Paperboy (25 page)

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 had 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 Wallis
⁴
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.

‘Show me what you’re writing,’ said Kath, making one of her rare forays from the bedroom. She had lost weight and was pale. Her fingers were always folded over each other, as though she could not trust her untethered hands. Her eyes were darkly shaded crescents, as if the light hurt her.

‘I’m not,’ I said glumly. ‘I can’t think what to write. Other people have done all the best stories.’

She pursed her thin lips and looked out at the street, thinking. ‘Fiction means you can make things up. Don’t worry about embarrassing yourself. You don’t have to write from experience, you know. You just have to believe in what you write.’

‘But I don’t know what I believe.’

‘Then copy someone good,’ she said, wearily seating herself beside me.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You admire the work of others so much – make that your starting point. Take their material. Re-work it, like you did with that terrible film script, only this time do it with something more manageable, and put some of your own experiences in it. Turn it into something that’s yours.’

It was the opposite of the advice I had found in books
on
the subject, which extolled the virtues of only writing about what you knew or had personally experienced.

‘Write a short story. Nobody expects you to produce
Bleak House
the first time you finish something. It doesn’t matter if the result is dreadful, the first attempt is always going to be less than perfect. It’s nothing to be ashamed of and at least it will get you started.’

‘How do you know so much about it?’ I asked suspiciously, screwing up one eye.

She sighed, glancing at the wall with a why-did-I-raise-a-stupid-son? look. ‘What do you think I wanted to be when I was younger? A copy typist in a company that made pumps? A greyhound-stadium cashier? We all have dreams, you know. You’re not unique.’

Of course. I had learned all of my grammar from her. She knew shorthand. She loved concision. She always said ‘comprises’ instead of ‘consists of’. She knew what synecdoche
⁵
was. Best of all, she could describe things in a way that made me feel I was actually there. She had a facility with language I could only dream about. It was just that she had never had the confidence to use it in public.

‘The only women who write are ones with lots of leisure time. It’s a suitable career choice if you’re a lady, but not if you’re a working woman.’ Kath pointed to the notebook. ‘Stick that up your jumper, but bring it with you. You can sit in the back of the Mini and write on the way to Herne Bay. And all the way back. I’ll never look at what you’ve written and your father won’t even notice.’

Kath’s attitude didn’t entirely make sense, but it was welcome. She owned a chipped black enamel Remington typewriter that appeared to date back to the time of William Caxton, but she let me take it to my room. It was heavy and made of cast iron, and looked like the Enigma
Machine.
You had to hit the keys so hard to leave an impression on the page that it hurt your fingers to write more than a couple of sentences, and sometimes the bit inside the O fell out. Changing a ribbon was about as much trouble as changing a tyre on a lorry, only you got your hands dirtier. I started to use the typewriter, although I had to stop before my father got home because you could hear it throughout the house. It came in a metal case, and I kept the whole thing under my bed because I wasn’t strong enough to lift it on to the top of the wardrobe.

I threaded in a fresh sheet of paper and typed my name, then the title of the story I was going to write. Loosely based on a dozen similar stories I had read, it was called
The Long Dark Corridor
. It would be about a lunatic who stalked his unsuspecting victims and when he caught them – well, I would think about that when I got there.

The more I wrote, the more puzzled and excited I became by the unexpected effect of words. I soon learned that:

Writing in the first person didn’t necessarily mean you had to tell the truth. In fact, it was a lot more fun if you lied through your teeth.

Sitting in cafés filling up the margins of notebooks with spidery writing made people think you were either a flower-child, or you had polio and were marking time until you died.

If the lock slipped on your keyboard and you suddenly started typing capital letters, the effect was LIKE SHOUTING and could actually make you jump.

Tippex was a boy’s best friend.

There was something comforting about the smell of a well-used eraser. And soft pencils, preferably a 2B. And the way a worn golden fountain-pen nib glided across a very smooth white piece of paper.

But a typewriter was best of all. Writing was more fun
than
shivering on a rock-frozen rugby pitch, squinting at the sky lost in thought as a leather ball bounced right by your feet and everyone shouted at you for failing to do something with it.

In fact, the only downside I could see was that writers earned less than tar-spreaders or toilet-cleaners. And they probably ended up
going funny
, which in writers’ terms meant suffering endless fits of melancholy, having violent affairs, committing murder, going blind or mad, and dying of cirrhosis of the liver.

How cool was that?

Appeased, I agreed to go to Herne Bay.

There’s a melancholy sense of things lost in the shabbier British seaside towns; of comfortable failure and better times long gone. I always came home feeling depressed after a Sunday spent in Hastings or Folkestone. On one of these miserable days out we drove from town to town, stopping for tea in overlit glass cafés where pensioners sat picking at orange pieces of battered fish. We paced pebble-strewn promenades watching seagulls fighting the air currents, and sat in shelters with our eyes scrunched against the fierce sea light, until even Bill was bored.

‘We could go up there,’ I suggested, pointing to the downs at the back of the town.

‘Nowhere to park,’ said Bill, but I could see him eyeing the great green wall that rose steeply behind the houses.

‘We could climb straight up. There’s nothing to stop us.’ The words came out of my mouth before the thought of what I had said hit home.

‘No, it’s far too dangerous. We wouldn’t be able to get more than a few feet.’

I had no idea if I was afraid of heights. Being afraid of everything else, the answer was probably yes. I found myself running towards the start of the slope and taking
the
lower incline easily. Bill was right behind me, then climbing alongside in surprise.

As the gradient grew sharper I had to grab tussocks of grass to keep from falling backwards, but I kept going. Kath could be heard down below, shouting words of warning. After a few minutes I heard Bill call and point back. ‘We should stop.’

I turned around and was amazed to see the sea far below, glittering distantly. I could suddenly hear the wind in my ears.

‘You’re scared!’ I laughed, which spurred him on.

Scrambling like monkeys, we rose above the town. Exhilarated, I realized I had no fear of heights at all – finally, something to be unafraid of! I looked across at Bill, who was about thirty feet away, knowing that he was taking his cue from me.

‘Do we keep going up?’ he called. He was turning blue with cold.

‘We keep going,’ I shouted back. By now I knew we were clinging to a sheer cliff by nothing much more than the will to keep climbing together. I forced myself to focus on the green wall.

We were alone in a ragged bright world, emerald and azure and white. Back on the ground, my mother and Steven were barely discernible dots. The pier looked miniature. With one hand over the other we pulled ourselves up, nearing the top. I saw Bill from the corner of my eye, watching me with amazement and pride.

I never wanted to reach the crest, but suddenly the cliff flattened out into a disappointingly mundane vista with mown grass walkways and a caravan park. The world was spinning. I flopped on to the grass, out of breath, laughing, and my father collapsed beside me.

The joy of that moment lasted for the rest of my childhood.

1
The longest-established detergent brand in the world.

2
Little was known about these. People went funny for a while and were then all right again. The cumulative stress of providing for families in the post-war years must have been enormous.

3
No longer Albion, but a sea-suburb of London filled with drunk children and media burn-outs.

4
Inventor of the bouncing bomb used to destroy dams in Operation Chastise (filmed as
The Dam Busters
). Why was he named after a London suburb?

5
When part of something is used to refer to the whole thing.

24

Caravan Nights

‘YOU’LL THANK ME
for this,’ said Bill one day. ‘I’ve bought us a holiday home.’

I was almost thirteen when in a fresh attempt to bond the family, and inspired by lack of money due to various half-finished projects around the house, my father blew what savings he had on a caravan. In my mind, the painted caravans that belonged to Arabs or gypsies were exotic and appealing, whereas a powder-blue tin box set into an oblong of concrete surrounded by fishing gnomes was only acceptable if you were a photographer producing a book on English eccentrics.

And a pikey caravan that was about ten feet long, like a home for circus midgets, balanced on two wheels and made of rotting painted hardboard, with a rusty tin flue, was not a holiday destination but an exercise in ritual humiliation.

Set on an acre of methane-filled marsh near Dymchurch, Kent, the site boasted an icy cinder-brick washhouse full of daddy-long-legs, a handful of bedraggled, stupid sheep notable only for the immense weight of clinkers hanging
from
their nether hair, and a grim little bar full of fishing nets, knots and floats which touted itself as a clubhouse, although it was hard to imagine the kind of prospective member they might turn away.

I pressed Bill’s hand on the linen of the upper bunk. ‘The bed’s wet, Dad,’ I complained.