Where Did It All Go Right? (19 page)

1.
Because Simon was that bit more committed to the army than me (i.e. he didn’t waste any of his valuable combat time doing jigsaws or making comics), we both accepted that he outranked me in the Action Man platoon: he had two gripping-hands Action Men while one of mine was still a spastic non-gripping. Captain Carson, his newest ‘soldier doll’ (as trademark-shy
Blue Peter
euphemistically called them) was naturally in charge. My Action Men, Simpson and Nixon, were Carson’s bitches.

2.
‘King of the Cops’ by Billy Howard, a novelty record to the tune of Roger Miller’s ‘King of the Road’ which to my Yarwood-raised delight included impressions of all the main TV cops: Kojak, McCloud, Columbo. It reached Number Six in the charts, although I remember it as a Number One, likewise CW McCall’s ‘Convoy’, which in fact reached Number Two a month after Howard peaked. (Funny how nostalgia idealises even mundane points of commerce like chart positions in its quest to smooth all the corners.)

3.
A special public relations use of the adjective ‘brilliant’, meaning bloody awful. I hated rugby, it was a brute sport.

4.
I was angered recently to hear a link on Channel 4’s
Top Ten TV Families
(a strand I once wrote links for myself) stating that
Butterflies
was Nicholas Lyndhurst’s debut TV appearance. Bollocks. He played the title role in
The Prince and the Pauper
and we used to watch him every Sunday (not to mention
The Tomorrow People, Heidi and Going Straight
, in which he played Fletch’s 17-year-old son Raymond). Do people who make TV programmes about TV know nothing about TV?

5.
Hours of fun with this simple toy, a benign version of the pre-computer police identikit, with assorted eyes, ears and mouthparts to place on a selection of head shapes. No batteries required.

6.
‘Libraries gave us power’ – opening line from the song ‘A Design for Life’ and family motto of the band who wrote it, Manic Street Preachers. My childhood was punctuated by regular trips to the town library, where I would crick my neck over the varnish-smelling shelves, coughs echoing round the place. I can’t say I read Marx and Engels at Northampton Library, but I did fill my head with natural history, drawing and the cinema. And the complete works of cartoonist Norman Thelwell. It’s power of a sort.

7.
‘Make A Daft Noise For Christmas’ by The Goodies (probably my then-favourite band; Number 20, December 1975), ‘In Dulce Jubilo’ by Mike Oldfield (one of Mum’s, twinned with the softly spoken ‘On Horseback’; Number Four, December 1975), and ‘El Bimbo’ by Bimbo Jet, a French ‘male/female vocal/instrumental group’ according to the
Guinness
, though neither record nor artist mean a damned thing to me now (Number 12, July 1975).

8.
The Organisation of Anti-Mob (the ‘Mob’ being the staff of Abington Vale Middle School), a Molesworth-influenced ‘secret society’ conceived by myself and Milner at breaktime to amuse ourselves. We turned our paranoid fantasy into a file, a loose collection of cartoons based on the idea that we were on to their game and with various gadgets and cunning would expose the Mob as sadistic torturers of innocent pupils. I was agent ‘X’. Milner was ‘Z’ (I think). It was hugely creative fun.

9.
See note 3. Who was I trying to convince?

10.
Milner moved to Dorset that year, my first experience of losing a friend, although we kept in touch (my first pen pal) and I even visited him on the south coast. He started the Poole branch of O.O.A.M. He’s one of the only schoolfriends I have actually met in adult life; he now lives in Tunbridge Wells with wife and two daughters. His dad returned to shore from the banana boats and became harbourmaster at Poole.

11.
Yet another home-made comic, this time in conjunction with Nigel Wilson. He was very much the passenger, artistically.

12.
I rather ungratefully fail to mention the black and white portable telly in my otherwise exhaustive Christmas present list for 1975 – perhaps because it was a ‘joint’ present, ‘for all of us’. If you ask me, I think Mum and Dad were way too generous in giving us this luxury item, especially as it was kept in our bedroom. Simon and I knew that it was more than our lives were worth to watch it after lights-out, although we did later develop a method for doing so: with the sound turned completely down and with a squash racket poised to turn it off without getting out of bed if we heard footsteps (you pushed the knob in). I know.

13.
White plastic cube filled with multicoloured square notelets which became the O.O.A.M. File. Funky in those days, now given away by insurance companies and car dealerships with their logo on the side.

14.
These actually were paints.

15.
Got it wrong.

16.
As close as he could get to a green uniform at this early stage. Si was in the Cubs from age nine, then automatically became a Scout at 11 and waited until he was old enough to join the Royal Anglian Regiment Army Cadet Force (Salamanca Platoon) at 13.

17.
Actually The
Jaws
Log, published in 1975 and written by Carl Gottlieb. ‘It’s an easy read, energizing and with some of the zest of the movie’ – Pauline Kael. Not that I would know, as I didn’t see the movie until March 1977.

18.
The famous long hot summer of ’76 led to nationwide water shortages and a deluge of cracked-reservoir footage on the news – although I’m surprised to see measures in place as early as April. The only appearance of Northampton in the mighty
Chronicle of the 20th Century
comes on p. 1107: a photo of Pitsford Reservoir and its ‘parched, cracked surface’. Fame at last.

19.
All this talk of Warlords (guns, badges) derives from a comic called
Warlord
.

20.
Nickname of Paul Givelin, lithe younger brother of barrel-chested Andrew Givelin, sometimes referred to as Taff, as they were … Welsh. Dad was a bank manager.

21.
Boys next door, opposite side to the Edwards, the Hannas. Their dad John was an amateur photography enthusiast and once lent me a grown-up SLR camera.

22.
Monster Fun Comic
, published by Fleetway. It ran for a total of just 72 issues from June 1975 to October 1976 when it was merged with
Buster
(subsumed being a more accurate word). Probably my favourite childhood comic, its stars were Kid Kong, Creature Teacher and Gums, the sublime
Jaws
spoof. Frankie Stein was ‘Editor-in-chief’, a refugee from the recently nixed
Shiver & Shake
, my second favourite comic.

23.
Kev Pilbrow, whose surname I have just this minute recalled by sheer force of memory, as he is logged simply as ‘Kevin’ when he joins our school mid-term in April ’76. His nickname was Nivek (geddit?). Within two weeks of his arrival Nivek was ferociously sick in maths ‘all over his book, desk, floor, briefcase and blazer – it was
red
’.

24.
Simon Suttle. I hope, in adult life, he is not obvious.

25.
A variant on the colloquial claim ‘bagsy’. This innocent game involved moving methodically through the toy section of ‘the club book’ (the Kays catalogue, the bible on Mum’s side of the family), taking it in turns to choose one item each per page. And that’s it. My heart aches in admiration for my younger self here: content merely to fantasise about what toys we might like to own, with no hope of ever getting them, and yet whiling away happy hours in the act of looking at pictures. It’s surely what Tiny Tim would have done, had the Cratchitts access to a club book.

26.
Plastic 1/32 scale figures that came attached to a series of fancy, collectable chopper bikes, possibly made by Matchbox – we named them Devlins after stunt-rider Ernie Devlin, star of the short-lived Hanna-Barbera cartoon
Devlin
, conceived solely to cash in on the Knievel dollar (and featuring the voice of Mickey Dolenz as Ernie’s mechanic brother Todd). I have just watched a QuickTime movie of the opening titles on a website devoted to H-B cartoons, maintained by an unhinged US enthusiast, as are all the best sites.

27.
Wheelies, after the famous driverless VW.

28.
What’s with the fickle attitude to Kim? One minute he’s in O.O.A.M., the next he’s in Coventry. I shall have to put it down to the vagaries of pre-teen loyalty, or the fact that Kim was an enormously clever and confident boy – perhaps it rubbed us up the wrong way with our deficiencies (although Jes was, I note, form captain this term). As the Anti-Kim Campaign hots up, drawings appear in my diary with the hapless doctor’s son dispatched in inventive ways: bodily encased in cement; sliced in two with a cutlass; pinned under an upturned bed of nails with myself, Angus, Jes and Nivek standing atop. Nothing worse than ignoring him actually took place in the real world. (Irrational this may have been, but I can assure you it had nothing to do with the colour of Kim’s skin.
See Chapter 13
for more candid details on that score.)

29.
Paul Bush, the one with the cruel name for Nigel Wilson. Became a huge pal of mine this year and stayed that way beyond the end of middle school, even though we went to different upper schools. The years 1976–78 were our salad days, characterised by supreme Pythonesque silliness, sleepovers and daft drawings (such as the off-colour bone-through-nose native he’s etched in my 1978 diary, followed by the rudimentary Wookiee). Paul, who sucked his thumb like I chewed my tongue, lived in a village outside Northampton, Earls Barton, but we managed to bridge the physical gap. His family had a summerhouse in their back garden (the kind that revolve, as seen in the climax to the great lost 1969
Dad’s Army
episode ‘The Battle of Godfrey’s Cottage’), and he later introduced me to the pleasures of Peter Gabriel.

30.
Look I’m sorry. The
War Papers
were complete, loving reprints of newspapers from the Second World War, they came out weekly and no doubt stopped coming out after about two months, as is the way of all things that build up week by week into a collection you will treasure. The early editions gave away free repro posters, and the Hitler one, a famous portrait, went on our poster board. We pinned him up with the very finest historical intentions.

31.
Wyn Murphy; Welsh lad, another thumb-sucker.

32.
Two things about Mrs Moxham. One, she took me out of class regularly at this time in order to do ‘tests’ on me (no electrodes, just patterns and numbers in books) as part of a paper she was doing on ‘gifted children’. Fans! Autographs later etc. I was just happy to get out of lessons. Two, after Jonathan Bailey had an ‘epo’ (an epileptic fit) while we were on the school trip to France in 1978, a rumour went round that Mrs Moxham slept in the vacant bed in the boys’ dormitory after we had all gone back to sleep, and a boy called Keith claimed he had seen her undressing. Yeah, right.

33.
See Chapter 4
.

34.
Pea-shooters? Where are we, Bash Street School?

35.
David Hemery
actually, British athlete, famous for being one of the few white record-breakers at the 1968 Olympics.

36.
Britains made fine quality painted plastic die-cast figures, including a superb range of cowboys and Indians. All our zoo and farm animals were Britains.

seven

Supermousse

In the 70s, foreign holidays broadened British culinary tastes
.

Frozen foods responded by giving families a widening

range of recipes every day of the week without the need

to find the ingredients or special skills to cook them
.

‘50 Years of Frozen Foods’, the British Frozen Food Federation website

What do I smell?

I smell home cooking

It’s only the river

It’s only the river

Talking Heads, ‘Cities’ (1979)

THEY SAY YOU
are what you eat, and of course they’re right. (They also say it’s not the end of the world, and you can’t always get what you want, and they’re right again.) As a kid growing up I was shepherd’s pie. Or, to qualify that, I was shepherd’s pie on Thursdays, which is when Mum made it and when I ate it. Here’s her recipe, handed down, we may assume, from more frugal times than the seventies:

Line the bottom of a lightly greased oven-proof dish with slices of corned beef or ‘bully beef’ as Pap Collins would call it, recalling the war years, much to our delight. Spread with tomato ketchup or, if preferred, brown sauce. Cover with generous layer of pre-cooked, mashed potato. Drag fork
across
surface to create ridges, add knob of butter and bake until golden and sauce is bubbling.

Mmm-mmmm, pie! The tomato sauce was the secret ingredient. Likewise, the currants in Nan Mabel’s famous treacle tart (again, nowhere to be found in any fancy recipe book – and don’t even think about sultanas). It was more of a treacle pie than a tart, in that it had a pastry lid, but what the hell, I’d eat one now if Nan were here to make it.

I mention these two significant home-made dishes of my childhood –
what do I smell? I smell home cooking
– as a reminder to myself. Because it’s tempting to look back and see only packet food and processed crap on the Collins family dinner table of my youth. (With a box of those bright orange ‘breadcrumbs’ and some hundreds and thousands standing by.)