Where Did It All Go Right? (9 page)

Thursday, 12 July

I went to Jonathan Green’s party and Richard Woodhall went mad on the swing and it fell on top of him and he cut his head open and Mrs Green had to ring up his mum and she took him to hospital.
¹¹

Thursday, 2 August

This week at the park the fair is on. I had a candy floss again. I won a biro and a Dracula’s vampire bat and I scared Nanny with it.

Tuesday, 14 August

We went to Auntie Mary’s
¹²
new house. It is very old and it’s going to be all painted up. There is a pigs field next to it.

Thursday, 23 August

My cousin Dean came for dinner. I had a Lord Toffingham lolly, so did Simon. Melissa had a Lemonade Sparkle and Dean had a Kinky.

Saturday, 1 September

Dad bought me a Liverpool football kit. I went down the field to fly Carl’s
¹³
kite with him and it got stuck in the tree but a big boy got it down.

Monday, 24 September

We stayed for sandwiches and in the evening we saw
Sykes
and
Star Trek. Sykes
was good but
Star Trek
was a repeat.

Wednesday, 3 October

Mum bought me a ‘Monster Mash’ record. It costs 45p.
¹⁴

Friday, 5 October

We watched
Dave Allen
on telly, it was on at 8.15 and finished a whole three-quarters of an hour later at 9.00.

Wednesday, 10 October

We went to Paul Cockle’s farm at school. It was a pig farm so it was very smelly. I fell off the haystack while I was climbing.
¹⁵

Thursday, 18 October

Cockle brought a pig’s ear, a pig’s windpipe, two pig’s eyes and a piece of pig’s skin. I had a haircut over the road at Carol’s.
¹⁶

Tuesday, 13 November

Today I became famous because I am so good at drawing. Mrs Crutchley told me to do a picture of cartoons. I drew some clowns and some spooks.

Wednesday, 14 November

We had a day off school because it was Princess Anne’s wedding. She married Captain Mark Phillips and we watched it
on
telly. We went to Nan’s house for dinner and tea and she bought me a disguise outfit.

Friday, 16 November

Today it was art and we are making puppets out of papier mâché. I am making Jimmy Savile but I haven’t put his hair on yet!

Wednesday, 19 December

The school was open and we had a cartoon film show before play, and a party after. Santa Claus came to the infants but not the juniors (HUH!).

Tuesday, 25 December

I got Subbuteo, Meccano set 3, Cluedo, tracksuit, a hamster, Sorry (a game),
Cor!!
annual, football annual,
Shiver and Shake
annual, a calendar, a Disneyland diary, another team for Subbuteo and some more balls, some coloured pencils and two drawing pads, two pencils, origami and loads more.

1.
Dean Cave, only child of Auntie Janice (Mum’s sister) and Uncle Allen, and our perfect cousin (‘He’s his family’s pride and joy/His mother’s little golden boy’). Dean – exactly one year between Simon and me – was our ‘significant other’ growing up. Though he lived in a different part of town and went to entirely different schools, Simon and I had Dean at the holidays, which seemed to come around so rapidly then, and we got on like a house on fire. (Actually, Dean’s house did go on fire once; the kitchen was gutted.) Because of his only-childness Dean accumulated an enormous stash of
stuff
: bigger and better Action Man gear than we ever got, more and varied Dinky toy cars, a radio-controlled car, a ventriloquist’s dummy. But Simon and I had each other, and anyway, Dean’s penance was to live under iron rule: Janice, with the best intentions in the world, made Dean tidy all his toys away the second they weren’t being used, and he kept them, à la Stinky Pete in
Toy Story 2
, in the original boxes. This used to infuriate us, because Dean would treat his
stuff
with too much reverence, a direct result of this oppressive regime. His Action Man, for instance, always kept his hat on, no matter what humiliation and torture our elaborate narratives put him through. Dean’s unintentional catch-phrase was, ‘I’ve still got me hat on.’ We loved him though. Dean grew up to look just like his dad (who looks just like his) and brought divorce to the family, which was such a scandal – I’d been long-ensconced in London by then – Mum didn’t even tell me about it!

2.
What Nanny Mabel actually bought me was some coloured
pants
. My first patterned undergarments in a short lifetime of plain ones: decorated with orange and brown shapes, and M&S without a doubt (Nan worked there). I dutifully recorded the gift in my diary and then became instantly embarrassed, like Adam and Eve, and my fig leaf was the added ‘i’. Genius when you think about it. On the subject of Stalinist revision, the day before (3 January) I have written that Simon was ‘very very naughty today at Nanny’s’ and then reconsidered, crossing out one of the verys.

3.
Knights with an ‘s’.

4.
Not a clue. ‘Dirt collectors’? We’ll chalk this one up to the childhood imagination and endeavour to protect it from modern innuendo.

5.
Kelvin was the eldest, Harvey the youngest – their parents were Tony and Pat Lay. (Mum and ‘Auntie’ Pat actually went to school together.) They had a cat called Suki which once bit Kelvin on the knee and made him cry. He’s a policeman now, just like his dad. I think Kelvin and an unnamed mate once pulled me down the grass bank at middle school by my legs for a cruel jape, and I pretended to have asthma to make them feel guilty. How ironic. (It didn’t work.)

6.
Weekend
magazine, a lively precursor of things like
Chat
and
Bella
which held an allure for me on two counts: it had pop posters in it (at a time when pop was entering my life), and a weekly feature wherein true-life tales of human peril were illustrated with a dramatic photo-reconstruction, something I would morbidly pore over (‘My legs were trapped and the train was coming’, that type of thing). An early hint at my subsequent masochistic fascination with disaster. Even at this age I was learning to control my fear.

7.
Or ‘Sharpy’ as we knew him. Round-faced boy who lived in Chelfham Close.

8.
A toy tractor, naturally.

9.
Richard Griffin, also known as Griff. Someone who occupied the ‘best friend’ slot for a while. He – along with David Edwards (Eddy) – was unfortunate enough to be one of the first kids in class to be fitted with glasses. He had I think slightly older, starchier parents than the rest of us, but was nonetheless the only kid I knew who had a Shaker Maker and, boy, was I jealous of that. (A heavily TV-advertised ‘craft’ toy: you filled plastic moulds with some noxious pink agent and shook it vigorously as if mixing a cocktail. The gunk set hard in the shape of Donald Duck or similar and when it had shrivelled dry you painted it. That was it. The USP was the shaking. Immortalised in name by Oasis in 1994.)

10.
Maria and Justine Edwards, daughters of Geoff and Jean, our next-door neighbours (we holidayed together in Yarmouth that summer). Because most of the houses in our estate had low, wire-mesh fences as standard issue, an awful lot of handing over of kids by parents occurred (they were too high for us to scale without assistance). All rather convenient and sociable. The Prouts, whose garden backed on to ours, erected a high wooden fence for privacy, as was their right, but we would simply peer through the slats as if they had something to hide. We put up a high wooden fence between us and the Edwards eventually – just a few boards, not the whole length of the garden, and nothing to do with the family feud I have since learned about.

11.
We all had swings. It was as if they were issued along with the coal bunker and the wire fence. Wooden seat, chains, steel-tube frame held in the ground with metal hooks, but Richard Woodall was really going at it, and they must have worked loose. The Edwards had a slide.

12.
Mary Gardener. Not a blood auntie, a friend of Mum’s from back in the Duss’on welfare days. She and her husband had bought this barn in a field in Roade and intended to convert it, 25 years before there were entire theme evenings on BBC2 showing you how to do this. Their kids, who must have been about the same age as us, had an Evel Kneivel toy, the kind that did stunts in the TV advert but not in real life.

13.
Carl Merrick, an only child who lived on the intersection of Winsford Way and the slightly posher Milverton Crescent (the Merricks had a car porch, a canoe and a beautiful Samoyed dog). I think he was a year older than me – he certainly carried the aura of a kid who
knows more
. I liked Carl a lot; he would frequently just
give
me things, like a figurine of Charlie George, or his old Surf Flyer skateboard. When he swapped his Haunted House board game with me the deal was so obviously weighted in my favour: he only got a John Bull printing set in return. But Carl cared not – he was fed up with his game, and coveted the little rubber alphabet, so to hell with the size or price differential. (Definitely older.) The Merricks must have moved away as he disappears from my life after 1977 without any fond farewell.

14.
I may have known the value of nothing, but I knew the price of everything.

15.
I also took fright on a tour of the pigsties. It was hot, loud and dank in this cavernous barn and one of the pigs jumped up and put its head over the side of its pen. Filled with fear – of what? pig attack? – I went back out the way I’d come in and waited outside on my own for it all to be over, like a softy. Didn’t write that down in my diary, did I?

16.
Carol Cater, home-hairdresser and wife of sales rep Chris. A childless and overtly sexy couple, he was in those days very much a prototype for Paul on the sitcom
Ever Decreasing Circles
(played sublimely by Peter Egan) and she had jet-black hair and the come-hither look of a young Dorien (Lesley Joseph) off another future sitcom,
Birds of a Feather
. I had my hair done by Carol for years; she cut my first ‘spike’ in 1980, supplied me with my first henna in 1981, and latterly endured a string of impossible pop star pictures torn from
Smash Hits
to copy: Sting (when he was cool), Nick Heyward, Bono (‘That looks like a root perm,’ she explained, scaring me away for good).

four

St Francis, I Gave You the Best Years of My Life

‘Boys,’ sa headmaster GRIMES, smiling horibly
,

‘st. custard’s hav come to the end of another term.’

Can there be a note of relief in his craked voice?

There can be no doubt of the feelings of the little pupils
.

CHEERS! HURRAH! WHIZZ-O!

CHARGE! TA-RAN-TA-RA!

The little chaps raise the roof of big skool, which do not

take much doing as most of it is coming off already
.

Nigel Molesworth,
Whizz for Atomms
(1956)

I LOVED, AND
I mean
loved
, the Molesworth books, written by exprep schoolmaster Geoffrey Willans and visualised by the spidery nib of Ronald Searle, whose work I knew from the title sequences of the St Trinian’s films and
Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
. We had a book club at middle school called Scoop (the one at primary school was Chip) and through it I ordered the frankly inappropriate and scurrilous Molesworth volume
Down with Skool!
, purely on the strength of the Searle cartoon on the cover. I would not be disappointed.
¹

Down with Skool!
was one of four Molesworth books, first published back in the Fifties, collected from
Punch
magazine, not that I was aware of their vintage or their genesis. (The other volumes were
Whizz for Atomms, How to be Topp
and
Back in the Jug Agane
.) If they hadn’t been illustrated with cartoons I doubt I’d have read them, but once sucked in, I became duly obsessed with St Custard’s school; with Molesworth, Grabber, Grimes and Fotherington-Thomas, and the creative spelling and lack of grammar in the trademark prose. Molesworth spoke of ‘swots, bulies, cissies, milksops, greedy guts and oiks with whom i am forced to mingle hem-hem’ and introduced the term ‘chiz’ into my vocabulary (‘a chiz is a swiz or swindle as any fule kno’). Molesworth appreciation in adulthood is like belonging to a secret sect. The phrase ‘as any fule kno’ is like a code. You either get it – and form a wry smile at the very memory – or exist forever in concentric circles of unyielding darkness. Try it at your next dinner party.

What’s interesting to me now about Molesworth is that St Custard’s was a boarding school. As in fee-paying. Live-in. For poshos. Mention of ‘new bugs’, ‘mater and pater’ and ‘writing home on Sunda’ should have alerted me to the fact that this was a scholastic universe far away from my own. But I never twigged. Skool was skool. And down with it chiz chiz.

* * *

Abington Vale Primary School – which achieved the impossible and
took me out of the field
, at least during the week – was a first-rate place. Brand new, red-brick, like so much of late Sixties Abington Vale, and built to serve the local estates. All the kids who went there, aged between five and ten, lived nearby. Quite villagey, in a way, but without the silage and flaming torches.

It sat within comfortable walking distance of Winsford Way and in the infants (that is, the first and second year) ‘home time’ meant a benign picket line of expectant, chattering, bouffanted mums at the school gates, most with prams, waiting to troop us all back to our semi-detached plots in streets like Milverton Crescent, Lynmouth Avenue and Crediton Close. Why they were all named after towns in Devon and Somerset I don’t know. Perhaps one of the planners holidayed in the West Country.