In every issue of Lois Lane, Superman did one of three things: he turned bad, died or got married. And it always turned out to be a hoax.2 The Man of Steel required his girlfriend to pass an endless series of tests; she would have to go without sleep, or remain silent, or be turned into an old hag or a baby in order to prove her loyalty. Superman demanded such terrible sacrifices from his friends that you wondered whether it was worth knowing him. He was good, so he could do no wrong. He was invulnerable, so nothing would ever hurt him. And only the people with whom he surrounded himself, ordinary flawed human beings, could ever get hurt, which is why he refused to become intimately involved with anyone. He was the opposite of Jesus: everyone else had to suffer for him.
Superman also played tricks on his pal Jimmy Olsen to punish him for using his signal watch too often, making him undergo strange transformations, like becoming a human porcupine, Elastic Lad or a giant turtle boy. I loved Superman because he was a stern finger-wagging patrician who told everyone what to do and hated anyone having fun, and was therefore unconsciously homoerotic. I wanted Superman to be my father because you always knew where you were with him. A man’s most attractive quality is the ability to make a firm decision. Strictness was something my father had never managed to master.
When I got home, the ritual of comic-book reading had to be carefully organized. I would clear the small oak table in the kitchen, and place a cup of tea to my right, with a chocolate bar just below it, a Fry’s Mint Cream3 or Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut. I would lay the first comic before me and open it, solemnly reading from cover to cover (including all the advertisements for 100 magnets or an entire civil war army) so that its world entirely enveloped me, and I could no longer hear my parents arguing. Comics provided solace and protection. Their panels were windows into a happier, safer, brighter place.
When you’re a kid you only really read comics for about five years before real life intrudes upon your imagination, and your teenage years arrive. DC’s storylines really began to flounder after the liberation movement of the sixties, and the Lois Lane comic got discontinued, even though she continued to crop up in Superman comics, falling off piers or out of office windows, into his waiting arms. What was wrong with the woman? Did she have some kind of balance problem? Had she thought about removing her high heels before leaning over rooftops?
DC’s stern fundamentalist superheroes could only ever be on the side of the establishment. Like good Christians, they tried to win back some ground by expanding their family, but by the time they had taken on a super cat, a super horse and even Beppo the Super Monkey, I knew it was time to switch to Marvel Comics. I put up with Marvel’s overwrought writing style because the lurid artwork was like a rainbow being sick across the page. The best story was Spiderman’s three-issue fight with Dr Octopus, involving the first of his Aunt May’s many brushes with potentially fatal illnesses. Spidey needn’t have worried; the old broad had the constitution of an ox.
On his rack, Mr Purbrick also stocked shoddily reprinted collections of weird tales with surprise endings. The lead stories were always about giant creatures called Koomba or Zatuu, who were defeated by an insignificant bloke in a hat, the sole purpose of their existence being for the artist to have fun drawing them smashing up city streets.
But oh, the pleasure didn’t end there. In the backs of these comics was always a page entitled BUMPER TREASURE CHEST OF FUN! It sold:
Trick black face soap
Worms (‘They magically appear when dropped in a glass of water. Imagine the look of horror on your victim’s face. Harmless.’)
Onion gum
See-behind glasses
Throw your voice!
Joy buzzer
Plastic sick (‘Whoops! Who’s been ill? Imagine their faces! Hours of fun!)
X-ray spex (actually cardboard lenses with pieces of ribbed feather across the centre pinholes that created a black ghost-shape within any object looked at, the sort of thing people see as they’re going blind).
Purbrick’s sold Ellison’s Jokes, which included tin ventriloquists’ swozzles that you were always in danger of swallowing and choking to death on, and ‘Fake Soot’, which comprised tiny specks of ground rubber. His shop was in the middle of the parade on Westcombe Hill, a down-at-heel middle-class suburb. There were no turds or rubber breasts in his joke shop; the children were expected to throw fake soot at each other.
Although I much preferred American comics, I also took all the British comics because everyone else did. Dandy, Buster, Topper, Lion, Beezer and the rest were delivered every Wednesday, along with Kath and Bill’s Daily Mail. My favourite stories concerned the Steel Claw, a man with a metal hand who turned invisible (except for the hand) whenever he was electrocuted. The strip required its hero to walk into power cables at the same rate that normal people crossed the road. Girls weren’t allowed to read these comics. They had to make do with Bunty, a periodical seemingly financed by the hockey industry.
I loved the private world of comics – no adult could make sense of stories that accurately reflected the preposterous illogicalities of imaginative children. Comics were a narcotic that led to harder drugs like Mad magazine, with its unfunny American jokes about cars and movies and Madison Avenue, and Famous Monsters of Filmland, which was filled with appalling puns and blurrily reproduced stills of long-forgotten B-movie monsters. My favourite monster was the crimson creature shaped like the top of a cucumber that fired mind-controlling bats to attack the people of Earth in Roger Corman’s It Conquered the World. It wasn’t much of a stretch defeating this fearsome beast; the hero just hit it with a flamethrower and tipped it on its side. When he did, you could see the castors it moved around on sticking out from underneath.
Famous Monsters had great stuff you could send away for in its back pages, including rubber horror masks that made your face sweat, ten-foot inflatable pythons, giant weather balloons, ‘sea monkeys’ that were actually dried brine shrimps, despite the fact that the artwork showed them sitting in armchairs reading newspapers, 8mm reels of The Giant Claw,4 The Deadly Mantis and other lousy monster movies, Aurora horror model kits,5 the baby chick incubator, the Mad Doctor hypodermic needle (‘everyone will faint when you plunge this needle into your victim’s arm!’), spooky sound effects LPs and live monkeys. None of which my mother allowed me to send off for.
‘They would have to come all the way from America,’ Kath told me. ‘It would cost a fortune, and nothing would survive the trip. I’m not spending all that money to have a dead monkey delivered in a box.’
Entering Purbrick’s shop with the Superman comic held before me like a talisman, I waited for the newsagent to finish dispensing his weird-smelling cough sweets. When he noticed me, I launched into an elaborate, pointless lie about returning home to discover that I had already bought the comic from another shop some days before, the implication being that my philanthropy virtually kept the shops in the area afloat with my purchases, and I could be forgiven for this one rare mistake.
Purbrick saw right through me. It was as though he had sent away for the X-ray spex. He stood with his arms folded over his bulging pinstriped waistcoat, staring down at my gangly form. What he didn’t understand was that I needed the comics more than heroin, and would probably break into shops for them if necessary. I had developed an elaborate system of swapping at school which could translate a coveted copy of The Legion of Super Heroes6 into its equivalent value in tubes of fruit Spangles.7
‘All right,’ said Mr Purbrick finally, ‘I’ll take it back just this once. But I’ll never take another comic back from you ever again.’
And with a sigh, he went to the till to return my mother’s shilling.
1 Superman had one flaw: he could see across the universe but not through a sheet of lead. Presumably he never solved crimes in churches, not being able to see through their roofs.
2 The 1950s were a period of such stasis that no one wanted change, even in their comic books; there was an outcry among fans when
Lois had her hair permed.
3 Also came in fruit flavours differentiated by the dazzling colour of their fillings. Sorely missed.
4 Fighter jets versus giant prehistoric bird! Or rather, jets versus goggle-eyed string puppet (strings highly visible).
5 You could even get accessories to pimp your models of the Wolfman and the Phantom of the Opera, like spare bats and cobwebs. Cool.
6 The comic-book equivalent of a tree-house club. The super-teens met in a rocket and spent most of their time banning each other and voting for new members. Saturn Girl was really bossy. Plus, their powers were rubbish. Bouncing Boy? Q.E.D.
7 Fruit-flavoured boiled sweets which, like Fruit Gums, stopped being enjoyable after the revised code of acceptable additives came into force.
4
Background Material
‘WE’RE LEAVING TO visit your grandmother in exactly ten minutes,’ warned Kath. ‘You know she doesn’t like to be kept waiting.’
‘I can’t come,’ I said simply, feeling it was time to put my besocked and sandalled foot down.
‘Why not? Are you feeling unwell?’ It was the only excuse that would be acceptable to Mrs Fowler, and possibly not even then.
‘No, I’m at absolutely the most crucial moment in the whole book.’ I held up a 1930s library copy of something to do with female pirates and purloined emeralds which I had found to be pretty racy, even though it was falling apart and grubby from a thousand other readers.
‘Nice try. The book will wait. Good use of “crucial”. Mackintosh on, please.’ My mother clapped her hands together and left the room, trying to look stern but failing this time.
In the Fowler family no one was much interested in family. Alice, my maternal grandmother, had white fluffy hair, high cheekbones and a quiet half-smile, and wore Wedgwood cameos on black lace, but no one explained why she had no husband, and I was not old or brave enough to ask. She reminded me of the granny in Tweety Pie cartoons.
She lived in Brighton in a time machine, a mid-Victorian corner house with green wooden shutters, two front doors and a hissing copper-plated boiler. Everything about her was genteel, softly spoken and late Victorian. She disapproved of shouting and running on a Sunday, and never bought a television because she thought it would irradiate the brain and destroy the art of conversation. She also had a paid companion who stayed in the kitchen, a pinch-faced witch called ‘Aunt’ Mary who hoarded food in case rationing returned and counted out the milkman’s change as if parting with family heirlooms. After her death, Kath found a suitcase full of tinned peaches under her bed.
The house had three smells: beeswax, lavender and suet pudding. There were metal bed-warmers and aspidistras in pots, and green velvet tablecloths with tassels, and the stillness in the hall was only disturbed by ticking clocks. The scullery had a flagstone floor, and there was different crockery for day and evening use, a vivid orange for breakfast, a calming blue for dinner. The wallpaper was ‘Acanthus’ by William Morris, the light was always low, and it was very, very quiet. My grandmother’s world was constructed around a century of Victorian advice. Children were seen and not heard, overcoats were to be worn until the last day of May, and tea cooled you better than lemonade on a hot day, as did running your wrists under cold water, where the blood was nearest the surface. I loved her house because there were strict unbreakable rules, so you always knew where you stood.
Things were different on my father’s side. Bill’s mother was a terrifying old woman who didn’t seem keen on being reminded that she was anyone’s grandmother. It was impossible to imagine that she had ever been young. She was known only as Mrs Fowler. Nobody in the family could remember whether she had any other name. She smelled of an eye-wateringly pungent perfume called 4-7-11, wore thick black zip-up fleece-lined heavy-traction boots, a long navy-blue coat she never took off and a hat seemingly constructed from black lacquered wicker. She leaned on an ebony stick more intended for thrashing someone than walking with.
Grandfather William, her silent, skeletal husband, occasionally appeared in the kitchen like Banquo’s ghost, only to disappear into the shed or the pub before imparting information. I loved my grandfather. The old man smelled of tinned tobacco, bitter and oil, and winked at me behind his ghastly wife’s back. He was tanned from working outside as a tar-spreader, gaunt-faced, with thin fair hair and a rumpled forehead like his son and eventually his grandson. Deep creases ran from cheekbone to jaw, and glasses were perched on a nose that had been broken so many times the blood no longer reached the end of it. Both he and Bill were physically small, but according to Kath only her husband suffered from ‘Napoleon complex’, whatever that was. She insisted he had been taller when they were courting.
William and Mrs Fowler lived a few streets away from Westcombe Hill, at the leafy Royal Standard on the far side of Blackheath, and were genteelly working class, meaning William was poor but honest and lived within his means, occasionally going to church and only saying ‘bugger’ when he hit his thumb with a hammer. He was one of those men you saw in old photographs who looked really uncomfortable with the top button of their collar done up on a white shirt. They were only ever photographed in one of two places: squinting into the sun in their front garden or sitting on the beach fully dressed, cooking complex meals on a primus stove behind a rampart of sand and a striped windbreak. I remember Mrs Fowler once complaining that the hardest part of cooking on a primus stove on a windy beach was getting the Yorkshire Puddings right.1
Their house was neat and tiny, and had no bathroom or indoor toilet, just a big butler sink in the kitchen for washing. A single latticed bay window overlooked a neighbour’s sleepy beehives. The blue staircase to the bedroom was so steep that it had a rope running beside it rather than a rail, possibly as a reminder of the nation’s former status as a seafaring force. There was a three-dimensional concave ceramic plate on the lounge wall with a picture of a water wheel on it, and a brown Victorian print of a woman unravelling wool while two gentlemen in tight fawn trousers perched on bended knees to wind up the twine. It bore the caption ‘Two strings to her bow’ and Kath said it was a pun, but I could not see how. Surely it would have been better as ‘Two beaus to her string’?
The television set had shiny wooden roller doors designed to hide the screen, as if there was something vulgar about exposing a naked cathode tube. I was sometimes allowed to watch Torchy the Battery Boy,2 after which Mrs Fowler would shut the roller doors with a bang. Beside the upright piano there was a scallop-windowed cabinet full of gaudy fairground knick-knacks that I was never allowed to touch. Their house smelled of polish too, but of a cheaper, less labour-intensive sort.
There was also something hidden and private about my paternal grandmother that involved tears and whispers in the kitchen, and doors firmly closed against young eyes. The lounge always felt like an offstage area to the hushed dramas that were unfolding in the main auditorium. Occasionally, neighbouring wives knocked urgently and headed for the kitchen, staying behind the door and speaking in low voices before rushing back to make their husbands’ tea.
The rest of my relatives were shadowy and indistinct. Bill’s sister Doreen was sweet and gentle, married to a kind, decent man and the mother of normal children, but she only met up with parts of the family at their supernaturally tidy house in Reading because Auntie Doreen and her mother ‘didn’t speak’ over something that had happened at least twelve years ago. When Mrs Fowler argued with members of her family, she left scars on them like radiation burns.
Mrs Fowler had a sister called Carrie who also had caring eyes and some kind of secret sorrow that nobody was ever allowed to mention. Kath had lost her brother Kit to diphtheria,3 whatever that was, when they were six. She had a sister, Muriel, distant, religious and grand, who had married a Glasgow city archivist and given birth to a congregation of well-behaved children with biblical names. The received wisdom was that we Fowlers didn’t need them, and they didn’t like the Fowlers because Bill was common. At the s
lightest provocation, Muriel would unlock a gigantic embossed family Bible and read out bits in a condescending voice that gave us the creeps. We would endure an occasional Sunday at their house before fleeing at the first available opportunity. As we drove off in Bill’s motorbike and sidecar there was always a palpable sense of relief, and everyone could start laughing again.
Around the edges of these characters were the lost ones.
A sixteen-year-old cousin who had died after climbing under a motorbike tarpaulin to smell the petrol. An uncle who had fallen off a Thames lighter, and his brother who had dived into the fast brown waters to save him – both were wearing cable-knit sweaters and workboots, and were swiftly pulled under by the racing tide. A stillborn baby, a girl who ran away – subjects that were unthinkable to broach. There was a tiny sparrow-like aunt, loud, deaf, coarse, gurning and toothless, called Aunt Nell, whose sailor husband might have died at sea, and whose daughter Brenda was mute, ‘simple’ and uncomprehending. Aunt Nell lived in the basement of a damp Isle of Dogs4 slum with a foul-mouthed mynah bird, and cleaned cinemas until she was eighty. I adored her.
It struck me that the War had turned all of these people upside-down; nothing was in its rightful place any more, which was why they seemed so lost. Over all of them, living and dead, lay a soft fog of mystery. No anecdote had an ending, no story was ever complete. Questions were diverted and details trailed off. Where was my other grandfather? Why didn’t Mrs Fowler talk to my mother or her own daughter? What had happened to Nell’s husband? How could the smell of petrol kill you? The stories remained incomplete for decades, until my well-intentioned sister-in-law decided to shine a torch on the family tree, affronting everyone in the process and accidentally closing the subject for ever. Kath, in particular, had kept her secrets close to her chest, and was mortified by the idea that her grandchildren might realize she had been born out of wedlock.
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