Where Did It All Go Right? (29 page)

Was this what Hell looked like? Twisted metal, slippery gantries and burning oil? It was good enough for me. I lived the rest of the Seventies in fear of fire and water.

My wife Julie was raised as a good Catholic – the first I have ever had a sensible conversation with about the subject. She also grew up fearing fire, but the kind that comes with brimstone. Her Hell
was
not a movie set, it
was
Hell. As such, she didn’t worry too much about being trapped in a sinking ship or a burning building – there was a good deal worse in store at the other end if you didn’t behave yourself. Because I was raised without fear of damnation for my sins, I suppose I was subconsciously casting around for something else to believe in. A secular society will always find its own devils. Mine was the disaster movie.

These films, major cinematic events, haunted my waking days. I had looked
The Poseidon Adventure
in the eye; I had sat through it, counted the survivors into the helicopter and jumped at the scalded cook, and I had no intention of putting myself through that sort of distress again.
The Towering Inferno, Earthquake
and the rest would never get me. My image-filled head had no room left to spare. While on holiday in Blackpool later that year Nan, Pap and I would walk past a cinema showing
Earthquake
every day, and I noticed from the dramatic poster that it was being shown in something called Sensurround:

‘Please be aware that you will feel as well as see and hear realistic effects such as might be experienced in an actual earthquake. The management assumes no responsibility for the physical or emotional reactions of the individual viewer.’

What responsible advertising, I thought. If only
The Poseidon Adventure
had carried such a warning. There was no way you’d get me into that cinema. What if there was ‘an actual earthquake’ while the film was showing, and nobody noticed until it was too late?

I began a rigorous programme of disaster-movie avoidance. (You might like to call it denial.) When the kids’ movie show
Clapperboard
ran a feature on disaster movies, with on-set footage from
The Towering Inferno
, I actually left the room (it was at Nan’s house, so nobody else knows this). That’s how vigilant I was about not glimpsing further Hollywood disaster. Another junior film programme
Screen Test
shattered my fragile defences by running a clip of
The Towering Inferno
, and because I was at home, with Simon, I couldn’t very well admit my demons and leave. I watched it – the bit where a screaming woman is winched off the top floor in a breeches buoy – and it had the predictable effect of deepening my fear of fire.

Shipboard peril could easily be avoided by remaining on dry land, but I had become so genuinely frightened of dying in – or being dishevelled by – a house fire, I developed my own foolproof psychological defence. Every night in my bed I would deliberately think about the house burning down. That way, I reasoned, it wouldn’t actually happen. Because if it did, I would be able to say to the firemen as they wrapped me in a blanket, ‘I knew the house was going to burn down: I thought about it just before I went to sleep.’ The probability seemed so remote, I actually found comfort in this bizarre piece of provincial voodoo.

But I’m more struck, retrospectively, by the way I exorcised the demons of
The Poseidon Adventure
. Mature and focused, I faced down my fears. I may have been running away from the disaster movies I
hadn’t
seen, but not from the one I
had
. My obsession initially took the form of a project. I saw the film on Thursday; by the weekend I was making a book about it, methodically drawing all the characters and key scenes from memory in a pad with biro and coloured pencils.
⁷
On the Monday Dad, having noted my fixation with the film, bought me the original novel by Paul Gallico when he took Simon to Birmingham for his allergy tests (I think we all know what
I
was allergic to). I still have the book, dog-eared to within an inch of collapse – but then, unlike every other film and TV tie-in book I bought, I actually got a lot of use out of it.

Originally published in 1969, this is Pan’s 1974 paperback edition and it bears two stills from the movie, which I pored over even more than the text: a happy, pre-‘Auld Lang Syne’ line-up of Rev Scott (Gene Hackman), Linda Rogo (Stella Stevens) and husband Mike (Ernest Borgnine); and a sweaty, precarious boiler room scene featuring Nonnie (Carol Lynley), Mr Martin (Red Buttons) and the Rogos. You can also see the high-heeled feet of Susan (Pamela Sue Martin).

What’s more, the book listed the principal cast on the back under the obligatory now-a-major-film blurb. Having it seems absorbed every chronological detail of the film in a single sitting,
I
was now able to guess which actor played which part simply from the hierarchy of the cast.

I devoured the novel, though it was resolutely not a kids’ book. Most of the characters had been retained in the screenplay by Wendell Mayes and Stirling Silliphant, though Rev Scott had the nickname ‘Buzz’ in the book and ‘looked like some primitive tribal priest at invocation’ at the climax, ‘all but nude, the lantern strapped to his back, the fire axe still bound about his middle’. Mayes and Silliphant had thinned out the band of survivors too (a common novel-to-screen trick, but one to which I was not yet accustomed): no Hubie Muller, no Miss Kinsale, no Kemal, no Beamer. And no Susan Shelby rape scene, understandably (‘a hand tore at her underclothes’, all that). But the novel was close enough to the film for me to relive the pain, discomfort and degradation of those survivors. It was my mid-Seventies way of getting the video.

The self-administered psychotherapy was going swimmingly. Talking of which, there’s a key scene in the film where our embattled band must swim through a flooded corridor to get to the boiler room, and they are asked to hold their breath for thirty seconds. (Actually, if you time the sequence in the film, Scott and Mrs Rosen are underwater for at least three minutes of elastic screen-time.) In accordance with my healing programme, Dad, Simon and I would practise holding our breath for thirty seconds at Kingsthorpe when we went swimming on Saturdays. We called this game
Poseidon Adventure
, but I knew it wasn’t a game. It was preparation for the worst.
⁸

I didn’t know at the time that it was what Freud identified as ‘repetition-compulsion’ (the tendency to relive unpleasant or traumatic situations), but I knew it helped. It’s helping right now. It is, as Freud spotted, anxiety that prepares us for danger. In other words, whittling is a good, useful emotion. Nan and Mum had it right all along. Because
The Poseidon Adventure
was a shock – I wasn’t prepared for it – I subsequently used repetition-compulsion (the swimming, the drawing, the reading, the all-purpose fixating)
to
prepare for the next such shock. I was building my defences. Live in fear, be prepared.

I had conducted this elaborate dance with dread before. When I was much younger, aged five or six, I experienced coulrophobia: I was scared of clowns. Not their painted faces and big shoes, although it has been long established that these are very scary things, but by the possibility – I think – that they might drag me out of the audience and make me a part of their show, perhaps throw water at me. (So, there’s a link between this and my later disasterphobia: dishevelment; loss of dignity – is someone taking notes?
⁹
) It was a big day when the circus came to town, either Billy Smart’s or Chipperfield’s, and Mum and Dad would always take us along to watch the sad animals and the high-wire spills and then … they would send in the clowns. At no point did I express any displeasure at this torture: I just sat and laughed with the rest of them, willing it to end and for some sedated lions to come on.

I recall, one year, making eye contact with a clown who was waiting to enter the ring. He saw me looking at him and raised his eyebrows twice for my benefit (everyone else was watching what was going on in the ring). It was my private clown moment, and it sent a shiver down my spine.

However, if you go through my childhood drawings from the time,
¹⁰
you will discover that they are virtually all of clowns. Endless
clowns
, many of them in various states of dishevelment, jumping out of their trousers to reveal spotted pants, or wearing torn trousers after some comedy explosion, the spotty underwear showing through.
¹¹
This was my revenge on the clowns for potentially endangering me. All the slapstick and violence and humiliation would be visited upon them, not me, in my pictures. The clowns would be contained, they would stay in their ring.

When the Italian clown Charlie Caroli became a Seventies children’s TV star, I watched without fail every week, entranced by the relentless slapstick. Because there was no live audience, I felt safe.
¹²

It was this safe distance that was broken down by Roger Whittaker and
The Poseidon Adventure
. Just because something was on television or in a film no longer meant it couldn’t happen to me.

* * *

Nothing did happen to me, of course. Auntie Janice had that chippan fire but the damage didn’t extend any further than the blackened kitchen. There were flames when Dad ‘found’ a Misfit in the toaster (Misfits was a children’s card game), but beyond that, through all my childhood, nothing truly disastrous happened. I was never dishevelled or blackened. The Jerries never came. Whenever we had high winds, I was convinced the windows would blow in, but they didn’t. The back fence blew down in a gale in September 1975 but that was as cinematic as the weather got.

The disaster movies got me in the end. By which I mean I was forced by circumstance and the idiocy of my fear to watch some of them. (This is just as well actually. I had enthusiastically drawn up a ‘disaster film survey’ at the back of my 1975 diary and it fizzles out quickly, because of course in 1975 I had only seen the one.) In 1976, we were bought
Big Terror Movie Themes
, an LP by Geoff Love and his Orchestra, containing the foreboding music from
Jaws
,
Airport
’75
and
Earthquake
. Good therapy, even though it was only orchestral cover versions. In 1977 I braved a number of made-for-TV disaster movies, the nursery slopes of any genre –
Flight to Holocaust, Smash-up on Interstate 5
– and subsequently some lesser-known pre-cycle pictures like
The Last Voyage
and
Skyjacked
. I also saw what was according to Geoff Love an honorary disaster movie,
Jaws
, at the pictures. My fear was subsiding. In 1978 I went on a ferry, which didn’t turn over. In 1979 I saw
The Poseidon Adventure
for the second time, on TV.

Everything was fine.

And then in the Eighties, I found out there might be a nuclear war.

1
. The lyric was written by Mr R.A. Webster, a Birmingham silversmith and fan who had entered it into a 1971 competition on Nairobi-born Whittaker’s radio show. The winning entry was actually ‘Why’ (a minor hit in 1971), but Whittaker liked ‘The Last Farewell’, recorded that too and put it on an album. Four years later it was picked up by the radio station WSB in Atlanta, Georgia, as it captured the mood of the Vietnam era. ‘The Last Farewell’ went on to become the most requested song on their playlist and within weeks it was a hit not just in the States but all over the world, selling over 11 million copies. Way to go, Mr Webster.

2
. By ‘war’ of course I meant one that impacted directly on my life, saw me evacuated to Wales in a Mickey Mouse gas mask, that kind of thing. Unbeknown to the ten-year-old me, war raged all around the world in 1975. South East Asia was in turmoil, with South Vietnam falling to the Communists and the Americans hauling ass out of there. Cambodia fell too after a bloody battle, with the Khmer Rouge announcing in Phnom Penh, ‘We enter as conquerors and are not here to talk about peace.’ (That much was clear, as tales of appalling genocide emerged.) Anarchy reigned in Bangladesh. Civil war in Angola. Christians fought Muslims on the streets of Lebanon. Spanish embassies were bombed and set alight in Holland and Turkey when Franco executed five Basque separatists. Revenge killings erupted across Northern Ireland. But things seemed peaceful enough in Northampton.

3
. Cooked minced pig’s offal, eaten cold and sliced off a loaf. We also ate faggot, which was made of minced pig’s liver and breadcrumbs, I now learn. Yum.

4
. As Graham McCann notes in his invaluable book
Dad’s Army
, ‘It was considered more or less
de rigueur
in those days for a British situation comedy to attempt this hazardous transformation – during the first three years of the decade alone, the likes of
Up Pompeii!, On the Buses, Please, Sir!, Steptoe and Son, Father, Dear Father, Bless This House
and even
Love Thy Neighbour
, aided and abetted by an ailing and risk-aversive British film industry desperate to tap into television’s mass audience, would all spawn at least one cinematic spin-off.’

5
. Another instant transportation device to this period is the song ‘I’m Not In Love’ by 10CC, which was Number One during
The Poseidon Adventure
aftershock period, entering the charts the week after we saw the film and staying in the Top 10 for a month. It more than reminds me of the time – the famous female-whispered interlude (‘Be quiet, big boys don’t cry, big boys don’t cry’) struck me then as an apposite soundtrack to the film. It might have been Mrs Rosen reassuring little Robin, telling him to be brave in the face of watery doom. Perfect timing by Manchester’s 10CC boys and the great British record-buying public – it could so easily have been ‘Whispering Grass’ by Don Estelle and Windsor Davies (lovely boys don’t cry).

6
. An interesting allusion, especially as the souls trapped in the
Poseidon
work their way
up
through the concentric circles of torment, counter to Dante’s vision. Religious suggestions run right through
The Poseidon Adventure
– even the ship is named after a Greek god, and the Bible of course is chock-full of disasters: flood, fire, plague. The
Poseidon’s
survivors are led by a fire-and-brimstone priest who sacrifices himself so that his flock may live, and the final rescue by the coastguard sees them whisked away into the sky, blinded by a bright light after being trapped in the darkness. And the meek – Martin, Nonnie, Manny – inherit the earth. I love this shit. I once encountered a ‘reading’ of
The Guns of Navarone
which involved Oedipus and castration (disabling those phallic guns) and I loved that too.