Are you talking to me?: A Life Through the Movies. John Walsh
from writhing across the hall. I stood watching it all, transfixed.
Finally she looked up. ‘John,’ she panted, ‘run up to the bathroom and grab a toothbrush and bring it down here.’
‘But you can’t clean his teeth now,’ I wailed. ‘He’s having a fit.’
She explained that the toothbrush was to stop the guy biting his own tongue off and I fled to retrieve a dental scour, mentally noting that, whichever one I chose, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be mine.
I had, in other words, seen apparitions, victims, nutters, every class of Gothic weirdo staring and twitching before me, right there on the home turf. I was used to it. Just as I’d seen emblems of torture and death nailed to the wall of the murky church every Saturday. The combination of a medical father and mother, and an enforced regimen of Catholic iconography, had made me an early connoisseur of the grotesque.
And in the early Sixties there seemed to be a lot of dark around. The drive to church was dark, the Clapham streets were dark, people moved around swathed in uniformly grey overcoats, and the shadows of St Mary’s church found a domestic echo in the gloomy upstairs rooms of our new house, to which we’d moved in 1962, when I was eight.
We lived, it seemed, in a 40-watt zone. Nobody ever left a room without turning off the light, so the house stayed in semi-total darkness, except for the first-floor living-room, where we gathered on Saturday evenings, like well-off refugees. The Clean Air Act was yet to be introduced to London, and smog could still descend in a grey blanket on the streets of Battersea and make the outside world through the windows seem clouded and sinister, as if seen through gauze or tissue paper. My mother drew the heavy brocade curtains firmly shut at 7.45 every Saturday evening, on returning from church, and switched on the tiny lamps on the mantelpiece and the big standard-lamp in the corner. We didn’t have an open fire, but a newly-trendy, coal-effect, three-bar heater threw unconvincing wiggly shadows over the white rug where Madelyn and I always sat to watch television. My parents ranged themselves on cushioned thrones on either side of the fire, Dad nursing a gin and orange, Mother a newspaper or a copy of The Lady. We were a family group straight out of Norman Rockwell, cosy and warm, the long red curtains keeping out the cold night, the fog, the heaving swell of the big lorries on the road, the drunken shouts from sloshed revellers stamping homeward from the Northcote pub down by the market.
I was allowed to stay up till 9 p.m. but was expected to put myself in the bath when I was told, get soaped and rinsed, towel myself dry and emerge, in pyjamas and dressing-gown, to warm up by the fire before bedtime.
On this hellish night, before bathtime, I was eating cheese and onion crisps and reading one of the Molesworth books, How to Be Topp – a favourite, full of spidery drawings of oikish schoolboys and hopeless elderly masters – when the Saturday-night film came on at 8 p.m. I was engrossed in the fictional cricket match at St Custard’s, but the dark spidery fingers of the film’s credit sequence gradually stole my attention away.
‘I did it for the children,’ a woman kept saying in a tight, guilty whisper. The whisper gradually crawled inside me while I was reading. I would look up now and again, see that this was grown-up stuff, go back to the book, look up again … On screen, the lady was twisting her hands. You could see only her hands and a dark side-view of her troubled, whispering face, as she said it over and over: ‘I did it for the children.’ On the screen I read the words superimposed over her hands: ‘Screenplay: William Archibald, Truman Capote’, ‘Based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James’, ‘Produced and directed by Jack Clayton’. The words came and melted away like a series of threats. I tried to continue with my book, but couldn’t. The tiny TV set in the corner contained something intriguing with which even a favourite funny book couldn’t compete: an early inkling of how fascinating the human heart finds things that will scare it to death.
The movie got under way. A Victorian governess called Miss Giddens, played by the buttoned-up Deborah Kerr, was being interviewed by a business-like character in an old-fashioned coat (Michael Redgrave) who was talking about his children. Ms Kerr was pretty but formal, a very correct sort of schoolmistress in a black dress, her fair hair drawn back from her forehead and clamped in a matronly helmet over her tiny ears. The man was brisk and slightly bullying, but he hired Miss Giddens anyway, and she was soon riding in a horse-drawn trap on a sunny morning towards a country house to take up her new position.
The children, Miles and Flora, were cute but rather stiff, unlike any children I’d ever met. The housekeeper (Megs Jenkins) wore a starched white head-dress and a pleated apron and was obviously a pushover, keen to be liked by the new arrival.
Everybody was getting on fine. Nice house, nice children, nice servant, all of them glad to see the nice nanny. My crisps were a nice treat, the fire was warming, the room breathed family togetherness. Maybe I’d been wrong to be worried by the credit sequence. The Saturday-evening world inside the curtained windows was as nice as could be, and so was the posh-kids drama on the television screen.
Then it started to go wrong. There was a scene in which Deborah Kerr was talking to Megs Jenkins and Flora, the little girl, out in the garden – and the governess suddenly saw, on the battlements of the house, a man looking down at them. She gazed up at the figure, trying to make out who it could be, but was blinded by sunlight, as the music emphasised her sudden panic. Tiny hairs prickled on my arm. Assuming the man to be an intruder, Deborah Kerr rushed inside the house, up the stairs, up to the flat roof – and discovered only the brilliantined Miles, sitting there playing with some pigeons. The governess asked if anyone else has been standing there. No, said Miles, there’d been nobody around but himself. But the scene intimated some evil and dread about to take over the ordinary world.*
‘This is awful boring grown-up stuff for you to be watching,’ said my mother. ‘I think it’s time you had your bath and got in your pyjamas.’ How shrewd of her to sense that the film wasn’t going to be a joyful experience for a highly-strung kid.
I looked at Madelyn. She was eating a Kit-Kat, unconcerned, her eyes fixed on the TV. ‘Tell me what happens, Mad, OK?’ I said.
‘Sure, yeah. Don’t take too long or you’ll miss the plot.’
Outside, on the landing, the bathroom door yawned open on the right. It seemed like a dark cave, the invitation to some frightful ambush. I looked up at the 40-watt bulb. The figure of the man in the film, standing in blinding sunlight, seemed to lurk there. On the wall outside my parents’ bedroom, the pictured face of Christ the Saviour regarded me calmly, his opened-up heart (that classic piece of bad-taste Catholic iconography) streaming light.
I rushed into the bathroom, closed the door and locked it firmly. There’s nothing wrong, I told myself, it’s only a silly film from a hundred years ago. The long bathroom window had a venetian blind which threw slatted shadows from the streetlamp onto the vinyl floor. I switched on the light over the sink and peered out the window while the bath was running. Nobody was around on Battersea Rise. No walkers, no dogs, no drunks. Maybe they were all indoors, watching two Victorian children explaining away their ghostly visitations.
Ten minutes later, bathed, towelled, pyjamaed, tooth-brushed and ready for bed, I stood in the bathroom doorway. The living-room door was three steps away, but it seemed like half a mile through a graveyard. A nagging alarm was dinging in my head, because I had to turn out the bathroom light, and I couldn’t bear to. I wanted the whole house to be lit up like a pantomime stage. I wanted to be un-frightened. Eventually I took a deep breath, yanked the light switch, crossed the big hallway and opened the living-room door.
My family’s eyes were fixed on the TV screen. I reclaimed my position on the white rug.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked, as airily as I could.
‘Shhhh,’ they all said, in chorus.
‘Mad? What’s happening now?’
‘It’s nothing,’ said my sister. ‘They’re just playing Hide and Seek.’
That sounded OK.