Paperboy Read online

  About the Book

  1960, and after fifteen years of post-war belt-tightening, Christopher Fowler’s family wasn’t quite ready to indulge a child cursed with too much imagination…

  Told through the eyes of a lonely boy who spent his days devouring novels, comics, cigarette cards, cereal boxes – anything that might reveal a story – this acclaimed memoir recalls an era, not so long ago, when Vesta beef curry was considered the height of sophistication and reading was regarded as ‘a bit of a waste of time’.

  By turns moving, painful and touchingly funny, Paperboy is about a coming-of-age that was both deeply eccentric and endearingly ordinary.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  1. The First Patch of Sunlight on the Pavement

  2. Things to Make and Do

  3. Not a Hoax, Not a Dream, but REAL!

  4. Background Material

  5. Free Time

  6. You’ll Hurt Your Eyes

  7. Turning the Tables

  8. A Friend for Life

  9. Horror Story

  10. Between the Lines

  11. Lost for Words

  12. Mother and Movies

  13. In the Dark

  14. Tea with Mother

  15. The Big Picture: Part One

  16. The Big Picture: Part Two

  17. Running Away

  18. Mother Makes a Friend

  19. Celluloid Relatives

  20. Still No News from Michael Winner

  21. Hard House

  22. Bad Influence

  23. A Nice Day Out

  24. Caravan Nights

  25. Certificate X

  26. Mummy’s Boys

  27. A Private Thing

  28. Rebel Rebel

  29. The Safety of Scientists

  30. Being Normal

  31. The Naming of Fears

  32. White Paper

  33. A Brush with History

  34. The Last Star in the Sky

  35. Accidental Examples

  36. The Sovereignty of Words

  About the Author

  Also by Christopher Fowler

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  I’d like to thank my agent Mandy Little for not thinking me mad when I told her I was writing this book, and for remaining so unfailingly enthusiastic about it. I could imagine the look on the face of Simon Taylor at Transworld when he realized I was writing a memoir. ‘What? He can’t stick to one genre for more than five minutes?’ Luckily for me, he liked it and graciously spread his enthusiasm to others. Thanks, too, to Kate Samano for bringing some level-headed attention to detail to the occasional chaos of the prose.

  Most of all, this is for my mother and brother, who were probably happy to have forgotten these events, until I had to dig them all up again. And, of course, it’s for my father, whose memory grows dearer with passing time.

  ‘My, you do like a good story, don’t you?’

  Sweeney Todd,

  Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler

  1

  The First Patch of Sunlight on the Pavement

  EARLY ONE MORNING at the height of summer in 1960, I returned from the corner shop with a packet of Weetabix1 under my arm and stopped to stare at the alien death ray that was scorching the pavement in front of me.

  What I saw was a fierce yellow cone of light, ragged at the edges, smashing on to the concrete slab beside the green front gate with the power to melt a thousand suns. It was filled with sparkling, shimmering life forms that writhed and twisted like an invasive virus under a microscope.

  I shrugged, navigated my way around the beam, went into the house and ate my breakfast (two Weetabix coated with snowy-white Tate & Lyle sugar and soaked in evaporated milk until they attained the consistency of rotted chipboard). Then I cut out the coupon on the back of the packet and sent away for a 3-D Spectroscope, so that I could view the three-dimensional animal picture card they gave away free inside.

  I only needed Number 32, the Marmoset, and Number 28, the Diplodocus, to complete the set. The cereal company had no qualms about mixing dinosaurs and furry woodland creatures. Earlier that year I had sent off for the 31-in-1-o-scope, a pocket gadget with supposedly myriad uses, although I could only find about seven. It included a pocket knife that had snapped on first use and a magnifying glass that couldn’t even burn an insect. Before that I had collected a Cornflakes marching band finished in red plastic, and a set of Shredded Wheat bath-time submarines propelled by baking soda.

  I needed to keep an eye out for free offers. A child marooned in a London backwater with no ready cash was automatically rendered passive, a watcher-listener. At the mercy of my family, I could not go very far or do anything too unusual. My only consolation was that things were probably better than they would be as an adult, when, as my father constantly reminded me, I would have to find something useful to do, like mending carburettors, or else face a miserable fate. So I passed my childhood reading, watching, listening, and soon found that I could create something out of nothing, because the tools of imagination were everywhere I looked.

  Having reached this frame of mind, I discovered that it was possible to stare at the first patch of bright sunlight on the pavement outside the house on a summery morning and see what others could not see. When I looked at the light falling through the dusty, unkempt hedge on to a section of warm grey stone flecked with mica, where ants filed past each other with shreds of leaves and ladybirds dotted the branches like shiny spots of poster paint, I was transported to a hostile jungle, a parched desert wasteland, an uncharted forest. In sparkling motes of dust, I could witness a fiery apocalypse, the scorched surface of Mars, the arrival of deadly space spores, the mistrustful eye of God, the light of salvation in ascending angels.

  Born in suburban post-war Greenwich with no money, a mystifying family and an uncertain future, I was uncomfortable even entering a shop or talking to classmates, and felt that I might not survive long enough to ever be considered part of the real world. But I was sure of one thing. Imagination, in one form or another, would always provide a means of escape.

  In the summer of 1960 an impoverished London was limping into unknown territory, still bearing war wounds that successive governments had not been able to heal. The re-elected Conservatives were intent on building homes and motorways, creating jobs, ending debt, changing the lives of working men and women, but nothing much seemed to be happening. The New Elizabethans’ England2 felt dictatorial, not democratic. ‘Do Not’ and ‘We Know Best’ were the orders of the day, as if knowledge and freedom were things to be afraid of.

  London, said one radio comedian, had spent the last fifteen years tidying up after a very messy party, and the Hitlers wouldn’t be invited round again. The city had swept all the debris away, shovelling the rubble of destroyed houses into vales and ditches, even managing to turn the hilly scrubland of nearby Blackheath into a great green billiard table. It had eradicated all the stubborn stains and had set about replacing the damaged ornaments with ugly, cheap-looking utility versions. Everything would soon be back to normal, even if it was all much scrappier and poorer than before. But where on earth did the country go from here, now that the framework of the past had burned down? What was going to replace it?

  1960 was not a time suited to imagining – but imagination held the key to the coming decade. The ideals of a new generation could, my parents were told, transform the country; goodbye sooty old industrialization, hello trendy young image. London’s image, especially, was in line for a makeover, as a tiny handful of miniskirted dolly birds and Chelsea Set3 boys in military tunics prepared to spark a revival in the capital’s dyi
ng leisure spots. Their psychedelic lifestyles were specifically designed to enrage adults, and yet there was a sense that something radically new was needed. Angry letters were written to The Times complaining about the young sporting their parents’ War medals as fashion accessories. Later, punk would democratize rebellion. London’s first swingers were few in number, and only appeared among the plum-voiced children of the rich. Their antics had traditionally been tolerated with a roll of the eye until their money ran out and they grew up. This time, though the air was thick with measured outrage, even I could sense that something fresh might come of it.

  Unfortunately, I would never become a part of their exciting world. I was ten years old, for God’s sake, a decade and a social class down, stuck in a suburban Edwardian terraced house with a family that wasn’t even peculiar enough to be classed as eccentric. My classmates never noticed me, except when I accidentally found myself in charge of the playtime goalposts and let the ball into the net three times because I was busy trying to remember what Gold Kryptonite4 did to Superman – then they noticed me long enough to kick me into a hedge.

  My formative years were to be filled with orderly lassitude, like those of a soldier posted to a peaceful backwater. These were days of strawberry jam on white bread, the squeak of chalk in hushed classrooms, Hancock’s Half-Hour,5 cold mutton on Mondays, Shirley Abicair and her zither,6 back-fence arguments, kicking about in the garden and walking alone through empty, silent streets. The only counter-culture I could experience was the over-the-counter culture of the local Co-op. The most exciting thing that happened that spring was the tortoise waking up. If someone bought a car, all the men in the street came out to look at it.

  Barely dragged out of the threadbare fifties, South London was still sooty and pockmarked, its populace coughing and on the cadge. It was a strangely private place, divorced from what was supposedly really going on. The houses might have been in London, but London was not yet in many houses. Little of what was happening in the capital filtered through; the odd radio report was commented upon, an occasional newspaper headline was read aloud over breakfast, but apart from the scandalously unfilled bombsite at the top of the hill, the part of Greenwich where my family lived was just the same as it had been for the last thirty years.

  During weekdays the men were all off at work, and their wives were busy waxing the lino in cool, shadowed hallways or in still, dead front rooms where even the dust hung motionless in the air. You could smell coal and lavender polish, cigarettes and steamed vegetables, mildew and fresh-cut grass. It was all so quiet and safe, full of purposefully pressed lips and chapped hands. The passing summer days were sensible, predictable and becalmed. Housewives’ Choice7 was on the radio, and the choice was always the same. There was very little noise. Mangles were turned by hand, workmen dug roads with pickaxes, houses were swept with brooms. On Sundays it was so quiet that you could hear your neighbours cleaning their shoes next door.

  But I felt that even here, behind the dullest daily routines, there was a dark and unruly strangeness that might somehow find a way to surface. It lay just behind a wooden fence, over a wall or through a hedge. It was hidden behind net curtains, in rooms where adults sat smoking in silhouette, in kitchens where wives washed up and whispered, in railway alleys where lovers clung guiltily to each other. It was tucked away just out of reach, on top shelves, in the backs of cupboards, deep under the stairs.

  Or perhaps it lay within the pages of a forgotten book.

  1 Breakfast cereal in tablet form that resembles roofing felt, or, when milk is added, wet roofing felt.

  2 Faintly pretentious but peculiarly charming term chosen for those born in the reign of Elizabeth II.

  3 Posh trendsetters showed their rebellious independence by spending Daddy’s allowance at the Chelsea Drugstore, a groovy bar on the King’s Road, Chelsea, now a McDonald’s.

  4 It robbed Superman of his powers for ever. Needless to say, he didn’t come into contact with it much.

  5 Seminal radio show by Galton and Simpson that changed the face of British comedy by foregrounding character. Sad, dry and hilarious if listened to with patience.

  6 She sat and pinged it on her lap. An example of someone who became a TV star purely because she played an instrument no one had ever seen before.

  7 Morning radio show that played slush for women trapped behind ironing boards.

  2

  Things to Make and Do

  ‘YOU HAVEN’T SEEN my good trowel anywhere, I suppose?’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a “good” trowel.’

  ‘Yes, there’s my good trowel and my cheap trowel.’ Bill tracked dirt into the little red scullery as he wandered in, as if shedding pieces of himself. ‘It’s a small house. How can things go missing?’

  Kath absently wiped her husband’s bootprints from the red-leaded floor. If he kept shedding and she kept wiping, perhaps there wouldn’t be anything of him left one day. ‘Why, what else have you lost?’

  ‘Bricks. The gas poker. Four planks. A geranium tub. Some sheets of corrugated iron. My best pliers. One of my crash helmets. A large panel of foam rubber. And the old playpen. I was going to burn it at the bottom of the garden, but it’s disappeared. And I’m sure we had a coil of rope somewhere.’

  I’m sure we did, thought Kath grimly. It was probably in the back room, beside the two motorbikes Bill was taking to pieces. A working-class habit, she supposed, always aware that she had married beneath her. Her husband did not distinguish between the inside and the outside of the house, which is why the tiny front garden was filled with engine parts, why there was an upright washing machine and a mangle in the back yard, why there were two motorbikes in the back room and a third leaking oil in the hall.

  ‘Where’s the boy?’ Bill plunged oil-smeared hands into luminous green Swarfega,1 gooshed them about, removed them with a sucking noise and wiped them dry on Kath’s only clean tea towel. To my father, I was always ‘the boy’.

  ‘He was under the kitchen table, reading Where the Rainbow Ends to the cat.’

  Kath was cooking gammon with tinned pineapple rings and marrow, which she would cut into strips and boil until it jellified, held together by the rind. Then she would grate nutmeg over it, a mis-remembered tip from a make-do-and-mend wartime recipe book. You could eat most of her meals through a straw except for the meat, which had usually been cooked for so long that it couldn’t have been tenderized with a lawn-roller.

  Kath didn’t approve of Bird’s Eye peas or Smedley’s frozen fish fingers because, being convenient, they were therefore common and eaten by people in council flats, as was Echo and Stork margarine. She experimented once with a packet of Vesta Chow Mein because it was exotic and bore the name of a Roman goddess, but didn’t buy it again because it was too spicy. Spices were not kept in the Fowler larder because they were nasty foreign things that spoiled the taste of food and took the pattern off your Fablon shelf coverings. Vesta Chow Mein comprised a sachet of grey powder with dried peas and unidentifiable red bits in it, like food designed for astronauts or arctic explorers, and came with a packet of little yellow strips that you emptied into a hot frying pan, and watched as they swelled up into crisp twirls. Even though it smelled like the stairwell beside Waterloo Bridge and probably contained more chemicals than the Greenwich gas manufacturing plant, I thought it was fantastic.

  Bill lit one dog-end of a Woodbine2 from the embers of another, flicking the first out into the yard, and peered under the table at the untidy stacks of picture books high enough to hide a small child behind. ‘Well, he’s not here now.’

  A terrible howl of pain rose from the garden. My mother dropped a pan of water into the sink with a bang and ran outside, ready to face the sight of blood.

  ‘Christopher, what on earth are you doing?’ she screamed when she realized that I was trapped within a collapsed pyre of acrid burning wood and twisted metal. She only ever called me by my full name when I had done something terrible.

  My fa
ther pulled at the flaming playpen, which had concertina’d over my legs, pinching the skin blue, and was the reason why I was shouting the place down. Gradually I was released from this homemade torture chamber and dragged aside, leaving the burning frame to belch oily smoke over the neighbours’ washing. The people next door had all filed out to watch with folded arms and pursed lips.

  ‘What on earth did you think you were building?’ Bill shouted, peering forlornly through the flaming tangle of embers and metal at his blackening best pliers.

  ‘A big dipper,’ I answered, as if it was obvious.

  I had attached roller-skate trucks to the base of the geranium tub, tied the rope to it and hauled it over steeply angled tracks consisting of the planks and sheet iron, laid on top of the playpen struts. The poker had an unusually long hose, and was attached to the red-painted gas tap in the scullery. It made a wall of flame for the coaster car to blast through – I would have constructed a water flume, but the tin tub was still used for baths in our house and I did not want to risk denting it.

  I had only ever been on one Big Dipper, in the hellish death-trap that was the Sheerness3 Pleasure Garden, a funfair that Kath said was run by gypsies, or at least by people with curly hair, tans, gold teeth and earrings. The front car had part of its floor missing, so you needed to keep your feet raised to avoid having them torn off in the sleepers passing below. Fairgrounds provided a rich source of horror stories for my mother. ‘Mrs Reed’s sister was thrown out of the chain-chair roundabout just as it hit top speed,’ she told me once. ‘They found her handbag over by the United Dairies … Your grandfather was there the night a stray spark burned the ghost train down with children still inside, and the people in the queue outside thought the screams were part of the ride … Your cousin Brenda won a poodle at a sideshow and used to suck it at night to get to sleep. It turned out to be made of lead, and we think that’s why she went simple.’

  I desperately wanted to build a funfair of my own at home.