But there was one magical moment in a string of awful Christmases.
After glass-blowing, Bill had moved into a scientific lab where he designed and built vitreous instruments. He was regarded as brilliant at his job, and once constructed a human brain in glass just to show off his skills. When the company moved to Toronto he decided not to go with them, presumably because his mother would disapprove of the move. It broke his heart to watch his colleagues leave without him, and while he was looking for a new job, the family tightened its collective belt still further. But on that freezing, penniless Christmas night, I awoke to find the old leather armchair at the end of my bed covered in twinkling red and yellow lights my father had made, which were threaded around a dozen small boxes containing what seemed at the time to be the best train set in the world. How had he managed to pay for it? There was even a box of miniature coal pieces for the tender, to which I could add rubberized soot from Mr Purbrick’s shop.
Bill and Grandfather William spent the whole of Christmas Day and Boxing Day crawling around on the floor getting electric shocks. They finally decided on a suitable layout for the set, and permanently mounted it on framed hardboard that was unfortunately too big to go out of the sitting-room door, so it had to be sawn in half and put on hinges, during which Bill accidentally sawed through the coffee table. When the grown-ups grew bored with the technicalities of point-switching and went in search of brown ale, I finally got to enjoy the fun of being intermittently electrocuted.
A truce had been called, but it did not last long. My mother withdrew her money from the Christmas savings club and treated herself to a dress, flared and flowered – the only one that ever turned up in family photographs. It made her look like part of the modern world and therefore slightly weird, like a blonde Alma Cogan or a prettier Fanny Cradock.
My father went nuts. He told her she looked like a cheap tart, and that she was trying to encourage the men of the neighbourhood, only two of whom were ever visible during the day: octogenarian Mr Hills and the bloke with Down’s Syndrome who sat on his front step with his trousers pulled up high, looking like a big smiling baby. Dad never allowed Kath to wear any sort of make-up. There were only two items in her side of the bedroom cupboard (there being no bathroom). One was a Pifco hair-dryer in cream Bakelite that weighed the same as a leg of lamb, and was kept in its original red satin-lined box like a school trophy. The other was a scary-looking contraption with a pink rubber bulb and red tubing attached. There was an indecent intimacy about this device, but I could not begin to imagine what it might be for, other than watering plants.
The dress brought up the question of money, and money brought up unemployment, and the vexing embers of low self-esteem began to glow bright. Bill’s mother fanned the flame with her own sly whispers, and suddenly everything ignited. One night I awoke to crashes, screams, the sound of someone being pushed or falling. I looked through the banisters but the kitchen door was shut, so I crept downstairs and quietly pushed it open.
My mother was sitting on the floor, wedged into a corner, and my father was standing before her, flexing his right fist. There was broken glass and china everywhere. Kath’s mother’s ceramic statue of a lady in a green lace dress had lost its nose. At my appearance, the rage faded from Bill’s eyes and Kath climbed awkwardly to her feet. She had been punched and slapped, but I could see that she was not scared. She simply seemed emotionless, quiet and determined.
Kath pulled on her cardigan in stoic silence and went out into the rain, and around the corner to the local police station. A portly constable came back with her and spoke quietly to my father. The copper could not have been satisfied with Bill’s response, though, for he remained outside in the front garden all night, his cape wrapped against the downpour, keeping watch on the house. To be on the safe side, Kath slept with a carving knife under the bed.
In the morning, having satisfied himself that the house was at peace, the policeman quietly went away before the neighbours could spot him; it was what policemen still did in the sixties. A few days later, he came back to check on the inhabitants of Number 35 again and had a quiet word with Kath, advising her that perhaps she might like to rethink her decision to remain with her husband.
The atmosphere at home calmed but it was never the same after this, because the threat of violence had been made good, and once out, this particular demon could never be put back in its bottle. There were further fights, but they lessened in frequency. My mother was not frightened of my father; quite the reverse. She felt him to be a coward, and he gradually diminished in her eyes. It was a process neither of them could control, no matter how much Bill tried to make amends. He even had the nose on the ceramic green-laced lady replaced, but it was the wrong shape and discoloured over time, making her look like an elegant leper.
It was tempting to trace the cause of Bill’s behaviour to his unemployment and loss of status in the home, but the truth was more complicated. Coming from the kind of family where conscription into the armed services was seen as an escape from poverty, he developed a strange relationship to the spending of money. Things were purchased in order to last, never because they held appeal. Christmas presents invariably came from London’s Petticoat Lane market1 at knockdown prices. Pennies were watched and pounds hoarded for no other discernible purpose than habit. Although she had no sense of materialism and was thrifty by necessity, Kath felt that meanness was a sin and would ultimately deny them happiness. There was a line where thrift crossed into something more miserly and joyless.
In a flourish of rare generosity Bill also bought a television, but TV was rubbish back then, and never worse than on a Sunday, when programmes didn’t start until late afternoon and consisted of things like The Brains Trust, where a group of elderly men in demob suits droned on about town councils and indecency, or quiz shows with Sir Mortimer Wheeler, an archaeologist who always had a pipe gripped between his teeth. Other delights of the times included nature programmes with Armand and Michaela Denis, a pair of self-publicizing globetrotters who fascinated as much for their fabulous lifestyles as for their dubious animal knowledge. Armand was Belgian, and had supposedly married New York beauty Michaela within twelve hours of meeting her. Michaela’s main item of travel equipment was her cosmetic box, and she was never seen without a thick layer of orange make-up and silver nails. We also had Mr Pastry, a peculiar old man who vaulted chairs and threw himself around like a teenage acrobat. Cartoon fun was provided by a Viking and a pirate, Noggin the Nog and Captain Pugwash respectively. They were drawn with a remedial simplicity most children could have improved upon. The worst of all children’s entertainers was Harry Corbett, who always wore a suit and tie, despite the fact that he had one hand up Sooty, a dead-eyed teddy bear glove puppet that was the least anthropomorphic children’s character in the history of television. Believing in Sooty required a leap of imagination that was beyond anyone over two years old. For the more mature child there were Tales from Europe, creepy, gaudy Eastern European folk fables put out by the BBC, who saved on dubbing by simply whacking English narration on top of the existing dialogue. This show was useful for teaching us that Europeans lived inside trees and wore dirndls. On Friday evenings there was Crackerjack, a sort of music hall for children without the smut. It featured singalongs, bad panto skits and a game called ‘Double or Drop’ in which children were forced to hold a pile of stuff without dropping it. The prize for winning was the meanest of all game-show rewards, a pencil inscribed with the word ‘Crackerjack’, while the loser was given a cabbage. The whole thing played out like some kind of experimental psychological torture. TV was also flirting with science fiction, though, and in 1963 Doctor Who arrived.
I would never understand space operas like Star Trek; all those life-lessons to be learned each week made it like being at school. Doctor Who landed at a time when England was finally freeing itself from debilitating post-war gloom. The nation of smog and rations and polio jabs was slowly fading. The English imagination, cowed by
the horrors of a Europe-wide conflict, was set to return. Pop music was in its grand ascendancy. After the largely disastrous design mis-step of the Festival of Britain,2 which, with the exception of the Royal Festival Hall, was all curly ironwork and atom-balls, the creative arts were budding in fresh directions. Thanks to television series like Quatermass, Pathfinders to Venus and A for Andromeda, the strange ideas of science fiction were stealing young minds.
Into this fertile innocence was planted a series of such peculiar originality that it took the nation entirely by surprise. Its hero was a crafty and somewhat sinister elderly man, its setting anywhere and everywhere, its cast of characters ever-changing, fallibly human. Although flawed by primitive monochrome technology and virtually no effects that could not be produced in polystyrene, it exhibited imagination in abundance. There was one recognizable object, although it quickly became unrecognizable as they vanished from the London streets: the blue police box, bigger inside than out – the first thing I had to grasp. Folding time and space, that was the second. Time Lords, the third. And as the series developed, through many doctors and dozens of castaway passengers, one true nemesis ruled them all.
The Daleks were unlike any alien seen before. They possessed no recognizable human features and had no redeeming qualities. Their very alien-ness made them impossible to reason with. When Daleks appeared, there was a sense that the laws of normal TV could be broken and something terrible might happen. But they were popular because any child with a sack and a sink plunger could carry off a passable imitation. Even Spike Milligan conjured up some dubious Pakistani Daleks who fried a dog and put it in their curry.
Finally, Daleks ingrained themselves deep within the national psyche. It was often stated that the English were historically a cruel race, and perhaps they found a kindred spirit in this cruellest of enemies. The poverty-row settings and props became unimportant when all you saw was encroaching alien terror. Likewise, who wondered how they coped with stairs when the Daleks had ways of getting to everyone? Which just left the fear, the need to block out the sound of those rasping voices, those futuristic but oddly sixties metal bodies that hid the slimy, pulsating deformities within.
The early shows were redolent of the grim dampness of an England now lost from view. The Doctor’s companions were unwilling participants, frightened and anxious to go home. Foolish and foolhardy, they had none of the robotic common sense exhibited by American starship crews; they were students and schoolteachers hurled into dislocated situations, facing unthinkable evil. Nor could the Doctor be entirely trusted to protect them. If anything, it seemed likely he might just let them all die. It felt like I was watching my family on the screen.
Before Doctor Who commenced, a new type of story had already caught my interest. I had grown bored with lantern-jawed pilots and their tubby sidekicks, and instead was looking for something stranger. I discovered an elegant volume bound in thick black card, presumably belonging to my mother, called The Fifty Strangest Stories Ever Told, part of a series printed on porous paper that turned a brittle yellow almost as I was reading it.
These dark, discordant stories chimed with the mood of disappearing innocence in our little house. During one of the many terse verbal duels that took place downstairs, a family mystery was solved by listening intently through the banisters. I discovered why I had no maternal grandfather.
There was no such person.
My grandmother was single, and, what’s more, she wasn’t even Kath’s mother. She was a former private nurse who had kindly agreed to adopt a number of children born out of wedlock between the wars, so Kath and her sister Muriel weren’t sisters, her adored brother Kit who had died of diphtheria wasn’t her brother, her real parents were no more than ciphers, and my uncles, aunts and cousins weren’t kin, just a bunch of strangers.
Suddenly nobody was related to anyone on my mother’s side of the family, which explained a lot when my father barked, ‘Don’t think you’re so high and bloody mighty. At least I know who my parents are.’ My family history simply unravelled, fell apart and blew away.
After hearing this, I suddenly felt comfortable with the idea of opening an anthology of disturbing stories.
In the front of the book was a handwritten quote. It said:
A writer must find a direct line into the perverse nature of the human heart.
It seemed to me that horror stories were ideally suited for doing just that.
For three-quarters of the twentieth century, virtually every respected writer wrote at least one such tale. According to the introduction, the illustrious history of the horror story had begun with Christopher Marlowe, John Webster, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley. By glancing at the contents page, I could see that just about everyone had turned their hand to the genre: Dickens, Conrad, Forster, Du Maurier, ‘Saki’ and Conan Doyle, inevitably, but also Muriel Spark, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Bowen, W. W. Jacobs. The ability to create a frisson of fear seemed to be a rite of passage for most writers.
It wasn’t hard to see the appeal of a category that set its authors the task of naming the unnameable, of imagining fates worse than death in an attempt to respond to our most deep-rooted anxieties. Wasn’t identifying a discomfort the first step towards controlling it? I had always been fearful, convinced that all worst possible scenarios would eventually present themselves in my life. Whenever my parents took a Sunday trip to the coast and walked along the beach, I spent most of my time checking tide tables and imploring them to turn back in case the sea swelled up and cut us off, drowning the entire family. I knew all about horror stories because I had already played most of them out in my head.
Horror’s golden age had arrived between terrifying wars at a time when the world stopped making sense. Although the traditional horror story eventually vanished the way of the locked-room mystery and the country-house murder, as forgotten by the general public as John Dickson Carr’s mad, wonderful conundrums, it remained a nostalgic reminder of a simpler age, when fears were easier to define and tales of terror operated under a strict set of literary rules. I loved rules.
My mother’s book was filled with horror stories of the twenties and thirties, and of a very specific type. Many of them began with a sturdy chap knocking out his pipe on the mantelpiece, pouring two large brandies and retiring to an armchair to tell his clubbable companion an eerie tale by firelight. This technique had the odd effect of simultaneously making the story more real (he was hearing it directly from a friend of the family who had come to dinner – not that the Fowlers ever had anyone to dinner, or had any friends) and more distant (it was told at one remove, a ‘friend of a friend’ story). Such tales usually ended with the raconteur replacing his pipe in his mouth and saying something like ‘And from that day on, he never spoke another word to anyone again. Another snifter, old chap?’
Even I could tell that many of the stories were pretty tame and often rather reactionary, but some of those from the pen of H. G. Wells were never bettered.
The book was considered only suitable for adults – it was unthinkable that such a forbidden tome should fall into the hands of a child. Yet the adult authors were themselves Edwardian children raised on spectacularly macabre tales and thinly disguised right-wing warnings (Rudyard Kipling was regarded by George Orwell – a little simplistically, perhaps – as a rabid fascist). Many of these early stories dealt with fears that were thankfully receding in the public imagination: fear of starvation, poverty, foreignness, the cruelties of changing fate and falling fortune. Others were about madness and the fear of going insane. It was hardly surprising when you considered the number of lunatic asylums still operating in and around London. I once saw an old asylum admittance slip stating that the patient was suffering from ‘Hereditary Disappointment’. No wonder people feared doctors.
Feeling as guilty as a shoplifter, I removed the book from its high shelf and lugged it up to my bedroom, to be consumed in shiversome chunks, story by story, and stored under the bed in the times between.
In the giant story book, a number of authors tapped into the feelings of the times, acknowledging the world’s loss of innocence. Ray Bradbury caught the sense of change within small-town communities. The wonderfully imaginative EC horror comics – the ‘E’ was for ‘Entertaining’ – sometimes adapted literary stories like Bradbury’s. Lately, however, they had been removed from Mr Purbrick’s comic-book rack, having been attacked for damaging the development of children’s minds by one Dr Fredric Wertham, in one of America’s periodic piques about the moral disintegration of the nation’s youth. Wertham described comic books as ‘cheap, shoddy, anonymous. Children spend their good money for bad paper, bad English and … bad drawing’. But then he also thought that Wonder Woman’s independent streak made her a lesbian. Kath happily gave such books house-room because, although they looked fabulously disreputable, they bore Bradbury’s illustrious name on their covers.
Ray Bradbury blurred the line between fantasy and reality, the boys in his tales hovering in that soon-lost golden period of waiting and longing. Between the fulfilment of wishes and the failure of dreams, a melancholy sense of things lost mingled with a calming warmth that I could feel rising from the page to heat my hands. But Bradbury dealt in nightmares as well, and I needed to find them. The collecting and cataloguing gene, so often prevalent in young males, was kicking in. Soon there would be index cards, alphabetical shelves, thematic indices and all the other codifying hobbies commonly found among boys without sex lives.
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