Paperboy

by Christopher Fowler

  It seemed obvious to everyone that my parents did not belong together. Bill’s mother got the ball rolling by failing to attend her only son’s wedding and avoiding all contact with her daughter-in-law. Kath took her new husband to her mother’s house in Brighton, where her nervous beau committed so many cringe-worthy faux pas that he could never bring himself to go back again. Kath then went to his mother’s house to repair the ill-will, only to rush from the front step with her nose in a handkerchief, sobbing.

  Early on, a sense of buyer’s remorse settled over my parents’ marriage. During their courtship Bill had presented himself as an open-hearted man of action, but he turned out to be a mummy’s boy who spent three work-nights out of five with his parents, leaving his wife alone at home. She, on the other hand, failed to live up to his strong-willed mother, and was considered by their side to be too high-minded. There was a general consensus that if she had Put Her Foot Down early on, things would have worked out satisfactorily. But she didn’t, and they didn’t, and so Kath and Bill remained padlocked together for fifty years of mutual disappointment and recrimination.

  For me, this was where the early appeal of burying one’s nose in a book came in.

  When we reached Reynold’s Place, where William and Mrs Fowler lived, my mother tidied my hair and pushed me towards the front door.

  ‘You knock,’ she said, knowing that I was awkward in formal situations. ‘I’m sure your grandmother will be pleased to see you.’

  I knocked and waited. A thumping sound grew inside the still house. The great black door creaked open. Balanced on an ebony stick, a great navy-blue dress and coat appeared before me, topped with a stern face and a wicker hat like an upturned bucket.

  ‘You’re late,’ said Mrs Fowler, stepping aside to let me in. ‘Go into the front room and don’t touch a single thing, while I have words with your mother.’

  She did not approve of kissing. As I passed, she snatched the book from under my arm. ‘You won’t be needing that,’ she told me. ‘It’ll be full of germs and bad ideas.’ She left it on the rainy step outside.

  There were no books in the house at Reynold’s Place because books did not look nice enough to be displayed, and in Mrs Fowler’s eyes did not reveal themselves as status symbols to visiting neighbours. Books developed the imagination, and imagination was the enemy of hard work. Everyone in Mrs Fowler’s family worked very hard until they dropped dead. In Mrs Fowler’s experience, ‘imaginative’ people were usually neurasthenic girls who cried a lot and proved useless to themselves and others. They moped, or were hysterical and took to their beds on rainy days. There was a word for imaginative boys, too, but it wasn’t mentioned in polite company. If I had turned up with welding equipment instead of a book, Mrs Fowler and I might have got off on the right foot.

  I weaved my way carefully through the fragile knickknacks, gewgaws and whatnots in the polish-squeaky front room, and perched on the guest chair in the corner, resigning myself to a very long afternoon. On my last visit I had dared to open the cabinet of not-very-curious curiosities to handle a china dachshund, only to watch in horror as it slipped through my fingers and snapped its head off on the floor. Balancing the head back on, I furtively replaced the guillotined dog, and there it stayed in the cabinet for years, awaiting discovery and retribution.

  After that, each trip to my grandparents’ house was like being put on trial for a crime you had denied knowledge of committing.

  1 For international readers, a light cake of baked batter, tricky to cook at the best of times. In Kath’s case, a concrete orange disc ideal for use as a paperweight or doorstop.

  2 Torchy lived on another planet with a poodle and a talking letterbox for companions. He was incredibly gay.

  3 One of a range of eerie Victorian illnesses like whooping cough and the dropsy, eradicated by inoculation.

  4 Traditionally poor area of South London docks, now renovated for corporate singles.

  5

  Free Time

  CHILDHOOD WAS FILLED with agonizing afternoons spent waiting beyond the whispers, or attending bizarre rituals for the sake of my parents. The least pleasurable of these was the Cubs,1 presided over by a man who looked like Central Casting’s idea of a paedophile. His pressed fawn shorts were so wide at the hem and his thighs so thin that we all had to look away when he crouched down in front of us for fear of witnessing a testicular protrusion. There was a particularly trying bout of suppressed laughter in the troop after he asked whether anyone had seen his conkers during a park ramble.

  Having failed to impress in Ropecraft, Woodsmanship (acts of arson involving the rubbing of sticks), Folk Dancing, Tracking or Being a Friend to Animals (due to an earlier incident involving a tethered stag beetle and a magnifying glass), I was luckily hit in the eye with a cricket ball and excused meetings long enough for the Cubmaster to wearily assume that I was unlikely to return.

  With the woggle safely discarded, the other blot on my free time was Sunday School, which involved lolling around on hard wooden benches while Miss Parker, a dumpy, well-meaning woman whose bulky undergarments showed through her cardigan like riot-gear, bowdlerized the Bible’s more lurid tales into fables suitable for tiny tots. To do this she used an easel and a set of pastel-coloured Fuzzy Felt action figures. The set included stick-on halos, Jacob’s ladder (like a regular painter’s ladder but golden) and a boulder for removing from Jesus’s tomb in order to facilitate resurrection.

  Miss Parker had the kind of mind that automatically went blank whenever it was confronted with images of fornication or retribution. Consequently, her biblical world consisted solely of kind acts, good Samaritans, loving thoughts and turned cheeks. She said that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’s ladyfriend and called the disciples his ‘best chums’. Everyone hated her except a pigtailed girl in the front row who got to put away the Fuzzy Felt figures as a reward for perfect attendance. She died of diphtheria in her second year, and nobody wanted her seat in case it was infected.

  As a child of the fifties and sixties, I had several other claims on my precious free time:

  Moorfields Eye Hospital (for eye-strengthening exercises that involved overlapping chipped Victorian slides of tigers and songbirds in cages, and flesh-coloured NHS specs held together in the centre with Elastoplast).

  Inoculation queues (for Diphtheria, Tuberculosis and a variety of poxes left over from an earlier century, possibly the seventeenth). Weeks passed in a dark room with whooping cough, chicken pox and measles, when you weren’t allowed to open the curtains in case you suddenly went blind, and some kind of respiratory illness which required you to spend evenings with your face suspended above a steaming enamel bowl with a tea towel draped over your head.

  Visits to bombsites, the source of all major childhood injuries due to the fact that they regularly required scaling up and sliding down. (‘He fell twenty feet into a pitch-black crater and nobody heard his desperate cries for help,’ ran one of Kath’s awful warnings. ‘His voice grew fainter and fainter until it finally ceased altogether. They didn’t find him until after Lent.’)

  The fifties was also populated with the kind of characters who turned up in Ealing comedies, and some who didn’t, including:

  Men in mackintoshes, who went funny during the War and were now likely to interfere with you if you were wearing short trousers.

  Landladies who wore nylon blouses with their bra straps showing, and who spent their days cleaning windows with brown paper and vinegar, and red-leading their front doorsteps, or trying to whack you with a broom for playing football against the side of their houses.

  Policemen who insisted on asking you where you were going, why you were covered in mud and whether that lovely mother of yours was at home during the day.

  Lollipop ladies with red lipstick, orange make-up, yellow hair and white raincoats.

  Bus conductors who kept up a steady stream of banter with their passengers, including the recitation of songs, jokes, bits of poetry and smut-tinged social
observation, while jauntily swinging from pole to pole through their buses.

  Park keepers in brown suits who carried pointed sticks for picking up litter and told you off for infringing council by-laws, a sure sign that you had been accidentally enjoying yourself.

  Bleached-blonde women who ran launderettes with permanent fags dangling insolently from the corners of their mouths, and who were the conduits for all neighbourhood gossip. ‘She’s someone to notice,’ the lady who ran the Sunbeam Launderama, Westcombe Hill, told Kath. ‘Her brother’s cousin’s husband painted Shirley Bassey’s bathroom. And that was before she was famous.’

  Train drivers who tooted and occasionally threw lumps of coal when they recognized kids waiting to see them pass on the branch line.

  Cadaverous Christmas Club men who came calling with rows of numbers neatly laid out in their account books.

  People dressed as giant rabbits, foxes, superheroes, princes or astronauts, who called to ask housewives if they could answer a simple question and produce a packet of Daz washing powder in order to win five pounds.2

  The man at the seaside who needed to be challenged by tapping him on the back with a rolled-up newspaper in order to claim a reward.3

  Gypsies selling dishcloths and clothes-pegs from wicker baskets.

  Rag-and-bone men, or totters, yelling incomprehensibly from their horses and carts, something that usually sounded like ‘Ramnmnbhoooouune!’ and who were still, amazingly, trundling around the neighbourhood in the internet age.

  The knife grinder with slicked-back hair and a bootlace tie who had an eye for the daughter of the house across the way, and who stood around chewing a match on the street corner waiting for long-legged schoolgirls to pass by.

  The Knock-Down-Ginger boys from the council estate who rang doorbells and ran away, and later got tattoos and became car mechanics before going to prison for handling dud cheques.

  The woman in the pink cake shop with pink hair and a pink nylon overall and pink lipstick who pinched my face and said she’d like to eat me up, and who probably wasn’t joking.

  The heron-necked man with round glasses who rang the doorbell on Sundays and optimistically asked if we would like to take Jesus into our hearts, and could he leave a pamphlet? Oh no, it’s you, Mr Fowler, I’ll be on my way then.

  The ice-cream-van man, the wet-fish man, the encyclopedia salesman, and a dozen other doorbell botherers who were likely to tip up in the course of an ordinary working day.

  It was just as well we didn’t have a television, or we would never have got anything done. That was the problem with being born in the fifties; there was far too much talking going on, I thought, as I locked myself in my bedroom with a copy of Jules Verne’s In Search of the Castaways4 (according to the stamp, last taken out of East Greenwich Public Library in 1937).

  Was it a good idea about this time to start dressing up like characters from my favourite books and films? I thought it might help me to empathize with different heroes and villains I admired, but soon learned not to suddenly come around the corner looking like Moriarty, Im-Ho-Tep or the Beast with a Million Eyes while my mother was dressing or holding sharp objects.

  My arrival was usually mitigated with a sigh of ‘Oh Chris, it’s you,’ but my ‘exploded head’ mask from I Was a Teenage Frankenstein had Kath screaming the house down. Perhaps I should not have waited until a foggy, dark night to put it on. Or turned the lights out and come rushing at her with a carving knife while she was quietly cutting her toenails in the bathroom.

  Vampire victims went down well, if I could keep still for long enough while clutching a sawn-off bloody tent-peg over my heart. I also donned my mother’s nightdress and tried ageing myself like Ayesha stepping back into the flame of eternal life in H. Rider Haggard’s She, achieving the wrinkled-skin effect with rubber cement, but it was difficult to get off, and I was forced to go to school the next day looking like one of the lepers from Ben-Hur.

  Three years later I had another go at frightening my family with the aid of a pint of crimson poster paint and two ping-pong balls on elastic. Staging the moment when Ray Milland tears out his own eyes in The Man with the X-Ray Eyes proved to be more effective than I had expected, but it wasn’t a good idea to make Bill jump, because he was soldering the lid of the tropical fish tank5 at the time and dropped his iron into the water in shock, branding a guppy. Bill chased me out into the street and fell over next door’s dog, breaking one of its toes. The terrier always bared its teeth at him after that, grimacing so broadly that it looked as if someone had wedged a coat hanger into its mouth.

  This penchant for theatre continued longer than was strictly healthy. Tying a dead pigeon to my blood-spattered forehead for a re-enactment of a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds proved to be more unhygienic than frightening, and gave me an eye infection. After this, my impersonation fetish lay dormant right up until the release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

  For now, the best way to learn about real people, I decided, was in books, because the characters were forced to follow the course of a plot rather than shuffling aimlessly through their lives being annoying and unpredictable. It was time for some serious reading.

  1 Junior version of the Scouts, designed to instil obsolete qualities like good sportsmanship and fair play.

  2 They drove around in cars shaped like giant tubes of toothpaste or sausages. I wish I was making this up.

  3 Most memorably, the snitch killed in the opening of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock.

  4 In the Walt Disney version, Hayley Mills and Maurice Chevalier cook eggs and sing while stuck up a tree. Not quite how Jules envisioned it.

  5 Due to the poor quality of TV reception in the sixties everyone kept tropical fish in order to have something to stare at that wouldn’t give them a headache.

  6

  You’ll Hurt Your Eyes

  ‘WHERE’S THE BOY?’ called Bill. ‘I need him to hold the carburettor valve in place on the Triumph while I hit it.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Kath, unwilling to commit an act of betrayal. She did not wish to lose a son and gain a G-clamp.

  ‘If I don’t get this fixed the bike will have to stay in the hall until next week,’ he threatened. ‘Or possibly spring.’

  ‘He’s under the table,’ Kath called back, whispering, ‘Sorry, Chris.’ ‘Reading again.’

  ‘Not to the cat, because that’s over here.’

  ‘He’s reading to the tortoise.’

  ‘What’s he reading to it?’

  ‘War and Peace. He hasn’t got very far. I said it would be beyond him at seven.’

  I remembered an exchange from last week’s Hancock’s Half-Hour.

  Hattie Jacques: ‘Reading again, eh? You’ll hurt your eyes, you will.’

  Tony Hancock: ‘I’ll hurt yours in a minute.’

  Hattie was right, of course. Reading under the bedclothes with a torch was something that would become a Problem in Later Life, just as falling asleep drunk with headphones on would eventually affect the fate of your ears. The house in Westerdale Road, Greenwich SE10 (after which I would always write ‘London, England, Earth, The Universe’ on letters) had a few desiccated paperbacks on the shelf, but the problem lay in working out which ones were any good. Our English teacher had told us that to be properly educated, we had to be raised within an environment of rigorously structured academic philosophy, which would prove tricky given my family’s favoured reading material:

  Mother

  Daphne du Maurier

  George Bernard Shaw

  The Coronation of Edward VII Souvenir Album

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  The Reader’s Digest Anthology of Much-Loved Novels (Condensed)

  Georgette Heyer

  Adventures in Conversation (Turn Idle Chatter into Talk That Sparkles!)

  Sundry volumes on knitting and playing the piano (separately)

  Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

  Agatha Christie (The Mystery of the Seven P
ipe Cleaners or something like that)

  Anna Sewell (Black Beauty)

  Make Do and Mend: The Ladies’ Home Thrift Companion

  T. E. Lawrence

  Mrs Beeton

  The Pan Books of Horror Stories

  Father

  Titbits

  Reveille1

  Sven Hassel2

  Dennis Wheatley

  Ian Fleming

  Sax Rohmer

  Great Naval Flags of the World

  Motorcycle Mechanics

  R. Lobsang Rampa (The Third Eye)

  (NB. Rampa wrote books of mystical Tibetan philosophy, and turned out not to be a Tibetan lama at all, but a plumber’s son called Cyril Hoskins who had never been to Tibet. He said he’d channelled the lama’s spirit after falling on his head, and that the book had been dictated to him by his cat, Mrs Fifi Greywhiskers. Branded a fraud, he moved to Canada.)

  Me

  Where the Rainbow Ends

  The Adventures of Toby Twirl

  20,000 Leagues under the Sea

  Finn Family Moomintroll3

  The Swiss Family Robinson

  Down with Skool! and How to Be Topp4

  The Huckleberry Hound annual

  War and Peace

  Professor Branestawm

  Treasure Island

  My parents had differing attitudes to books. My father came from a house where there had been none, and consequently handled the few he read as if they were filled with nitro-glycerine. You could never tell if he had even opened one. My mother had always been surrounded by books, so she had a healthy disrespect for them. Most of hers looked as if they had been dropped in the bath and dried out on a paraffin stove. Once I caught her using a fishbone as a bookmark.

  There was also a pile of tattered Victorian children’s books which the family had inherited from elderly relatives, none of which would have been allowed anywhere near modern children. Most people can recall a happy moment from a book they read as a small child, but looking back, I can only remember horrors from mine. ‘Uncle Two-Heads slowly sinks into the quicksand’ read the frontispiece of a grisly work called Tiny Tim in Giant Land, which featured the distorted creature clawing at wet sand as it was sucked into his screaming mouth. This was deemed suitable for seven-year-olds. ‘Karik and Valya trapped in the lair of the water-spider’ showed two miniaturized Russian children being wrapped in slimy webbing by a gigantic eight-legged multi-eyed horror at the bottom of a pond.