Paperboy

by Christopher Fowler

  He had also decided to start on the garden, which had clearly not been touched since the outbreak of World War Two. To assist him in this task he had purchased a chainsaw, a band-saw, a sledgehammer and a new pickaxe. My mother had been hoping for a few boxes of peonies and some crazy paving. Instead she got a huge pile of rubble removed from the concrete forecourt of the garage. Bill had decided to smash up the old surface and relay it, but the concrete appeared to be several feet deep, and he only succeeded in removing the top layer, creating a bomb crater that remained for years to come. Every time it rained, the hole filled with brackish water that attracted flying things from the woods with long legs and stingers.

  Bill was bored, if truth be told, and was always looking for something to do. His life was slipping by in slivers of wasted time spent working on projects he was never enthusiastic enough to finish. He had recently decided that we were spending too much money on over-priced shop products like fizzy drinks and soap powder, and had passed a couple of fruitless months attempting to create his own versions more cheaply. He knew a lot about chemistry and physics, and broke down these items into their chemical components, coming home with five-gallon drums of an industrial-strength Teepol1-derivative, explaining that the solution was used as the basis for all washing-up liquids. He only stopped after Kath pointed out that he was giving me and Steven skin complaints.

  To escape the noise of power-tools, my mother spent her time huddled in the kitchen trying to get warm. It was the only room that ever seemed to have any heat. I lay on the floor of the lounge, trying to concentrate on filling my notebooks in the fading light. Steven rolled in the sawdust, playing with screwdrivers and nails, gurgling and laughing and smiling delightfully. It somehow escaped our attention that Kath had recently undergone a kind of nervous breakdown.2 We all still expected our tea to be served on time.

  Although I had been going to the cinema a lot lately, I always came back to books. I knew that if I had to choose between a film and a book, I would always go for the latter. Films were better shared, and it took time to organize the right person to see them with. A book was a private transaction between reader and author. It would let you hide inside its covers. It would protect you and keep you safe. The volumes silted up my unfinished bedroom, covering the walls like lichen.

  Bill finally bought a car, a rusty lemon-coloured Mini Minor into which the four of us barely fitted. In response to the sense of creeping misery induced by the house, he now insisted on Sunday trips to the coast, whatever the season, whatever the weather.

  My father’s ability to choose the most depressing seaside resorts in England was uncanny. We were driven to Sheerness, where the beach was covered in reeking green weed, and sat huddled in a wooden hut watching huge tattooed women eating whelks while their children dropped bricks on stranded jellyfish. We went to a place called Point Clear, which looked like the surface of the moon, only not as verdant and with more broken glass. We went to Herne Bay, where the elderly sat in shelters watching the sun go down on their lives. We went to Dymchurch, famed for the poor quality of its arcade trinkets, the insolence of its disaffected teen street population and its army shelling range, on to which doped-up youths occasionally blundered. We went to St Mary’s Bay, where severely handicapped schoolchildren were arranged in wheelchairs on the brown mud like human groynes. We went to Dungeness, a wind-blasted stone beach dominated by the eerie glow of its humming power plant. There had to be more attractive places to visit.

  The journeys were passed filling up deadly boring I-Spy books. There were about forty of these object-spotting volumes, with titles like I-Spy Churches or I-Spy Something on the Pavement. You had to tick off the appropriate box whenever you spotted an item on the list, and when the book was full you could post it off to Big Chief I-Spy in return for a merit badge. Big Chief I-Spy said he lived in a wigwam, but the address on the envelope was somewhere on the Edgware Road in central London. Still, it made the journey go faster and the sooner we got there, the sooner we could set off home. I gave up buying the books after Big Chief I-Spy expressed his disgust at what I had managed to find on the pavement.

  It occurred to me that my father might be trying to bond us into a family unit. Faced with a choice between losing our parking change in penny arcades reeking of candy floss and sick, or hiding behind a windbreaker trying to spoon beetroot slices out of a jar, there was a danger that we might actually start talking to each other.

  ‘Where do you fancy?’ asked Bill. ‘Dungeness, Sheerness, St Mary’s Bay or Herne Bay?’ It was like a restaurant with a very limited menu, where none of the dishes were any good. I wanted to stay in a hotel, but my father was scared of them. Hotels were for posh people who would find ways to belittle him because they knew about tipping and cutlery and cocktails. Besides, I was halfway through writing a new review and didn’t want to have to stop in order to spend two hours in a fag-smoke-filled car to emerge in a town that stank of chip fat and hot seaside-rock-making equipment.

  ‘Herne Bay, I think,’ he said after much consideration. ‘But don’t think you’re bringing those bloody books with you.’ By now, he had transformed my obsession with filling notebooks into the topic we never mention. The topic was creativity. After the War, the English had developed a deep suspicion of anything artistic. To a nation founded on land ownership and keeping horses, a green and pleasant kingdom now dedicated to rebuilding itself, art was something kept in galleries that no one needed to visit. Art had stopped in 1890, and was certainly not to be produced at home. The Pre-Raphaelites had been reviled for weaving sentimental narratives with linear plotlines into their paintings; all art since had committed the sin of being inexplicable, and was therefore feared and ridiculed.

  In the shires, art became grimly egalitarian; any retired person should have a go at it to get them out of doors. When we had occasion to visit coastal art fairs (usually on rain-swept days when there was absolutely nothing else to do) we found three subjects under the brush: rowing boats at low tide, seagulls in flight and church steeples at dusk. Anything abstract provoked Bill’s comment that ‘a child of six could do it’. Art was feminized as something that would soften and damage maleness and corrupt the viewer. For decades, books and films had told solid stories, with tableaux, speeches and much worthy declamation. They were conservative, sensible, right-thinking, and that was how people wanted their art to be as well.

  I wanted my family to eat at a seaside restaurant, even if it was the kind that served a brown pot of tea with every meal, but my father didn’t approve of paying three quid for a piece of haddock served on a paper tablecloth. Instead he dug out his raincoat, the windbreak, a mallet, a shovel, the paraffin stove, the picnic hamper and assorted roadmaps covering areas miles away from where we were going, while I carried on writing up my review.

  In 1969 I saw Richard Attenborough’s film version of Oh! What a Lovely War and loved it because it was so experimental. The anti-war show had been staged by Joan Littlewood using seaside pierrots, singers and dancers in white conical hats and matching romper suits with black pom-poms down the front, but such characters had vanished by the sixties, so the history of the First World War had been turned into a surreal screen epic based on statistics and factual quotations. The setting was Brighton Pier, a folly that stood as a symbol of the War itself, so families paid for funfair rides that killed them, the great battles of Verdun, Loos and Ypres were represented by ‘What the Butler Saw’ machines, English high command operated from the top of the helter-skelter, losses were totted up on cricket scoreboards, and red tape literally stretched across battlefields.

  For me, that was when the seaside finally came into focus, as a symbol for all things absurdly English. Here were the oldest and youngest, the richest and poorest, the gaudiest and the most sublime things to be found in the country. In the film, Brighton – that phlegmatic coastal Albion3 – became a sinister surrealist playground. If I could have found the key to such places earlier, I would have enjoyed myself on fam
ily days out.

  Other films I marked in my notebook included Dr Syn, Sinful Davey and Where’s Jack?, which were all about highwaymen, and a film about Buddhist monks that Bill disliked because it had no action in it. Hitting someone counted as adventure, and was suitable for all the family. Nancying about in saffron was Labour and a threat to everything for which we stood. Lately, my father had started buying the Daily Express and muttering darkly about foreigners. To be fair, he wasn’t alone in doing this. Men who were old enough to remember living through the War were now being subjected to more changes than at any other time in history, and many of them simply retreated into revisionist memories of happier times.

  I looked through my reviews, which now filled more than a dozen notebooks. Nearly all of the English films represented cinema on its beam-ends, too dull to be cool, too bad to be cult. How had I ever managed to sit through such rubbish? With no one to share my enthusiasm, not even my best friend, I hung around the cinema on the off-chance, like a horny sailor cruising the docks.

  I kept some of those notebooks far into adulthood. Looking back one day, I noticed that Eye of the Cat, a film in which the lead character played an ailurophobe attempting to steal a fortune from a house filled with felines, had been given a four-star rating for one sequence involving a steep hill and an old lady in a wheelchair without brakes; I had not been very discriminating as a child. One of the rare double bills I had reviewed was The Strange Vengeance of Rosalie and To Kill a Clown. In the former, psychotic Bonnie Bedelia lured a businessman to her shack for sex, then kept him tied up there. In the latter, Alan Alda and Blythe Danner were hippies in a beachfront shack belonging to a fascist militiaman armed with attack dogs. This was a rare ‘nutters in sheds’ double bill. Suddenly I could see how distributors’ minds worked.

  I hadn’t liked to admit it, but Easy Rider made me very uneasy. My notes reported that I saw it four times with Simon, at his urging, and suggested that despite those iconic shots of Peter Fonda riding his long-forked hog, I was frightened by the film’s wind-in-the-hair freedom and lack of restraint; proof that carrying a heavy leather briefcase to and from an all-boys school for eight years could leave lasting damage.

  It was around this time that I became obsessed with one movie.

  It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World had sweeping blue skies, men in hats, primary-coloured boxy saloon cars, cleavages, shouting and the kind of deafening wanton destruction that propelled me through a feverish adolescent crush on all things loud, bright and American. I fell in love with its sheer bellowing energy. When a hungover Jim Backus reacted to bright sunlight by somersaulting over a billiard table, I collapsed too. I followed the film from one flea-pit to the next, watching it over and over, mesmerized, until I knew all the usherettes.

  I watched it until every line repeated in my head milliseconds before arriving on screen. The film became a series of set-pieces to be ticked off one by one. I wrote about it endlessly, and through this process, some input of my own began to emerge. Years later, I found myself driving through California, and accidentally ended up in Plaster City, the town from which a hysterical Mrs Marcus, played by Ethel Merman, calls her son, Sylvester. It was a special moment; you had to be there. I left the area trembling and strangely fulfilled.

  What I did not know back then was that this extremely shrill, rowdy and fairly unfunny Cinerama ‘comedy to end all comedies’, where even Buster Keaton and Jack Benny were reduced to walk-on roles, had been heavily trimmed by director Stanley Kramer to increase the number of times it could be shown in a week. Many years later, Tania Rose, the film’s co-author, put me in touch with a very nice man who had dedicated his entire life to finding the missing pieces of the film. He was deranged, of course, but in the same way as I had been – and one obsession validated the other; if more than one person was affected, it meant I wasn’t mad. When the film’s missing plotlines were finally located and restored, a darker, more cynical film emerged – I was glad they had cut it, at least for the sake of my childhood sanity.

  Another good thing about It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was that it was too long to run with a short feature. Long after films ceased to be shown in double bills, audiences still had to endure execrable shorts about showjumping, the porters of Covent Garden or Princess Margaret attending Ascot. Twisted Nerve was always shown with a fantastically bad musical short filmed in Belsize Park called Les Bicyclettes de Belsize, presumably because the director had seen Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, with which it had absolutely nothing in common. Slathered with naff pop songs and shot in such soft focus that the audience must have wondered if they were suffering from cataracts, I regularly caught it drifting about the outer reaches of the cinema circuit.

  Bad films weren’t worth reviewing in a straightforward fashion, so I started to extemporize, adding descriptions of new scenes and new endings that I felt improved them. When I reluctantly showed my mother the notebooks, she asked me what exactly I was reviewing the films for, especially when so many of them were devoid of any redeeming features.

  ‘This is all very well,’ she said finally, ‘but you need tales of your own, not other people’s.’

  ‘I don’t know how to go about it.’

  She put down her drying-up cloth and thought for a minute. ‘All stories are about the gradual disclosure of information,’ she said knowledgeably. ‘Look at Dickens. But take your time. There’s no rush. You have plenty of years in front of you.’

  She was right. The reviews were patched re-hashes of other people’s work. Without rigour or originality, they revealed nothing about me.

  She turned to me and placed her hands on either side of my head, as if trying to look inside. ‘You know what I see here, Chris? A great big blank page. I suppose I should be thankful that nobody has written anything good or bad across you yet. But at some point, you’ll have to start colouring in your own emotions, or someone else will do it for you, and then you’ll never find your own voice.’

  I wasn’t entirely sure that I understood what she meant.

  Still, later that day I slid the notebooks away beneath my bed and opened a brand-new Letts Schoolboy Diary. I would find my own voice. What I needed was something to write about.

  ‘Look at it out there, bloody chucking it down,’ said Bill, jingling his change at the window. ‘Stair-rods. Just our luck. I’m wondering …’

  I perked up. Maybe we wouldn’t have to go, after all.

  ‘I’m wondering if we should pack the blowlamp in case the paraffin stove doesn’t start.’

  I finally noticed that my mother was not her usual self. She always seemed to be on the verge of tears, and had stopped baking. The most she could be encouraged to muster up for dinner was mince with carrots and peas. Apart from that, we were mainly eating out of cans. True to form, I liked Heinz Kidney Soup, the thick sepia gunge with bits of ground-up kidney in it that everyone else hated.

  Kath spent all her time cleaning or shut in her bedroom reading, and I wasn’t making matters any easier by avoiding everyone. Instead of wondering what was wrong and trying to help my parents sort things out once and for all, I immersed myself in a world of words and artificially forced colours. Ink on paper, images on celluloid: everything I felt was created by someone else. There seemed to be a clear protective layer between me and the world, just like the plastic the new supermarkets now used to wrap up their meat, not raw and bloody but safe and easy to handle. I was also silent, bad-tempered, sulky and solipsistic, as adolescence demanded in a truly dysfunctional family.

  I turned back to the blank pages before me. I needed a story. I needed a hero, or a heroine. What did I know? What had I been taught?

  There had been a time when every schoolchild could recite the kings and queens of England in order. Whether one regarded this exercise as pointless or not, it was a cornerstone of education, along with parroting multiplication tables and knowing what a gerund was.

  If England was a nation suffering from its history, at least everyone ha
d a working knowledge of certain historical events, which provided a unique set of reference points for de-coding the stories of English heroes. The radio shows our family listened to ran comedy skits on everything from Mafeking to the siege of Sidney Street, and everyone from Sherpa Tensing to Svengali, and even the lowliest comedies were prepared to structure jokes around Anne Boleyn, Nelson, Sir Isaac Newton, Dr Livingstone, Madame Pompadour, Julius Caesar, H. Rider Haggard, Sir Francis Drake and Dr Henry Jekyll, knowing that they would be understood by the masses.

  This was the shared knowledge of a once-finite national identity, which filtered the rest of the world through set texts featuring the South Sea Bubble, the Spanish Armada, Oliver Cromwell, the India Mutiny, Florence Nightingale and Queen Victoria – texts so rigid and perversely opinionated that they could be parodied by Sellar and Yeatman in 1066 and All That. Naval heroes, explorers, commanders, scientists and pilots captured the national imagination, filled children’s comics and provided the basis for nicely bowdlerized biographies. War exploits were honoured in The Dam Busters and The Battle of Britain, while Douglas Bader was held up as one of the last templates for the courageous twentieth-century Englishman, as if getting your legs blown off was a covetable right of passage.

  Even my father could sense that the dawn of a new age was upon us; the celebration of celebrity, and even non-celebrity, was starting to replace English mythology. Steve McQueen, sweating in a torn vest, had become everyone’s idea of a star, replacing heroes like Barnes Wallis4 and Captain Scott – but he was tacitly understood to be stupid. Virility and intelligence were rare partners. The English no longer persisted in telling stories about bright-eyed POW officers who dug their way out of prison camps with teaspoons.