Where Did It All Go Right? (28 page)

16.
Irony and sarcasm have arrived, like unwanted, boorish gatecrashers at a party. There’ll be trouble.

17.
I’d wanted one of these ever since seeing
The Punch and Judy Man
(1962), in which Tony Hancock and child actor Nicholas Webb methodically devour a ‘Piltdown Glory’ each, one rain-soaked seaside afternoon: ‘two scoops of luscious vanilla, two scoops of tasty chocolate, a succulent slice of banana, juicy peach fingers in pure cane syrup, topped with super-smooth butter-fat cream. Oh – and a cherry!’ (Mine wasn’t that elaborate but it was good enough for me.)

18.
A tragic tale of unrequited interest. Becky was Rebecca Warren, befreckled, buxom star of the choir and in the year above. I took a shine to her, mistook her polite reciprocation for encouragement and bought her fudge from Wales. She accepted the gift gracefully but I was simply not ready for boy-girl friendship with the new undertones of pre-teenhood ‘confusion’. It was awful, like something out of Mike Leigh. I became obsessed with a small hole in her jumper as we sat there in her mum’s front room, eyeing the time. She looked better in school uniform I thought. I never went back. Married to a man called Tim now.

19.
The 16th annual Abington Park Art Exhibition, a pleasant diversion in any year. Anyone could enter a painting, and red stickers were applied to those that had been sold. In later years, I entered pictures of my own, slightly inappropriate caricatures of film stars that always got hung inside the museum in a dark corner (1980: the cast of
The Poseidon Adventure
; 1983: Donald Sutherland and William Atherton from
Day of the Locust
– which I actually
sold
to someone whom I was heartbroken to learn hadn’t a clue who the two men were; 1984: a pair of Marlon Brandos, as Vito Corleone and Walter E Kurtz).

20.
Fame at last. The issue was dated 13 August (‘Prog 25’, as they called them in
2000AD
) and I received a letter of notification from the editor Tharg with the traditional salutation, ‘Borag Thungg, Earthlet’. It came of course from Kings Reach Tower in Waterloo, London, the home of publishers IPC – where I would later work.

21.
The most significant thing about my love (at first sight) of
Happy Days
was the fact that I didn’t realise it was set in the 1950s. I just thought it was what America was
like
– and in terms of high school and ice cream parlours I was right.
Happy Days
must have been into its second ‘season’ by now, having taken two years to cross the Atlantic. (It began in 1974 in the States after the success of the film American Graffiti convinced ABC to pick up the rejected 1972 pilot
Love and the Happy Day.)

22.
I wonder if the terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 caught this TV movie? It starred Patrick Wayne (son of John) and Christopher Mitchum (son of Robert); also Lloyd Nolan and Sid Caesar for disaster movie ballast (
Airport
and
Airport
’75 respectively).

23.
I actually discovered a moderate ability for hockey, quite out of step with my Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards performance in every other school sport. Never played for the team or bought my own stick or anything but the fact that I wasn’t bad is worth noting.

24.
As coincidence would have it, two of my uncles are called Alan (one of them spelt Allen). Both are self-employed builders; both built themselves big houses in posh streets. Uncle Alan and Auntie Margaret (Dad’s sister) did it first.

25.
After the Fonz, Arthur Fonzarelli.

26.
Blame Selwyn Froggitt for this, eponymous Scarsdale halfwit off the Yorkshire TV sitcom, by now into its third rip-roaring series. I don’t know why it took this long to start using his catch-phrase.

ten

Big Boys Don’t Cry

– Is it bad?

– It’s a fire. All fires are bad
.

Paul Newman and Steve McQueen,
The Towering Inferno
(1974)

HOW MANY PEOPLE
can honestly say that Roger Whittaker gave them nightmares? I can. By the time I’d turned ten – and this seems to be a pivotal year for me, fearwise – anything could put the frighteners up me. Not that I was walking around in a constant state of paranoia, jumping out of my skin every time a car backfired or a dog barked, it’s just that fear definitely
set in
at this time. I expect it was all part of growing up.

Roger Whittaker’s ‘The Last Farewell’ was the song that broke him in America in 1975, though he was already well established in Europe. A moving declaration of love from a sailor about to go to war,
¹
it has the heartfelt chorus, ‘For you are beautiful, and I have
loved
you dearly/More dearly than the spoken word can tell.’ But never mind that.

I heard the song for the first time on Radio 2 at Nan Mabel’s during one of my special-relationship jaunts. I expect Jimmy Young was playing it. For some reason, the following couplet caught my ear, almost without me knowing:

‘I’ve heard there’s a wicked war a-blazing/And the taste of war I know so very well.’

And the taste of war I know so very well
…

That very night I had a bad dream. About war. This line from the song kept repeating in my dream like a mantra or the quote at the start of a chapter in a pretentious book. It was otherwise an abstract canvas, this dream, the thrust of which was me being alive during wartime. Jackboots marching past in the street outside, sirens, searchlights, that sort of thing. In my dream, I knew the taste of war so very well, and it frit the life out of me (as they say in Northampton). It was as if actual war had been declared that night.
²

There’s no doubt about it, a trigger had been pulled. The phoney war was over. From that moment onwards, I somehow realised that war was real. World war had happened twice, maybe it could happen again and if it did, this time it would happen to me. None of this was based on information, simply intuition. Black storm clouds had suddenly gathered on my horizon, signalling the end of the age of innocence. All thanks to Roger Whittaker. Bastard.

Now, I enjoyed my black and white war movies on TV –
Ice Cold in Alex, The Wooden Horse
– never missed an episode of
Colditz
or
Dad’s Army
, and of course we lived for Action Man, but war up to that point was a setting, not a reality. It was
not a problem
. Even the
grave
and devastatingly non-fictional
The World at War
, which we would gather around every Sunday before tea, seemed remote, grainy, boxed-off, defused. The footage of the concentration camps chilled my blood, but it was all so surreal – bodies in a pit, bodies in a cart – my mind wasn’t capable of being
scared
by it. Amazed, appalled, but not directly worried. This was clearly never going to happen to me, or my family. It was unthinkable, so I didn’t think it. The little boy’s haunted face at the end of the programme’s credits gave me the willies (as did Carl Davis’s solemn theme music and Sir Lawrence Olivier’s narration), but only in the same way that
Dr Who
did. A plate of crisp sandwiches and a piece of haslet
³
would soon banish my unease.

We had been watching
Dr Who
since 1972, much of it through our fingers, so the thrill-ride aspect of fear was well known to us. It was a good game. My preferred comics were ones with a ghostly theme,
Shiver and Shake
and
Monster Fun
. One of my favourite
Shiver
stories was ‘Scream Inn’, about a haunted hotel. ‘We’re only here for the fear’ ran its tagline. That was me.

However, this new post-Whittaker insight, vague as yet, that
some
scary things were real, marching past in the street outside, was truly head-turning. We didn’t really believe that Dr Who’s Silurian foes the Sea Devils were going to rise up out of the surf at Pwllheli – although Simon and I teased one another that they might – and we didn’t really think that the Jerries were coming.

But what if they did? What would I do if they did?

This horrible, dawning realisation was some kind of early, unconscious acceptance of mortality, even though it wasn’t death that scared me but suffering, disruption and sirens. I suspect it’s a trait I have partly inherited from my more anxious mother’s side – just as I’m certain my hoarding and cataloguing come directly from my dad. But I also suspect it’s programmed into us somehow. Perhaps all ten-year-olds have a lucid moment of understanding: we’re doomed.

I didn’t exactly see dead people
all the time
from the moment I
heard
Roger sing, ‘the taste of war I know so very well’, but it definitely marked the onset of the spooked years.

* * *

Simon’s birthday is on 29 May. However, in 1975, when he turned eight, I was the one who got the gift that goes on giving. The gift of mortal terror. Dad took us, as a treat – ha! – to the ABC in town to see a double bill. A perfectly mismatched double bill as it happened, and a sign of those random, pre-video times:
Please, Sir!
and
The Poseidon Adventure
. A tenuous big-screen adaptation of a popular sitcom
⁴
and the godfather of 1970s disaster movies, both enjoying a second run (
Please, Sir!
had originally come out in 1971,
Poseidon Adventure
in 1972). I expect Dad fancied seeing them – or else they were simply ‘what was on’ at Northampton’s only cinema – and Simon and I were up for it, as going to the pictures meant Disney and James Bond up to that point, and we had yet to be disappointed.

Please, Sir!
was amusing enough (I think some kids swore at Hedges and Price at the beginning; very ‘A’ certificate), but I was captivated by
The Poseidon Adventure
– the stunts and the high adventure, the rising water and the heroic Gene Hackman, the horror, the horror. And it literally changed my life; the world looked very different afterwards.

The waterlogged tale of ordinary people trapped in a capsized liner on New Year’s Eve, it is now recognised as the film that kick-started a box-office cycle. In fact, by May 1975 the cycle was spinning fast:
The Towering Inferno
had opened, and
Earthquake
and
Airport ’75
were almost upon us in the UK. Fire, flood and devastation were all the rage, reflecting a public appetite for catastrophe in line with the general precarious state of the decade thus far.

Very much the age of the jumbo and the balaclava, it seemed
that
planes were crashing or blowing up every week in the early Seventies: Palestinian terrorists destroyed three airliners in Jordan, a British Trident crashed in Staines (118 killed), a Libyan Boeing 727 was shot down in the Sinai desert (74 killed), and a Turkish DC-10 crashed in Paris (341 killed). Meanwhile, smoke billowed out of the
Queen Elizabeth
in Hong Kong harbour, 35 were killed in the appalling Moorgate tube crash, 30 died in the ‘Summerland’ holiday camp fire on the Isle of Man, and 10,000 perished in an earthquake in Managua, Nicaragua. The bodies were piling up, the temperature rising.

It’s a fire. All fires are bad.

The day before we went to see
The Poseidon Adventure
, Britain recorded its worst ever road crash (all road crashes are bad), when a sightseeing coach plummeted 16 feet off a bridge in the Yorkshire Dales killing 32 passengers. Not that the ten-year-old me would have noticed or cared. In my world, nobody died. All fires were somewhere else.

Then I saw
The Poseidon Adventure
: 117 minutes that shook my world. In it, most people died. The whole point of it, and of all the other copycat disaster movies, is that you can count and identify the survivors. Six. Mike Rogo, James Martin, Nonnie Parry, Manny Rosen, little Robin Shelby and his sister Susan. (‘Is that all?’ asks the rescue worker in the film. That is all.)

Now, the Whittaker watershed is something that’s been buried deep within my psyche all these years; I didn’t pinpoint it at the time. But I knew
The Poseidon Adventure
had changed my life from the moment I emerged back into the light that dusky May evening. It opened my eyes to the possibility that everything could go belly-up. Like the passengers of the
SS
Poseidon
, I could be singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ one minute, and drowned out by the wail of the ship’s hooter the next, while the boat listed to one side. It’s the classic disaster-movie narrative structure: happy equilibrium established and disturbed; a motley band of survivors organise themselves to escape, and we place bets on who will make it and who won’t. Bad luck if your money was on Mrs Rogo, Mrs Rosen, Acres the ship’s steward or their valiant leader Reverend Scott. The film may be taken as a metaphor for the journey of life and the arbitrary
nature
of natural selection, or else as a metaphor for a load of people getting burnt and drowned in a ship.

I will always cite
The Poseidon Adventure
as one of my all-time favourite films, never mind how unfashionable or dated it looks. This is a film that has lived in the very marrow of my bones for over 25 years. In the four-year gap between seeing it at the ABC and it being premiered on television at Christmas in 1979,
The Poseidon Adventure
grew and grew in my mind, forming new shapes in my memory, until the myth of it was, for me, far greater than the reality. More real, in fact. It still gives me a memory rush when I see it:
⁵
the spectacle of all those gallons of water pouring into the ballroom, the statutory shock moment when we glimpse a scalded kitchen worker, the climactic boiler room which so acutely illustrates the film’s tagline, ‘Hell, upside down’.
⁶