by Tim Lott
I sort through the records one by one and load them on to the record changer. The sound they issue is tinny and thin, the music disappointing: covers of ‘Little Brown Jug’ and ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, piano medleys by Russ Conway, light instrumentals by defunct showbands. At the bottom of the pile is a record with a black label, quite badly scratched, that I force on to the turntable without looking, for I am bored now and ready to give up. The needle strikes the groove and a sound issues into the air quite unlike anything that I have ever heard. The chords, instead of being brassy and upbeat, overprocessed, are melancholic, bare and stricken. Through the hiss and scratch of the record, a clarinet sounds.
I sit, rooted to the spot. Then the vocals begin, and I feel a tear form and run down my cheek. The voice is incredible, worn, razed and busted up, with a moan that tugs at my chest. It is a woman and she does not sing so much as drawl, in a voice stretched out and punctured and sad. I can just about make out the lyric through the pop and bustle of the stricken quality, and this, too, is mesmeric and strange. Out of the world I live in, which is made up of gameshows and toothpaste ads and Sunday Night at the London Palladium and Alma Cogan and Helen Shapiro and Max Bygraves, I hear, it seems to me for the first time, something that is real.
The song is ‘Strange Fruit’. I read the label, which bears the legend ‘Billie Holiday’. I assume this must be a man. And perhaps for the first time I begin to realize, though without word or conscious thought, that there are two worlds to inhabit: the ersatz and the authentic – avoidance or involvement, denial or engagement. To be lost in one is to be numb and to be lost in the other is to be in danger. Or perhaps, as my mother suggests, as I play the record time after time, until the groove is worn to nothing, I am simply morbid and more fascinated by death than is healthy for a child.
It is nine o’clock in the morning and I am eating my breakfast, a boiled egg with bread soldiers that I dip distractedly into the yolk. As usual, it is overcooked and I have to scoop the whole thing out with a spoon. I cover it with salt. I sip at a cup of Camp coffee. There have been no comics delivered this morning, so I pick up my father’s Daily Express and begin to read.
The first thing that strikes me is a double-column black and white photograph of a man whose face is so creased and melted by pain that it is hard to look at. He is wearing a trilby and his eyes are drooped and deep-set. They stare at the camera and the camera reads the despair within them. The eyes are completely indifferent, lost. The mouth slips downwards at the edges. The impression is of someone completely broken inside, whose face is so heavy with grief it appears that gravity itself has forced each line of jowl, cheek and eye downwards towards the earth. I recognize the man, but cannot place him until I read the headline:
HANCOCK FOUND DEAD IN HOTEL ROOM
SUICIDE SUSPECTED
I cannot take my eyes from the page. Tony Hancock was my hero, my favourite comic. Dad and I would watch him on the tiny screen, doubled up with laughter at his pretension, his conceit, his puffed-up, tragic pride. We laughed because he was us, because he was true. He had gone to his hotel room in Sydney, Australia, swallowed too many barbiturates and lain down to die. His suicide note read: This is quite rational. Things seemed to go wrong too many times.
I am bewildered and cannot eat my breakfast. How can anyone be so sad as to want to take their own life? It is an unfathomable mystery to me. I carefully tear out the photograph, take it upstairs and paste it into my scrapbook. I cannot forget the look in his eyes. What strikes me is that Hancock is even now dead, as he stares mutely at the camera. The suicide merely confirms what is already true.
It is a Saturday, and for the first time in my life my mother is allowing me to go to the cinema by myself. She is nervous and takes much persuading, but she believes, as does Jack, that to be too protective of your children does them more harm than good.
As I board the 105 bus at the junction of Rutland Road and Somerset Road, I feel excitement at this new freedom, this barrier crossed. The future will be full of such crossings, into new territories, new freedoms. The bus conductor takes my fare and hands me my ticket without remark. The strangeness of going unaccompanied is invisible to everyone but me.
I sit at the front of the bus upstairs, my favourite position, and the AEC engine churns and wobbles like a cement mixer. The bus travels past the council estates, where they eat Stork margarine instead of butter, never watch the BBC and come to school with dirty mouths and wild hair. The bus travels past the flat scrub and canal of Durdan’s Park, past the endless plain terraces of subtopia, all dun-pebbled, accompanied by garages, crowned in red tile.
The bus arrives at the Palace Cinema; I can see its great golden dragons in the distance. I jump from the bus before it stops and run towards the entrance, past Southall Town Hall, which is immaculate, mysterious and imposing. Southall Community Centre is half a mile over the bridge, and the trains I can hear faintly at night sound clearly here. Living, as I do, in the suburb of a suburb of a suburb (London–Ealing–Southall–Rutland Road), Southall High Street contains a fleck of the excitement of an imagined West End, imagined because I have never been there, Jack and Jean not seeing the point of London.
The film I am rushing to see is Phil Silvers in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, part of the zany cult of the time. I pay sixpence to get in – decimalization is still several years away – and take my seat, by an aisle. I already have a small packet of fruit pastilles and watch the invocations to buy Kia-Ora, Sun-Pat peanuts and Paines Poppets, and to visit the Golden Orient Chinese Restaurant in Hanwell Broadway, with mounting impatience. As the film begins, the cinema goes completely quiet, for there are no videos to convince people that film is a private experience, allowing for private manners. The experience is to be silent, collective, apart from the outbreaks of laughter or intakes of breath.
The film is not as good as I had imagined from watching Phil Silvers in Sergeant Bilko. It seems stupid and chaotic, and tries too hard to be funny. But I am pleased to be there, unaccompanied and, for a few hours, quite free.
There is a rustle as someone sits next to me. I think this odd, as the row is more or less empty, but ignore it, although I notice through the darkness that the size suggests a man rather than a boy. He wears a hat and I cannot see his face. A faint wave of laughter transmits around the auditorium as Phil Silvers pulls one of his terminally exasperated, disbelieving looks at the stupidity and naivety of the outside world. I feel a creeping sensation on my leg. The man has put his hand on my knee.
I am corrugated with terror. Of course, Jack and Jean have told me about ‘perverts’ and ‘flashers’ and ‘weirdos’ and ‘homos’ who occasionally populate cinemas and municipal parks, but as a child I imagine myself immune from serious misfortune of any kind. I have been given a prescription for what to do in circumstances like this: go immediately to the manager and report it. But I feel transfixed by shyness and cannot bring myself to seek out anyone in authority to tell them that someone is trying to mo-lest me. Anyway, what does the manager look like? I could tell an usherette, but she is a girl; she will laugh at me. Instead I rise from my seat and the hand falls away. I go and stand at the back of the auditorium, wondering if I should tell ‘them’. But the embarrassment is too great. Assuming that, in the dark, if I move to a new seat, the man will not be able to find me, I move along the side aisle and into a space ten or twelve rows back on the other side of the cinema.
After a few minutes, I begin to find my way back into the film and relax, but then I feel a movement beside me and the man sits down in the seat next to me once more. The terror redoubles now, immobilizing me. My small palms, holding the empty packet of fruit pastilles, are wet. I feel the man’s hand again, this time in my lap, questing for my zip. I can hear his breathing. He smells of wet earth. I cannot see what his other hand is doing.
Still too intimidated to go to the manager, I rise again and run, but, in a panic, I do the thing I am always told not to do: I go to the toil
et. I think that if I lock myself in a cubicle, the man will not be able to get to me. I rush into one, but the lock is broken and there is unflushed crap in the bowl. The toilet is otherwise completely empty. Fighting the panic, I dart into the second cubicle. This time there is a lock and I slide it closed. I stand on the toilet seat, so that if the man looks under he will not see my feet. I am not thinking straight. I fear that I am about to be fucked and murdered, although I do not know what fucking is, will not even pronounce the word in my own head.
I hold my breath. I wait minutes and nothing happens. Then there is a footfall outside and someone tests the door. I realize how completely vulnerable I now am and berate myself for my stupidity through the fear. I hug myself with crossed arms; my Viyella shirt is cold against my skin. I do not know what to do. What seems like hours pass, though it is probably five or ten minutes, and I listen for the sound of either a single movement or a loud bustle that will betoken the safety of a crowd. Neither happens. A hope in me begins to swell that the man has gone away, given up. I peer under the door and can see no shoes to suggest a hovering presence. Gathering myself, I unlatch the door. The smell of piss in the air strikes me. There is opal light from the overhead window. I can hear faint traffic.
Outside, I immediately see that the toilet is empty. Tense and blank now, I head towards the door and pull it open. The man is standing in the hall between the toilet and the cinema. He is in shadow, I cannot make out his face. He is reaching out towards me and is speaking in a low, cocoa-warm voice.
I only want to give you money… I only want –
I thrash out. I once saw my father take a football in the groin and he was nearly sick with pain, so I hit blindly towards the man’s crotch. To my surprise, he grunts and doubles up in agony, and I force my way past him in the narrow corridor and into the safety of the cinema. Even as he doubles, he is imploring me.
But I just want to –
What is it that old men want to do to children? I do not know, but I know that it is terrible, and a secret. Phil Silvers is bellowing, ten feet high, behind my head and the crowd is laughing idiotically. I race out of the cinema, into the light, not checking over my shoulder and run, run, run.
I am sitting at the kitchen table in Rutland Road, alone with my mother. She is cooking shortbread and I am bored, dithering at the table over a plate of cherries, which I consume indifferently. I put the pips back on the plate, until there are twenty or so. Then I begin playing ‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief’. I have an odd faith in these portentous games, like reading the numbers on bus tickets to find out how many times I will be married and how many children I will have.
The cherry pips decide that I will be a rich man. This excites me and I wonder how it will come about. I ask my mother what she thinks I should do when I grow up. She is silent for a moment and puts her finger to her lip. It is clear that she is taking the question seriously. Her eyes are filmy with faint confusion.
A draughtsman is a good job. Perhaps you should be a draughtsman.
Mum, what’s a draughtsman?
A draughtsman? He does… drawings.
But I can’t draw, Mum.
Well, you can learn. You can learn anything.
What does he draw pictures of?
Jean is still, as if scanning through her memories for the answer. It suddenly becomes clear to me that my mother does not have the faintest idea what a draughtsman is, that the thought is borrowed, picked up like static takes fluff.
Buildings, I think.
Jean turns back to her shortbread, pulls it from the oven and begins to stack it in a biscuit tin. The tin is decorated with a picture of two white Scottie dogs perched on a wicker picnic basket draped with a tartan rug. The shortbread smells delicious, as always.
Arthur and Jack have lent a boat from a friend at the badminton club (grammatically, of course, they have borrowed it, but the terms in our argot are reversed). The order of consumption in subtopia is this: first a terrace, then a semi, then a caravan on Camber Sands or at Folkestone, then a boat, which you would park in your front garden and take out twice a year for a doodle on the river. There are several of them in the streets around Southall. My father thinks they’re a waste of money, but on this occasion has decided it will be a laugh.
The boat, when we see it moored at Teddington, is a bit ropy. It is squat, small and ugly, a cabin cruiser that is little more than a tiny caravan with a hull. The paintwork is peeling. Arthur is wearing a little sailor’s cap. None of them knows anything about the river, but they decide to give it a go.
Can’t be that difficult.
No. Just like driving a car. Only you keep to the right. Is it the right?
Yes, I think so.
We board the boat, me and Jeff, Jack and Jean, Olive and Arthur, and set off down the Thames. The outboard motor is weak and makes a noise like a lawnmower. Our progress is slow, but the water is calm and the weather reasonably pleasant. I settle into a sort of disinterested torpor and half doze.
After a while I open my eyes. There is a loud rushing sound in my ears. I look at the adults. Arthur is fiddling furiously with the motor. Jack’s and Olive’s faces are tight with fear. But I am not unduly worried, because I know adults can do anything, solve any problem. The sound is getting louder and Jack is barking at Arthur.
For Christ’s sake!
Arthur is silent, struggling with what looks like a gearstick. He is white and his lips are pushed tight together. He is sweating. The sailor’s hat is still in place, but pushed to one side precariously.
I look over the bow of the boat, to see the source of the noise. There is a huge weir in front of us that crashes down into a great spume of white water. It is immediately clear to me that if the boat goes over, it will be smashed to pieces. And yet the weir has the boat in its grip and the motor is too weak to pull us out. Gradually, inevitably, we are slipping towards this boiling horizon.
I can feel quite clearly now, stronger than the spray of water, the air of panic. I begin to understand that the adults have lost control and look around for my mother. She is not there. Arthur grunts and cries out. With a last desperate pull, just as it appears we will go over, he has shifted the lever into reverse. The engine catches and the boat holds still, then very gradually starts to move backwards, away from the weir. The relief is thick as tar. Shaken, we decide to turn around and head back to the jetty.
I wonder what has happened to my mother in those moments when it appeared that her whole family, including herself, was about to drown in the freezing Thames. I ask my father where she is, but he seems busy with something. Eventually, when she reappears, I have forgotten the question. I do not find out until much later that my mother, as catastrophe approached, went down to the tiny cabin, closed the door, laid her head on the pillow, put her fingers in her ears and closed her eyes tight. She remained fixed in this position, hiding, until Jack came and told her that the danger had passed.
Chapter Eleven
‘In the animal kingdom, the rule is eat or be eaten. In the human kingdom, it is define or be defined. The struggle for definition is the struggle for life itself’ – Thomas Szasz
It is the 1970s, a short, stupid non-time bracketed between two distinct eras: the long 1960s and the longer still 1980s. Everything once loose is being packaged, everything once fresh is being recycled. Hyper-reality spreads like a secret fog. Imagineers conceive themed shopping centres, construct heritage out of history and lifestyle out of life. Things, it seems, must be more than, or different from, what they are.
Collective memory fades, consensus fractures, nostalgia is epidemic. In popular movies, buildings burn, the earth splits apart, aeroplanes crash, floods smother cities. In Rutland Road and Acacia Avenue, in Mon Repos and Mon Abris, the sense of progress and security begins, for some, to be fringed with doubt. There is inflation, decimalization, oil shock, IRA bombs, industrial strife. Mass immigration is changing the face of England, nowhere more th
an in Southall. These things are not distant, like the floating silver bubbles of the 1960s. They hector and threaten a whole raft of what once were certainties: civility, stability, money’s absolute value; whiteness, and superiority over what are politely referred to as ‘our colonial cousins’ or ‘coloureds’.
The National Front march in Southall in the 1970s. Although it is an axiom of Jack’s and Jean’s philosophy that everyone has a right to say what they think, they dislike the NF as bolshie and troublemakers, and wrong. Everyone’s the same, wherever you go, Jack would always insist. At the same time, they are uneasy at the speed of what is a remarkable transformation of their world. There are rumours that whole families of Asians are tunnelling through the walls and living secretly in lofts. And there is the smallest part of both of them that believes it.
Nevertheless, the protective faith that is Jean and Jack’s inheritance – Everything’ll come out in the wash – is, like all habits, not prone to easy decay. Entropy and change are played down, advancement and continuity teased up. And this is not an altogether difficult trick for them, since in many ways things remain on the up and up. They have a car now, one of a series of Morris Travellers, and a telephone on a telephone table with seat, and a colour television edged in black plastic rather than cedar-wood or mahogany. They begin to eat out in the new Greek, Indian and Chinese restaurants for the first time, and likewise for the first time they holiday abroad, in Majorca and Malta.
