on ‘How to Build a British House’, the end photograph showed a man standing on his roof behind actual crenellations, beneath a fluttering Union Jack, clenching a pipe stem between his teeth, staring pompously into the middle distance. Another article entitled ‘Things to See in London’ included the Inigo Jones Watergate, Adelphi (moved and forgotten), the Crystal Palace (moved and burned down) and, more obscurely, the W. T. Stead Memorial on the Embankment (Stead was a journalist and spiritualist who survived the sinking of the Titanic). The volumes were fascinating from an anthropological perspective, but also dusty, peculiar and vaguely offensive. I loved them.
In a house that contained so little to read, I would read anything, because I possessed no functioning critical faculties whatsoever. At breakfast I would read the Cornflakes box, and then, when it was empty, attempt to make the absurdly complicated paper sculpture of a tiger’s head that Kellogg’s had printed on the back of the packet. I would even read the sugar bag, although Mr Cube, the anthropomorphic lump of sugar brought in by Tate & Lyle to deliver propaganda messages against the government’s plan to privatize the sugar industry, gave me the creeps, as did Mr Therm, the weird dancing gas flame who advertised cookers. When there was absolutely nothing else left to read at the breakfast table I would read my father’s Daily Express, every front page of which featured ‘Our Radiant New Queen’. In times of desperation I read my mother’s knitting pamphlets.7 I would read on the toilet and in the bath, and while crossing the road, which you could do because there were hardly any cars about. I read while walking along the pavement, aided by a sixth sense that kept me from vanishing down manholes or smacking into lampposts. I read just standing up for a pee, with a comic book propped on the cistern.
Ideally, I wanted to read every book in the English language, climaxing with Shakespeare, which at the moment looked like gibberish. But the only things I could afford to buy for myself were comics, and they became my literature.
More than that, they were an addiction.
The first one I ever bought was a Harvey Comic featuring Baby Huey, a stupid giant yellow duck in a nappy. When this character proved unsatisfying I switched to Hot Stuff the Little Devil, Little Dot, Casper and Wendy, Sad Sack, and Richie Rich, the adventures of a grotesquely wealthy blond boy who was forever carting around wheelbarrows full of giant diamonds. Even at an early age, I knew this comic was wrong.
But there was something bigger and better out there, and its name was Superman.
1 Glowing lime de-greaser; could double for Green Kryptonite.
2 Rough-as-guts cancer-sticks for the working class affectionately known as ‘gaspers’.
3 A ‘resort’ on the Isle of Sheppey that comprised a lido, a funfair, some manky beach huts, a nasty estuarine beach and the pikiest holiday-makers on the South coast.
4 Occasionally humorous Victorian magazine famed for its longevity in dentists’ waiting rooms.
5 Elizabeth’s hard-drinking sister, a legendary royal freeloader inexplicably worshipped by the lower orders.
6 On Empire Day a grateful nation (and Canada) held inspirational speeches and lit bonfires in their back gardens. It became Commonwealth Day in 1958 in order to sound less patronizing.
7 Most of which have now been turned into a range of smutty birthday cards suggesting that the models were rent boys or on drugs.
3
Not a Hoax, Not a Dream, but REAL!
‘YOU ARE GOING to take it back.’
My mother was holding up the comic I had just bought. It wasn’t that she disapproved of me reading them. She was angry because she’d given me a shilling to go and buy a sliced family loaf, and I’d come back with Superman.
‘I can’t take it back.’ The idea was mortifying. It had been opened and partially read. It was like taking two bites out of a Mars bar and trying to return it to the confectioner.
When Kath stood with her right hand on her hip, she was meant to be obeyed. Her pale-blue pinafore dress and freshly lacquered helmet of tight fair curls formed the weekday uniform of a woman who intended to get things done. ‘This is a lesson you need to learn, Christopher. You did a wrong thing, and you must undo it by yourself, even though it hurts. Take it back.’
I took the comic from her and headed across the road to Mr Purbrick’s with shame soaking into my heart. Why didn’t she understand that comics were the key to the world? You could always buy another loaf, but Superman comics were hard to come by.
When the Westcombe Hill corner shop began stocking The Man of Steel, everything changed. On the cover of the first issue I purchased, Superman had the head of a giant red ant. It was a Red Kryptonite story, and, as was so often the case with DC Comics, the cover was a ‘fanciful’ – i.e., untruthful – version of the events depicted inside. Red Kryptonite was my favourite chunk of Superman’s home planet because the results to exposure were unguessable, and were usually part of some convoluted and ludicrous hoax to teach Lois Lane not to be nosy.
I hated Batman, who had stupid ears and no superpowers, and I spent all of my pocket money on comic series that were doomed to failure and had zero resale value, like The Metal Men (robots with the properties of the element table), The Atom (a shrinking man who spent most of his time climbing out of Venus flytraps or fighting spiders), The Flash (who could run fast – big deal), Strange Sports (weird science-fiction sports matches), Sea Devils (boring underwater adventures) and Challengers of the Unknown (purple jumpsuited heroes without superpowers).
Purbrick’s stocked comics in a rusty wire revolving rack, and I had a small window of opportunity to buy them on a Wednesday before they sold out. Certain issues became legendary, especially the tale of ‘Superman Red and Superman Blue’, although I later decided this was more about fetishizing two different versions of the Man of Steel’s costume than about the plot. One story, called ‘The Death of Superman’, was endlessly plugged across the DC range (‘Not a hoax, not a dream, but REAL!’) and I was desperate to get my hands on it. It seemed that DC had got themselves into this having-to-explain-it’s-not-a-hoax situation because they had made their hero so invincible that his powers negated most of the more dramatic storylines.1 The writers had to resort to ever more elaborate ruses for their sensational cover gambits. Virtually every plot turned out to be a trick, a hoax or a dream.
I therefore found myself fascinated by the Superman comics for all the wrong reasons. I wasn’t interested in heroics or battles with space aliens. I wanted to see how much more absurd Superman’s psychological gambits could become before something cracked and they all went mad.
Mr Purbrick was behind the counter, dispensing horrible-tasting cough sweets called Hacks. The logo on their bottle featured an elderly man sneezing wetly i
nto a vast hankie. Damn, why couldn’t the place have been shut for lunch?
Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen comics were particularly instructive, I found, because they took the hoax-plot to a surreal level. The Man of Steel’s two sidekicks were clearly in love with him, but he didn’t love them. Lois would be humiliated, bullied, deceived and placed in danger by a man who was prepared to disguise himself under rubber masks just to ‘teach her a lesson’. Her old-maid status was endlessly mocked. She would be duped by gold-digging monocled counts who turned out to be Superman (punishing her for some perceived failure of judgement), fake superheroes who were revealed as gangsters, and handsome historical figures like Robin Hood or Julius Caesar, usually as a result of hitting her head on a rock and thinking she’d been hurled back into the past.
I re-read these comics with an increasing sense of puzzlement. Why would a gangster pretend he had superpowers just to shut Lois Lane up? You are a gangster, and Lois Lane is about to expose your misdeeds in the Daily Planet. Do you, a) shoot her in the head? Or do you, b) fly through her bedroom window on wires in tights and a cape, snog her, propose, get her into a wedding dress so she can say ‘I grew tired of waiting for you, Superman, I am marrying Astro-Lad’ and then dump her?
In one issue Lois Lane spent the entire story with her head in an iron box, too ashamed to go out, because she’d been given the head of a cat. Sometimes all of Lois’s friends were in on these humiliations, but could not tell her because they were being watched from space. When Lois finally got to the altar with Superman, it turned out to be a dream caused by her falling off a pier. Sometimes she ended up in a straitjacket, raving, and this too would be revealed as a trick.
Was adult life going to be like this, I wondered? When I grew up would I have to be on my guard every second of the day in case somebody tried to trick me? Would I wake up to discover it had all been a hoax, a dream, and not real at all?
I liked Lois Lane because she was a contrary woman with a job to do, like my mother. What I could not see, of course, was that Lois Lane comics were aimed at teenage girls, and since I did not know any girls I was not able to understand the psychology of someone who would spend a week with her head in a metal box in order to get a date.
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