Paperboy (24 page)

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 Albion
³
– became a sinister surrealist playground. If I could have found the key to such places earlier, I would have enjoyed myself on family 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.