Loving Monsters by James Hamilton-Paterson Page A

background), perhaps you ought to be writing this yourself, you seem to be remembering it all so vividly. Buy yourself a tape-recorder, like me. Maybe what you need at the end of this tumult of reminiscence is an editor, not a biographer. No, he says emphatically, while managing to suggest both wistfulness and contempt. Me write? God, no. Though no doubt I have the required sensibility. (Oh no doubt, I remark bitterly to myself. In another moment he’s going to tell me that the only thing keeping him from being a latter-day Shakespeare – or Mozart, come to that – is a rueful lack of self-discipline plus too many other interesting things to do. Really, Parnassus is pretty much like Everest these days: open to practically any Tom, Dick or Harriet who can be bothered to take a week off, make the effort and afford the gear.) The sensibility(he repeats) but not, I fear, the application. Though (this comes out more graciously) it no doubt takes a certain gift as well? One wonders. (Goodness, one does. Mean old faggot, if that is what he is. What
is
he? Why did I agree to this? What am I doing here, meteless and moneless on Tuscan hills? Or rather, cold and coffeeless?) Town gas was very formative in my young life, he is improbably saying.
    – There was of course the lamplighter episode. I must have been about five. I was fascinated by this man who went around the streets of the neighbourhood with a long pole, lighting up the lamps as it got dark. No doubt you’ll be able to check this, but I vaguely remember the lamps had little pilot lights that were always burning so perhaps they came on when he nudged a tap on with the tip of his pole. I do remember the lamp-posts had an arm sticking out at the top, a bracket to prop a ladder against. This lamplighter had a pouch of tools on his belt. I think I fell in love with him. One does at five. One day he suggested I feel the front of his trousers to guess what he had inside. I had the image of a large piece of wood and connected it somehow with the pole he used for lighting: an extension, maybe, or a spare part. Why he would have kept it inside his trousers is not a question a five-year-old asks in a world where everything is so new and marvellous that no single thing is more rational than any other. Things just are. I believe I quite often felt his bit of wood. –
    You don’t think (I enquire in my role as fact-checker and tester of likelihoods) that someone among the good burghers of Beechill Road might have noticed and said something?
    – Oh no. It was lighting-up time, getting dark. Besides, in winter he wore a long coat that smelt tremendously of gas. And linseed oil, too, since he carried a ball of putty in one pocket, presumably to repair leaks. Lots of things smelt like that in those days. Even coal cellars smelt of gas and putty because that’s where the meter was. The other thing about coal gas was that it could be used to help you escape the army. I remember after the NationalService Act of 1947 plenty of young conscripts tried to dodge being called up and they used the same tricks some people had used during the war to avoid active service. When you were called up the first thing was to report for a medical. If you wanted to fall at this early hurdle you could try telling the MO you couldn’t wait to be enlisted and get among all those gorgeous young male bodies. Claiming to be queer wasn’t guaranteed to work and besides it could lead to official records and all kinds of unpleasantness. A less stressful gambit was to drink a pint of milk through which you’d let coal gas bubble for an hour or so. It tasted unspeakable but it did give you several very convincing symptoms which included palpitations, lead-coloured lips and tongue, foul breath, dilated pupils. Just about everything an army doctor least wanted to see except hammer toes and syphilis. Quite simply, you were temporarily poisoned. Some people did actually die of it, I gather. Hardly the way to win the