Читать книгу Are you talking to me?: A Life Through the Movies - John Walsh - Страница 9

‘Thanks to the movies, real gunfire has always sounded unreal to me, even when being fired at’

– Peter Ustinov

The first time I was ambushed by the Baxter Gang, I was ten years old, walking home from choir practice at the local church of St Vincent de Paul. It was a dusty, sun-bleached London Saturday afternoon in high summer, so hot that the granite pavement winked at you until your eyes hurt, your black school brogues felt like twin ovens around your baking feet, and the only solace for your raging thirst was to spend two shillings on a pyramid-shaped lump of frozen orange squash called a Jubbly. It was not an elegant form of water-ice – you had to strip back the slimy, orange-silted bits of cardboard from the apex and plunge your mouth over it, grinding away with all your teeth at once, like a horse, to loosen some icy shards of squash and hold them, melting, in your mouth until you couldn’t stand the pain any longer. Satisfying, yes, but strangely headache-inducing.

I was walking home along Lavender Sweep, a road whose name (though once presumably thought charming) always put me in mind of a loo-brush, when the Gang appeared in front of me. There were two of them, about my age, and they meant business. One was a skinny oik with a crew-cut and a green Ben Sherman shirt, the kind with the button-down collar. His sidekick was a classic School Fat Boy, a roly-poly, broken-winded gobshite with a spotty chin and a greasy Prince Valiant haircut. They stopped as I drew level.

‘Give us a suck of yer lolly, then,’ said the skinny one.

‘Who are you?’ I countered.

‘We run this place,’ said the oik. ‘Don’t we, Jeff?’

Jeff said nothing, but looked at me with a scowl.

‘What, all of it?’ I said, looking round. ‘You mean, you own this whole street?’

‘Where d’you live?’ asked the oik, with an attempt at truculence.

‘Round here,’ I said neutrally.

‘That your dad’s motor?’ he said, indicating what was indeed my father’s Rover 2000.

‘Might be,’ I said.

‘Rich ponce, are you?’

‘Where do you live, then?’ I asked in return. ‘I ’aven’t seen you round ’ere before.’ I had slipped, cautiously, into the Battersea vernacular.

‘His dad,’ said the skinny one, indicating the fat Jeff, ‘he’s been in the nick. Got no time for rich ponces.’

‘Oh, really?’ I said. Our encounter was proceeding in meaningless, small steps, but there was no doubting the threat that lay beneath our trading of questions and answers. The back door of my house was precisely ten yards away, but I could hardly flourish my key and let myself in, leaving them to trash my father’s car and run away laughing.

‘I got to go,’ I said. ‘Got a karate lesson in fifteen minutes.’

The blatant lie hung in the air, an unmistakable counter-threat.

At last the fat boy spoke. Like an old tape-recorder switched on and slowly whirring into life, Jeff gathered his great brain and said: ‘D’you want a fight?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I got to be somewhere else. ’Bye now.’

‘You startin’ somethin’, mate?’ Jeff persisted – an absurd question, since I was clearly trying to signal my departure. ‘Cos if you are, I’m going to finish it.’

It was obviously a speech he’d been practising for a while, part of a preamble to violence he’d learned from a cooler kid, and was desperate to try out on somebody, no matter how unpromising the circumstances.

‘No, no, honestly not,’ I said. Whereupon he hit me with his fist, surprisingly gently, on the chin.

I couldn’t believe it. Nobody had ever hit me there before. At school in Wimbledon, surrounded by the cream of the Catholic middle-classes, we didn’t do such things. We wrestled, we inflicted arm-locks and head-locks on each other, we dealt in Chinese Burns and Dead Legs and agonising Half-Nelsons, but we never took a swing at another chap’s face. That was the stuff of gangster movies and cowboy films.

The blow in my own backyard, didn’t actually hurt, but it was incontrovertibly a punch in the face, and demanded some form of response. Though it didn’t hurt, it was extremely annoying. So I did what any bourgeois movie-going kid would have done. I balled my fists, narrowed my eyes and bore down on the fat pillock with the words ‘Why, you …’ grating from my ten-year-old lips.

Amazingly, he and his skinny friend hastened away down the street. It was enough that they’d laid a featherweight blow on a local boy (especially a rich ponce). They had no more interest in a full-scale fight than I had. The gesture was, it seemed, enough.

In the badlands around Clapham Junction in 1963, you had to watch yourself. I was a well-educated doctor’s son, living in a working-class neighbourhood populated by criminals, toughs, tearaways, blag-artists, shoplifters, dodgy market traders, the weasel-faced sons of whippet-thin men who worked in the motor business.

Most of my days were spent at school five miles away in Wimbledon, where the streets were leafy, the shops were full of new pastel fashions, and the houses on the Ridgeway and the Downs sported glamorous, off-street driveways. Around my home in Battersea, everything was terraced, shuttered, council-owned, bleakly functional. I wish I could say I became street-wise from growing up in a tough neighbourhood, but the only streets I knew were the long shopping thoroughfares of Battersea Rise and Lavender Hill, places down which I tramped aimlessly on Saturday mornings without picking up any proletarian savoir-faire at all. Most of the time, I longed to get home, where I could read my comics and make my Airfix models in peace, away from the noisome reek of Northcote Road market and the hopeless furniture shops on Rise and Hill; full of leatherette-and-draylon three-piece suites.

When I encountered the tough kids in the neighbourhood, I had no idea how to behave – what to say, how to initiate or conclude a fight, how to handle the endlessly protracted, preambular exchange of insults. But what struck me about the encounter in Lavender Sweep was that we were all – all three of us – going through the motions of a fight rather than actually fighting; and that everything we said and did came from movie Westerns.

Take that moment when the skinny one affected to ‘run this place’ and I scoffed at his presumption. God knows what he meant by saying it, but he and I were mimicking a scene from Red River, a classic John Wayne movie. In an early scene, an exotic Mexican dude rides up just as Wayne is explaining to his toothless sidekick Groot (Walter Brennan) and his adoptive son Matthew (Montgomery Clift) that the patch of land on which they’re standing is an ideal place to start a homestead (‘There’s good water and grass – plenty of it’) and that he will establish the Red River D cattle company on this very spot. The Mexican explains that all the land is, in fact, owned by a shadowy megalomaniac called Diego, and that Wayne has a bit of a nerve to claim ownership of it on a whim.

‘Go to Diego,’ grunts Wayne, ‘and tell him all the land north of the river is mine. Tell him to stay off it.’

‘Others have come here and tried to take this land,’ says the smiling Mexican. ‘Others have thought like you …’

‘And you’ve always been good enough to stop them?’ says Wayne, employing a sophisticated play on the words ‘good’ and ‘enough’.

‘Señor,’ says the Mexican, smiling fit to bust, ‘eet ees my job.’

‘Pretty unhealthy work,’ says Wayne, waving his compadres away from the imminent shoot-out.

‘I’m sorry,’ says the Mexican, and pulls his gun, but Wayne shoots him, right there on his horse, and that, it seemed, was the way you ended any tiresome disputes over who owned the territory with the good water and the plentiful grass.

If only we could all be like John Wayne. The thought filled the heads of several million Americans (and several million English schoolkids) for decades. If only we could bully our way into acquiring land and telling people what to do, if only we knew, like him, when to pull a gun and do the right thing about territory, or justice, or cattle, how much simpler life would be. Whatever character he played, Wayne seemed to make up the rules of the Old West as he went along, and everyone just agreed with him. It saved time and meant you didn’t have to get shot. He was the Man, the Chief, the natural leader – a gun-slinging Moses who knew the way to the Promised Land and who assumed personal charge of the Ten Commandments. He had a gruff authority nobody could argue with. He showed you how things were done around these parts, and you just had to go along with it.

Perversely Red River was the key Western of my young days precisely because it presented John Wayne, for once, as wholly un-admirable. But before we get into that, a word about the stranglehold that Western movies exerted on the impressionable youth in the Granada stalls.

Being ten years old, in 1963, wasn’t much fun. You were still a kid, but you weren’t a child any more. You lived in a worrying interregnum between childish toys and pubertal exhibitionism. Your life took a sudden turn into intense physicality. Your friends suddenly turned into football fans, and their conversation degenerated into a recital of goal statistics or players’ names. Two of my closest pals became Boy Scouts and went around with flashes of green ribbon on their school socks as an insignia of their new identity as expert knot-fashioners and the like. (I was once invited to join their hearty freemasonry, to go on marches with them, attend a jamboree, and spend a weekend climbing a mountain called Snowdon in Wales. ‘No thanks,’ I said, ‘I just can’t stand all the baked beans.’ It wasn’t just a smart remark. The Scout movement had been hijacked by a Heinz sponsorship and were expected to turn out en masse in a beans-fuelled, march-and-sing advertisement. Both the prospect, and the sponsor, turned my stomach. I was happier being a non-competitive school swot.)

If you were neither a Chelsea supporter nor a Scout, there were other opportunities to test your physical robustness in public. Like being casually whacked around the head by the school bullies, Lemmon and McGuire, as they passed you in the playground. Or being winded in the solar plexus by your friend Mick Hewitt, as you walked together to rugby practice in Coombe Lane – a moment that left me gasping, ‘Why did you do that?’, to which there was no answer, except, ‘Because you were there.’ Casual violence was in the air in those days, the first whiffs of national testosterone, perhaps, in the first generation to have survived both the war and the exhausting regimen of rationing.

It seemed that you were always a heart-beat away from being punished by masters, duffed up in the locker rooms, chased across the playground by a Lord of the Flies posse of thugs who didn’t appreciate your smart-alec interventions in the classroom. And that was just at school in Wimbledon. At home in Battersea, where I hung out with the boys at the church, I watched with incredulity as, one by one, the members of the choir transferred their allegiance to rival street gangs. The sight of my one-time pal Gerard Kelly, a weedy falsetto who used to hit the high notes of ‘Faith of Our Fathers’ better than anyone else, newly kitted out in skinhead braces and steel-toed boots, swaggering down Battersea Rise arm in arm with a little girlfriend (both of them aged eleven) in her rat-tail hairdo, en route to a gang rumble in the Station Approach outside Clapham Junction, was both laughable and alarming. These guys meant business. Unlike the pretendy hard-cases at school, my angelic former choristers were looking to do some serious damage. Anybody was fair game. Even me.

The Baxter Gang started to appear all over the place. (I never knew their real names, but the skinny oik in Lavender Sweep had borne a faint resemblance to Chris Baxter, a nice, inoffensive kid in my class at school, so Baxter became the generic name for everybody who was out to whack you in the face for no reason.) The worst time was in February 1964. It was another Saturday afternoon, and I was walking up St John’s Hill to the Granada cinema when someone behind me said, ‘Got the time, John?’ Thinking it must be a friend, I stopped, turned round, and found myself sandwiched between two teenagers. One was about fifteen, a standard-issue Battersea thicko, but his friend was older and nastier – maybe eighteen or nineteen – and clad in a skinny macintosh through which he was clearly freezing. He was unshaven and undernourished.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Just keep walking, John,’ said the thicko. ‘We just want a little chat.’

What could I do? Since we were walking up the hill, it would be hard to run away up the steepening gradient. I didn’t fancy hurling myself into the traffic. As for turning round and running away down the hill, it never even occurred to me. You just don’t run away down a hill. We walked along, line abreast, in an awkward silence. Nobody tried to make conversation. Then one of them said, ‘How much money you got? Gimme all the money you got.’

I actually laughed, rather bravely, at that point. ‘I’m only ten,’ I said. ‘I don’t have any money. How much money do you expect a ten-year-old schoolboy to have on a Saturday afternoon?’

They didn’t argue the point, even though I was (they’d spotted) a future Rich Ponce. Instead: ‘Take off yer watch,’ said the unshaven one. ‘No I won’t,’ I said firmly.

It was a good watch, with an electric-blue face. My mum had bought it for me. I’d picked it out myself from the window of Laucher’s Jewellery and Clocks emporium on the Queenstown Road, and accessorised it with a thick, metal-studded leather strap. It was a prized possession.

‘Take it off, or I’ll –’

‘No I bloody won’t,’ I said, astonished to hear myself swear. ‘Just push off.’

The tall freezing youth brought up the pocket of his raincoat, through which poked something long and thin. It pointed at my stomach.