Paperboy (3 page)

Naturally, none of these groups spoke to each other unless they absolutely had to – i.e., when their houses fell down.

Class was an endless source of fascination. Another ancient
Punch
cartoon I recalled showed an upper-class young lady cutting up a hansom carriage in her motor-car at Piccadilly Circus.

It was a mysterious world all right, and better to stick with what you could understand. After nursing my wounds by removing a knee-scab with surgical precision, I lay on the bed and opened my Jamboree Bag, so-called because it had a poorly printed picture of Scouts on the cover.

Inside were:

The only quality the Jamboree Bag possessed was its mystery, and it therefore remained far more interesting if left unopened. Things invisible to the eye contained hope.

My bedroom was filled with reading material: books salvaged from dustbins, books borrowed from friends, books with missing pages, books found in the street, abandoned, unreadable, torn, scribbled on, unloved, unwanted and dismissed. My bedroom was the Battersea Dogs Home of books. Unfortunately, none of them were books I would have chosen for myself. I did not want to learn about dentistry, rope-making, the Museum of Bricks or the Shropshire Evangelical Guild, and I certainly did not want to read the Condensed Books of the Reader’s Digest, not just because the novel of the month was usually a heartwarming chronicle of a Brooklyn family who had relocated to the Italian countryside, but because it was obvious that ‘condensed’ meant ‘censored’. I rescued them because I could not bear to see them thrown away. It seemed wrong to leave words unread, even when they were incredibly, staggeringly boring. I read the boring bits first just to get them out of the way, and this proved so arduous that I often failed to reach the good bits.

I would be left alone here until dusk, which at this point of summer was around nine p.m. I loved reading. When I was reading, I could not hear my parents sniping at one another. Kath had a subscription to the
Reader’s Digest
, which was filled with snippets of triumph over tragedy, girls choking back tears, brave guide dogs, recovery from secret illness and other wholesome toss in which I had no interest.

The family also owned a set of ten blue cardboard-bound volumes from the 1930s entitled
The Arthur Mee Children’s Encyclopedia
. These volumes included such fascinating and useful items as:

In an article on ‘How to Build a British House’, the end photograph showed a man standing on his roof behind actual crenellations, beneath a fluttering Union Jack, clenching a pipe stem between his teeth, staring
pompously
into the middle distance. Another article entitled ‘Things to See in London’ included the Inigo Jones Watergate, Adelphi (moved and forgotten), the Crystal Palace (moved and burned down) and, more obscurely, the W. T. Stead Memorial on the Embankment (Stead was a journalist and spiritualist who survived the sinking of the
Titanic
). The volumes were fascinating from an anthropological perspective, but also dusty, peculiar and vaguely offensive. I loved them.

In a house that contained so little to read, I would read anything, because I possessed no functioning critical faculties whatsoever. At breakfast I would read the Cornflakes box, and then, when it was empty, attempt to make the absurdly complicated paper sculpture of a tiger’s head that Kellogg’s had printed on the back of the packet. I would even read the sugar bag, although Mr Cube, the anthropomorphic lump of sugar brought in by Tate & Lyle to deliver propaganda messages against the government’s plan to privatize the sugar industry, gave me the creeps, as did Mr Therm, the weird dancing gas flame who advertised cookers. When there was absolutely nothing else left to read at the breakfast table I would read my father’s
Daily Express
, every front page of which featured ‘Our Radiant New Queen’. In times of desperation I read my mother’s knitting pamphlets.
⁷
I would read on the toilet and in the bath, and while crossing the road, which you could do because there were hardly any cars about. I read while walking along the pavement, aided by a sixth sense that kept me from vanishing down manholes or smacking into lampposts. I read just standing up for a pee, with a comic book propped on the cistern.

Ideally, I wanted to read every book in the English
language,
climaxing with Shakespeare, which at the moment looked like gibberish. But the only things I could afford to buy for myself were comics, and they became my literature.

More than that, they were an addiction.

The first one I ever bought was a Harvey Comic featuring Baby Huey, a stupid giant yellow duck in a nappy. When this character proved unsatisfying I switched to Hot Stuff the Little Devil, Little Dot, Casper and Wendy, Sad Sack, and Richie Rich, the adventures of a grotesquely wealthy blond boy who was forever carting around wheelbarrows full of giant diamonds. Even at an early age, I knew this comic was wrong.

But there was something bigger and better out there, and its name was Superman.

1
Glowing lime de-greaser; could double for Green Kryptonite.

2
Rough-as-guts cancer-sticks for the working class affectionately known as ‘gaspers’.

3
A ‘resort’ on the Isle of Sheppey that comprised a lido, a funfair, some manky beach huts, a nasty estuarine beach and the pikiest holiday-makers on the South coast.

4
Occasionally humorous Victorian magazine famed for its longevity in dentists’ waiting rooms.

5
Elizabeth’s hard-drinking sister, a legendary royal freeloader inexplicably worshipped by the lower orders.

6
On Empire Day a grateful nation (and Canada) held inspirational speeches and lit bonfires in their back gardens. It became Commonwealth Day in 1958 in order to sound less patronizing.

7
Most of which have now been turned into a range of smutty birthday cards suggesting that the models were rent boys or on drugs.

3

Not a Hoax, Not a Dream, but REAL!

‘YOU ARE GOING
to take it back.’

My mother was holding up the comic I had just bought. It wasn’t that she disapproved of me reading them. She was angry because she’d given me a shilling to go and buy a sliced family loaf, and I’d come back with Superman.

‘I can’t take it back.’ The idea was mortifying. It had been opened and
partially read
. It was like taking two bites out of a Mars bar and trying to return it to the confectioner.

When Kath stood with her right hand on her hip, she was meant to be obeyed. Her pale-blue pinafore dress and freshly lacquered helmet of tight fair curls formed the weekday uniform of a woman who intended to get things done. ‘This is a lesson you need to learn, Christopher. You did a wrong thing, and you must undo it by yourself, even though it hurts. Take it back.’

I took the comic from her and headed across the road to Mr Purbrick’s with shame soaking into my heart. Why
didn’t
she understand that comics were the key to the world? You could always buy another loaf, but Superman comics were hard to come by.

When the Westcombe Hill corner shop began stocking
The Man of Steel
, everything changed. On the cover of the first issue I purchased, Superman had the head of a giant red ant. It was a Red Kryptonite story, and, as was so often the case with DC Comics, the cover was a ‘fanciful’ – i.e., untruthful – version of the events depicted inside. Red Kryptonite was my favourite chunk of Superman’s home planet because the results to exposure were unguessable, and were usually part of some convoluted and ludicrous hoax to teach Lois Lane not to be nosy.

I hated Batman, who had stupid ears and no superpowers, and I spent all of my pocket money on comic series that were doomed to failure and had zero resale value, like
The
Metal Men
(robots with the properties of the element table),
The Atom
(a shrinking man who spent most of his time climbing out of Venus flytraps or fighting spiders),
The
Flash
(who could run fast – big deal),
Strange Sports
(weird science-fiction sports matches),
Sea Devils
(boring underwater adventures) and
Challengers of the Unknown
(purple jumpsuited heroes without superpowers).

Purbrick’s stocked comics in a rusty wire revolving rack, and I had a small window of opportunity to buy them on a Wednesday before they sold out. Certain issues became legendary, especially the tale of ‘Superman Red and Superman Blue’, although I later decided this was more about fetishizing two different versions of the Man of Steel’s costume than about the plot. One story, called ‘The Death of Superman’, was endlessly plugged across the DC range (‘Not a hoax, not a dream, but REAL!’) and I was desperate to get my hands on it. It seemed that
DC
had got themselves into this having-to-explain-it’s-not-a-hoax situation because they had made their hero so invincible that his powers negated most of the more dramatic storylines.
¹
The writers had to resort to ever more elaborate ruses for their sensational cover gambits. Virtually every plot turned out to be a trick, a hoax or a dream.

I therefore found myself fascinated by the Superman comics for all the wrong reasons. I wasn’t interested in heroics or battles with space aliens. I wanted to see how much more absurd Superman’s psychological gambits could become before something cracked and they all went mad.

Mr Purbrick was behind the counter, dispensing horrible-tasting cough sweets called Hacks. The logo on their bottle featured an elderly man sneezing wetly into a vast hankie. Damn, why couldn’t the place have been shut for lunch?

Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen comics were particularly instructive, I found, because they took the hoax-plot to a surreal level. The Man of Steel’s two sidekicks were clearly in love with him, but he didn’t love them. Lois would be humiliated, bullied, deceived and placed in danger by a man who was prepared to disguise himself under rubber masks just to ‘teach her a lesson’. Her old-maid status was endlessly mocked. She would be duped by gold-digging monocled counts who turned out to be Superman (punishing her for some perceived failure of judgement), fake superheroes who were revealed as gangsters, and handsome historical figures like Robin Hood or Julius Caesar, usually as a result of hitting her
head
on a rock and thinking she’d been hurled back into the past.

I re-read these comics with an increasing sense of puzzlement. Why would a gangster pretend he had superpowers just to shut Lois Lane up?
You are a gangster, and Lois Lane is about to expose your misdeeds in the
Daily Planet
. Do you, a) shoot her in the head? Or do you, b) fly through her bedroom window on wires in tights and a cape, snog her, propose, get her into a wedding dress so she can say ‘I grew tired of waiting for you, Superman, I am marrying Astro-Lad’ and then dump her?

In one issue Lois Lane spent the entire story with her head in an iron box, too ashamed to go out, because she’d been given the head of a cat. Sometimes all of Lois’s friends were in on these humiliations, but could not tell her because they were
being watched from space
. When Lois finally got to the altar with Superman, it turned out to be a dream caused by her falling off a pier. Sometimes she ended up in a straitjacket, raving, and this too would be revealed as a trick.

Was adult life going to be like this, I wondered? When I grew up would I have to be on my guard every second of the day in case somebody tried to trick me? Would I wake up to discover it had all been a hoax, a dream, and not real at all?

I liked Lois Lane because she was a contrary woman with a job to do, like my mother. What I could not see, of course, was that Lois Lane comics were aimed at teenage girls, and since I did not know any girls I was not able to understand the psychology of someone who would spend a week with her head in a metal box in order to get a date.