Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints (11 page)

Thank God there were no Inges at Butlins to witness our hideous behavior.

Our perverse fun came screeching to a halt when we both succumbed to food poisoning. I can still remember the dodgy-looking lard-fried eggs that brought it on. The virulence of the attack was made all the more hideous by the fact that we had to schlep to the communal toilets/delousing stations in order to throw up, et cetera.

Maintaining our newfound sense of irony while suffering through food poisoning was quite difficult, but somehow we managed. I distinctly remember attempting to throw up
as if
I was throwing up.

Food poisoning was far from rare at Butlins. This was, I hasten to add, back in the days before
E. coli
came into common parlance and hand washing became a national pastime. None of the Redcoats seemed remotely surprised or apologetic
when they encountered groups of groaning, stomach-clutching campers. They treated food poisoning as if it was one of the rides in the amusement park. Our turn had come. Lucky us.

I must emphasize that these recollections about the Butlins of my formative years should not be construed as a commentary on the Butlins of today which, I might add, remains a perfectly marvelous vacation option.

The gastric agonies eventually subsided, and we both made full Piaf-like recoveries. We had no regrets. Our time at Butlins had been positively life-changing.

Biddie and I had discovered Camp.

Butlins did not seem to have this effect on everyone. Not everyone at Minehead was posing in doorways or bursting over the side of the swimming pool with such studied enthusiasm. This perplexed us. Biddie and I did not understand how people could be so utterly doltish and boring in such an environment. How can you dive in an artless, doltish, ramshackle kind of way into a swimming pool which has been painstakingly festooned with plastic birds and flowers? It is insulting to the swimming pool itself and to all the good people who have tried so feverishly to give you the Esther Williams experience of a lifetime.

You must walk to the end of the diving board, suck in your stomach and your cheeks, raise your arms like Evita, and dive with the self-consciousness and panache of somebody who understands that life is a stage set, a really tacky, faded stage set.

Thanks to our two weeks in Minehead, Biddie and I now acted exactly like the people in the Butlins postcards and brochures. We had found ourselves, or at least the waving, posing brochure versions of ourselves.

E
verywhere I looked there were sets of rose pink dentures soaking in mugs or drinking glasses. False teeth were a huge part of my childhood and of the landscape of the twentieth century. No slapstick movie or TV comedy sketch was complete without a set of chattering dentures. It is no exaggeration to say that false teeth were
culturally central.

Having all one’s teeth pulled out was not just inevitable, it was positively de rigueur! When Betty, still in her thirties, announced that her denture days had arrived, nobody in our
house batted an eyelid. We saw it as a happy happenstance: soon our already glamorous mother would have a fabulous new smile. How could it be anything other than a totally life-enhancing change?

We were woefully unprepared for the overwhelming hideousness of the whole ordeal. When Betty returned home from the dentist, a cerise-colored chiffon head scarf wound tightly around her head and jaw, she looked as if she had been in a car accident. Not only did she look dreadful, but she also carried about her the sad and hopeless air of a broken woman. What on Earth had happened? Where was that glamorous Lana Turner confidence we had all come to know and love?

Betty shuffled to the sideboard and poured herself a glass of gin. She took a halfhearted sip. The liquid dribbled out of her mouth. She abandoned her glass and then lit a cigarette. It fell poignantly from her unrouged lips. She was Lana Turner all right, only it was the downtrodden Madame X she was playing as opposed to the upbeat assertive Lora in
Imitation of Life.

Betty collapsed on the couch and stared at the ceiling. Her lips caved in slightly. She now resembled the hideous toothless gypsy hags who banged on our front door once a week and menaced us into buying their malfunctioning clothespins.

Simultaneously, my sister and I burst into tears.

So began a gruesome and interminable period of toothlessness while we all waited for Betty’s gums to heal and for the arrival of her new choppers.

Though bloody and bruised, Betty received little sympathy. I was unapologetically furious with her for looking so horrid and unattractive. My sister shared my indignation and continued
to weep openly and reproachfully. Narg and Uncle Ken and Aunt Phyllis and Terry had all gone through same thing. They had received sympathy. But Betty was different. She had an obligation to us. Glamour was part of her contract.

Eventually the new choppers arrived. Betty, with a gleaming set of movie-star white teeth, was back to her old self again and then some. We breathed easy.

A minor challenge now presented itself. The new Hollywood teeth did not seem to fit as well as they might. It took only a light sneeze to send Betty’s gnashers flying across the kitchen. I can still recall the poignant noise they produced when they hit various hollow surfaces and rattled to the floor.

Flying dentures were a common sight back then. Nobody in our house seemed able to keep choppers in place for any length of time. Sneezing and coughing were the most common cause. The sequence was as follows.

“Achew!”

Rattling sound.

“Oh, Christ!” (Spoken in toothless voice.)

Whenever Betty’s teeth flew out, we looked away until she popped them back in. If Terry was the culprit, we gave ourselves full permission to enjoy the slapstick. I still chuckle when I recall the day his choppers landed in the oil under his motorbike.

Undeterred by Betty’s oral crucifixion, I began to crave my own set of dentures. My reasoning was simple. Once I had dentures, I would no longer be obliged to visit Mr. Porter. He was our large and terrifying dentist, whose unmarried, one-armed sister functioned as his assistant. He drilled our teeth,
sans anesthetic, with a device which looked like a vintage Black & Decker. While the sadist drilled, his sister held us down with her one arm.

The agonized shrieks which rose from his chair caused much weeping and sighing among adults and children alike as they trembled in the adjacent waiting room.

When my sister and I expressed any fear of Mr. Porter, Betty became rather uneasy. She could not cope with the idea that she might be raising children with low pain thresholds. Cowardice of any kind was absolutely unacceptable. She would have preferred that we become drug addicts or shoplifters. Anything was preferable to being yellow.

Betty’s side of the family was very, very butch. She came from a tough clan of pain-loving Northern Irish Protestants.

“Your grandmother just had her varicose veins cut, and she refused painkillers,” she proudly announced one day, daring us to react. Her reasoning was as follows: anesthetics were for weaklings and English people. The Northern Irish had a higher tolerance for pain because they had endured suffering and because they were much, much, much better people.

When my grandfather wrote to Betty informing her that he and his wife had just removed what were left of each other’s teeth with electrical pliers, Betty waved the letter aloft as if it was a winning lottery ticket.

I began to be slightly concerned. What would happen if I ever got drastically sick? I could just imagine Betty holding back the anesthesiologist as I underwent an appendectomy or a heart transplant. “Don’t be ridiculous! Of course he doesn’t need any Demerol. He’s of Northern Irish descent!”

*  *  *

Once a year we had the opportunity to visit the primordial slime from which all this tough-guy stuff emerged. Every July we decamped to strife-torn Belfast to visit Betty’s father.

David Carson Gordon was a member of an unusually butch species. He is long dead and his species is now extinct, but it used to be quite common. I saw specimens on every street corner in Northern Ireland.

I guess you could call them Irish working-class boule-vardiers. They were easy to spot because, like Amish or Hasidim, they had a very specific personal style. Their jaunty appearance was an amalgam of country and city style, reflecting the contradictions of their formerly rural lives.

Having come from the wilds of County Antrim, D. C. Gordon was a prime example of this genre of small-town tough guy. Attired in a collarless shirt and a mud-flecked, thick wool, pin-striped, three-piece suit, he cut an impressive figure as he squinted down at the gold watch and chain which dangled from his waistcoat. His trousers were tucked into a pair of dark green, poo-spattered rubber wellies. His meticulously combed, center-parted hair—very Edwardian—was covered by a flat farmer’s tweed cap. It was all very proto–Ralph Lauren.

These dandies were not to be found in England. I saw men like D. C. Gordon only in Northern Ireland. The fellows back home were, by comparison, quite wimpy and pathos-drenched. They wore thick glasses and depressing cardigans from Marks & Spencer—very Mister Rogers—and their hair was Brylcreemed into stripy comb-overs. They could often be
seen meekly accompanying their wives on shopping trips up the local high street.

Compared to these neutered males, D.C. and his cronies were swashbuckling pirates or libidinous musketeers.

There were invariably gaggles of these gentlemen lurking outside the Belfast pubs and betting shops. They had the air of men who were charged with making important, world-altering decisions. As they chatted, glancing up and down the street, they gave the impression that deep thoughts and momentous ideas were being exchanged, as opposed to, for example, racing tips.

These tough guys had their own florid and scary language. They entertained each other with hilariously creative similes and euphemisms. If he thought somebody was tightfisted, D.C. would say of that person, “Him! He’d drink beer out of a shitey rag, as long as someone else is payin’.”

If a male friend was married to a harridan and that friend happened to drop dead, D.C. would sum up the situation with a laconic “He preferred the boards.” These kinds of remarks were usually followed by toothless cackles of auto-amusement.

While the men were thus engaged, the womenfolk bustled to and fro, doing pointless, self-indulgent things like child rearing, food gathering, ignoring their aches and pains, and generally depriving themselves in order to make ends meet. No wonder Betty had run off to join the Air Force and married a bloke who rubbed her feet and listened to opera.

In D.C.’s world, men had a full monopoly on recreational activities. While the women scrubbed and toiled and baked without so much as an ass pinch or a thank-you, their menfolk
seemed unable to function without a steady flow of time-honored pleasures and rewards. They were hardworking, but only in sporadic bursts. The rest of the time they gambled on the horses and drank Guinness and cultivated audaciously high expectations of their womenfolk. They were completely and utterly heterosexual.

I have a great snapshot of D.C. sitting proudly in a horse-drawn cart with his name emblazoned across the front. This image recalls Charlton Heston’s chariot-racing scene in
Ben-Hur.
At the time of the snap, D.C. was the proprietor of a thriving milk delivery business. This enterprise—the apotheosis of his career—eventually failed. According to Betty, the reasons were twofold: first, and commendably, good-hearted D.C. had a hard time collecting money from the poor and gave away much of the milk. Second, and less fabulously, what little profits were made went straight to the betting shop or the cash register at the Woodman’s Arms.

The life of a Northern Irish boulevardier was not without its challenges. On one occasion, while sauntering home from the aforementioned Woodman’s Arms after an evening of conviviality, a sixty-five-year-old D.C. plunged into a construction hole, breaking a leg and losing a great deal of dignity. He was carted off to hospital, where the fractured limb was encased in plaster. Painkillers were ostentatiously declined. D.C. was then told that he must rest for two months. The phrase “never walk again” was used.