‘Shippam’s,’ Kath assured her. ‘Salmon and shrimp.’3
‘I don’t eat things from jars, you never know where they’ve been.’ She returned it to the plate with a sniff.
‘I’ll have one,’ said William, but his hand was slapped away.
Kath was on safer ground with the cakes, and passed them around to general compliments, with a notable silence from Mrs Fowler that everyone took as a good sign.
William’s thick ridged fingernails looked absurd when placed on either side of a fairy cake. ‘Are there any gherkins?’ he asked. His wife made it plain that if he was planning to let the side down every single time he opened his mouth, he might as well be somewhere else. ‘Come on, Billy, show me this problem with your pressure gauge,’ he said, rising and wiping his hands on his trousers.
Bill released an audible sigh of relief. ‘Righto, it’s a bit of a bugger, but if we can take it to bits …’ He didn’t dare catch my mother’s eye as the pair of them scuttled from the room. The door closed. The clock ticked. Mrs Fowler coughed. The silent seconds stretched to a minute.
‘My son likes a good hot meal when he gets home from work,’ she announced, apropos of nothing at all. ‘Thoroughly cooked right through, not half raw. Lamb chops.’ A pause. ‘Pork.’ No reaction. ‘An occasional steak.’
Kath wasn’t rising to the bait.
‘Peas.’ Mrs Fowler left little pauses to give her words gravitas.
‘Cabbage.’ Pause.
‘Onions.’ She stared hard at the wallpaper above Kath’s head, thinking.
‘Sponge pudding.’ Pause.
‘Custard.’ Pause.
‘And a banana. My son—’
‘ – is also my husband,’ said Kath hotly. ‘He is always provided with a tasty, attractive and nutritious meal.’ She now sounded like a post-war diet pamphlet.
‘ – loves strawberry jelly for his afters.’ Mrs Fowler sniffed and looked around. ‘Are you planning to have more children?’
Kath looked mortified. ‘No,’ she said quietly, glancing at me. Steven was asleep upstairs.
‘I ask because the last one clearly wasn’t planned. You should think about having a coil fitted. When there are unexpected mouths to feed, you must learn to cut your cloth according—’
‘I don’t think I need to be told how to have children!’
‘Well, there’s obviously not enough money to go around.’
‘We manage perfectly well.’
‘Then I wonder why he complains about the amount of mince you cook.’
‘Bill doesn’t believe in giving me housekeeping money. I have to take night jobs—’
‘Unsuitable jobs for a homemaker, no wonder he has to come to me for his meals.’ She was finally enjoying herself. There was nothing like a good row to create an atmosphere in which she could breathe more freely.
‘He comes to you because you won’t loosen your apron strings.’
‘It’s his choice. I have never told him what to do.’
‘Of course not, you’ve made it amply clear what would happen if he didn’t.’
Mrs Fowler’s back straightened, like a hedgehog unfurling. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘You haven’t spoken to your daughter for ten years. You act as if she doesn’t exist, and your son’s not strong enough to stand up to you.’
‘So this is what you really think of your husband, is it? You push him into a marriage he’s not ready for—’
‘We were engaged for six years before he found the courage to defy you and propose!’
‘ – and you’re still not happy with your lot!’
I buried myself in the intricacies of my train set as the two women fought for control of my father. It seemed peculiar to me that a man as weedy and inconsequential as Bill should be the subject of so many arguments. He didn’t seem much of a prize. I tuned back in as my grandmother was saying, ‘I didn’t come here to be insulted!’
‘I wonder where you usually go,’ Kath speculated.
‘I will not stay in this house for another minute!’
‘You had to be dragged here in the first place. I’m amazed you managed to last this long,’ my mother volleyed back.
‘William!’ called my grandmother. ‘We’re going home right now.’ Turning to pick up her wicker hat, she discovered that Wobbles had just finished stripping it to shreds. She slapped the cat so hard that it flew across the room, hackled and yowling, roused from deep slumber to a state of heightened terror. Rising to her full, imposing, navy-blue light-absorbing height, she swung around to her daughter-in-law. ‘I knew it! I always knew you would be nothing but trouble.’
‘Of course you did,’ said my mother. ‘I committed the unforgivable sin of marrying your son.’
My grandmother stumped towards the door as her husband caught up with her and turned to the family with a sheepish apology on his face. Kath was white and shaking, but held her ground on the front step until he had bundled the old woman out of sight.
‘Well,’ she said, slamming the door with satisfying finality and marching back down the hall, ‘I feel much better for that.’
What upset her most of all was not her mother-in-law’s attitude, but the fact that Bill’s loyalty remained firmly planted on the wrong side.
1 A weekly periodical that preferred articles on crocheted jumpers to the discussion of orgasms, which weren’t invented until 1985.
2 The only cookery book that existed in English households for about 150 years. Mrs Beeton died at the age of twenty-eight, surprisingly not from her own cooking.
3 It was a known fact that you couldn’t open a jar of fish paste without wanting to eat the whole thing. Perhaps it contained morphine.
15
The Big Picture: Part One
‘WE’RE GOING TO be late,’ I yelled down the hall.
‘No, we’re not,’ Bill yelled back. ‘There’s plenty of time yet. It’ll only take us ten minutes to get to the Blackheath Roxy, five minutes to park and buy Mivvis, then you’ve got trailers before the first feature so we’ll have a good ten minutes spare. And afterwards we can look in on Mrs Fowler and Granddad.’
‘It’s a double bill, Carry On Cruising and The Cracksman. We’ll never make it in time for the beginning,’ I insisted. We were going on the only one of my father’s motorbikes that was running at the moment, and part of it was still in bits on the floor of the back room. Why did I want to see The Cracksman, starring squeaky-voiced, baby-faced, curly-headed comic Charlie Drake? Why would anyone? It seemed as if half of all the films that showed in our cinemas were British.
‘It’ll only take me a minute to put the silencer back on,’ Bill yelled. ‘Go and find the Swarfega, I’m covered in oil.’
The best way to get out of the House of Recriminations was to start going to the pictures in the evenings, and after much begging, it was agreed that on my eleventh birthday I would be allowed to do so. The timing was right, as I had read virtually everything in the library deemed suitable for my age except The Mechanics of Soil Erosion in the reference section.
I had always been allowed to go to the flicks during the day, but that limited you to Disney films starring blue-eyed, perky, pigtailed talent-vacuum Hayley Mills, and Ray Harryhausen’s piratical fantasies. Not that I had anything against Harryhausen; he had souped up Jules Verne stories to create movies like Mysterious Island and First Men in the Moon. His finest moment came with Jason and the Argonauts, as the gods showed signs of mortality and mortals displayed heroism close to godliness. The jerky stop-frame animations actually helped certain scenes, especially in the electrifying moment when the huge statue of Talos came creakingly to life and stepped down from his pedestal, complemented by a wonderful Bernard Hermann score that set the hairs rising behind my ears.
In The Valley of Gwangi Harryhausen pitted some rather camp cowboys against stop-framed blue-tinged dinosaurs. It never occurred to me that this was a strange subject for a film, since I had encountered it before, in a
stinker called The Beast of Hollow Mountain. Sadly, there were only two cowboys-versus-dinosaurs1 films for me to see, but the former was blessed with a stirring score and some genuinely peculiar moments involving a very tiny horse. Later, I also loved One Million Years BC, a historically dubious cavemen-versus-dinosaurs film that looked like the ‘before’ section of a hair-conditioner commercial, which had Raquel Welch posing in a chamois-leather bikini and little chamois bootees while giant prehistoric turtles lumbered sleepily across Gran Canaria.
Gradually I came to see how such films worked their magic. The classic Harryhausen signatures, I noted in my diary, were as follows:
A dinosaur tethered with a rope, simply to make kids ask, ‘How did they do that?’
Mysteriously tousled fur, which indicated the problems of working with hairy animated models.
A climactic roaring fight between two mythical monsters, which ended with one biting the other’s neck.
I tried re-creating these creatures in the form of plasticine models, but the more I re-used the modelling clay the more it merged into one colour, which was usually a sort of foul-smelling brownish purple.
There was other children’s fare at the pictures, of course. tom thumb was a rare example of a successful English film that could stand beside The Railway Children and the horrible-but-indulgently-recalled-with-fondness Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. tom thumb’s creepy Yawning Man, with its resemblance to every child’s weirdest old relative, and a lengthy dance piece involving Russ Tamblyn somersaulting around a cupboardful of animated toys, lingered on in my dreams for years.
Other films disturbed, creating ruffles in my subconscious that could not easily be smoothed away. Moments in the most innocuous Disney films bothered me, usually ones involving sudden upheavals in home life. Every child got upset when brave hillbilly pooch Old Yeller died, because everyone related to the loss of a pet, but I found the idea of uprooted kids setting off in search of relatives deeply disturbing. I was also bothered by the way in which handsome American heroes seemed comfortable strutting around without shirts on, not minding who looked at them. I always wore a vest, a shirt, a jumper and a raincoat, topping the ensemble with a cap and a scarf, like a Victorian child actor.
My mother had decided I was unusually sensitive after seeing me reduced to tears by the animated version of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, not because the dogs had been kidnapped by Cruella De Vil but because their loss had really upset the maid. Was this normal behaviour in a child, she wondered?
It also bothered me when characters met in a restaurant and left before finishing their meal, or, worse still, when one ordered, argued with the other and left before the food arrived. I also hated characters half-shaving before wiping the rest of the soap off with a towel, or getting out of the shower and wrapping a towel around themselves without drying their backs properly. I hated them getting out of taxis and thrusting a note at the driver without saying thank you, or not giving a full address or time on the phone but just saying something like ‘Meet me at the station.’
Kath could see how this fastidiousness might derail more significant concerns, and wanted to keep me on track. She quietly decided it was time for me to leave behind kiddie fare. I would finally be allowed to see ‘A’ films.
The English attitude to film suffered from the weight of the nation’s theatrical past. Our cinemas had grown out of converted variety houses and music halls. In 1921, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had premiered at London’s Palace Theatre with thirty members of staff creating live sound effects with coconut shells, as if it was still a stage play.
Variety acts and one-reelers shared the same bill right up to the Second World War, and many theatres kept projection equipment to fill in between acts. After the War, while Hollywood was sending John Wayne2 across the Nevada horizon, the English were busy transcribing the delicate slights of The Importance of Being Earnest to celluloid.3 Only a handful of English films had any sense of landscape, and those that did had but a fragmentary connection with the past, which, in a country with an urban society more than two thousand years old, was a little odd.
For the rest of my life, the act of going to the cinema would trigger deep-seated childhood memories in me; not just the tang of cheap snouts and Jeyes Fluid,4 but the whole experience of communal emotion. For a child who was imaginative and a bit lonely, the cinema was a place where barely acknowledged feelings crystallized into something real and vivid. I grew up with strange loyalties to certain films – why else would I and all my friends have sat through so many identical incarnations of James Bond? Attitudes to class percolated through English comedies in order to condescend to the working man, sneer at the nouveau riche, vilify management and pillory the State, until it was hard to work out who on earth I was supposed to empathize with.
But I needed to see English films because Hollywood didn’t reflect my world. I watched mystified as Californian kids went to school in sports cars, girls in eye make-up were branded ‘bad’, dads attended a weird ritual called Little League, people said, ‘Try to get some sleep, you look terrible’ when the person they were talking to looked fantastic, teenagers climbed into each other’s bedrooms via trellises, fathers called their daughters ‘Pumpkin’ and boys called their fathers ‘Sir’, black people didn’t mix with white people, police handcuffed you face-down for doing nothing wrong, wives always died instead of getting a divorce, and everyone shrieked and bellowed at each other at the tops of their voices instead of having normal, quiet conversations.
What was it with the brown paper grocery bags that had no handles? How were you meant to carry them? And there were all those guns. To children raised on Dixon of Dock Green,5 America seemed like the Wild West. Having been taught that displays of public emotion were a sign of innate vulgarity, the mix of violence and sentimentality I witnessed on the screen was thrilling and shameless.
All films were partly about recognition, so it mattered where they were set. It was great being able to recognize a local area when it appeared on screen, so films were also about geography. American movies often had a wonderful sense of location. Theirs was a lateral society, an open, sprawling, outdoor canvas upon which to paint colourful, exciting pictures. English films, by comparison, reflected an indoor sensibility. Where Americans rode and drove and waved and shouted and fired guns at the sky, the English sat and discussed and apologized and cupped their cigarettes inside their hands so as not to annoy the person next to them. This private indoor distinction, the careful attention to space and conversation, was one of the most noticeable traits in English films.
For me they acted as an alternative to the view from Hollywood, and even though many of them were truly dreadful, I was able to find fractured reflections of my life there, my language, my hopes and fears.
The gap that existed between British cinema and Hollywood became clear when I considered the word ‘pilot’. In the context of American film, I got John Wayne killing Japs. In the British equivalent, I got Terence Alexander muttering ‘Crikey’ and fondling the ends of his handlebar moustache.
The British studios had been built on London’s drab outskirts, and if their films reflected the past, they presented an image of a rapidly disappearing country: a world of chaps in sensible jumpers and strange hats, misty suburbs, empty roads and grimy canals, coffee-bar girls in pointy sweaters, spivs and dolly birds, jokes about pickled onions and wind, steam trains, bombsites, cheery constables armed with whistles, nurses in suspenders (often in drag), stationmasters, dowagers, vicars, workmen and bureaucrats. The received wisdom was that British films were constipated, class-ridden, conservative and vulgar, but I found them slightly magical, if only because I sensed they represented a world that was soon to vanish completely.
In the years that followed, my movie-going involved visiting cavernous damp auditoriums with names like Roxy, ABC, Forum, Bijou, Gaumont, Gaity, Victory, Eldorado, Tolmer, Essoldo, Embassy and Granada. Cinemas were everywhere. I came to revel in films that were populi
st, unfashionable, unfunny, forgotten, offbeat and very, very bad, because they were all concerned with telling English stories. Many of them had developed into series: the Hammers, the Carry Ons, the Cliff Richard films, the Doctor films, the Quatermass films, the Will Hays, the Arthur Askeys, the George Formbys, the Bonds, the horror anthologies, the Norman Wisdoms, the St Trinians and numerous other strands that wove themselves through the decades. All too often they scraped by on the goodwill of the entertainment-starved public and the barest of cinematographic credentials. Television could not compete; even Carry On Nurse was better than squinting at a picture through a ten-inch rectangle of thick glass. Little did I suspect that I would one day get the chance to watch it again on the two-inch screen of a mobile phone.
Of course at the age of eleven, glued to a horsehair chair, sucking a Jubbly in my school-regulation gabardine mac and interference-encouraging short trousers, I was hardly an image-saturated jade. Everything was new. When a movie character in a tense situation said, ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this’, ‘We should all try to get some sleep’ or ‘You search the basement, I’ll take a look around outside’, I did not think it was a cliché, I thought it was utterly original. When the soundtrack music boomed ominously and the heroine went off to wander about a basement full of dripping pipes, I, fragile, easily influenced and perched on my itchy seat as delicately as a piece of Dresden, was coated in a moist craquelure of fear, my attention dragged away from poking about in confectionery, my jaw slack with amazement.
I knew I had betrayed my beloved books, with their cracked spines and dusty pages, for their flashier, shinier cousins, but I didn’t care. By its very nature, seduction requires a loss of reason.
1 The only thing more exciting than this scenario would have been pirates versus aliens.
2 Real name Marion Morrison. You can’t have a butch cowboy star with a name like a girl and a supermarket.
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