Are you talking to me?: A Life Through the Movies. John Walsh
it? Of course I didn’t. What was I, asking for trouble? But my cheeks burned with the unsaid rejoinder and I knew, for the first time, that such words were there at my disposal. Had I the balls, the cheek, I could have said it, and taken the consequences. He might have slapped me across the face. He might have recoiled, as if stung. As it was, twenty seconds passed like an eon between us. In the distance a dog barked in the peculiar silence.
‘You will come and see me after the game,’ he said at last, loudly enough for the others to hear. ‘I’ll deal with you then.’ And he blew his pathetic whistle and we all ran off towards the second half of the afternoon’s cold misery.
But after the game he wasn’t waiting for me outside the changing rooms, even though my sporting pals confidently predicted that a terrible fate lay in store for me. I hung around for half an hour, waiting to be summoned, desperately trying to think of other useful Fletcher Christian lines I might (but probably wouldn’t) say, and finding none that would stop a furious sports master baying for blood. But he’d gone, and I snuck off home at 3.30 wondering if I’d got away with it.
In the next rugby class, and the next, he ignored me completely. But I noticed that, although his verbal assaults grew, if anything, more contemptuous, he didn’t do the ear-yanking routine on boys again.
It wasn’t much of a victory. But in its mild, unspoken way, it was a giant leap forward, into the Technicolor dawn of the Sixties.
* When Lindsay Anderson’s If … came out, six years later, its satiric portrait of a public school peopled by mad masters and machine-gun-smuggling Upper Fifth desperadoes was welcomed as a subversive metaphor for the Establishment under threat. ‘It’s something like the Writing on the Wall,’ Anderson told the press. I dare say he was right, but some of us felt we had been there already, watching a film in 1962 about a floating school whose headmaster simply had to go.
2 FACES AT THE WINDOW The Innocents (1961)
It was a Saturday night in 1963 and it was bathtime. It was one of the worst nights of my life.
I was nine and my sister, Madelyn, was ten, and we did what we always did on Saturday nights. We accompanied our parents to the knobbly-Gothic church of St Mary’s, Clapham Common, for a service called the Novena. It was a form of Catholic insurance policy. You were supposed to attend this downbeat vaudeville show of hymns and prayers for nine weeks in a row (hence novena), in order to rack up moral credits that would, in theory, reduce your final sentence in Purgatory. It was not unlike accumulating supermarket air-miles over several years in the hope of eventually claiming a flight to Rome; but it lacked any sense of collector’s achievement, since we just did it week after week without claiming any reward or enjoying any respite.
The only excitement the trip offered was the place where my father parked the family Renault in St Alfonsus Road, SW4, round the corner from the church. He always took the same spot, under a streetlamp beside a shop. On the wall to the right of the shop window was a film hoarding. It was a matter of vivid excitement to me, each Saturday, to see what new film was being advertised. I had no idea which cinema was displaying its wares; I still don’t know its exact location; I never went there. But the hoarding had a magic of its own, like an endlessly-shifting art gallery of startling images. It never advertised children’s movies, cartoons, musicals or comedies. It was always a horror movie. The Kiss of the Vampire, The Evil of Frankenstein, The Gorgon, Dr Terror’s House of Horrors … The titles, in the early 1960s, became interchangeable: The Curse of This, The Tomb of That, The Masque of The Other, The Black What-Have-You. Hammer film studios seemed to have a grip, as determined as Peter Cushing’s thin, professorial lips, on the imagination of Clapham Common audiences.
Sometimes, in a sinister variant, the movie on offer would depart from the Gothic hysteria – the haunted houses and screaming faces, the blood dripping off the title – and deal in something worse, something modern. I gazed at the picture of Devil Doll, with its hideous smiley-faced, ventriloquist’s dummy mask, a midget killer in a sensible black suit with a gingham tie and a hankie peeping from its breast pocket, and had to avert my eyes because its promise of playroom homicide was too close to home to be borne. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? also featured a doll’s head with its forehead bashed in, and sickly pictures of two old ladies with huge staring eyes. One was stern and vindictive (Bette Davis), clearly Snow White’s wicked stepmother grown old and mad; the other (Joan Crawford) was fretful, nail-chewing and demented in a different way, but I couldn’t then register the iconography of paranoia. I just knew they both spelt trouble.*
I would pause every Saturday evening and explore every corner of the new frights on display, like a connoisseur inspecting the brushwork at a Monet exhibition. I took in the disarrayed limbs, the torn clothing, the suggestion of devoured flesh, the craggy lettering, the open mouths, the torrid reds and decadent greens of the colour palette, even the subtle placing of the ‘X’ to indicate that this was an adults-only treat, until I was ordered back to reality by a parental shout, and dragged away to the church, there to kneel in silent contemplation of a naked man on a cross, with a gaping spear-wound in his side, dying slowly of asphyxiation, and an audience of middle-aged loners and crumbling old ladies with whiskery chins and parchment cheeks.
The images on the film posters became my weekly dose of fright, a bracing insight into a world of cruelty and dementia, a nasty newsreel bringing fresh information about terrible goings-on in Gothic castles and gloomy mansions. They would stay with me during the Novena service, bound up with the gloomy shadows of the Lady chapel and the imagery of religion. So many movies featured crucifixes, Satanic faces and sacrificial victims that it was easy to confuse the church-stuff and the cinema-stuff. They were both alarmingly keen on death and darkness. For ages I was convinced that horror films were shot in the dark, and that the whole movie would be swathed in blackness from start to finish. It seemed an odd form of enjoyment, to sit in a dark cinema watching mad people with staring eyes making each other bleed in dark rooms and spooky exteriors, but no odder than to kneel for half a hour in a crepuscular church, listening to tales of crucifixion with a moaning organ accompaniment.
Some nights, the advertisement featured double-bills, an extra-strength dose of horror. One night it was Maniac, Michael Carreras’s psychological chiller about an oxyacetylene-torch killer on the loose in France, and The Damned, Joseph Losey’s early classic about leathery bike-boys and radioactive children. Maniac and The Damned. Two in one evening! The poster for Maniac urged interested punters, ‘Don’t go alone – take a brave, nerveless friend with you!’ Its imagery was simple and effective: two eyes looking at you, wide and deranged, with spooky concentric rings around them, to indicate they were the eyes of an Unbalanced Person.
I had some experience of the type. I’d seen patients in my father’s surgery at our home in Battersea with a similar stare, as I came through the waiting room to tell him, sotto voce, that his supper was ready. I’d watched Dad, one Saturday morning, negotiating with a very disturbed man who was dressed in his pyjamas under his shabby macintosh, and who talked a stream of gibberish and brandished a portfolio of medical records as thick as a phone book, while my father encouraged him to calm down, sit down and ‘wait, like a good man’ for the ambulance to arrive. I hung around in fascination, as the man’s long face twisted this way and that, like someone looking for a wasp buzzing in the air, and his disturbed eyes occasionally locked in panic on mine.
Another morning, while the surgery was in full swing, someone had an epileptic fit on the No. 37 bus, and was carried off at the stop across the road from our front door. He was brought into the house and lain, twitching horribly, on the carpet, with his head rolling on the Welcome mat. My mother, a former nursing sister, had taken charge and was kneeling on top of him, pinning down his shoulders, when I arrived to see what the commotion was. It looked like the aftermath of a one-sided wrestling match. Flecks of white spit lined the corners of his mouth. There was a noise of grinding