you can do about it but sit in total darkness where anything can happen.’ I did not really want to become an adult after that.
Round the Horne
was the first show that made me think about the comic possibilities of language, even though I didn’t understand what half of it meant. When Kenneth Williams said, in his best camp voice, ‘This is our friend the choreographer, Reynard La Spoon. He can do things with a bentwood chair that’ll make your eyes stand out like organ stops,’ I fell off my chair laughing, to the bewilderment of my parents.
Kenneth was up in the crow’s nest searching for Moby Dick. ‘Avast! Avast!’ he’d yell. ‘What is it?’ ‘I don’t know, but it’s pretty big.’ Howls of laughter from me, clutching my sides helplessly. ‘You all think I’m a raving madam,’ said Williams. ‘Madman, Kenneth, that’s a misprint,’ said his foil, Betty Marsden. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I fell off my chair again.
Stars were famous for their eyes, their lips. The singer Alma Cogan was famous for her sequined frocks (‘She makes them all herself,’ my mother would parrot every time doomed, tragic Alma came on to belt out ‘Fly Me To The Moon’), but Kenneth Williams was the only star I could think of who was famous for his nostrils.
As lunch came to an end
Movie-Go-Round
started, unveiling a week’s worth of new films by running audio clips. Without visuals, just clanks and bonks and booming voices, the films were more intriguing. Hidden things created curiosity.
‘There’s something wrong with the boy,’ my father decided. ‘I think he has too much
imagination
.’ He made it sound like smallpox or whooping cough.
The table-turning incident came after Bill had spent every evening that week up at his mother’s having poison dripped into his ears.
Mrs Fowler lived to judge others. She had never travelled further than a hop-picking holiday 2 in Kent, yet sat at home in her navy-blue coat, holding court with a coven of the more easily swayed housewives in Reynold’s Place, Blackheath, offering advice about who to ostracize, who to shun and with whom to form an alliance.
Her husband had been made to feel unwelcome in the kitchen that doubled as her headquarters, and spent his daylight hours in the tool shed shaving unwieldy offcuts of metal into household items of quite astonishing ugliness. Although William was a fine craftsman he had no sense of design. He made a music box in the shape of a piano – not an attractive concert grand, but an upright pub Joanna. He also produced a coffin-thick clock with its fine teak finish covered in a layer of Perspex that trapped the dirt behind it, and a carved tug-boat which, he revealed with the proud flick of a switch, had port and starboard lights that turned it into a bedside lamp. There were many other large, riveted objects that never left his workshop for a place in their tiny house, and remained on the floor, turning rusty, where they could catch the ankles of any unsuspecting visitor.
Men always made things. Armed with a fretwork saw and reeking horse-glue, Bill also made stuff, most of it horrible. He had been a glass-blower, and filled Reynold’s Place with the kind of coloured glass animals I used to see at the seaside: ducks, horses, a drunk leaning on a lamppost, even an entire funfair carousel. Tales of Bill’s former job came with dire warnings – of the new glass-blowing recruit who had breathed in instead of out, filling his lungs with molten glass, and of delicate bulbs shattering in the hands, to send vitreous slivers burrowing so deeply into the skin that you had to wait for them to circulate in your bloodstream for years before they painfully emerged from a tear-duct or from under a fingernail.
The house in Westerdale Road had nowhere for Bill to work. His only escape from Kath was to go up to his parents’ house and sit smoking with William while his mother thumped about on her stick, dropping insidious criticisms
Round the Horne
was the first show that made me think about the comic possibilities of language, even though I didn’t understand what half of it meant. When Kenneth Williams said, in his best camp voice, ‘This is our friend the choreographer, Reynard La Spoon. He can do things with a bentwood chair that’ll make your eyes stand out like organ stops,’ I fell off my chair laughing, to the bewilderment of my parents.
Kenneth was up in the crow’s nest searching for Moby Dick. ‘Avast! Avast!’ he’d yell. ‘What is it?’ ‘I don’t know, but it’s pretty big.’ Howls of laughter from me, clutching my sides helplessly. ‘You all think I’m a raving madam,’ said Williams. ‘Madman, Kenneth, that’s a misprint,’ said his foil, Betty Marsden. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I fell off my chair again.
Stars were famous for their eyes, their lips. The singer Alma Cogan was famous for her sequined frocks (‘She makes them all herself,’ my mother would parrot every time doomed, tragic Alma came on to belt out ‘Fly Me To The Moon’), but Kenneth Williams was the only star I could think of who was famous for his nostrils.
As lunch came to an end
Movie-Go-Round
started, unveiling a week’s worth of new films by running audio clips. Without visuals, just clanks and bonks and booming voices, the films were more intriguing. Hidden things created curiosity.
‘There’s something wrong with the boy,’ my father decided. ‘I think he has too much
imagination
.’ He made it sound like smallpox or whooping cough.
The table-turning incident came after Bill had spent every evening that week up at his mother’s having poison dripped into his ears.
Mrs Fowler lived to judge others. She had never travelled further than a hop-picking holiday 2 in Kent, yet sat at home in her navy-blue coat, holding court with a coven of the more easily swayed housewives in Reynold’s Place, Blackheath, offering advice about who to ostracize, who to shun and with whom to form an alliance.
Her husband had been made to feel unwelcome in the kitchen that doubled as her headquarters, and spent his daylight hours in the tool shed shaving unwieldy offcuts of metal into household items of quite astonishing ugliness. Although William was a fine craftsman he had no sense of design. He made a music box in the shape of a piano – not an attractive concert grand, but an upright pub Joanna. He also produced a coffin-thick clock with its fine teak finish covered in a layer of Perspex that trapped the dirt behind it, and a carved tug-boat which, he revealed with the proud flick of a switch, had port and starboard lights that turned it into a bedside lamp. There were many other large, riveted objects that never left his workshop for a place in their tiny house, and remained on the floor, turning rusty, where they could catch the ankles of any unsuspecting visitor.
Men always made things. Armed with a fretwork saw and reeking horse-glue, Bill also made stuff, most of it horrible. He had been a glass-blower, and filled Reynold’s Place with the kind of coloured glass animals I used to see at the seaside: ducks, horses, a drunk leaning on a lamppost, even an entire funfair carousel. Tales of Bill’s former job came with dire warnings – of the new glass-blowing recruit who had breathed in instead of out, filling his lungs with molten glass, and of delicate bulbs shattering in the hands, to send vitreous slivers burrowing so deeply into the skin that you had to wait for them to circulate in your bloodstream for years before they painfully emerged from a tear-duct or from under a fingernail.
The house in Westerdale Road had nowhere for Bill to work. His only escape from Kath was to go up to his parents’ house and sit smoking with William while his mother thumped about on her stick, dropping insidious criticisms
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