I had bought ice creams from her many times before, but she had barely noticed me. This time, though, I felt sure it would be different. It simply took an act of courage on my part to talk to her. I waited until all her customers had been served, then presented myself before her, staring down at the selection of fiercely coloured ice-cream boxes. Caught in the low light of the tray, her eyes were lost in darkness as she chewed rhythmically, awaiting my request. Her red lips sparkled with frosted gloss.
‘I’d like …’ I began. ‘I see you here every week …’ My words emerged with awkward bluntness. ‘You’re so …’ I put my money away.
‘If you wanna choc ice it might ’elp if you stop staring at my tits,’ she snapped. Her lips shone fiercely in the spotlight. She breathed out, a long slow sigh, clicked off her tray light and walked out of my life.
There were just three classifications of film from which to choose.
‘U’ certificates meant Disney animations and live-action stories of brave animals that banded together to find their way home, boring musicals, homoerotic Italian Hercules movies in which the hero would glisten while lifting fake rocks in a short red skirt, or effects-driven action films featuring giant stop-frame animated bees being poked by men with javelins.
‘A’ certificates admitted children so long as they could locate an adult to see them through the door, which meant hanging around on street corners to pick up strangers, like under-age rent boys touting for trade.
‘X’ certificates were for over-sixteens and were forbidden and scary, but you could start slipping into them if you were a tall fourteen, or like the weirdly mature Greek boy in my class, who had permanent five o’clock shadow by the time he was twelve.3 I discovered that I could gain free entrance by walking in backwards while everyone else was coming out.
On Saturday mornings there were the imaginatively titled Saturday Morning Pictures, which consisted of just over a thousand children slinging things at each other for two hours. This was a proper club, for which we got spiffy orange enamel badges and our own signature song, ‘The Greenwich Granadiers’,4 sung to the tune of ‘The British Grenadiers’, a military song that no one now remembers. Naturally, no girls were allowed to attend such events for fear that they would be knocked unconscious – or maybe there were girls, but I never noticed any. I once tried to get Pauline to come along, but she loftily informed me that I had absolutely no idea what girls wanted and never ever would, before returning to work on the tariff for her Ark’s passengers. She wanted to be a tax lawyer when she grew up, like her father.
The experience of attending the Saturday Morning Pictures was appalling: a sea of bouncing, shrieking, caterwauling, flailing, flatulent, hyperactive kids throwing empty Jubbly cartons and rock-hard sweets from Jamboree Bags at each other. A Jubbly was orangeade frozen in a triangular carton: once you had sucked all the condensed juice from the corners and crunched them, you had to take the whole thing out and turn it upside-down, at which point you usually dropped it on the floor.
While I was doing this, a vaguely sinister man in a double-breasted suit called Uncle Arthur would come on stage and award sweets to children, whom he drew from the dark by shining a mirror in their faces. How Uncle Arthur picked these children was a mystery; I liked to think they were selected at random, or perhaps he picked the most intelligent-looking ones, or the ones who looked like they wouldn’t tell their mothers if he touched them above the knee.
After several ineffectual pleas to keep quiet, Uncle Arthur beat a hasty retreat and was replaced by two Warner Brothers cartoons, an episode from an ancient Captain Marvel serial featuring square-shouldered men in trilbies, and a feature film – not a proper film, but wholesome tripe produced by the Children’s Film Foundation.
The CFF, one of the greatest nails in English cinema’s coffin, made films about perky pigtailed girls, and boys in grey flannel shorts who usually discovered counterfeiters’ lairs while on hop-picking holidays, and who dispatched crooks by dropping bags of flour and hockey nets on them. Saturday Morning Pictures clubs eventually died out, but were periodically revived by do-gooders who honestly believed that modern kids wouldn’t grow bored of them and start stabbing each other.
I thought I had probably been interfered with on the way home from one such event, but I could not be entirely sure. A man in a plastic mackintosh called to me from the narrow rain-slick street beside the cinema and asked if I could lend a hand with his bike. He said the front wheel had a puncture, but there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the tyre. While I held the bike upright so it could be checked, the man knelt beside me and allowed his hand to roam lightly to the top of my short trousers. He squeezed my inside leg a couple of times, telling me I had strong muscles, and that was it. I didn’t tell my parents because there wasn’t very much to tell, although of course the man might have gone on an interfering rampage after that. I remember, though, that only one of us had been nervous, and it hadn’t been me. To hear parents talk, you’d have thought it was a big deal.
Life at home reached an uneasy truce. Bill finally found a job, and although it was a humiliating step down and didn’t use his old skills in scientific glass technology or gas chromatography, it was at least tangentially related. He became the manager of the Elephant & Castle gas showroom, working in the hideous concrete mall where gang members were soon to start knifing each other over issues of respect. He also agreed to spend fewer evenings at his mother’s house and more time with his children. I could not imagine why he wanted to be anywhere near his horrible mother when we were so much more interesting, but her shadow reached down over our little orange house like Dracula’s, luring Bill away to sit with her while she peeled pomegranates5 and knitted her four-thousandth shapeless cardigan of the winter.
Saturday Morning Pictures was fun in an anthropological way. It was worth going just to see how badly children behaved when locked in a big dark room together. The films were never really about anything, but were packed with enough incident to quieten the audience down from time to time. The noise level roared back up whenever there was a dialogue scene or a bit with a girl in. Books didn’t just have plots, they had themes, but the only message I got from a Children’s Film Foundation film was that crooks could be captured with bags of flour, and all windmills had treasure maps hidden inside them.
The funny thing about the children’s films they showed at Saturday Morning Pictures was that one day, all of a sudden, the thought of seeing just one more was enough to make you throw up, and you could never face going back again. It was a far cry from a world where adults paid to see Spiderman films without worrying about being considered infantile.
I thought about the shared experience of cinema-going for a while, and came up with a great idea. My mother loved films, so I would get my father to take us all to the pictures, share confectionery in the dark and become a happy family again.
Of course, it didn’t quite work out like that.
1 An ice cream clearly named before the development of market research.
2 Brand name: the rather wonderful ‘Drink-On-A-Stick’.
3 I think I loved him.
4 Granada: a cinema chain with such faith in the British film industry that they were turned into bingo halls.
5 Bitter fruit not intended to be eaten like an orange.
14
Tea with Mother
A NEW WORLD of convenience was on the horizon. Now that nobody could afford servants any more, labour-saving devices were needed at home. I once saw an advertisement in a Victorian issue of Punch that depicted a delighted housewife unwrapping a fireplace. The headline read: ‘If you really love her, this Christmas you’ll buy her a grate.’
In the sixties, grates, gas pokers and coal scuttles ceased to be desirable gifts for loved ones.
In order to rid the world of Victoriana, everyone in the country had started covering their doors and boarding over their staircases with plywood, inadvertently preserving the original features of their h
ouses in the process.
This DIY frenzy, which my father caught on to despite the fact that he never finished a single job in his life, was the fault of a man called Barry Bucknell, who had the first-ever makeover show on TV. Bill referred to him as ‘the bodger’, which was a bit rich coming from a man who couldn’t hang a picture without accidentally knocking through to next door.
Bodger Bucknell was popular because there were only two TV channels, so programmes achieved astonishing ratings and were highly influential. If TV chef Fanny Cradock dyed her boiled eggs aquamarine (she was addicted to lurid food colouring) then all the women did, although nobody chose to follow her lead on the ‘shave your eyebrows off and repaint them just below your hairline’ front. Cradock also treated her husband Johnnie like a whipped dog, which many suburban wives must have found exciting. But then, women of the period had adopted Lady Isabel Barnet as a role model because she spoke so nicely on What’s My Line? and wore a frilly blindfold-mask as the guests signed in. Isabel Barnet finally killed herself out of shame at being caught with a shoplifted jar of jam, which, to women of my mother’s generation, seemed a decent and entirely logical reason for suicide.
I didn’t bother with television because it consisted largely of windmills, puppets and pottery wheels, interspersed with elderly men smoking pipes while they discussed Harold Macmillan in Old Etonian accents. Television was worthy and posh and educational. If the members of the latest Big Brother house had been tipped on to the screen in the sixties, they would have been the subject of a condescending documentary investigating primitive cultures, or slugs.
However, the couch-potato era started here, with families sitting together on the three-piece suite of an evening, mother knitting, father reading the paper, kids quietly playing, and everyone at least half-watching television. Boys were obsessed with Thunderbirds, because the stories took a back seat to the nuts-and-bolts mechanical detail of each rescue. We never asked why the characters had American accents or why their heads were so disproportionately large for their bodies; we just wanted to see a monorail catch fire.
The Avengers offered stranger fare, with tales of killer rain, robots and murderous grannies, and endless shots of eerily deserted airfields and villages. The most amoral and fantastical episodes were written by Philip Levine and Brian Clemens, who also conjured the show’s marvellous line-up of eccentric cameos, from deranged colonels to railway fanatics. Best of all, every episode had a simple hook that suckered you in – the town that loses an hour, the man who is killed by an invisible winged creature, the church with no parishioners and a graveyard full of coffins. The episodes were virtual blueprints for budding writers.
There was nothing like this on the BBC, though. Auntie was obsessed with the everyday. When the BBC showed a game-show challenge in which the contestants had to hack up a piano with an axe and feed it through a letterbox before a bell went off, the entire nation chopped its upright parlour pianos into matchsticks. This appealed greatly to my father, as he was very fond of destroying things. He soon dealt with the beautiful piano in the front room, hacking it into splinters and filling the summer sky with the smell of burning varnish. Another time, he boiled my lead farmyard figures down in Kath’s only frying pan; the resulting poisonous metal pancake lay in our back garden for years, killing everything within a five-foot radius. When Bill wasn’t practising the destructive art of DIY, he was taking his motorbikes apart and putting them back together, at which point he would find himself with several pieces left over.
But there was one room in our house that genuinely felt indoors, and didn’t have bits of motorbike all over it. The front room had a three-piece brown hide sofa with farting leather cushions, a polished walnut sideboard full of unused best crockery, the tiny television, and a three-panelled mirror on a chain above a green tiled fireplace. The room was comfortable and cosy and nobody was ever allowed to sit in it. This was because it was for guests, an idea my mother must have read about in Woman’s Realm1 or heard Fanny Cradock lecturing on. The idea was that guests came to tea and you served them sherry and little sandwiches without crusts and had intelligent conversation. The only problem was that the Fowlers didn’t know anybody upon whom this practice could be inflicted.
Kath tried it with the Hills next door, but they were ancient, deaf and slightly incontinent, so nobody was allowed to tell jokes or make them jump. And on the other side, Percy’s mum lived alone with her son because something mysterious had caused her husband to leave the house in the middle of the night and never come back. She was prone to fits of hysterical crying and the dropping of china when left alone, or suddenly laughing in a high-pitched scream that sounded like someone trying to choke-start a Ford Cortina. Her name seemed to be Margaret Poor-Soul, because that’s what everyone called her.
My mother came up with a solution to the guest shortage. She would invite Bill’s parents down the hill to take tea with our family. It would be their first-ever visit. Mrs Fowler would finally see what a good wife Kath was, conversation would be made, the good teapot would come out, there would be angel cake, serviettes and doilies. The best crockery would get an airing and the rift would be healed.
My father was sent to negotiate, but it took several visits to reach an agreement. His parents would come down and see us at four o’clock on Sunday afternoon for tea, then leave. It was like getting Jews and Arabs to the same table.
Kath opened her ancient, linen-covered Mrs Beeton2 book and started baking. Like many English cooks of the era, she was wonderful when it came to pies, puddings, cakes and pastries, and appalling with meat and salads. All meat was either slow-roasted to shoe leather, or boiled until it resembled human flesh. Salads consisted of lettuce, hard-boiled eggs, tinned beetroot slices, cucumber and quartered tomatoes, with no dressing other than the vinegary bite of Heinz Salad Cream.
In honour of the occasion she baked fairy cakes, an iced fruit cake, angel cake, a Battenberg cake and marzipan slices with almonds. My father coated the cracked hide of the three-piece suite with something called Leather Nourishment and spent an hour blowing under sheets of newspaper to get the front-room fire started.
At twenty past four, my mother’s calm demeanour started to crack. At half past, the doorbell finally rang. There they stood, William and Mrs Fowler, looking like Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic, with the barn replaced by a Victorian terrace. My grandfather had put on the only shirt and tie he owned, and had been made to wash his hair. He looked like a cross between a scarecrow and a badly embalmed corpse. And there she stood, the terror of the neighbourhood, decked out in navy blue, the black wicker hat wedged down hard over her steel-grey hair, the heavy ebony walking stick supporting her thick legs. She waited to be invited across the threshold, like Mrs Dracula.
‘We were expecting you at four,’ said Kath.
‘I was told half past four,’ said Mrs Fowler, daring her to disagree. As she removed her coat she glanced at the cheap hall wallpaper and sniffed disapprovingly. Her husband looked as if his collar was slowly choking him to death.
Kath attempted to guide them into the front room, but lacked the force to pull it off. Mrs Fowler walked straight past the carefully prepared neutral territory and into the little kitchen parlour where we spent most of our time. It was the only place in the house that had not been tidied up. She looked about in unconcealed distaste, pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped the kitchen chair before seating herself. ‘I thought you said you had a garden,’ she said, pointing out of the window. ‘That’s a back yard.’
‘Oh yes, we do overlook the yard here,’ my mother anxiously agreed, ‘but the garden is conveniently located around the corner.’ Anyone would have thought she was showing the place to a prospective buyer.
Mrs Fowler lumbered to her feet and went to inspect the flowerbeds. What she saw was a thirty-foot-long rubbish dump containing a collapsing corrugated-iron shelter, the remains of two old motorbikes, various holes and piles of nettle-covered bricks, some disease
d nasturtiums and one stem of a succulent plant that the narcoleptic tortoise had taken a few beakfuls out of. Just below the window, a dead bush shook as the cat strained inside it, extruding a pale poo that it could not be bothered to bury. A half-eaten sausage sandwich lay on the windowsill, left by Bill when he was working on his bike.
‘I’m surprised next door hasn’t complained to you about rats,’ said Mrs Fowler, peering at the enforced proximity of the neighbours’ washing. This would have to have been the day when Percy’s mum’s gigantic pants were all hung out. The annoying thing was that Mrs Fowler didn’t have a garden at all, so she had no right to criticize.
Discomfited by formality, William was itching to get outside and attack something with a ring spanner. He was clearly suffering from shed withdrawal.
Mrs Fowler hated being in a house where she was not in charge. She reminded me of Peggy Mount in Sailor Beware, a film about a pinafored battleaxe who wrecks her daughter’s wedding.
‘What are you feeding him?’ she asked, heading towards the scullery cupboards, but Kath managed to attach herself to the passing arm that held the stick and veer it around in a smart pivot, relaunching her in the opposite direction.
‘We’re having high tea in the front room,’ she announced, glaring at her husband and eldest son. We looked back from the doorway like a pair of craven cowards, then reversed into the narrow corridor as an advance party.
After pausing to inspect the room, my grandmother entered and lowered herself on to the sofa. Beneath her, one of the leather cushions released a dreadful flatulent sigh. Her hands could not gain purchase on the arms of the suite because they were still slippery with Leather Nourishment, and she slowly slid over.
‘Move up, old girl,’ said William, making a joke of it. ‘We won’t be giving you pickled eggs again.’ She fired poisoned lances at him.
My mother offered sandwiches. Mrs Fowler took one and lifted a corner, checking inside. ‘Is this paste?’
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