Paperboy (6 page)

Landladies who wore nylon blouses with their bra straps showing, and who spent their days cleaning windows with brown paper and vinegar, and red-leading their front doorsteps, or trying to whack you with a broom for playing football against the side of their houses.

Policemen who insisted on asking you where you were going, why you were covered in mud and whether that lovely mother of yours was at home during the day.

Lollipop ladies with red lipstick, orange make-up, yellow hair and white raincoats.

Bus conductors who kept up a steady stream of banter with their passengers, including the recitation of songs, jokes, bits of poetry and smut-tinged social observation, while jauntily swinging from pole to pole through their buses.

Park keepers in brown suits who carried pointed sticks for picking up litter and told you off for infringing council
by-laws,
a sure sign that you had been accidentally enjoying yourself.

Bleached-blonde women who ran launderettes with permanent fags dangling insolently from the corners of their mouths, and who were the conduits for all neighbourhood gossip. ‘She’s someone to notice,’ the lady who ran the Sunbeam Launderama, Westcombe Hill, told Kath. ‘Her brother’s cousin’s husband painted Shirley Bassey’s bathroom. And that was
before
she was famous.’

Train drivers who tooted and occasionally threw lumps of coal when they recognized kids waiting to see them pass on the branch line.

Cadaverous Christmas Club men who came calling with rows of numbers neatly laid out in their account books.

People dressed as giant rabbits, foxes, superheroes, princes or astronauts, who called to ask housewives if they could answer a simple question and produce a packet of Daz washing powder in order to win five pounds.
²

The man at the seaside who needed to be challenged by tapping him on the back with a rolled-up newspaper in order to claim a reward.
³

Gypsies selling dishcloths and clothes-pegs from wicker baskets.

Rag-and-bone men, or totters, yelling incomprehensibly from their horses and carts, something that usually sounded like ‘Ramnmnbhoooouune!’ and who were still, amazingly, trundling around the neighbourhood in the internet age.

The knife grinder with slicked-back hair and a bootlace tie who had an eye for the daughter of the house across the way, and who stood around chewing a match on the street corner waiting for long-legged schoolgirls to pass by.

The Knock-Down-Ginger boys from the council estate who rang doorbells and ran away, and later got tattoos and became car mechanics before going to prison for handling dud cheques.

The woman in the pink cake shop with pink hair and a pink nylon overall and pink lipstick who pinched my face and said she’d like to eat me up, and who probably wasn’t joking.

The heron-necked man with round glasses who rang the doorbell on Sundays and optimistically asked if we would like to take Jesus into our hearts, and could he leave a pamphlet? Oh no, it’s you, Mr Fowler, I’ll be on my way then.

The ice-cream-van man, the wet-fish man, the encyclopedia salesman, and a dozen other doorbell botherers who were likely to tip up in the course of an ordinary working day.

It was just as well we didn’t have a television, or we would never have got anything done. That was the problem with being born in the fifties; there was far too much talking going on, I thought, as I locked myself in my bedroom with a copy of Jules Verne’s
In Search of the Castaways
⁴
(according to the stamp, last taken out of East Greenwich Public Library in 1937).

Was it a good idea about this time to start dressing up like characters from my favourite books and films?
I
thought it might help me to empathize with different heroes and villains I admired, but soon learned not to suddenly come around the corner looking like Moriarty, Im-Ho-Tep or the Beast with a Million Eyes while my mother was dressing or holding sharp objects.

My arrival was usually mitigated with a sigh of ‘Oh Chris, it’s
you
,’ but my ‘exploded head’ mask from
I Was a Teenage Frankenstein
had Kath screaming the house down. Perhaps I should not have waited until a foggy, dark night to put it on. Or turned the lights out and come rushing at her with a carving knife while she was quietly cutting her toenails in the bathroom.

Vampire victims went down well, if I could keep still for long enough while clutching a sawn-off bloody tent-peg over my heart. I also donned my mother’s nightdress and tried ageing myself like Ayesha stepping back into the flame of eternal life in H. Rider Haggard’s
She
, achieving the wrinkled-skin effect with rubber cement, but it was difficult to get off, and I was forced to go to school the next day looking like one of the lepers from
Ben-Hur
.

Three years later I had another go at frightening my family with the aid of a pint of crimson poster paint and two ping-pong balls on elastic. Staging the moment when Ray Milland tears out his own eyes in
The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
proved to be more effective than I had expected, but it wasn’t a good idea to make Bill jump, because he was soldering the lid of the tropical fish tank
⁵
at the time and dropped his iron into the water in shock, branding a guppy. Bill chased me out into the street and fell over next door’s dog, breaking one of its toes. The
terrier
always bared its teeth at him after that, grimacing so broadly that it looked as if someone had wedged a coat hanger into its mouth.

This penchant for theatre continued longer than was strictly healthy. Tying a dead pigeon to my blood-spattered forehead for a re-enactment of a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds
proved to be more unhygienic than frightening, and gave me an eye infection. After this, my impersonation fetish lay dormant right up until the release of
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
.

For now, the best way to learn about real people, I decided, was in books, because the characters were forced to follow the course of a plot rather than shuffling aimlessly through their lives being annoying and unpredictable. It was time for some serious reading.

1
Junior version of the Scouts, designed to instil obsolete qualities like good sportsmanship and fair play.

2
They drove around in cars shaped like giant tubes of toothpaste or sausages. I wish I was making this up.

3
Most memorably, the snitch killed in the opening of Graham Greene’s
Brighton Rock
.

4
In the Walt Disney version, Hayley Mills and Maurice Chevalier cook eggs and sing while stuck up a tree. Not quite how Jules envisioned it.

5
Due to the poor quality of TV reception in the sixties everyone kept tropical fish in order to have something to stare at that wouldn’t give them a headache.

6

You’ll Hurt Your Eyes

‘WHERE’S THE BOY
?’ called Bill. ‘I need him to hold the carburettor valve in place on the Triumph while I hit it.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Kath, unwilling to commit an act of betrayal. She did not wish to lose a son and gain a G-clamp.

‘If I don’t get this fixed the bike will have to stay in the hall until next week,’ he threatened. ‘Or possibly spring.’

‘He’s under the table,’ Kath called back, whispering, ‘
Sorry, Chris
.’ ‘Reading again.’

‘Not to the cat, because that’s over here.’

‘He’s reading to the tortoise.’

‘What’s he reading to it?’

‘
War and Peace
. He hasn’t got very far. I said it would be beyond him at seven.’

I remembered an exchange from last week’s
Hancock’s Half-Hour
.

Hattie was right, of course. Reading under the bedclothes with a torch was something that would become a Problem in Later Life, just as falling asleep drunk with headphones on would eventually affect the fate of your ears. The house in Westerdale Road, Greenwich SE10 (after which I would always write ‘London, England, Earth, The Universe’ on letters) had a few desiccated paperbacks on the shelf, but the problem lay in working out which ones were any good. Our English teacher had told us that to be properly educated, we had to be raised within an environment of rigorously structured academic philosophy, which would prove tricky given my family’s favoured reading material:

Mother

Father

Titbits

Reveille
¹

Sven Hassel
²

Dennis Wheatley

Ian Fleming

Sax Rohmer

Great Naval Flags of the World

Motorcycle Mechanics

R. Lobsang Rampa (
The Third Eye
)

(NB. Rampa wrote books of mystical Tibetan philosophy, and turned out not to be a Tibetan lama at all, but a plumber’s son called Cyril Hoskins who had never been to Tibet. He said he’d channelled the lama’s spirit after falling on his head, and that the book had been dictated to him by his cat, Mrs Fifi Greywhiskers. Branded a fraud, he moved to Canada.)

Me

Where the Rainbow Ends

The Adventures of Toby Twirl

20,000 Leagues under the Sea

Finn Family Moomintroll
³

The Swiss Family Robinson

Down with Skool!
and
How to Be Topp
⁴

The Huckleberry Hound annual

War and Peace

Professor Branestawm

Treasure Island

My parents had differing attitudes to books. My father came from a house where there had been none, and consequently handled the few he read as if they were filled with nitro-glycerine. You could never tell if he had even opened one. My mother had always been surrounded by books, so she had a healthy disrespect for them. Most of hers looked as if they had been dropped in the bath and dried out on a paraffin stove. Once I caught her using a fishbone as a bookmark.

There was also a pile of tattered Victorian children’s books which the family had inherited from elderly relatives, none of which would have been allowed anywhere near modern children. Most people can recall a happy moment from a book they read as a small child, but looking back, I can only remember horrors from mine. ‘Uncle Two-Heads slowly sinks into the quicksand’ read the frontispiece of a grisly work called
Tiny Tim in Giant Land
, which featured the distorted creature clawing at wet sand as it was sucked into his screaming mouth. This was deemed suitable for seven-year-olds. ‘Karik and Valya trapped in the lair of the water-spider’ showed two miniaturized Russian children being wrapped in slimy webbing by a gigantic eight-legged multi-eyed horror at the bottom of a pond.

The nightmare-inducing winner was the fantasy
Where the Rainbow Ends
, a book considered ideal for every
young
child’s bedroom. One illustration showed a girl being yanked into a shadowy forest by homunculi with razor-sharp claws, her pale arms striped with crimson scars. It was captioned ‘Rosalind is dragged into the Black Wood by imps’. Even then, I knew what the author was getting at. It was something about not liking Darkies, as my father amiably called them. In the 1960s black men were most visible as bus conductors, in which role they attracted public approbation for introducing an element of sexy cheerfulness into a job that had usually been occupied by dodderers. In old pulp novels they still turned up as dangerous exotics who were there to test white people’s self-control.

There was a grisly Steptoe-ish feel to much Victoriana, a cruel sensibility that had been exacerbated by the War and now filtered unthinkingly into daily life. One day Bill opened these books to see what I found so fascinating, tutted (not because they were gruesome but because they weren’t about anything real or useful) and threw them all into his weekly garden bonfire. He liked to poke a fire with a stick.

The most obscure book I ever found in the little orange-bricked house in Westerdale Road was Maurice Richardson’s
The Exploits of Engelbrecht
, the adventures of the Surrealist Sportsman’s Club that included chapters on witch hunting, going ten rounds in the boxing ring with a grandfather clock and a game of rugby on Mars. So carefully did I guard this from the garden bonfire that it remained lost in the house until we finally moved.