Paperboy (20 page)

19

Celluloid Relatives

I KNEW I
was spending too much time at the pictures when the cinema manager started to greet me by my first name. I was so at home in the Odeon that I used to go out to the foyer snack bar in my socks. The ice-cream girl would say ‘Your usual, Chris?’ as she poked about in her tray for a Zoom! lolly.

Although I saw most of my relatives so rarely that I would have had trouble recognizing them in the street, I discovered through cinemas like the Odeon a group of people far more familiar to me. These were not other patrons, but the character actors who inhabited English films in the Sunday double bills. Every comedy of the fifties and sixties featured permutations of the same stalwarts, and I loved them all, because I could rely on them always to play the same parts.
¹

These included:

A man called Michael Ripper played all the other parts that no one else wanted. In fact, he was such a ubiquitous character actor that I was able to buy a small book about him called
Michael Ripper: Unsung Hero
. Sample dialogue:

Oddly, I didn’t remember the stars, just the extras. They made the stories seem real. I had always felt that the library was my second home, but the regularly disinfected crimson foyer of the Woolwich Odeon now became my safest haven.

To enter a cinema was, I felt, to enter a contract between film and viewer. Something special was transmitted, and the oddest films and characters left a lasting mark. Only
in
England could someone have produced an entire book about the eccentric bit-player Charles Hawtrey.
²

To me, this intensely personal obsession was the dark heart of English storytelling. The most marginal books and movies helped me form a mental library, a catalogue of touchstone images. Time found a way of rendering them special, turning them into secret memories.

Just as I had become fascinated by the wrong comics and the wrong stories, I fell in love with the wrong films. I knew what I was
supposed
to like – I was meant to be obsessed with James Bond, but I wasn’t very much. Instead I loved the odd little English films no one else noticed. Besides, I thought grandly, James Bond was for reading, not watching – although the books were pretty dreadful because they merely exposed the awful snobbery of Ian Fleming,
³
who spent many, many pages wagging a finger at his proletarian readership and lecturing them on the correct hour to dine at private members’ clubs and what not to wear on golf courses, as if they would ever need to know. It was easy, I realized, to appear well-bred if you only ever addressed the social classes beneath you.

But it was impossible to overestimate the effect that the James Bond films had on my schoolmates and their dads.

Here was the first English hero not wearing a sensible V-neck jumper; he didn’t need one because he was in Jamaica, a place that could only be imagined by penniless post-war audiences. The series might have started with
Dr No
, but it was with
Goldfinger
⁴
that 007 truly became an
aspirational
symbol for the times. Everyone remembered the gilded Shirley Eaton, Pussy Galore, Oddjob and the Fort Knox countdown (destined to be the first of many urgent bomb deadlines), but audiences conveniently ignored the fact that 007 was first spotted with a stuffed seagull attached to his head, or that he talked flippantly about heroin-soaked bananas before the opening credits rolled. In fact, after he had blown up a drugs empire filled with cartoonish barrels of nitro-glycerine, had a fag, snogged a pneumatic semi-naked lady and fried an attacker in his bath, it seemed highly appropriate that camp icon Shirley Bassey should start screaming out the title song.

I knew that Bond was never serious, only manpower pushed to the zillionth degree, which was why his women needed ludicrous identities and pumped-up sexuality to compete. It was a rule, of course, that no matter how old a legend became, he was still allowed the embrace of a hot young girl. This reached levels of horror in the late Roger Moore 007 films.

But to a rationed post-war nation for whom a roulette wheel represented exoticism and a cigarette case sophistication, Sean Connery could hardly fail to become a hero. He wore cufflinks. He travelled to places few English people had ever seen, and ordered cocktails at a time when Babycham
⁵
was the height of glamour. I could tell even Bill thought he was wonderful, because suddenly he was an expert on spies. He was an expert on a lot of subjects about which he knew absolutely nothing. ‘007 is a man’s man,’ he said admiringly. ‘Mind you, you can tell he’s never had to put a shelf up with those cuticles.’

This was now the era of the Swinging London movie, but as the family had moved further out of the city instead of further in, London – swinging, dangling or otherwise – was more distant than ever, and anyway I wasn’t entirely sure what ‘swinging’ actually meant.

Middle-class England was still easily shocked by anything brightly coloured and fast-moving. It shushed everything above a whisper and had nearly dropped dead from fright over rock ’n’ roll. It was even more mortified by a towel-draped Brigitte Bardot at a time when Londoners thought Al Fresco was an Italian chef. Only a handful of art teachers would actually see Bardot in a film, but everyone was disgusted by the idea of foreigners coming over here with their chianti bottles and nipples and seafood starters, corrupting the country with mucky continental values.

My family never ate out unless it was in a café, the kind of place that served two slices of bread and butter with battered cod. Kath fantasized about having a starter – not just the ones you saw on set-meal menus, which were always either half a grapefruit with a glacé cherry in the middle or a glass of tinned tomato juice, but a proper starter like prawns with avocado. It wasn’t the taste she desired, but the ritual of folded linen and courses and wine. The most she got offered after the pictures was a saveloy. She wanted to go ‘up west’ to see a play – not a musical but something with substance. Once she took an evening off to see
Krapp’s Last Tape
by Samuel Beckett, and loved it, but the experience could not be discussed because it had to remain a secret from Bill, and he was always listening out for warning signs of artistic conversation.

I knew that there was a world outside the Woolwich Odeon; I just couldn’t access it. Britain did its best to keep out American excess, while its citizens secretly craved it. Marlon Brando’s motorcycle gang film
The
Wild
One
was banned in England for over a quarter of a century while the horrified tabloids predicted a teen-induced mass breakdown of social order. Although I did not know it at the time, London had a handful of dedicated independent cinemas: the beloved and much-missed Academy screens in Oxford Street, with their beatniky hand-made wood-cut posters; the Biograph in Victoria, which had become a useful pick-up joint for lonely bachelors; and railway-station cinemas that I got to visit with my mother whenever we were early for a train after going to Moorfields Eye Hospital. These places ran Warner Brothers cartoons and continuous Pathe newsreels that showed Princess Margaret opening smelting plants, the Dagenham Girl Pipers,
⁶
jets breaking the speed barrier and ‘the cheerful people of Fiji’.

I loved tatty English films because I could relate to them. Nearly all of them took place indoors, and it was always raining. The sets were full of wavy wallpaper like the stuff in Cyril Villa, and the actors were like the relatives I wished we had. People used words which were soon to vanish from the English vocabulary:

Scarper

Clot

Barmy

Rozzer

Shiv

Blithering

Bint

Lolly

Twerp

Snout

Punch-up

Of course, there was an upper echelon of respected performers that my parents held in high esteem. Peter O’Toole, Dirk Bogarde, David Niven, Stanley Baker, Michael Caine, Laurence Olivier, Albert Finney, Vanessa Redgrave and Julie Christie had, after all, been raised into the world pantheon of stars.

Male film heroes were cut from different cloth, tending towards the boy-next-door cheeriness of John Mills, the elegant sturdiness of Richardson and Gielgud, the daydreaming Tom Courtenay, the effete charm of Alec Guinness, the neurasthenic mannerisms of Peter Sellers. English performers had grown up handling the twice-nightlies and provincial tours. They eschewed method acting and considered their work a craft. During the filming of
Brief Encounter
, Celia Johnson apparently asked if David Lean could hurry up with the shooting of her big romantic scene because she had a train to catch.

Moira Shearer might have inspired a generation of hefty county girls to worship ballet in
The Red Shoes
but she didn’t cut the mustard in Woolwich. Our family had a history of enjoying ‘popular’ English films: Michael Redgrave trying to silence his ventriloquist dummy in
Dead of Night
; Joyce Grenfell’s gormless Miss Gossage (‘Call me Sausage’) in
The Happiest Days of Your Life
; Barbara Windsor’s airborne bra in
Carry On
Camping
; films in which Stanley Baker bared his dimple and blew things up.

None of us realized that this was the last gasp of old-style Great Britain. The Beatles were soon to spearhead a new musical movement that would switch our world from monochrome to colour. There would be an explosion in literature and art. Ken Russell would direct sixteen films in three years. The Union Jack minis that never broke red, white and blue file in
The Italian Job
were on their way. If it all seemed so much easier in the sixties, it was because
suddenly
people had the confidence to make themselves heard. The English films of the fifties had been about community spirit and the after-effects of the War, but the sixties charted a social upheaval that exploded into celebration, and almost as quickly collapsed into decadence. It would be like witnessing the rise and fall of an isolated civilization in a single decade.

Swinging London’s psychedelic mindset lived in films and music, and I desperately wanted to be a part of something fresh. It was a hopeless dream, of course, because I had nothing to offer. Like today’s celebrity wannabes, I could not understand why I would never be allowed in merely on the merit of my enthusiasm.

But it didn’t stop me from reading or going to the cinema. I made no friends in Abbey Wood, a town that made Lagos look like St Tropez, and barely spoke to anyone at school. Even my teachers were learning to avoid me. I found it safer to keep my mouth shut and my eyes on the pavement when walking anywhere. The contract was between me, the page and the screen, and would not be broken by anything as boring, untidy or unpredictable as real life.

1
American readers may wish to skip this part. I just felt the need to name some unsung heroes.