‘Show me what you’re writing,’ said Kath, making one of her rare forays from the bedroom. She had lost weight and was pale. Her fingers were always folded over each other, as though she could not trust her untethered hands. Her eyes were darkly shaded crescents, as if the light hurt her.
‘I’m not,’ I said glumly. ‘I can’t think what to write. Other people have done all the best stories.’
She pursed her thin lips and looked out at the street, thinking. ‘Fiction means you can make things up. Don’t worry about embarrassing yourself. You don’t have to write from experience, you know. You just have to believe in what you write.’
‘But I don’t know what I believe.’
‘Then copy someone good,’ she said, wearily seating herself beside me.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You admire the work of others so much – make that your starting point. Take their material. Re-work it, like you did with that terrible film script, only this time do it with something more manageable, and put some of your own experiences in it. Turn it into something that’s yours.’
It was the opposite of the advice I had found in books on the subject, which extolled the virtues of only writing about what you knew or had personally experienced.
‘Write a short story. Nobody expects you to produce Bleak House the first time you finish something. It doesn’t matter if the result is dreadful, the first attempt is always going to be less than perfect. It’s nothing to be ashamed of and at least it will get you started.’
‘How do you know so much about it?’ I asked suspiciously, screwing up one eye.
She sighed, glancing at the wall with a why-did-I-raise-a-stupid-son? look. ‘What do you think I wanted to be when I was younger? A copy typist in a company that made pumps? A greyhound-stadium cashier? We all have dreams, you know. You’re not unique.’
Of course. I had learned all of my grammar from her. She knew shorthand. She loved concision. She always said ‘comprises’ instead of ‘consists of’. She knew what synecdoche5 was. Best of all, she could describe things in a way that made me feel I was actually there. She had a facility with language I could only dream about. It was just that she had never had the confidence to use it in public.
‘The only women who write are ones with lots of leisure time. It’s a suitable career choice if you’re a lady, but not if you’re a working woman.’ Kath pointed to the notebook. ‘Stick that up your jumper, but bring it with you. You can sit in the back of the Mini and write on the way to Herne Bay. And all the way back. I’ll never look at what you’ve written and your father won’t even notice.’
Kath’s attitude didn’t entirely make sense, but it was welcome. She owned a chipped black enamel Remington typewriter that appeared to date back to the time of William Caxton, but she let me take it to my room. It was heavy and made of cast iron, and looked like the Enigma Machine. You had to hit the keys so hard to leave an impression on the page that it hurt your fingers to write more than a couple of sentences, and sometimes the bit inside the O fell out. Changing a ribbon was about as much trouble as changing a tyre on a lorry, only you got your hands dirtier. I started to use the typewriter, although I had to stop before my father got home because you could hear it throughout the house. It came in a metal case, and I kept the whole thing under my bed because I wasn’t strong enough to lift it on to the top of the wardrobe.
I threaded in a fresh sheet of paper and typed my name, then the title of the story I was going to write. Loosely based on a dozen similar stories I had read, it was called The Long Dark Corridor. It would be about a lunatic who stalked his unsuspecting victims and when he caught them – well, I would think about that when I got there.
The more I wrote, the more puzzled and excited I became by the unexpected effect of words. I soon learned that:
Writing in the first person didn’t necessarily mean you had to tell the truth. In fact, it was a lot more fun if you lied through your teeth.
Sitting in cafés filling up the margins of notebooks with spidery writing made people think you were either a flower-child, or you had polio and were marking time until you died.
If the lock slipped on your keyboard and you suddenly started typing capital letters, the effect was LIKE SHOUTING and could actually make you jump.
Tippex was a boy’s best friend.
There was something comforting about the smell of a well-used eraser. And soft pencils, preferably a 2B. And the way a worn golden fountain-pen nib glided across a very smooth white piece of paper.
But a typewriter was best of all. Writing was more fun than shivering on a rock-frozen rugby pitch, squinting at the sky lost in thought as a leather ball bounced right by your feet and everyone shouted at you for failing to do something with it.
In fact, the only downside I could see was that writers earned less than tar-spreaders or toilet-cleaners. And they probably ended up going funny, which in writers’ terms meant suffering endless fits of melancholy, having violent affairs, committing murder, going blind or mad, and dying of cirrhosis of the liver.
How cool was that?
Appeased, I agreed to go to Herne Bay.
There’s a melancholy sense of things lost in the shabbier British seaside towns; of comfortable failure and better times long gone. I always came home feeling depressed after a Sunday spent in Hastings or Folkestone. On one of these miserable days out we drove from town to town, stopping for tea in overlit glass cafés where pensioners sat picking at orange pieces of battered fish. We paced pebble-strewn promenades watching seagulls fighting the air currents, and sat in shelters with our eyes scrunched against the fierce sea light, until even Bill was bored.
‘We could go up there,’ I suggested, pointing to the downs at the back of the town.
‘Nowhere to park,’ said Bill, but I could see him eyeing the great green wall that rose steeply behind the houses.
‘We could climb straight up. There’s nothing to stop us.’ The words came out of my mouth before the thought of what I had said hit home.
‘No, it’s far too dangerous. We wouldn’t be able to get more than a few feet.’
I had no idea if I was afraid of heights. Being afraid of everything else, the answer was probably yes. I found myself running towards the start of the slope and taking the lower incline easily. Bill was right behind me, then climbing alongside in surprise.
As the gradient grew sharper I had to grab tussocks of grass to keep from falling backwards, but I kept going. Kath could be heard down below, shouting words of warning. After a few minutes I heard Bill call and point back. ‘We should stop.’
I turned around and was amazed to see the sea far below, glittering distantly. I could suddenly hear the wind in my ears.
‘You’re scared!’ I laughed, which spurred him on.
Scrambling like monkeys, we rose above the town. Exhilarated, I realized I had no fear of heights at all – finally, something to be unafraid of! I looked across at Bill, who was about thirty feet away, knowing that he was taking his cue from me.
‘Do we keep going up?’ he called. He was turning blue with cold.
‘We keep going,’ I shouted back. By now I knew we were clinging to a sheer cliff by nothing much more than the will to keep climbing together. I forced myself to focus on the green wall.
We were alone in a ragged bright world, emerald and azure and white. Back on the ground, my mother and Steven were barely discernible dots. The pier looked miniature. With one hand over the other we pulled ourselves up, nearing the top. I saw Bill from the corner of my eye, watching me with amazement and pride.
I never wanted to reach the crest, but suddenly the cliff flattened out into a disappointingly mundane vista with mown grass walkways and a caravan park. The world was spinning. I flopped on to the grass, out of breath, laughing, and my father collapsed beside me.
The joy of that moment lasted for the rest of my childhood.
1 The longest-established detergent brand in the world.
/> 2 Little was known about these. People went funny for a while and were then all right again. The cumulative stress of providing for families in the post-war years must have been enormous.
3 No longer Albion, but a sea-suburb of London filled with drunk children and media burn-outs.
4 Inventor of the bouncing bomb used to destroy dams in Operation Chastise (filmed as The Dam Busters). Why was he named after a London suburb?
5 When part of something is used to refer to the whole thing.
24
Caravan Nights
‘YOU’LL THANK ME for this,’ said Bill one day. ‘I’ve bought us a holiday home.’
I was almost thirteen when in a fresh attempt to bond the family, and inspired by lack of money due to various half-finished projects around the house, my father blew what savings he had on a caravan. In my mind, the painted caravans that belonged to Arabs or gypsies were exotic and appealing, whereas a powder-blue tin box set into an oblong of concrete surrounded by fishing gnomes was only acceptable if you were a photographer producing a book on English eccentrics.
And a pikey caravan that was about ten feet long, like a home for circus midgets, balanced on two wheels and made of rotting painted hardboard, with a rusty tin flue, was not a holiday destination but an exercise in ritual humiliation.
Set on an acre of methane-filled marsh near Dymchurch, Kent, the site boasted an icy cinder-brick washhouse full of daddy-long-legs, a handful of bedraggled, stupid sheep notable only for the immense weight of clinkers hanging from their nether hair, and a grim little bar full of fishing nets, knots and floats which touted itself as a clubhouse, although it was hard to imagine the kind of prospective member they might turn away.
I pressed Bill’s hand on the linen of the upper bunk. ‘The bed’s wet, Dad,’ I complained.
‘Good country air will do that,’ he explained proudly, as if he knew anything about it. ‘You need toughening up. People around here have damp sheets all the time.’
‘Then why on earth don’t they move somewhere nicer?’ I tried lying down on the bed, and found that the gas mantle was frighteningly close to my head. I knew there was a hotel near by, full of varnished teak, soft yellow lighting and brass ship’s fittings, where the landlady was serving prawn cocktails in little metal cups. I also knew that Bill did not consider hotels to be for the likes of him, and wouldn’t dream of staying in one.
Many years later, Steven had to drive around the West Country on business, and insisted on taking Bill with him. The weather was foul when they arrived in Torquay, and Steven was running late for a meeting. Dropping our father on the steps of the nearest hotel, he told him to head for the bar, where he would pick him up in an hour’s time. When he returned after the meeting, he found Bill standing forlornly on the steps where he had been deposited, soaked to the bone. He had been too embarrassed to enter the foyer.
I did not understand this, because here was a man who always looked immaculate in his grey suit, white shirt, grey silk tie and polished black Oxford toecaps, who did not own jeans or plimsolls, who even wore his suit on the beach. The idea of him coming on holiday to sit smartly upright behind the folding table of the world’s smallest, cheapest caravan in the ugliest part of the British Isles outside of Canvey Island (another regular holiday destination) made no sense at all. Many men of Bill’s age regarded a smart suit as a sign of respect and class, but even if he had been born fifty years later he would not have considered three-quarter-length camouflage trousers, trainers and a sleeveless top to be suitable apparel for a father.
I was angry with him for two reasons: his unthinking cruelties to my mother, and his determination to transform me into some kind of motor mechanic by having me climb underneath cars, bikes and now the caravan to hold a bolt in place or ‘press hard on that until there’s nothing leaking out’, because I always did the wrong thing and got oil everywhere. I knew I was meant to be thinking about grommets and differentials, but instead I’d be worrying whether Dickens had got the train signals wrong in Our Mutual Friend. My lack of concentration on the job at hand would lead to a yell from above, a shower of petrol/ oil/unidentified green liquid and a thump round the back of the head, along with an exhortation to ‘Go away and read something, for God’s sake, you’re bloody useless.’
One miserable Sunday, I spent the entire afternoon holding up one end of the caravan so my father could make a wooden chock to fit beneath the wheels. When my attention slipped and I allowed the end to slide from my grasp, everything inside tilted over and smashed. Bill screamed blue murder, because his hand had become trapped in the process.
‘Where’s your strength?’ he yelled, clutching his hand. ‘You can’t do anything. Flesh and blood? You’re as dry as those bloody books you’re always reading. You’re just made of paper. I’m amazed you don’t curl up and bloody blow away.’
There was a small plywood shelf in the caravan, and I quickly filled it with so many paperbacks that it came away from the wall. Reading prevented me from participation; for the rest of the family it must have been like having to lug an embalmed corpse around on holiday, from the miniature railway to the pier to the beach. The only time I remember speaking in anything approaching a connected sentence was to ask a question about Yosarian in Heller’s Catch-22, forgetting that no one was remotely interested.
Recently, I read that children’s brains hardwire themselves differently the moment they hit their teen years. The physical structure and layout changes, making teenagers more reflective and self-aware, but it also stops them from interpreting the facial emotions of others, creating a cognitive gap between them and adults. I had always selfishly thought that my parents were unresponsive to my needs, but it turns out they were being perfectly normal.
Even without this knowledge I resolved to be nicer, to help repair the leaking caravan, motorbike and car, to do chores around the house, stop reading, stop imagining, start being a better son. In brief, it was time to put away childish things and become a man.
But Kath hated the caravan as much as I did, and a fresh fault-line was developing through the family that sided Steven (practical, mechanical) with our father, and I (dreamy, vague) with our mother. Kath handled the ban on imagination by reading and going to see movies on the sly, but she was not allowed out alone unless she was working, so various subterfuges were used. She would ‘take Chris to visit a sick friend’ if she wanted to get to the cinema, or develop a headache that required her to spend the evening in her bedroom, where she would read. Even then, Bill couldn’t resist looking in from time to time, so she had to be careful. He followed her everywhere, issuing warnings, unable to see how much he needed her.
Meanwhile, I was illicitly sliding the typewriter from beneath my bed when no one was looking and tapping out stories in faint print, so that I would not have to make a noise with the keys. I could not have been more furtive if I had been bottling my own gin from a homemade still.
The pair of us were behaving like spies, mother and son, tangling ourselves in such complex webs of deceit that Bill must have thought his wife was having an affair. He was now the enemy of freedom, the head of the thought police, and as I was reading Orwell’s 1984 at the time, I became Winston Smith, quickly learning how to hide my rebellious traits in case I awoke one morning to hear my father intoning ‘You are the dead’ out of the caravan’s gas mantle.
The lies just kept on compounding themselves, until I could not be trusted to catch my mother’s eye over the dinner table, in case I accidentally gave something away. We looked out for each other, stepping on unguarded conversations, creating alibis and cover stories, always ready to jump in with a dozen barely plausible excuses. Sometimes neighbours were roped into this complicity, and even the dog was enlisted on a couple of occasions with false visits to the PDSA and some protracted explanation involving distemper, the only animal illness Kath had been able to recall.
There was one good thing about being stranded in a caravan in a filthy field, and that was
the farmer’s house, because the old man let us watch his television. This was where I first came across re-runs of The Quatermass Experiment, whose hero was a grumpy, unlikeable professor attached to the government in some capacity as a space scientist. The stories showed a great mistrust of being instructed from above, as government yes-men told Quatermass that they knew what they were doing, creating artificial foodstuffs (probably Fanny Cradock’s boiled-egg colouring) when in fact the entire country was being flogged off to alien forces. It was science fiction, but the series actually seemed to foresee the Thatcher era. Professor Quatermass remained a great English anti-hero, not just because he was shabby and unstarlike, but because he displayed a consistent suspicion of authoritarianism when most male icons were themselves authoritarians.
I outstayed my welcome in the farmer’s house, and was eventually banned from the telly room for getting overexcited. I took my revenge by flying a kite threaded with pieces of silver paper from Bill’s fag packets over the farmer’s roof, in order to muck up the old man’s television reception.
There wasn’t much else to do near the caravan site except bring down sparrows with the aid of a thick elastic band and a box of mothballs. Bill owned an old Bolex cine-camera, but it was kept locked in a box underneath packets of silica, and was never used in case it got damaged. Valuable, attractive or interesting items were never used in the Fowler household; they remained in their original boxes where no harm could befall them. I would have liked to make an action film that involved tying my brother to the tracks of the miniature railway. Steven was happy to do it, and was trusting enough to assume that he would be untied before the train got there.
Around this time, my mother did something extraordinarily weird. Faced with the prospect of yet another week staring at the rain-darkened ceiling of the caravan from her damp single bunk, Kath vanished.
No one knew where she had gone. One minute she was there, and the next she wasn’t. Her little suitcase was missing. It was the first and only time she ever did such a thing in half a century of marriage. She disappeared for precisely one week, and, like Agatha Christie before her, refused to talk about where she had been when she returned.
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