Life's Lottery (80 page)

Schoolboy hero of Anthony Buckeridge’s novels for children, from
Jennings Goes to School
(1950) onwards. The character debuted on BBC Radio in 1948.

Created by author Frank Richards in 1908, Billy Bunter – ‘the fat owl of the remove’ – was the break-out character of a series of stories published in the periodical
The Magnet
about the fictional Greyfriars School. Part of his appeal was that, unlike the straight-arrow decent sorts who were the heroes of the series (and who seem insufferably priggish), Bunter was gluttonous, cowardly, devious and feckless. Bunter appeared in novels until the mid-60s, and paperback reprints were still read by children well into the 1970s, though the Edwardian public school setting had become bizarrely alien.

A series of girls’ school stories written by Eleanor Brent-Dyer, first published between 1925 and 1970. If you think the worlds of Greyfriars and Chalet School, and the numberless other boarding school adventures published in the twentieth century, are gone forever, consider that J.K. Rowling is writing essentially the same stuff. If Keith and Vanda were eleven now, they’d be reading Harry Potter.

Hackwill is indicating that he needs to urinate.

The men’s room.

UK institution, a national random-number prize-draw. Government-sponsored, it raises money that is theoretically ploughed into good works.

Also appears in
Jago.

Naughty children in a popular comic-strip created by Leo Baxendale.
The Beano
was, and still is, a British weekly comic specialising in irreverent humour.

Spun-off from the 1950s TV series
Whack-O!
which had a brief 1970s revival, this peculiarly British 1959 school comedy did indeed feature an emphasis on corporal punishment jokes.

Moustachioed British comedian, usually seen as a schoolmaster, RAF officer or other silly-ass, pompous, inept Establishment figure.

Less familiar than DC’s Batman or Marvel’s Doctor Strange, the Streak is the speedster superhero mainstay of comics published by ZC Comics, a company which features in
The Quorum.
My short story ‘Coastal City’ (
www.johnnyalucard.com/coastal.html
) is set in the ZC Comics universe.

See: ‘Where the Bodies Are Buried’.

Long-running BBC1 pop music programme (started 1964, still airing), roughly the equivalent of
American Bandstand.

A BBC-TV police series (1966–76). It spun off from
Z-Cars
(1962–78) and starred Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor as hard-man superintendent Charlie Barlow and his milder sidekick Watts. Rough American equivalents would be
Kojak
or
The Streets of San Francisco.

See
The Quorum
for another account of this period, focusing on these characters.

Also appears in
The Quorum
.

Exams taken at seventeen or eighteen. Admission into a university (or, in the 1970s, a polytechnic) usually depends on grades earned in A Levels.

British equivalent of Barbie. In the earlier version of
Life’s Lottery
, I misspelled it Cindy – which is what you get when boys write about such things.

Annual event held since 1970 at Mike Eavis’s farm near the village of Pilton, near but not in the town of Glastonbury.

A Level results aren’t enough to get into Oxford or Cambridge universities; prospective students have to sit further exams set by those universities, though admission also depends on performance in interview.

Argentine dictator, invader of the Falkland Islands.

Britain’s highest military decoration.

A British sporting expression: in rugby or football, a player sent off the pitch by the referee after foul play is said to take an early bath because he gets to the showers before his team-mates.

Royal Marine slang for forced march over rough terrain.

Pirate hero of the novel by Rafael Sabatini; coincidentally, Dr Peter Blood is transported to the West Indies as a convict for treating men wounded in the Battle of Sedgmoor, the climax of the ill-fated Monmouth Rebellion – which took place very near the locale of this novel.

A persistent schoolboy joke has it that the children’s TV cartoon
Captain Pugwash
series features characters with
double entendre
names like ‘Seaman Staines’, ‘Master Bates’ and ‘Roger the Cabin Boy’. This is not the case.

Captain Hook’s mate in J.M. Barrie’s
Peter Pan.

Female pirate, glamourised in the film
Anne of the Indies.

Katharine, Kate or Katie Reed. A character Bram Stoker intended to put in his novel
Dracula
, she didn’t make the final draft but I put her in my novel
Anno Dracula.
She takes a leading role in the follow-ups
The Bloody Red Baron, Dracula Cha Cha Cha
(aka Judgment of Tears) and ‘Coppola’s Dracula’, and also appears in the story cycle
Seven Stars.

A major thread in the plot of my story ‘Where the Bodies Are Buried’.

You can find this on a map of Somerset. It also features, in ominous context, in my novels
The Quorum
and
An English Ghost Story.

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons
(1967–68), the last great Gerry Anderson puppet show.

This slogan ran in ads printed in British children’s comics. Bobby Moore was the captain of England’s World Cup-winning football team in 1966. He died of bowel cancer in his early fifties.

A TV detective, famous for his flamboyant dress sense and moustache, Jason King was played by Peter Wyngarde; he was introduced in the series
Department S
(1969–70) and continued his adventures in the spin-off
Jason King
(1971–72). It’s possible that his clothes were influenced by the fact that colour television was just becoming popular in the UK, and his shirts were a personal challenge to any slightly-mistuned set.

Also appears in
The Quorum
.

Exams taken in the 1970s by UK grammar school-children at sixteen. Kids who went to a secondary modern took different exams called CSEs. In comprehensive schools, there were O (Ordinary) level and CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education) streams. The inevitable effect of this is that pupils, employers and civilians looked at CSEs as lesser qualifications, though the schools insisted this wasn’t the case. A certain number of passes at O level were necessary to qualify to stay on another two years and take A (Advanced) Level exams. Now, the whole system has been amalgamated and British children all take one set of exams called GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education). It is an often-heard grumble from members of Keith’s generation when new record-breaking GCSE and A Level results are announced every year that exams were more difficult back in the 1970s. Then again, the same people claim Mars bars were more chocolatey, pop songs had proper lyrics and all these computers and internet doodads will lead to no good at all.

A famous sunstruck spell, leading to drought, hosepipe bans, phew-what-a-scorcher tabloid headlines and Mediterranean sleeping arrangements.

ie: Geography is her Major.

Also appears briefly in
The Quorum.

A medium-sized town or small city in Somerset. It does have a cathedral, and it’s generally assumed that the presence of a cathedral is what separates a city from a town.

A tradition in UK colleges and universities (where it often stretches to Rag Week) in which students do strange things to collect money for charity, often as a license for larkish behaviour. Men dressing up in drag is a tiresomely common feature. A certain amount of anarchy is expected. If it sounds ridiculous and annoying, remember British educational establishments have no tradition of fraternities or sororities, hence no hazing. At least, Rag Day – unlike Hell Night – isn’t an excuse to torture other students and contributes something to a good cause.

Also appears in
The Quorum
.

This took place in 1972, and was heavily covered by UK TV news.

A UK Number One hit in 1973. Though a pastiche of the ‘Jailhouse Rock’/‘Riot in Cell Block Number 9’-style American prison song, it had a special resonance in Britain thanks to the controversial use of rubber bullets by the security forces in Belfast. In the song, Sergeant Baker breaks up the hop at the local county jail; his line is ‘I love to hear these convicts squeal, it’s a shame these slugs ain’t real’.

Woody Strode as Pompey. Shamefully, this is exactly the sort of language schoolboys in Somerset used in the early 1970s; most of them had never met a black person.

UK slang: cigarette

UK slang: cigarettes

Exams taken in the 1970s by UK secondary modern school-children at sixteen. Kids who went to grammar schools took different exams called O Levels. In comprehensive schools, there were O (Ordinary) Level and CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education) streams. The inevitable effect of this is that pupils, employers and civilians looked at CSEs as lesser qualifications, though the schools insisted this wasn’t the case. A certain number of passes at O level were necessary to qualify to stay on another two years and take A (Advanced) Level exams. Now, the whole system has been amalgamated and British children all take one set of exams called GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education). It is an often-heard grumble from members of Keith’s generation when new record-breaking GCSE and A Level results are announced every year that exams were more difficult back in the 1970s.

Site of an important treaty in
The Quorum.

For more on Mickey’s comics career, see
The Quorum.

Ie: Manchester Polytechnic. In the 1970s, British institutions of higher education came in several forms: universities were considered to be more academic in inclincation, while polytechnics were supposedly more practical but also easier to get into. At a stroke, some years later, all polytechnics were turned into universities; which is why many towns now have two or more universities.

Mark’s magazine features in
The Quorum.

The Tory government’s replacement of a local tax based on property values with the ‘community charge’ in the early 1990s was extremely unpopular, triggering a wave of unrest – including protest marches which became unruly and were inevitably tagged ‘riots’ by the press – that led eventually to Margaret Thatcher’s fall from power. The poll tax was quietly scrapped and replaced by a variation on the old rates system.

Ferdidand Marcos, dictator. His wife Imelda was famous for the amount of money she spent on shoes.

Organised by rock star Bob Geldof in 1985, this was a huge concert (rather, series of concerts around the world) staged to raise money for African famine relief. It also revived the careers of some fading performers.

plastic calculating aide, rendered obsolete by pocket calculators.

The 1976 film was very popular with British teenagers, as much for its depiction of the alien rituals of Americans of the same age as the horror stuff.

Roughly the equivalent of welfare; now known as ‘income support’. Unemployment benefit (the dole) was available only to people who had been in work. Those who had never been employed weren’t eligible. The system has changed, and it is now much harder for a school-leaver or recent graduate to get benefits.

Was reissued in the UK the mid-1970s on a double bill with
Midnight Cowboy.

Old joke: ‘the school I went to was so good that it was
approved
. As much a penal as an educational institution, approved schools were for young offenders who needed straightening out. An American kid as uncontrollable as Tony Bennett might get sent to military school.

Vouchers, purchased on a weekly basis, for meals in the school cafeteria. Inevitably, also a form of currency among kids. In the 1970s, more schools provided meals than is now the case.

His subsequent misfortunes are extensively covered in
The Quorum
.