Autobiography (4 page)

Loudly and wildly the music played, always pointing to the light, to the way out, or the way in, to individualism, and to the remarkable if unsettling notion that life could possibly be lived as you might wish it to be lived.
Top of the Pops
makes the inevitable journey to London, where it stays forever. I rage with jealousy at the disembodied audience of zombies who show unearthly indifference in the presence of Shocking Blue. No illness of any ferocity could sway my interest during
Top of the Pops
, a rare flash of glamor in our oh so very pale lives, a heart-stopping rundown of the Top 30, followed by jaw-dropping paralysis as our personal favorites step into view. Now you see them, now you don’t. What
was
that? Eat it up and dream about it later, or wake up and dream as the years shuffle like cards. Facts blur with hallucination as T. Rex edge in from somewhere interplanetary, giving an elbow thrust to Pickettywitch and the galvanizing Tom Jones. T. Rex are a question I had been saving up for a long time, and the singer is of pleasantly soft speaking voice, and my little radio crackles with interference regardless of where the station happens to be. The year 1970 is loutish stoops in studlike gear, shuddering catchphrases and racist television comedies of half-wit mispronunciations; Ruffle Bars and T-Bars, and my parents are neither friends nor lovers to one another, and nothing in our lives is tidy or designed. With a detachable head, I paddle my own way through it all. As my parents clash on every subject, Jackie takes sides and cries in between. I make several bolts for freedom clutching only
The Otterbury Incident.
First, I run to Lostock, where Jeane and Johnny now have their own flat, but I am in the way here, too, and Johnny promptly hitches me onto the crossbar of his bicycle and takes me back home – all along Barton Road, a journey of days, and how I sat there throughout can only indicate the hardiness of the times.

I make several dashes to Dorothy and Liam, now living in the snootiness of willowy Wilmslow, where Liam’s GPO advancements have upgraded their lifestyle to a beautiful cottage on Mill Brow. I also make a midnight dash to Nannie, who whacks me across the head and then asks questions. My father still took Jackie and I to the Bluebird Café on Back Piccadilly, shaded somewhere behind Chelsea Girl, for a weekly watery-grey set menu of chips with everything, for Jackie and I would eat nothing else. No multinational menus were yet on the Manchester horizon, and anything with a hint of flavor was considered exotic. In the mid-1970s my parents would quietly divorce, Dad having disappeared two days before Christmas amidst loud assumptions that he has other lives elsewhere.

Throughout these years I am a largely bedridden child unwilling to keep death at bay. Hope remains only via television, which shows me what might happen to me should I manage to live to be fully grown.
Lost in Space
offers the full
flavor of studio-bound American allure as a handsome and well-balanced family hurtles through an extensive range of hostile planets in search of Alpha Centauri. The Robinsons are never short of food or hair products, and, whereas the family is gratingly sane, they are offset by Dr Zachary Smith, who is waspish and wicked and full of childish snips and snaps – each rapier rejoinder accompanied by arched brow and
Ah! Wilderness
eyes slung to the gallery. It is to the fourth wall (audience or camera) that actor Jonathan Harris plays, each startled reaction given directly to the unseen viewer. I would much rather be Major Don West (Mark Goddard), who is of track and field physical, but who is a juvenile groundling compared to the Elizabethan riches of Dr Smith, who, in his maggoty bitterness, provides all of the fun, and whose command illuminates the very smallest of actions. Bio-mechanical Major West hardly ever speaks, whereas Dr Smith’s mouth won’t close under any circumstances, and there he is – forever downstage and close to the camera, his joys and sorrows child-like (that is, undeveloped) and full of pantomime pranks; part circus, part
Peer Gynt
, and a thigh-slap away from
Annie Get Your Gun.
I cannot miss
Lost in Space
, where the secrets of masculinity are meted out in the ping-pong clash between Dr Smith and Major West; Mrs Danvers facing a wide receiver’s grit in two worlds that can never meet. The masculine man hates the feminine man because soft is the enemy of hard. Dr Smith’s voice is the caustic cattiness of a tetchy dowager rising in pitch as each line ends, hands a-flutter with
away with you, my child
intolerance. Major West, on the other hand, will kick to kill. My notepad resting on my lap takes the scribbles of unspoken truth: effeminate men are very witty, whereas macho men are duller than death. The divide bristles – West permanently at a Denver Bronco’s training session, and Smith playing with full nobility up and out to the studio lights – a
Twelfth Night
jester
allowed his moment. At 30, the prematurely grey Richard Bradford is the star of
Man In a Suitcase
, a discredited CIA agent now loitering about London waiting for the phone to ring (usually from a youngish blonde female whose father, The Major, is under shocking duress). As McGill, Richard Bradford mumbles his lines, is never witty, and gets by purely on the red-blooded toughness of his Tyler, Texas door-ramming physique, which provides all answers and never once fails him. Bradford is a figure of glamor, although his girlfriends are infrequent or short-term. He rests his cigarette down by placing it upright like a pencil, never slanted into an ashtray, and his charging physicality renders sparkling wordplay unnecessary. He lives alone, unexcited, disinterested, world-weary and ungiving, yet it is this dry-as-dust approach that makes him fascinating. Men, you see, are either one thing or another, but never both, and the world loves a man who can fight. Suddenly,
Department S
comes close to the unthinkable; a witty Sebastian Melmoth who is also swift to deploy expert judo at the drop of a Ming vase. Peter Wyngarde plays Jason King with impeccable Old Vic control, and dazzling Shaftesbury Avenue command. King is Knightsbridge to McGill’s Notting Hill, even though Peter Wyngarde had been born in Marseilles. Although King’s dapperness is a host of Burlington Arcade giveaways and Aix-en-Provence getaways, his Interpol partner Joel Fabiani (playing Stewart Sullivan) would thrash you in a game of squash – or squash you in a game of thrash. King is Beerbohm Tree smoking Sobranie, because Wyngarde is legitimate theater whom television is lucky to have, and whose techniques and intentions are infallibly precise (although the exact style of his delivery is by no means conventional)
. Wyngarde might occasionally rush into a following line without punctuated pause (enjambement?), but whatever he attempts by way of delivery is so meticulous that he leads the way as the governing center of
Department S.

Fabiani was the flipside of Wyngarde’s coin, being ex-US Navy, wiry Californian tough, and married to a woman. Completing the TV team is Annabelle Hurst (played by Rosemary Nichols), a most correct and well-educated computer-whiz British bird of polite wit; a tea-room and commando-trained lacrosse champ whose sexuality is only a detail. Of course, such women did not exist then, or now. In the wings, the child-like inquisitor does his best to understand whatever unravels before him on the screen (because the screen is certainly bigger than I am), with Sullivan as the true human ideal, yet the talent to amuse is Jason King’s – utilizing chopsticks with eye-crossing speed and reading from Italian menus with an expert’s sigh.
‘Mine’s the car with the Swiss number plates,’
he instructs hoteliers, and Europe is his casino. This charmless child is ready for bed, constructing a melting-plot wherein the broth blends Sullivan and King with an added dash of
77 Sunset Strip
,
and the final creation might very well be Mary Shelley’s.

I don’t care what the price is
I’ll make the sacrifices
I’ll bear the sorrow
Just let it be me.

By the grace of God I am a part of the local gang whose spearhead and protectionist is Lillian, who is all funfair worldliness at 16. Lillian organizes international excursions for a gaggle of kids to faraway, far-flung ranges such as Navigation Road or Jackson’s Boat. For a small weekly sub Lillian arranges everything, and the clued-up boys and girls of Stretford follow her in a trance, for Lillian could be as hard as nails – Susannah York’s Childie, but with grisly grit, cropped-off mousey hair, suede jacket and tight jeans. Touch her and you might not get your hand back. Yet Lillian is all heart and love, but fearless in the face of foe. Gangs are fashions passion in ragamuffin 1971, and some out-of-towners invade our untouchable Longford Park patch. Lillian warns a buckish bully that she can finish him off without actually touching him. Laughing at her, he opens his wastrel mouth wide, and with expert aim Lillian unleashes a wad of phlegm that scores an impressive bullseye in the back of his throat. Shaken and repulsed, he and his teen firebrands turn tail into the Chorlton mist. Firmly, I am under Lillian’s wing, and she loves the kids that make up the gang. Thin and lively, she will take a stand against any boy bigger or older, and never once would she hesitate. The one spoiler is Leslie Messenger, who is teeth-grindingly jealous of the attention given to me by the girls, and one afternoon he springs upon me, as Sunday’s dullness swarms the park with dingy, dreary, unkillable families. For what will be the second time, I floor Leslie, he all bluff and little-man threats, yet soft to the touch in the heel of the hammerlock. I do not know where my uppercuts come from, but there they are, an orbit of finishing blows rising from somewhere deep within, overtaking the final push that panics the body into do-or-die strength. It is a vigorous high, but it is not my sphere, and nor do I want it.

1971 brings a partial eclipse at 9:40
AM
, plunging the skies of Britain into 69 per cent blackness; Nannie drops to her knees and prays for salvation at what she is certain is the end of the world. Alas, it is not.

No rampantly challenging mind could overlook the lost cultures as mapped out in British film, wherein the restricted horizons of the expendable working-class thrillingly show us how British life got to where it is now – in your private modern
cuckoo-land. A gas-lit hallway in a tired lodging house and I am pulled in, with Mum forever fussing about the table setting tea. Distorted by nostalgia, we see in the family and in the local community everything an honest soul might need in order to live out their time on the human gridline, and we see the obvious punishments for anyone who would insist upon more than their lot. In my favorite films of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the working class are usually portrayed as children enacting pointless working-class crimes. We always see the police as adults, representing a conscience for the daft scrubbers in pubs and dance halls – who are not rich, and therefore cannot behave themselves. Decent folk always allow themselves to be controlled by the police, because the police are never known to be either devious or wrong. The laboring-class boys of grey flannel are instinctive in their behavior because they are, in fact, in possession of nothing at all other than instinct; science and diplomacy are tools unused. The shadowy social films of lost Sunday television are
Oliver Twist
(1948) (in which career-criminal Bill Sikes says
‘There’s light e
nough for what I ’ave to do!
’
),
London Belongs to Me
(1948),
The Blue Lamp
(1950),
I Believe in You
(1952) and
Sapphire
(1959). In
The Painted Smile
(1962), the statuesque womanhood of comely Liz Fraser attempts to frame an uncomplicated Tony Wickert for the murder of her boyfriend in the recurring British theme of happiness not to be found. In all working-class films of the 1960s, life’s winner is the boy with the gleam in his eye – roughs of self-recognition and blessed profiles. They will not accept conservative limits, and their selfish motivations or their crude nerve are both justified by the fact that they give nothing but look everything. By contrast, a Shakespearian saint with a disjointed face is never thought interesting enough for film. In
Two L
eft Feet
(1963) there is the unusual glimpse of hard and pretty Michael Craze rutting lustily for his pal David Hemmings.

Calling on friends, their back doors swing open with a swoosh of smells. The tangs of the unfamiliar are the malodorous hallmarks of the humans within – no scented candles yet, although the rarity of air fresheners can be found somewhere in the newly landed supermarkets of Maypole, Seymour Meade or the Co-op.

Putrid smells reduce me to a pitiful pile, and none
are more vomitarian than school dinners. All foods of miasmic fragrance disturb me, and the mere hint of garlic induces the shakes, as fish cooked or uncooked causes gut-wrenching
panic. This boy of 1971 has an abnormally limited palate – a working-class host of relentless toast, and the inability to expand beyond the spartan. Somewhere, Tin Tin sing
Toast and marmalade for tea
–
which certainly suits me. I remain bedevilled by a dangerously sparse intake of food until my late thirties, when pasta and pizza throw the line. In place of food, my senses existentially turn to old high walls of red brick, and I lie awake at night weighing the fascination. There will never be an end or a conclusion to this dazed attraction, and even now, decades on, I cannot find any written acknowledgement of the trance such things pull me into. Whatever detains the eye is understood by no one, least of all me. My eleventh year brings my becloaked stage debut at the local community center. In the play
On Dartmoor
I am Ulrick, a sulky child with a stupid voice. Unseen, I persistently shout down from an imaginary bedroom. The audience laugh, but my father does not.
‘
You were very embarrassing,’
he tells me, as I appear all-smiles, and my air-balloon collides. Two years on, at Stretford Stadium I represent the school in the 400 meters dash (of sorts), legs muddied, face wet with rain, I clamber in at fourth place. My father is standing by the finishing-line. As I approach him he says,
‘You didn’t win,’
and he looks away, and life decomposes in a bucket. Perhaps I
didn’t
win but it didn’t help anyone to point it out.