earnest to the cat, the tortoise or anything else that showed vague signs of sentient life. If I was lonely, I was too busy hurting my eyes to notice.
1 Smutty cheesecake-filled periodical.
2 A Dane whose brutal first-person Nazi memoirs still spark controversy today.
3 Creepy dough-faced creatures that provided a disturbing glimpse into the Scandinavian mindset.
4 Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle upset parents by creating four volumes of delightful schoolboy memoirs in ungrammatical misspelled English, ‘as any fule kno’.
5 Why didn’t we have Dick and Jane like the Americans? I guess they had more Dicks.
6 Not buried under Platform Nine in King’s Cross station as previously thought. Typical that the British should venerate a warrior who lost her most important battle.
7
Turning the Tables
I FIRST SENSED something was going badly wrong with my parents’ marriage when, during the course of a normal Sunday lunch, my father suddenly turned the laden dining table upside-down and stormed out of the room. I offered to help my mother clear up the food and broken crockery from the floor, but she said I would cut myself, and quietly got on with the job until everything was clean and tidy again.
Up until this point I had always loved Sunday lunch. Sunday was the one day in the week when my parents could lie in, and so the morning always coalesced slowly, starting with the newspapers, tea and biscuits, drifting into a late breakfast involving beans and sausages and
Two-Way Family Favourites
, the radio show aimed at BFPOs – British Forces Posted Overseas. Most of the songs they played were drippy, and the message was always the same: ‘Can’t wait to see you and the kids at Christmas,’ never ‘The government lied to us and I’ve had my legs blown off.’
All along the street it was the same: fathers tinkered and mothers cooked, while fifty wirelesses played Alma Cogan, Nat King Cole and Tommy Steele. 1 Everyone listened while they ate, so lunchtime was signalled by radio comedy. First there was
The Clitheroe Kid
, a funereally unfunny Northern sitcom about a schoolboy, with a lead character who spoke in the high, eerie voice of a medium receiving a message from beyond. There were rumours that Jimmy Clitheroe was a dwarf who wore a boy’s school uniform to get into the role, although actually he was a four-foot-three-inch comic who could only play children. Then came
Round the Horne
, which the whole family had to pretend they didn’t find dirty, because otherwise it would mean they got the jokes. I realized I was growing up in a time of spectacular hypocrisy. Everything I heard in adult conversation had to be translated:
‘Delicate’ meant pregnant or queer, depending on its use.
‘Funny’ meant queer or mentally ill.
‘Fallen’ meant that a girl slept around or had become pregnant.
‘Simple’ meant Down’s Syndrome.
‘Fast’ meant sleeping around.
‘More than her fair share of trouble’ meant her husband had run off with the girl from the launderette.
‘On edge’ meant suffering with nerves.
‘Suffers with her nerves’ meant hysterical.
‘Difficulties’ meant their oldest boy had been inside.
‘Doings’ or ‘Bits and bobs’ meant having a hysterectomy.
‘Poor love’ was used after a neighbour had lost a breast.
‘A bit niggly’ meant PMT.
‘Trouble downstairs’ could mean anything from your womb drying up to Siamese twins.
Clearly, being an adult was more complicated than it first appeared. It wasn’t all mending fuses and sitting in an armchair reading the paper until your tea was ready. Once my father gave me a warning. I had been holding a torch in place while he attempted to re-thread fuse wire in its ceramic block, and had momentarily lost my concentration. ‘One day when you’re grown up,’ he angrily told me, ‘all the lights will go out, and you won’t know how to repair a fuse, and the blackness will close in around you and there’ll be nothing
1 Smutty cheesecake-filled periodical.
2 A Dane whose brutal first-person Nazi memoirs still spark controversy today.
3 Creepy dough-faced creatures that provided a disturbing glimpse into the Scandinavian mindset.
4 Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle upset parents by creating four volumes of delightful schoolboy memoirs in ungrammatical misspelled English, ‘as any fule kno’.
5 Why didn’t we have Dick and Jane like the Americans? I guess they had more Dicks.
6 Not buried under Platform Nine in King’s Cross station as previously thought. Typical that the British should venerate a warrior who lost her most important battle.
7
Turning the Tables
I FIRST SENSED something was going badly wrong with my parents’ marriage when, during the course of a normal Sunday lunch, my father suddenly turned the laden dining table upside-down and stormed out of the room. I offered to help my mother clear up the food and broken crockery from the floor, but she said I would cut myself, and quietly got on with the job until everything was clean and tidy again.
Up until this point I had always loved Sunday lunch. Sunday was the one day in the week when my parents could lie in, and so the morning always coalesced slowly, starting with the newspapers, tea and biscuits, drifting into a late breakfast involving beans and sausages and
Two-Way Family Favourites
, the radio show aimed at BFPOs – British Forces Posted Overseas. Most of the songs they played were drippy, and the message was always the same: ‘Can’t wait to see you and the kids at Christmas,’ never ‘The government lied to us and I’ve had my legs blown off.’
All along the street it was the same: fathers tinkered and mothers cooked, while fifty wirelesses played Alma Cogan, Nat King Cole and Tommy Steele. 1 Everyone listened while they ate, so lunchtime was signalled by radio comedy. First there was
The Clitheroe Kid
, a funereally unfunny Northern sitcom about a schoolboy, with a lead character who spoke in the high, eerie voice of a medium receiving a message from beyond. There were rumours that Jimmy Clitheroe was a dwarf who wore a boy’s school uniform to get into the role, although actually he was a four-foot-three-inch comic who could only play children. Then came
Round the Horne
, which the whole family had to pretend they didn’t find dirty, because otherwise it would mean they got the jokes. I realized I was growing up in a time of spectacular hypocrisy. Everything I heard in adult conversation had to be translated:
‘Delicate’ meant pregnant or queer, depending on its use.
‘Funny’ meant queer or mentally ill.
‘Fallen’ meant that a girl slept around or had become pregnant.
‘Simple’ meant Down’s Syndrome.
‘Fast’ meant sleeping around.
‘More than her fair share of trouble’ meant her husband had run off with the girl from the launderette.
‘On edge’ meant suffering with nerves.
‘Suffers with her nerves’ meant hysterical.
‘Difficulties’ meant their oldest boy had been inside.
‘Doings’ or ‘Bits and bobs’ meant having a hysterectomy.
‘Poor love’ was used after a neighbour had lost a breast.
‘A bit niggly’ meant PMT.
‘Trouble downstairs’ could mean anything from your womb drying up to Siamese twins.
Clearly, being an adult was more complicated than it first appeared. It wasn’t all mending fuses and sitting in an armchair reading the paper until your tea was ready. Once my father gave me a warning. I had been holding a torch in place while he attempted to re-thread fuse wire in its ceramic block, and had momentarily lost my concentration. ‘One day when you’re grown up,’ he angrily told me, ‘all the lights will go out, and you won’t know how to repair a fuse, and the blackness will close in around you and there’ll be nothing
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