I WAS NOW halfway into what Freudian psychoanalysis designates the latency phase of personal development, ‘a period of emotional quiescence between the dramas and turmoils of childhood and adolescence’.1 I think it is a good name. Looking back on myself between the ages of ten and fourteen, I cannot perceive many signs of the person, especially the writer and academic, I was to become – unless it was that when asked ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ my standard reply for some time was: ‘Sports reporter.’ My main interest in life and the chief focus of emotion during those years was sport; sport of various kinds but especially football and cricket, whose seasons divided the year between them.
Dad took me to watch Charlton Athletic one Saturday not long after his return home, and I was immediately hooked. At some point in the 1970s I went with a friend to watch a professional football match for the first time in at least twenty years, at the Birmingham City ground, and revived the experience of entering the unappealing back parts of a football stadium, squeezing through its stiff turnstiles, mounting a dark, dank concrete staircase, and the thrill of emerging at last into an arena packed with humming, expectant humanity, looking down on a vividly green rectangle of grass on which a contest would shortly be enacted by twenty-two brightly clad athletes; and I understood then more clearly than I had as a boy the magnetic attraction of this colourful spectacle for the inhabitants of drab urban environments. It was especially appealing to men who had been deprived of it for several years by the war, and attendances in those days were high. Charlton’s ground, known as the Valley, was a vast bowl carved out of a former quarry which attracted crowds of up to 70,000 spectators, mostly standing on uncovered terraces, a mass of bodies that swayed and surged like the sea at moments of excitement. (It has since, I believe, greatly shrunk in scale and improved its amenities.) Charlton was not, strictly speaking, our local league club – Millwall was nearer. But Millwall was in the lowly Third Division and its ground, appropriately called the Den, had (and still has) the reputation of attracting a rough crowd, whereas Charlton was one of the elite teams of the First Division, the equivalent of today’s Premier League.
In 1946 they got to the FA Cup Final at Wembley, only to lose 3–1 to Derby County in extra time. I listened to the BBC radio commentary and was inconsolable at the end. But Jimmy Seed, Charlton’s brilliant manager, who had steered them from Third to First Division in two seasons before the war, vowed they would be back at Wembley next year – and by golly they were, just like a story in one of the boys’ magazines, Hotspur, Wizard and Champion, on which I spent my weekly pocket money – and this time they won! The FA Cup, now overshadowed by European competitions, was then the Holy Grail of English professional football, and I felt privileged to be a supporter of so successful a club. After that peak a slow decline in Charlton’s fortunes began, but I remained loyal. I no longer needed to be escorted to matches by Dad, but travelled to the Valley by tram with a couple of friends in Millmark Grove. My heroes in the team were the goalkeeper Sam Bartram and the centre forward Charlie Vaughan. Bartram was a virile and genial figure, with a grin like Burt Lancaster’s and dense auburn hair set off by the green woollen jerseys goalkeepers invariably wore in those days. Jimmy Seed defined a good goalkeeper concisely as ‘a gymnast with ball skills’, and Sam Bartram was certainly that, but he also showed, in the style of his flying saves, an instinct for what transforms a game into a spectacle. Charlie Vaughan had been a star of the amateur club Sutton United before he joined Charlton, and something of the gentlemanly amateur lingered in his deportment at the Valley. I don’t remember him ever committing a violent foul or protesting against a referee’s decision, and when caught offside in possession of the ball, he would place it for the opposition’s free kick before retreating. His posture was straight-backed, with arms usually held close to his sides as if to emphasise that football was played with the feet, and he would have been appalled by the holding and shirt-grabbing that is now tolerated in professional football. He was a good role model for a football-mad boy.
One of the great disappointments of St Joseph’s Academy for me was that, in common with most grammar schools, its winter sport was rugby. I never liked the game. I was always the youngest member of my class, small and slight in stature, and shrank from the violent collisions with larger bodies that were inevitable in rugby. It seemed to me a vastly inferior game to football, favouring brute strength over skill, and I have not changed my mind since. Rugby consists essentially of physical struggle, and the rules devised to make it a game have the effect of spoiling it as a spectacle – witness the number of international matches that are settled by penalty kicks which interrupt the play and are awarded for reasons often invisible and sometimes incomprehensible to spectators. Admittedly, a flowing passing movement that results in a try can be thrilling to watch, but such moments are rare. And there must be something fundamentally wrong with a field game in which a basic tactic is to kick the ball out of play.
The majority of pupils at St Joseph’s were, like me, primarily interested in football, and at breaks in the school day the playground was a pitch on which half a dozen games were played simultaneously with rubber balls of various sizes, up and down and from side to side, ‘crossed’ like a Victorian letter for the Penny Post, so that considerable skill was needed to avoid not only tackles from opponents, but collisions with players in other games. I was very good at playground football – good at dribbling and trapping the ball and shooting with either foot. These skills I honed in the road outside our house in Millmark Grove, kicking a small rubber ball against the low wall that bounded our front garden, and in games with friends that were only very occasionally interrupted by the passage of a car. I was obliged to play rugby at St Joseph’s in games periods, but I got out of it whenever possible and ensured by my apathy that I was never considered for matches with other schools at weekends. This freed me to play football in parks with a full-size leather ball and proper boots, eventually for the team of St Mary Magdalen’s parish youth club. We played in a league of South London Catholic parish teams, experience I drew on for a section of my novel Therapy. (It was reviewed in The Observer under a heading which was a quote from the text: ‘Immaculate Conception 2, Precious Blood nil.’)
I stopped going to see Charlton play at the Valley when I was about fifteen, and other interests and demands on my time began to take priority, but I continued to follow their fortunes in the newspapers, and I still glance occasionally at their position in whichever league they are in (they have been relegated and promoted several times over the years). Watching the highlights of top-class football on television is one of the very few activities that I could describe as relaxation unadulterated by any connection with work. My relationship with cricket in boyhood was much the same as with footbalI. I was deeply interested in the game as a spectator, spent days watching Surrey at the Oval, learned all the rules and technical terms, listened to Test Match commentaries, and was familiar with the achievements of the great players of the day like Hutton and Washbrook, Compton and Edrich, Laker and Lock. I was good at cricket in the street or playground, played with a worn tennis ball and a wicket chalked on a wall or constructed from a cardboard box, and like Timothy in Out of the Shelter I suspended a solid rubber ball on a string from the clothes-line in our tiny back garden on which I practised stroke play with a cheap cricket bat. But never the real thing, with pads, gloves, a full-size bat and that hard, intimidating leather ball. At some time in the 1980s I was pressured into participating in an English Department Staff–Student match at Birmingham University, and was embarrassed to find the bat so heavy that I was unable to achieve any backlift before the ball reached it, which restricted me to the leg glance and the dead bat by way of strokes. I scored one run in quite a long innings before being bowled out.
I have tried several other sports and forms of physical recreation at different times in my life – cycling, tennis, table tennis, squash, badminton, golf, swimming, dinghy sailing – sometimes briefly, sometimes intermittently, and none of them with distinction. The one I pursued for the longest time and greatly enjoyed was tennis, but I never had any coaching until I was well into my sixties, when it was too late to get rid of bad habits, and I never had a decent backhand.
I read a lot in the latency years, but somewhat indiscriminately. I read some classics – Ivanhoe, for instance, which I enjoyed; but I was also addicted to cheap story magazines for boys, as previously mentioned. From the excellent Deptford public library, which was only a mile from home, I borrowed all the Just William books by Richmal Crompton I could find, and all the Biggles books by Captain Johns. Some children’s classics like Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows had passed me by, perhaps because of the disturbances of wartime, but I did read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, on Dad’s recommendation.
He enjoyed reading and, considering his abbreviated education, had excellent though selective literary taste in fiction. He possessed a complete edition of the works of Dickens, obtained in the 1930s through loyal readership of the Daily Express, and tried to pass on his genuine enthusiasm for this writer to me. I enjoyed Pickwick Papers for its comedy, and for many years as Christmas approached I would re-read the chapters about the Christmas festivities at Dingley Dell as a kind of secular liturgy to get myself into the seasonal mood. I read Oliver Twist and I tried some of the longer novels but did not, as I remember, finish any of those. It was not just the number of their densely printed pages that put me off – so did Dickens’s highly rhetorical language and the dark, grotesque illustrations by Phiz and Cruikshank. I was not ready for Dickens, and in fact it was not until many years later, when I began to teach and write about him, that I read most of the novels for the first time. Other writers to whom Dad introduced me, and whom I found more accessible, included the short story writers W.W. Jacobs and Damon Runyon, and Dad himself wrote short stories in later life influenced by these authors and by Dickens. I was surprised to find after he died how many typed manuscripts of these stories there were among his papers. They all display a feeling for the expressive power of language, but were too old-fashioned in tone and subject matter to get published, except for some amusing sketches of the musician’s life he contributed to the Musicians’ Union journal, for example ‘Overheard in Archer Street’ (a short, drab street near Piccadilly Circus, where musicians gathered every Monday afternoon to look for work, arrange gigs, and gossip):
‘Put down Sunday same time as Saturday. I’ll give you the time for Friday when I see you Thursday, better still, phone me Wednesday – I’m out of town Tuesday, and by the way, they’ve scrubbed Monday.’
‘So we packed up at twelve and they said well don’t leave a full crate behind, so we stopped and finished that, then I dropped Joe home and he said have one for the road, so we all had a few at Joe’s then I dropped Sid off and Sid said come in, so I had a few with Sid, so I got in about five, I think, being very careful not to wake the wife as I picked up the television which sprang at me, then I remember waking up in bed just as she came home from work, and would you believe it, she hasn’t spoken to me since! There’s no doubt about it – women don’t understand this business.’
Dad loved Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, but I owe my introduction to that classic to my aunt Eileen, who gave me a copy, which I still possess, as a Christmas present in 1944. I loved all the comic set pieces, and often used them as comfort reading all through my adolescence. Many years later a Bulgarian postgraduate who was writing a thesis about comedy in my novels enquired if I had been influenced by Jerome K. Jerome. It had never occurred to me before, but I realised at once that she was right.
In that pre-television era BBC Radio was the main source of home entertainment, and I listened with Mum and Dad to popular comedy programmes whose characters and catchphrases became part of folk culture. The archetype was ITMA (‘It’s That Man Again’), which lifted the nation’s spirits during the war and continued afterwards till 1949. Its presiding comedian, Tommy Handley, interacted with a gallery of cartoon-like characters such as Colonel Chinstrap, who converted every remark addressed to him into an invitation to drink (‘I don’t mind if I do’), the char Mrs Mopp (‘Can I do yer now, sir?’) and the Middle Eastern street vendor, Ali Oop (‘I go – I come back’). Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh, set on a shambolic RAF station, performed and written by Kenneth Horne and Richard Murdoch, was another, subtler favourite, and at least one of its catchphrases, ‘Read any good books lately?’ is still used by people much too young to know where it originated. It was a great age of radio comedians, some of whom came to the medium from music hall, others who started their careers on the radio: Arthur Askey, Rob Wilton, Vic Oliver, Max Miller, Max Wall, Frankie Howerd, Tony Hancock . . . On Sunday evenings, when Dad was not usually working, we would sit round the hearth and listen to Variety Bandbox, a long-running programme on which many of these comedians featured. If I have some ability in comic writing it may be in part due to that early saturation in radio comedy.
I went to the cinema in these years with increasing frequency, sometimes to children’s matinées on Saturday mornings, and sometimes with my mother in the afternoon or evening. It was rarely with my father, presumably because of his work, though he was never a keen cinemagoer. There were two cinemas we mainly patronised: a big Gaumont in New Cross which showed new releases, situated at a busy road junction known as the Marquis after its contiguous pub, the Marquis of Granby; and the Ritz, a smaller cheaper cinema just round the corner from Brockley Cross, which showed older films. My attitude to the cinema at this stage of my life was conditioned by experiences much earlier in childhood. When I was only six or seven I had been taken to see some excellent films like The Wizard of Oz, Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Bambi, which were deemed suitable for children but had elements that frightened and upset me. The graphically depicted malevolence of the Evil Queen in Snow White, and of the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, images like the Scarecrow’s straw arm bursting into flame in the latter film, or the tears rolling down Bambi’s nose at the death of his mother, were distressingly unforgettable. The brilliance of The Wizard of Oz is that it resembles a dream in structure and imagery, so that watching it is like being trapped in a dream from which, like Dorothy, you awake at the end, but it continued to disturb me for some time with new dreams.
During the war I seldom went to ‘the pictures’ (as we called cinema) by choice, and my opportunities in any case were limited. When I acquired the habit back in London, I favoured comic films – the short animated cartoons of Disney’s family of anthropomorphic animals, or Tom and Jerry, or slapstick comedy like the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy, or formulaic westerns like the Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry movies, with plenty of action and not much to pluck at the heartstrings. That was the sort of thing you could see for sixpence at the Gaumont on a Saturday morning in an auditorium full of shouting, cheering and occasionally misbehaving children. If I went to the cinema with my mother I would steer her towards comedies or musical comedies – Danny Kaye was a great favourite – and away from love stories and melodramas. Then one day, when I was probably thirteen or fourteen, I went to the Ritz on my own to see the Powell and Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death, now an established classic, and was transfixed and transported by it. In the brilliant opening sequence a British pilot, Peter, is piloting a burning Lancaster bomber back to England after a bombing raid on Germany, having told his crew to bale out, but is unable to do so himself because his parachute has been destroyed. He communicates his plight in nonchalant British understatement by radio to an American girl called June serving in the WAAF, and within minutes they have fallen in love. Peter jumps out of the plane over the English coast and should have died, but the ‘Conductor’ delegated to escort him to the afterlife (the spirit of a French aristocrat guillotined at the Revolution) loses him in the fog over the English Channel and he finds himself alive on a beach, not far from June’s base, and meets her. The rest of the film chronicles a struggle for Peter between the agents of the afterlife and his friends on earth, conducted in parallel on two levels – naturalistically and supernaturally. Powell and Pressburger conjured up a witty and pleasing visualisation of the threshold to the afterlife, which is connected to earth by an enormously long escalator that deposits recently deceased airmen, still wearing their flying suits, in a calm all-white reception area like a hotel. (In America the film was retitled Stairway to Heaven.) At the climax a celestial tribunal debates whether Peter should be allowed to escape the death that was his allotted fate, while down below he is undergoing a critical brain operation. There were so many things in this film which appealed to me: the vivid evocation of the war in the air, the imaginative and strangely comforting transformation of orthodox notions of the afterlife, the comedy of the embarrassed Conductor, and the touching relationship between the RAF hero (dashingly played by David Niven) and his comely American sweetheart (Kim Hunter), which perhaps for the first time seriously engaged my emotions in the ‘love interest’ of a film. Seeing it contributed significantly to my passage from childhood to adolescence, stirring in me a more mature sense of the complexity of life and how it might be represented in art. Its themes and images stayed with me, and when some friends kindly purchased for me as a sixtieth birthday present the right to command a showing of a film at the National Film Theatre, I chose A Matter of Life and Death.
One afternoon at about the same period, I went to see another film on my own – I have quite forgotten what it was – at the New Cross Gaumont, and a man sat down beside me while it was in progress. This in itself did not surprise me, since in those days of double features customers often entered in the middle of a film and watched the whole programme until they reached the point where they came in. (‘This is where we came in’ was a popular idiom, now almost obsolete.) What did puzzle and somewhat annoy me was that the man had chosen the seat next to mine when the cinema was more than half empty. Then after a few minutes I felt his hand on my thigh. I froze. Why had he done that? What should I do? Had he mistaken my leg for the seat-arm, or was he a pickpocket? After a few moments of anxious hesitation, I got up and moved to another part of the cinema, reluctant to leave it immediately and miss the rest of my film. The man did not follow me, but the episode spoiled my enjoyment of it. When I returned home, Dad was alone in the house, doing something in the kitchen, making a cup of tea perhaps, and I told him about the man in the cinema and my theory that he was a pickpocket. Dad was concerned but, to his credit, remained calm, carrying on with whatever he was doing as he explained to me that some men were ‘perverts’ who were attracted to young boys, and this led to a brief and fairly rudimentary ‘facts of life’ talk. I had already learned the basic mechanics of the sexual act from a conversation with a boy at school (needless to say, there was no sex education at all at St Joseph’s Academy), and I didn’t learn much that was new to me, except how to pronounce the word ‘penis’, which I had only seen in print and pronounced silently to myself as if the first syllable was ‘pen’. I remember too that I got some welcome reassurance on the subject of nocturnal emissions, which I was beginning to experience. I was too shy to ask any questions that might have extended my scanty knowledge of sexuality and, probably like most children in the same situation, gave the impression that I knew much more than I did, to cut the conversation short. Nevertheless it was a bonding conversation. It may surprise today’s parents that I was allowed to go to the cinema unaccompanied in early adolescence, and not forbidden to do so after this episode, but children then were given more freedom, and expected to be more self-reliant, than nowadays.
One thing I did not do in the latency phase, and later regretted, was learn to play a musical instrument. I joined the Brockley parish Scout troop when I was about eleven or twelve, which offered an opportunity to play the cornet, and I was loaned an instrument for that purpose which I bore proudly home. Dad had once commented that I had ‘trumpeter’s lips’ (i.e. thin ones) so I thought he would be pleased and helpful. However, I proved incapable of blowing into the cornet with sufficient power and continuity to produce more than a few discordant notes, and I quickly lost heart. Dad did not encourage me to persist, probably judging correctly that I would never get on with the cornet and that my efforts to learn would be painful to listen to. It was certainly not an instrument suited to a small semi-detached house. He himself practised daily for an hour or two on the saxophone and clarinet – all scales and brief disconnected phrases designed to keep his fingering in good nick, never a tune, and rather irritating to other ears – so probably Mum was also relieved when I returned the cornet (and not long afterwards dropped out of the Scouts). I can remember only one occasion when I heard Dad play a tune from beginning to end, probably when I was thirteen or fourteen. We were staying at a Butlins-style holiday camp where Dad joined Mum and me at the end of a summer job in the vicinity, bringing his instruments with him, and one evening there was a concert at which the ‘campers’ were invited to ‘do a turn’. Dad went up on the stage with his alto sax and played a sweet, lyrical ballad without accompaniment, receiving warm applause which made me feel very proud. Perhaps if I had seen and heard him play in a band I would have been more motivated to learn an instrument myself, but the nature of his work precluded that. And I sometimes think that if we had had a piano in the house, a more domesticated instrument than the cornet or the saxophone, I might have learned to play it, but we didn’t because Dad had no use for one. As long as I lived at home he was always ready to share the experience of music with me on records and the radio, to inform me and educate my taste in the several kinds of music that interested him – popular, jazz and classical. In the 1950s he was very excited by the emergence of modern jazz in America in the form known as ‘bebop’, and communicated some of his enthusiasm for Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Lee Konitz to me; later I shared his taste for the cooler jazz of the Modern Jazz Quartet, Chico Hamilton, Miles Davis, and the exquisite solos of the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s saxophonist, Paul Desmond, and began to collect their records myself. In due course he persuaded me to listen sympathetically to symphonic music of the kind he liked – mostly late Romantic and early modern, like Rachmaninov, Ravel, Elgar and Delius. Long after I had left home and was living with my family in Birmingham, he regularly recorded music from the radio or from LPs he had bought or borrowed from the Deptford library, and sent the cassettes to me with enthusiastic recommendations. But he never gave me any encouragement to learn an instrument when I was young, which surprises other people when I tell them. I think he may have been apprehensive, consciously or unconsciously, that if I should become addicted to making music as he was himself in his youth I might be drawn into what he regarded as an insecure profession. If my school had offered tuition in music I might have learned to play an instrument there, but in that respect, and several others, the education it offered was lacking.
1 Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (1972)