Paperboy

by Christopher Fowler

  While she was away, the rest of us were obliged to pretend that there was nothing wrong. Bill never mentioned the subject, and quietly set about getting his own tea. It was as if Kath had been abducted by Quartermass’s aliens and they had wiped her memory from our brains.

  When she came back the following Sunday, she headed to her room to unpack her case, then came downstairs to prepare tea (sponge cake, banana trifle), acting as if nothing untoward had occurred.

  In theory, given that Bill had been unable to acknowledge her absence, we could simply have picked up where we had left off and gone on as before. Bill refused to speak to her, however, and went to his mother’s house, where he stayed for several weeks. Steven and I assumed that our mother had gone to stay in Brighton, where horrible ‘Aunt’ Mary, our maternal grandmother’s paid companion, still had a flat. The thought that she might have nipped off somewhere exotic for a mad fling never crossed our minds.

  Some while after Kath returned, an investigative rootle through her jewellery box provided me with a clue to where she had been. Beneath her fake pearls I found a small red enamel pin – the symbol of the Russian communist party. It transpired that she had fulfilled a childhood dream to visit the Hermitage in St Petersburg, staying alone in a government hotel on a non-existent budget. Eventually excitement got the better of her, and she came to speak of the wonders she had seen there, but only quietly, when my father was out of the room. She had pawned her mother’s ring to pay for the flight.

  Shortly after she returned, Bill got the message and sold the caravan.

  25

  Certificate X

  THE FAMILY HAD lined up on either side of the trench, with Bill and Mrs Fowler firing shots from one side, Kath and I sending up flares from the other, Steven slowly being annexed by my father, and Grandfather William operating as Switzerland, somewhere in the middle where we could both go and hide. My valiant effort to lie on my back holding a monkey wrench without thinking of Winston Smith’s betrayal of Julia in 1984 had failed miserably, and I was forced to concede that the problem of growing up with imagination in a relentlessly sensible household would not go away.

  Although we hardly ever had cross words, I could see that Steven was very different to me. Easy-going and naturally practical, he hid his anxieties so well that for many years I failed to realize he had braved a nightmarish time at school.

  Sensing that I was being increasingly annoying, I decided that I needed to involve Bill, to make him see my point of view. My father freely admitted to having no interest in books, little taste in films and actively detesting the theatre, but the door had been left ajar in one area. Apparently, like my mother, he enjoyed horror stories.

  It turned out that the book of The Fifty Strangest Stories Ever Told had belonged to him, not to Kath. I had never seen a proper horror film and was underage to do so (the ‘X’ certificate at the time being for over-sixteens), but I now worked on getting Bill to smuggle me into the cinema, which appealed to him because it was illegal and therefore somehow a manly thing to do. And if I could get my mother to come along too, we would all have something to talk about.

  Close, it turned out, but no cigar. My father would concede to the horror double bill, but not if it involved bringing Kath along; he was still punishing her for the St Petersburg jaunt, and thought it was ‘unladylike’ for a woman to enjoy being scared, although by now he had scared her quite a few times himself.

  We went through the local paper and I chose the most lurid Hammer double bill I could find. The first horror film I shared with my father created a bond that was certainly never there before.

  ‘You probably want to get rid of your school cap for the evening,’ he said, ‘and put on some long trousers, for God’s sake. If anyone asks, you’re sixteen but you’ve been sick. I don’t want you showing me up.’

  Luckily I was gangly and already taller than my father. I just needed to find clothes that didn’t make me look twelve years old, so the standard-issue grey and yellow school jumper was out. As I clumped up the steps of the cinema, I couldn’t have felt more self-conscious if I had been balancing on someone’s shoulders inside a double-height raincoat. But it was worth the effort to finally see a film bearing the forbidden, mysterious ‘X’ certificate.

  Horror has always been seen as an adolescent roadhouse on the way to more sophisticated forms of entertainment because the genre appeals at an early age. The young suffer few intimations of mortality, and children are morbidly fascinated by death and the supernatural. Each time I read or saw something that I liked, I drove another fence-post into the topography of my imagination, gradually mapping its outlines.

  Horror regained respectability through the sumptuous period pieces that were Hammer films. English horror had extended from a civilized background, the world of Benson, James and Saki,1 of ghost stories told over after-dinner port. Ghost and horror stories could be found in household collections all over the country because the literary tradition was respectable.

  Because I was such a politely spoken goody-two-shoes at school, I felt riddled with guilt crossing the plush crimson Dettol-reeking carpet of the Woolwich Odeon to stand in front of the cashier while my father lied about my age. Luckily, the cinema had employed a new member of staff who did not recognize me. It would have been mortifying to be identified as the strange child who spent his afternoons wandering around the foyer in his socks.

  Seven years had passed since the first definitive Hammer Dracula had appeared on screen. With no video and no MTV, youthful minds were less saturated with violence than they are today. Images retained the power to shock. Fast cutting had hardly been invented. All horror films appeared in double bills (the thinking seemed to be that two horror films equalled one normal film), so I knew I would already be tensed up by the B-feature before we even got as far as Dracula.

  On that very first occasion, the first movie was Plague of the Zombies, an elegantly photographed appetizer for the main event. It was not especially gory (only one beheading), but something about the class-warfare country-squire-using-undead-workforce plot held resonance, and those white-eyed zombies dressed in flour bags lingered in the mind. There was a doom-laden recklessness here, signified by the upending of a coffin that exposed a plague-corpse in broad daylight. I felt as if I was on unsafe ground. This was the first image I saw upon entering the darkened auditorium, because as usual we had missed the beginning of the film.

  At the start of the main movie I was teased with the end of the first Hammer Dracula film, which I’d been too young to see. Dracula had shrivelled in sunlight, so I knew that the count was dead.

  With tension creeping up my arms and legs, I waited for him to reappear. And waited. (This was a number of years before Hammer lazily allowed bats to vomit blood on to Dracula’s ashes to revive him.) The next forty-five minutes represented, for me, one of the purest sequences in horror history, as the camera prowled the gloomy corridors and I thought, He’s been bloody cremated, so how the hell can they bring him back?

  When the servant Klove slipped his sacrificial victim’s feet into a noose I was even more puzzled, so that the upside-down throat-slashing over Dracula’s ashes came as an astounding shock.

  The scene was originally to have featured a beheading, which would have been much less effective. Luckily the censors had rejected that idea in favour of a blade across the jugular, proof (if any were needed) that they hadn’t the faintest clue what they were doing. Nothing could ever recapture the peculiarly effortless sensuality that made the film work so well in the cinema. Those silent-movie reactions to crucifixes – the ridiculous throwing up of hands – soon came to appear stilted, so what made this minor horror film so special, beyond the fact that it was the first one to bury itself deep within my brain?

  The film grew more perfunctory after its bravura opening, but for a while it was perfect. It played like a stripped-down version of the traditional legend. The coach-driver refused to look up at the impossibly baroque castle; prim, pent-u
p Barbara Shelley was transformed into a sensual (and somewhat middle-aged) hellcat; Dracula was invited in by a feeble-minded lunatic; crucifixes seared; fangs were bared with a hiss; James Bernard’s sinfully lush score was backed by the ever-present moaning wind; and a dim-witted man of the cloth made a nuisance of himself. The only real romance on display was an unhealthy love of all things dead, and even the happy ending reeked of melancholia.

  How could this not have been the start of a lifelong love affair with horror and fantasy?

  Films were no longer enough; they were topped up with more Pan Books of Horror, and the New English Library of fantastic literature. A horror film, I later came to realize, was like sex: the first time might not be the best, but you would always remember it.

  English horror revealed the apathy at the heart of a particularly cruel type of English personality. The films succeeded because they were made in a morally hypocritical country. This new sensuality of the supernatural seemed linked to the growing freedom of the times; Hammer films appeared with a fully fledged worldview of their own, surprising everyone with their paradoxically low-key, high-style acting and graphic gore scenes, but then they were created in a country still riven by class problems, and they captured the casually callous attitude of the English upper classes in a way that no one else managed to. Count Dracula could have been a member of the House of Lords. It was a subtext that only occasionally protruded far enough to be noticeable, but it was always there.

  After this long night of fear I began to see all period horror films, even the tatty ‘murderous she-moth’ flick The Blood Beast Terror. The mystique of Hammer remained because their grand sets and full-blooded performances distanced them from surrounding shockers. In the same way that gentlemanly Kenneth Horne could make smutty jokes on Round the Horne over the Sunday roast beef and get away with it, the Hammer regulars could star in bloody set-pieces without appearing to be slumming because Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee were smart and mature, and I felt comfortable placing trust in them. They wore ties and spoke nicely. They were like my father.

  All the other parts were played by a gallery of Dickensian character actors, including Thorley Walters, Francis Matthews and, yes, Michael Ripper, who lent gravitas to the duffest dialogue lines. Ripper was usually cast as a Transylvanian inn-keeper, and bizarrely chose a West Country accent to deliver his lines, crying, ‘You’m bain’t be goin’ up to Carstle Draaakler tonoight!’ And this was the point. Hammer films weren’t set in Bavaria or Liechtenstein or Transylvania, they were set in England and they were about the English, only nobody could see it at the time. It was an England that was soon to fade from view.

  The early Hammer femmes fatales were sexy maternal types who wore nightgowns apparently made of heavy sailcloth. One of them, Jenny Hanley, was a presenter of the children’s TV show Magpie, so I figured it was probably illegal to have carnal thoughts about her. Hammer soon lost the courage of its convictions and presented risible versions of ‘young people’ on the screen, of whom blond-locked, caterpillar-eyebrowed Shane Bryant was the most appalling. The company’s decline was perhaps the result of a growing disillusionment among young people, who were beginning to choose more morally ambiguous, cynical ideas over straight battles between good and evil. Eventually, when compared to the feral punks of the King’s Road, Dracula came to appear positively benign.

  Bill didn’t stay the course with this new obsession. Like everything else that took his fancy, his interest waned before any real demand was made on his attention. Besides, his motorbike was playing up and we went from missing the first twenty minutes of every film to missing an entire hour. So, having gained confidence, I asked if I could now go to see adult films on my own.

  The oddest of my discoveries was The Wicker Man, which starred Christopher Lee and featured Ingrid Pitt, but was the antithesis of a traditional Hammer horror. Filled with folk tunes, sunshine and light, flowers, earth myths and mysticism, it presented pagan worshippers as level-headed and attractive people, while Edward Woodward’s painfully upright Christian copper was a humourless and prescriptive killjoy. The island of Summerisle’s determination to worship the old gods seemed desirable and even sensible, throwing Woodward into relief as an emotionally frozen God-botherer who got a well-deserved come-uppance. The skewed, wrong-headed values of the Summerisle family also, if I had dared but to admit it, reminded me of my parents.

  In many ways it was an English comedy, and English comedies were best when they were black, or at least cruel. The entire Fowler family – with the exception of the endlessly good-natured Steven – frequently found humour in human weakness, spite, sexuality, death and embarrassment. Post-war black comedy was a healthy acknowledgement of the absurdities of life that frequently blurred the distinctions between love and hate, between having plenty and having to go without. The idea that communities might exist in a debilitating, satanic war with their own natures, with a disregard for life, morals and decent feelings, could, it seemed, prove positively life-affirming.

  This, I learned, was where English stories won on account of their unpredictability and sheer bad manners. Black comedy felt like a fantastical sidestep from the politeness of everyday life, more closely allied to the horror genre by its preoccupation with the power of fate and the ultimate selfishness of humanity. I watched The Man in the White Suit on television with the sound turned off and noticed that it suddenly looked like a horror film, not a comedy at all.

  The English films of my childhood were now noticeably different from Hollywood films. Instead of sex bombs we had porky Diana Dors, although she gave her all and wasn’t afraid to take common parts. Jenny Agutter brightened many schoolboy nights because she happily took her knickers off in The Railway Children just to let a train know about a landslide. Generally speaking, though, English women went from buttoned-down frigidity to being treated with a mixture of fear and schoolboy sniggering. The women rarely exhibited the frontier emancipation of American heroines.

  I could see that the writers I most admired excelled in absurd dark comedy, horror, and sometimes in serious drama that mixed elements of both. The Whisperers, Séance on a Wet Afternoon, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg,2 The Ladykillers, Morgan – a Suitable Case for Treatment and The National Health were preferable to the social-conscience huffings of Lindsay Anderson, whose film If seemed like the sulky revenge of a disgruntled public schoolboy.

  After my first double horror bill, I felt as if I’d just lost my innocence in the intimate embrace of the dark. I felt like smoking a cigarette. We didn’t talk much on the way home. I wanted to go to sleep, because the experience had left me feeling exhausted.

  As he parked the motorbike, Bill turned to me and asked, ‘Did you enjoy that, then?’

  ‘It was amazing,’ I told him truthfully. ‘I think I want to do it again tomorrow night, maybe with somebody else.’

  1‘Saki’ was H. H. Munro, master of the poisonous short story. In his rarest tale, ‘The East Wing’, two men die in a fire to save a painting that, unbeknownst to them, has been sent away to be cleaned. He’s very funny and unsentimental, and was probably a closet case.

  2 This and The National Health were written by the wonderfully acerbic playwright Peter Nichols, whose memoirs are entitled Feeling You’re Behind.

  26

  Mummy’s Boys

  BOOKS HAD CONNECTED me to the world. Now the cinema connected me to my father.

  Although the horror fad didn’t last long, the pair of us still went to double bills so frequently that I sensed I was being used as a weapon to fight my mother. When Kath complained that Bill was never around, my father could point at me and say we were going out together. But at the end of every ABC or Odeon night, there was a price to pay: a visit to Mrs Fowler, during which I was made to sit in the kitchen with a mug of thick brown tea or Bovril1 while the old woman dug needles of doubt and suspicion beneath my father’s thin skin. He had made a bad marriage; Kath was needy and grasping, a bad housewife and an unfit mother;
her children were poorly behaved, weak-willed ‘mummy’s boys’ who would never amount to anything unless they were shown more discipline. And he was a pathetically poor excuse for a husband. If he had any spine he would have left her by now. In her day, a man knew how to keep a woman in her place. A man knew how to show he was the boss.

  Quite what this said about the state of her own marriage was a mystery. How did William sit beside her in his easy chair and listen to so much implied criticism of himself without wanting to smack her in the mouth and prove her wrong?

  After these trips, Bill was always more surly and curt with my mother. I no longer hated him, but my disappointment felt infinite. Why was he so easily swayed by his mother’s venom? Surely he could see beyond the words to her real intentions? Either he loved Kath and should stand up for her, or he didn’t, and should set her free. It was obvious to me that they were both made miserable by the gruesome roundelay of recrimination that occurred after each visit Bill made to his mother’s house.

  During the most recent visit, Mrs Fowler had surpassed even her own exacting standards, putting in a performance worthy of Iago by implying that Kath sought to be unfaithful to her husband whenever she was left alone. Since the main reason for my mother’s loneliness was Bill’s allegiance to his own mother, the idea required quite a feat of double-think to hold it together.

  On yet another Saturday morning spent wedged beneath an oily motorbike, desperately hanging on to one end of a brake cable while my father swore and huffed with a spanner, I momentarily lost concentration and felt the greasy line slipping through my fingers. It whipped back, lashing me around the face hard enough to cause an instant welt.

  My scream of alarm only served to anger Bill more than ever. I jumped up, clutching my cheek, the cable loosening as the bike toppled over on to a can of oil, tipping it across the hall carpet and splashing it up the walls.