Trivial Tales of Everyday Madness: Different Worlds 4

The earliest memory I have of helping myself to something I liked was at Ann
Street School in the Hilltown area. We lived in old pre-war tenements with
outside toilets before being relocated to the other side of town, but still central, to
Gardner Street - number 38 - where we had a good view of the Law Hill when I
was seven. (I knew that because I stood at our 'new' bedroom window looking
down at a girl sitting against the wall on the same side. We were on the top floor
and she was Jacqueline Martin). But at Ann Street we had been given these wide
format little books with a couple of illustrations on each page, with short
accompanying text underneath. I hadn't learned to read yet, but I was frustrated
we had to leave them at the end of the day before I had finished. I still had some
way to go and was intrigued by the story. I could follow it quite well by the
illustrations. A paragraph of text was directly underneath each drawing.
Then it came to me I could just take it home. But I hesitated because I knew
I was doing wrong. I also sensed that if I asked I still wouldn’t be allowed. That
it was a part of the school, and what they gave us was separate from home. (And
why ask if you think you'll get a negative response!). In primary one we weren’t
allocated homework, that I recall. Perhaps I changed my mind and left it in the
desk or our teacher, a woman, came round and collected the books and I didn’t
take it at all... It's odd. Both scenario's seem equally likely to me. I think I
vacillated too long and the 'moment' was gone. Left to my own devices at home,
I picked up a book my dad had felt lying around.. One of its long strips included
a parody of Superman – Superduperman, where he’s kicking the crutches out of
the arms of someone. The illustrations were intentionally grotesque, over the top.
I couldn’t understand who or what he was supposed to be, the gags lost on me,
but the drawings were amazing. I drew when I could; people with small heads
and odd triangular bodies. Whether that was down to a child’s relative lack of
hand to eye co-ordination, or a reflection of an emotional perception where I saw
people as hard edged and angular, I don’t know. Other vivid memories are being
left to watch episodes of The Outer Limits The Twilight Zone Doctor Who, most
of which I found equally fascinating and terrifying. My dad's book was The Mad
Reader, a satire of American TV shows.

There was also Kurosawa's Rashomon. I'd caught the part where the warrior
is caught on one of the landings of a house, oddly similar to ours I noticed, where
he's literally impaled by an onslaught of arrows, or so I remembered it, and it was
astounding. (I've seen it since, years ago, and it wasn't quite the Gladiator-like
onslaught I remembered but it was intense all the same!). And a film about a
boxer that ended in a huge parade through a crowded street with very tall
buildings, the space between them awash with paper being thrown from the
windows. Paul Newman in Somebody Up There Likes Me. The biopic of the
boxer Rocky Marciano, released in 1956. The film ends with a huge ticker-tape
parade in the streets of New York. I felt like I’d been on a long journey; as if I
had somehow went through his trials and tribulations along with him.
Another memory is of my dad losing his temper with my mum and
throwing his plate of mince, 'tatties' and peas into the fire where it smashed and
lay in a heap over the burning coals. Being left alone and crawling around, and
opening a cabinet and digging my fingers into a packet of some red and powdery
substance pleasant to the taste before I moved on. Left alone, sitting on the floor
in the bedroom enjoying the coolness of the bed quilt on my ear that seemed to
be inflamed with heat one night, and moving my head to another part of the quilt
as the coolness wore off and that small part of the quilt was warm. The heat and
energy from me could be transferred to another substance. Crawling carefully
along a section of wall outside, in the blazing sunshine, thinking “I’m five;”
monitoring my own progress and self-awareness. Or the subdued amazement
and puzzlement over being alive and here and now. Drawing fighter jets at
breakneck speed, with gun turrets shooting at each other, trying to capture the
reality of it, and frustrated it would come only as if in flashes, as my drawing
could never be fast enough to sustain the illusion.
Standing talking with a bunch of kids in the street, a younger one who
stood there with his mouth open and an older kid who joked if he kept it open
he’d 'toss a stone in (to) it'. Walking though a close after school, where an older
kid is sitting on a wall, and stopping to talk to him as he had one of those little
figures on the end of a wooden contraption he could lengthen simply by opening
and closing the other end and so making the figure seem to leap towards you.
Then he got up and seemed like a replica of his toy, as he was taller than I’d
expected. Looking around a vast, bare warehouse or factory, as stark and alien as
another planet in the bright sunlight. Spitting on the little blackboards we were
given, our teacher dismissing my earnest objections that it was a far more
effective or satisfying way to clean it than using the duster, which only smudged
the board with chalk. Swinging a bag of groceries in sheer exuberance at being
out, and watching in fraught surprise as a bottle of tomato sauce slipped out in an
arc into the air and shattered against a wall I was walking by, and being anxious
over what might happen when I got back, but somehow not getting into trouble
for it. Maybe my dad was in.
Some tension for some reason (maybe she was possessive) with the older
sister of another kid I got along with and having the 'revelation' I could use my
schoolbag as a weapon by hitting her with it by swinging it at her, and did, and it
scared her off. The schoolbag was irrelevant of course. A more abstract fear
during the winter months when approaching the flight of outside stairs from the
back of our tenements and it was all in semi-darkness, and I was convinced that
as soon as I turned into them and was hidden from view, the man who was
waiting there would kill me. Yet no memory of the same when I had to use the
loo outside. Probably because I was so close to the main door and adjoining
flats where I would see the lights from their windows, and knowing I would
never know anything about their lives. And a metabolism as regular as
clockwork perhaps. My mother arranging the candles on my birthday cake for
me to blow out, but I wanted them to be like I had seen on TV, enclosed in a sort
of Xmassy mist that had deeply appealed to me, and repeatedly trying to explain
it to her, but she couldn't seem to understand what I meant, and neither did I have
the vocabulary or concepts to explain I wanted the same 'mystical' effect as I had
seen on TV; nor did I understand that it had been created with a screen over the
camera lens.
Waking up early on my sixth birthday while they were still in bed and laying
into the toy drum kit sitting in the front room, making short work of the paperlike
skin stretched across the surface of the drums with the wooden drumsticks that
went with it. A surprise and disappointment, combined with some trepidation,
but no one said anything about it; and anyway, there were other compensations; a
comic annual or three and selection boxes; and oranges and apples in socks,
which had little appeal for me but it was all part of the excitement and I...
appreciated the thought. Santa Claus was interesting as a character in cartoons
and films on TV and at school, but I was under no illusions as to who had
supplied the goodies. (Neither would my mother have liked me to have given a
make-believe character the credit, though she did later laugh about the tooth fairy
when some money appeared under my pillow the following morning, after telling
me to put my tooth under it; but that may have been unconscious glee on her part
my teeth were falling out of my head).

One day at school in the playground, possibly my first day and it’s all a bit
strange and intimidating and I eye my situation and surroundings with a more
than a hint of trepidation again, looking to see who might be approachable, and a
kid my age, but confident, comes over and says “Watch this,” and puts a big
piece of Milky Way wrapper in his mouth, then opens it and it’s gone. He does it
again with something else equally unpalatable such as a penny and it’s gone. I’m
gobsmacked, astounded. If it’s a trick, I can’t see how it’s done for the life of me.
This kid has some kind of supernatural ability. The world is playing tricks on
me. But I don't know anything about tricks. I took him at face value. I feel a
weird sense of unreality. I almost prefer to deny it happened but I can’t deny the
evidence of my own eyes. The world is a far stranger place than I had assumed,
and at five or six I knew didn’t just vanish into thin air. It would have to be
relegated to the back of my mind until I figured it out, sometime in the future,
when I understood better how the world worked. For the time being it was as
unfathomable a mystery as my mother’s blatant hostility towards me, if a more
pleasant and interesting contrast.

Tripping over the stand on wheels that supported the old blackboards and
landing flush on my nose; it happened so suddenly, and my nose wouldn’t stop
bleeding and a teacher is traipsing me all over the school to find the nurse, and I
stand and wait while we visit one classroom after another, and I’m still stemming
the flow of blood with a hankie, it just won't seem to stop, and when my mother
opens the door to let me in but not quite and I push the door, she’s snarling at me
to wait, until the obstruction is removed, then surprised and temporarily subdued
to see the state I’m in, or I imagine she is, as I'm feeling very sorry for myself,
and because I was banking on that to offset the usual unpleasantness’.

A tremendous hailstorm when visiting our Uncle Billy, my mother's brother,

and Auntie Cathy, and I’m out playing with my cousins – two girls, who are
fantastic, and other kids and we shelter in a makeshift den someone had made
from wicker, and it looks as if the unrelenting downpour might even shatter it and
never stop, it’s so heavy. Later after a lull, we watch it again from the windows
of their tenement stairs, as it comes and goes in great waves. Or so it seemed to
me at the time.

My mother harshly reminding me to brush my teeth. I’m six, if that, and

haven’t yet picked up the habit. “Brush yer teeth. Do you want them all to rot?”
News to me, mater dear. A potentially pleasant activity needlessly turned into a
chore. My dad coming back late from working in a bar, and not being able to get
in, my mum telling him to 'wait a minute' as she removes the blockage from
inside the door that leads into the tiny lobby, then the sitting room, and I can hear
him complaining and knocking as she comes back out of the bedroom, where I
thought I heard her talking to someone. We’re on the first floor. Years later,
when I'm fifteen or sixteen, I figure out it was some loser, sliding down the
drainpipe.

Getting caught in another downpour one evening with another kid, while
another took off, we partly sheltered under bushes that hung over a wall just
inside the entrance to someone's house in a far more affluent area than where we
lived, and I was wet and miserable, and would soon be back home to my
unpredictable mother, but it was somehow counterbalanced, if with a painful
poignancy, as if the awareness that I had the whole of my life before me
permeated the darkness, making the world a strange and fascinating place. As
did the imaginary girl I had come to picture sitting on the settee, watching TV,
aware of me yet unaffected by the tense atmosphere that surrounded us, my
mother oblivious to her “presence,” and I knew she existed only in my mind, but
she was somehow oddly real. My mother could belittle me all she liked, but she
was my secret as long as I kept it to myself, and because she couldn’t touch her
or know about her, neither could she truly affect me.
Other memories of the music my mum played on the cheap gramophone; the
record player. Sometimes impossibly sad songs that affected me even then, with
their concentrated vignettes of some lost love, or other romantic tragedy of some
kind. I'd pick up the plastic discs with their assorted and sometimes colourful
labels – I liked the symmetrical way some of them were cut around the centre, in
slats, circling the hole, a few of which had different colours surrounding it in an
arc, and as if emanating from it – and wonder how such sounds could be
contained in a slight, pliable object. Something I would ponder over again and
again fro years to come.
Later, in Gardner Street, she played Dusty Springfield’s I Only Want To Be
With You, feeling as if it permeated my emotions, along with others, such as the
Beatles' Hello Goodbye, the craft and melody of which, I marvelled at. When I
played the B-side – I'd play her records when she was out – it was equally
brilliant and emotive. (I think it's I Am The Walrus. I re-discovered it in my teens
and it was even more electrifying). It was the same at school with Miss Leaburn.
It's easy to forger she was probably still in her twenties, or early thirties, if that.
Many afternoons were spent with a backdrop of music when the traditionally
academic subjects were over for the day and we were introduced to something
more artistic such as making symmetrical shapes from painting one side of paper
then folding it, and cutting shapes into potatoes and dipping them into paint....
which had limited appeal for me. Or Hans Anderson style cut outs (without the
intricacy.) Martha and the Vandellas' Band of Gold in the background as vivid
now as it was over forty years ago. A lyric – 'All that’s left is a band of gold, all
that’s left of the dreams I hold, is a band of gold'… impossibly poignant, that
could be roughly but accurately translated as Do Something! But it was adult
stuff, and of no direct relevance to me, yet the songs and their words would seem
to somehow seep into my very being, as did Smokey Robinson and Joni Mitchell.
Another song that grabbed me, though more so the tune than the lyrics was
Manfred Mann'ss Mighty Quinn, playing in the corridor where John Reilly told
me Lynne Edwards wanted to go out with me. Music to my ears; terror to my
soul. Terror to something anyway.
It was surely the most poignant or heart-rending of ironies that I liked much
of the same music as my mother did. I could go through her records and cassettes
and find much of interest if not all to my taste, but there was Brotherhood of
Man's ’ Age of Aquarius', and The Mamas And The Papas' Califormia Dreamin'.
I had no idea what that might be about and I doubt she ever did, but the melody
was exquisite,, and a Clodagh Rodgers 'longplayer', the first track, Captain of
Your Ship, a captivating melody, if so much bubble gum. And the Archie’s Sugar
Sugar, and Young, Gifted and Black that so mesmerised me were also her
records. But then by this time I was eleven or so. There were others not to my
taste such as Shirley Bassey, her favourite artiste – though I loved Goldfinger.
And later, Sidney Devine, who I thought was pretty dreadful. 'May The Bird Of
Paradise Fly Up Your Nose' An aberration of sorts on her part. But then I was
fourteen or fifteen when she developed a passing fixation on him. At least
Bassey and Tom Jones (looking as if he’d stuffed a salami sausage down his
trousers on one album cover) had done a couple of Bond theme tunes; another
passing obsession of mine – as a whole. She was keen on Elvis; there were a few
of his elpees. I far preferred his rock and roll tunes and the sultry earlier persona
as in Jailhouse Rock, with his terrific, self-choreographed dance routines, to the
cheesy ballads she seemed to like along with Tom Jones, and his tiresome Green,
Green Grass of Home. But Elvis’ singing on quieter ones could be pretty sublime
along with the melodies. He could also look a complete twat by in a restaurant
with his date, getting up to sing a song in a film. ’There was also Harry Nilsson’s
Without You, played so often along with that working class staple and homage to
the ego, My Way, by her Jekyll and Hyde semi-alcoholic live in partner in crazy,
and emotional parasite, over drunken New Year revelries, that the virtues of
Nilsson’s masterpiece were pretty much nullified for me, if not wasted on me,
until I had the good sense to listen to it along with Bowie and Slade and Deep
Purple, along with whatever else I picked up cheaply somewhere, such as Colin
Bluntstone's Say You don't mind, and Python Lee Jackson's (Rod Stewart
singing) amazing In A Broken Dream.- this while they were out carousing at the
weekend. A pity that even then neither the sentiments of the song, Nilsson's, or
PLJ, didn’t get through to me. But by then, Lynne had faded into an abstraction,
almost, as I allowed dreams of future rock stardom to fill my thoughts, those
dreams and aspirations seeming to merge with the persona of David Bowie,
himself virtually indistinguishable from his Ziggy Stardust persona and creation.
But then Lynne was gone for evermore anyway. To be transmuted into the
melodies and androgynous persona of Bowie. But I'm getting ahead of myself
again. In more ways than one.