Horror stories were not stocked at East Greenwich Public Library. I had to start haunting the second-hand bookshops for those. Over the next few years I discovered a wealth of beautifully written short stories hidden behind tacky covers. Some of them were so sublime and intuitive that when I read them, I felt that the authors could somehow see directly into my mind.
I discovered a chain of fantastically seedy South London second-hand book stores called the Popular Book Centres. They stamped their smudged triangular logo inside all their books, and made enough money from thrusting, pointy-breasted top-shelf smut to keep racks of yellowing, soon-to-be-lost, dirt-cheap paperbacks going for real readers. In this way, they were every bit as useful as public libraries.
The Popular Book Centre in Greenwich was presided over by a gimlet-eyed man with black fingernails and the complexion of an old haddock. He looked as though he had been cast to play a lecherous plumber in a porn movie. The great thing about the shop was that I could always find something rare and wonderful lurking in the racks, and as everything was 1/6d I could afford to take a chance on the dodgiest-looking books.
The library had been good to me, but now I temporarily deserted it for something grubbier and more delinquent. Alfred Hitchcock had put his name to a series of dog-eared anthologies that were wonderful assorted literary ragbags, and from these I started making informed decisions about the writing I enjoyed most. It was important; I did not play sports or ‘join in’, as my mother called it, and reading was, by its nature, an unsocial occupation.
I made my first list of favourite short stories:3
‘The Cone’ – H. G. Wells
‘Leiningen versus the Ants’ – Carl Stephenson
‘Camera Obscura’ – Basil Copper
‘Evening Primrose’ – John Collier
‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’ – Evelyn Waugh
‘The Fly’ – George Langelaan
In time I discovered a wealth of beautifully written stories, most of which are now lost from view. In my head I built the ultimate anthology. Dino Buzzati’s story ‘Seven Floors’ was a heart-rending study of our fear of illness, while his tale ‘Just the Very Thing They Wanted’ chilled because it denied its characters the rights to their most basic needs – the right to sit down, to be calm, to drink a glass of water. John Collier’s ‘Evening Primrose’ concerned a man who moved into a department store to live among the mannequins, because he could not cope with urban life. Tennessee Williams wrote of searching a cinema for companionship and discovering a ghost in ‘The Mysteries of the Joy Rio’, as did Graham Greene in the classic ‘A Little Place off the Edgware Road’.
Meanwhile, The Fifty Strangest Stories Ever Told remained under my bed until every story was digested. When the supply of new stories dried up, I headed back to the Popular Book Centre like an itchy drug addict, creeping shamefully past the soft porn in the window to root about in the barely fingered fiction section. Here, the Pan Books of Horror provided the next benchmark that all other collections had to reach. Their anthologist, Herbert Van Thal, edited the first twenty-five volumes, but as the tales became more explicitly gruesome they lost much of their power; heavier shocks were clearly required in jaundiced times. The darkest shadows are found in brightest sunlight, so it’s natural to discover them in childhood, but I still felt guilty about my nascent literary tastes. Other kids in my neighbourhood weren’t even reading, or if they were, they stuck to pilots and pirates. They weren’t checking out worst-case scenarios by trawling through horror stories, hoping to find survival tips.
Suddenly I felt sure that my mother had bought her anthology as a survival manual for her marriage. In several stories, a bullying husband would cruelly mistreat his innocent wife, or perhaps his son, only to finally receive a shocking comeuppance. An awful lot of the tales involved madness, death or everlasting purgatory. Even more involved the careful planning of a long, slow-nurtured revenge. Quite a few had clearly been written by downtrodden Edwardian ladies acting out wish-fulfilment fantasies.
It was as good an introduction to human nature as any.
1 One of the many London markets where you could watch men throwing entire dinner services into the air and catching them in feats that combined salesmanship with juggling.
2 Designed to show that we had bounced back from the War, it inadvertently exposed the nation’s exhaustion, except for the Skylon, an elegant slender structure with no visible means of support, like Britain.
3 The only common denominator I can find in this list is that none of the stories plays by the traditional rules of the genre.
10
Between the Lines
BY 1960, I had learned that the nostalgic clichés of childhood were largely true.
The week was indeed organized around the lynchpin of Sunday lunch – in our case, lamb, beef and pork in orderly rotation, with the odd chicken that looked as if it had spent its formative years locked in solitary confinement without sunlight or exercise, before being executed – or finally allowed to expire – in time for a special holiday. My mother cooked the meat, sliced it and cooked it some more, until it grew small, dried-out and as leathery as a posing pouch, when she would pour elasticated Bisto filled with tumorous lumps over it. Dessert was always Libby’s tinned peaches in a nasal-slime syrup, tinned pineapple chunks or tinned pears. By now, though, the meals were taking place in an atmosphere of distant resentment, with only the wireless or the sound of next door’s toilet being flushed to break the silence.
Children did indeed make their own amusement, and tended to be absurdly well spoken and polite. In my case, indoor pastimes included:
Using the Bayko building set to make boring miniature suburban houses with bay windows and porches. Most building kits involved the handling of many knife-sharp parts that would either give you a bloody gash or a black man’s pinch.
Magic Robot – a green robot which would spin around on a circular mirror and point to answers with a wand when you asked it questions. I took it to bits to find out how it worked, after which it never worked again.
Flounders, a dice game that allowed you to build fish, and another called Beetle Drive, which let you build huge insects. These games felt like zoo-based dominoes designed by a particularly creepy aunt.
Tell Me, another question-and-answer game, involving the rapid naming of items starting with an initial chosen by a spinning wheel. Typical question: ‘Name a major municipal building’. (It would be interesting to hear ten-year-olds’ answers to that question now.) The source of most family shouting matches.
‘Double Your Money – The Board Game Based on the Popular Hughie Green Show!’ A matter of opinion, clearly.
Spirograph, the plastic-wheel system for drawing complex fractals. It was fun until you realized that it allowed everyone else to do them as well, so no one would ever say, ‘Aren’t you clever!’
Escalado, a horse-race game which comprised a green baize strip, a G-clamp, six poisonous lead horses and a ratchet to make said strip shiver back and forth, stimulating forward movement in the steeds, although what actually happened was that they fell over (and presumably had to be shot).
The Dan Dare Space Communicator – a red plastic spaceship console that looked like something BBC engineers might have used in the early, heady days of Alexandra Palace, which could transmit thought waves across galaxies or possibly into the next room, if you’d only remembered to buy giant batteries for it.
Making things from smelly corrugated sheets of plasticine.
Paper-sculpture books with punch-out parts that required the use of a razor-blade to make the pieces fit together. Cue the home first-aid kit.
Building balsa-wood1 gliders with brain-fuddling spirit-soaked and varnished paper wings. An introduction to the power of narcotics.
The John Bull Printing Outfit, a typesetting kit with a smeary ink pad and thousands of tiny rubber pieces a baby could choke to death on. Fact: nobody ever put together more than four words before becoming extreme
ly irritable.
Airfix models including the Hovercraft, a miraculous sixties transporter that was too ugly to catch on, but continued its popularity in toy form for years.
The Chad Valley Give-a-Show Projector, basically a century-old Victorian slide projector given a yellow plastic makeover.
The Viewmaster 3-D viewer, which came with circular discs that, rather oddly, presented rubber-toy versions of movie scenes. The only discs I had were:
Pope Pius XII, Memorable Moments, Rome (Belgian issue)
The People of Lima, Peru
Ramsgate to Herne Bay, Kent!
Huckleberry Hound in ‘Pop Goes Yogi’
Plaster moulding kits. Pour the plaster into a red condom-shaped mould to produce British monarchs and squirrels that you could then hand-paint. Figures were always depicted standing against a tree stump, in order to strengthen their little plaster legs.
Cap bombs, spud guns, Bowie knives, sweet cigarettes, chemistry sets and other great stuff that wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a child today.2
And reading, reading, reading, reading.
I was not allowed to mix with the kids from the next street because they lived above shops and were therefore ‘common’. My mother had a peculiar sense of what constituted commonness. Heinz Baked Beans, football, margarine, Spam, the Daily Mirror, council flats, motorbikes, public displays of emotion, playing in the street, television, tattoos, dyed hair, shouting, swearing, braces, the Labour Party, plimsolls worn with trousers, over-familiarity, and failure to hold a knife and fork properly were unconscionable to someone who had been raised in a household that had only allowed reading, praying and going for brisk walks on the Sabbath. She didn’t like loud coughing either, although she was prepared to excuse Mr Hills next door, who had a cough like a duck’s death-rattle, because he had contracted it in the trenches. The fact that my mother did not know who her parents were was immaterial; it was how you were raised, nurture over nature, that was important. Grace, silence, acquiescence and politeness were everything, as was knowing your place and staying in it. Her own mother might have been a prostitute for all she knew, but it did not excuse going out on the Sabbath without gloves, or switching to a decent overcoat on the first of November.
The neighbours really did spend much of their time out on the street, gossiping. Summers were passed almost totally outside, seated on the pavement, sharing endless cups of tea, washing or polishing the front steps, complaining of the heat. Fiery sunlight, cadmium yellow and faintly dusty, forever warmed the orange brick sides of the houses. Bedtimes were proscribed by the height and rotation of the sun.
This past really is another country. How different were the children? Well, on Saturday mornings a children’s record-request radio show was run by the avuncular and rather stern ‘Uncle Mac’. The selection of music chosen by the boys and girls of England remained fixed for years, including patter songs like ‘Nellie The Elephant’, ‘The Railway Runs Through The Middle Of The House’ and horrible catchy, stirring military tunes like ‘The Dam Busters March’. For any man over forty, it’s probably still impossible to hear the opening notes of ‘The Theme From 633 Squadron’ without putting your thumbs to forefingers, upturning them over your eyes like a Spitfire pilot’s goggles and going ‘Nyeeeooour!’ The War was still fresh enough in our fathers’ minds for them to impress its importance on their offspring, but that didn’t explain the popularity of Max Bygraves3 singing ‘I’m A Pink Toothbrush, You’re A Blue Toothbrush’.
Although the house on Westerdale Road was minuscule, it afforded a few pleasures. I could dig in the rubbish-dump of a garden, where the neighbour’s dog planted crumbly white turds and Kath grew a handful of carefully nurtured but doomed plants. I could play forts within the knife-sharp shards of the collapsing Anderson shelter.4 I could torture daddy-long-legs in the outdoor toilet where we kept the boring comatose tortoise. I could try to keep sticklebacks in the brackish drainage ditch my father laughingly called a pond. I could creep through my parents’ bedroom digging secrets from their utility wardrobe (this room possessed my father’s one nod to decadence: black wallpaper decorated with oriental faces and silky sampans). But mostly I read, swapping and buying so many books that I became fearful for their existence, and took to hiding them behind grates and flues.
I had the distinct impression that our family ranked fairly low in the street’s subtle and complex class table, especially since Percy next door was given a bike for Christmas and that was just one of his presents, Percy’s mother proudly told Kath. I chanced my arm and asked for a typewriter, but Bill was currently out of work, and so instead I was publicly – and humiliatingly – presented with a blackboard, which in my father’s eyes was just as good a writing accoutrement. Years later, I saw old monochrome footage on TV of children playing happily in the street with sticks and tyres, and thought with incredulity, That was us, that’s how we were. Just as you will one day.
Our garden was particularly disgusting, a lumpy coagulation of dry, dead earth, rampant weeds, house bricks, bits of rusty iron and the odd fistful of rock-hard rabbit pellets. Londoners had become so inured to the sight of bomb damage, rubble and sooty derelict buildings remaining fifteen years after the War that they seemed not to concern themselves with gardening. My father would think nothing of having a pee against the collapsed remains of the Anderson shelter if he thought no one was looking.
Television was considered antisocial, so children formed their own social groups which roughly explored their parents’ divisions, without yet feeling the need to create issues of tribal respect. The only real dividing line was class. I knew my parents were poorer than the neighbours (‘But more respectable,’ my mother assured us) and it only made a difference in the way in which I amused myself. Rich kids were always away somewhere; the poor ones stayed at home.
‘You have to make an effort,’ my mother would say, which I knew was her way of suggesting that it might be nice to put down my book once in a while and form a friendship with someone, anyone.
By the age of ten I had outgrown cuteness to become an unprepossessing sight. Skinny, gangling and bookish, as pale as a blank page, with a domed forehead and sticking-out ears, a pudding-basin haircut, sticky-taped glasses, a narrow chin and large brown eyes that easily reflected fright and surprise, I was nobody’s idea of an appealing child. My weight was outstripped by my height, and I was all knees and elbows, so that when perpendicular I looked as awkward as a straightened chicken, and was better suited to lying on my stomach with a novel.
Much of my time was spent traipsing along the deserted suburban streets with an armful of library books, rain matting my hair and steaming up my lenses. At some point reading replaced doing anything else, so that I lived life as an outsider, an observer on the sidelines. In doing so, I was unconsciously copying my father.
I had a few street friends, kids who would play outside until the second it got dark, like vampires in reverse – no one was ever allowed to play out after that because it was another sign of commonness. Lawrence was ginger-mopped, with ginger freckles and what appeared to be purple eyes. He always made up his mind about something without getting all the facts – I found out years later that he had become a vicar. There was an arrogant rival from my class called Peter who was so incredibly bright that he had a nervous breakdown on his first day of senior school, much to his mother’s horror and everyone else’s glee, and he was good fun to hit.
There was also Pauline Ann Ward from across the road.
She had a glossy dark bobbed haircut and wore yellow summer dresses and sandals long after everyone else had moved on to jeans. She wore cardigans and Alice bands and had eyes the colour of an August sky. I supposed I was in love with her. One day, purely in the interests of exploration, she offered to take her knickers off for me, even though we were in her garden and it was snowing, but I declined her offer because I was trying to build a sledge. Even so, her proposal was disturbing enough to make me step back through the ice of her f
ather’s frozen goldfish pond.
Girls like Pauline were far more bothersome than books. You always knew where you were with a book. A girl would laugh at your jokes and then snub you for several days, for no apparent reason. She would go out of her way to let you know you were invisible to her, then stare at you with X-ray eyes until you paid attention. She would tease you, pull up her dress, demand to see your willy, ridicule it, then run screaming to her mother when you tried to hit her.
I didn’t understand Pauline, and she wasn’t even a real girl because she had thick legs like a boy and no breasts to speak of yet. Plus, she played with a Noah’s Ark and kept mentioning God’s Will whenever I wanted to talk about space monsters.
‘Your parents are funny,’ she said one day as she sat cross-legged on the floor, marshalling pairs of wooden animals into the Ark.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘They don’t like each other.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Your dad said he’d like to glue your mum’s mouth shut. If my dad said that, my mum wouldn’t cook his dinner.’
‘My mum’s tried that,’ I replied. ‘When was the last time your dad threw something at your mum?’
‘Good heavens, they don’t fight,’ said Pauline smugly, trotting her giraffes on board. ‘They adore each other.’ Checking that all the animals were safe from inundation, she raised the gangplank. ‘And they love the Lord Jesus,’ she added for good measure.
One evening, seated in my bedroom, I tried to work out my feelings about girls by drawing up a chart. Tables, with lists and tick-boxes, always helped to sort out complicated feelings. This one was entitled ‘BOOKS VS GIRLS’.
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