Perhaps my youth was mis-spent in darkened cinemas, when I might have been better employed reading Hegel or Gibbon or Proust, climbing Snowdon or Helvellyn with the Venture Scouts, travelling in the Sudan or the South China Seas, helping the sick with Mother Teresa. But the movies changed my life in the Sixties and early Seventies, and this is a celebration of that heady metamorphosis. And I cordially invite the reader to raid his or her own filmic image-bank and consider what flickering presences, what seductive scenes and passionate epiphanies, made them into the people they’ve become.
* J.G. Ballard, speculating about Hollywood’s influence on American attitudes to war, came up with a startling theory about movie-worship. ‘Any dream that so endures,’ he wrote, ‘must draw its strength from the deepest survival instincts. The potent spectacle of bright light playing against a high wall taps into something hardwired in our brains – memories, perhaps, of the first dawn.’
* Which goes, in its entirety: Yeah. Huh? (Pulls out gun.) Huh? Huh? Faster ’n you. Go fuck yourself. (Puts gun back in holster.) I saw you comin’, you fuck, shitheel. I’m standing here. You make the move. You make the move. It’s your move. (Pulls out gun again.) Huh. Try it, you … (Puts the gun away.) You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Well who the hell else are you talkin’ …? You talkin’ to me? Well, I’m the only one here …
1 THE CAT IN THE CRIMSON SOCK Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)
It was a fabulous wedding. At least they all told me it was. I hadn’t a clue. I’d never been to a wedding before.
The lady coming towards us was an apparition in rolling breakers of white shiny stuff, surmounted in her upper reaches by wavy clouds of white net that hid her face like tumbling cumuli obscuring a pale, autumnal moon. Everybody in the crammed pews had turned to look, as she drifted down the aisle on the arm of a teary-eyed old geezer with a moustache – what was he, her granddad? – processing slowly down the whole length of the church. I gazed at her too, this ghostly bride, but I was shocked by the sight of the whole congregation brazenly turning their backs on the altar and the tabernacle and the priest who stood beside me.
It seemed, to my prim, eight-year-old eyes, jolly rude to behave that way. You didn’t turn round and look behind you in church. Even if a platoon of Protestant militia were (as seemed likely, in those doctrinaire days) suddenly to burst in, blasting assault rifles in the air, you always faced the altar when the priest was on it, doing his priestly business. It was a rule of Catholic church-going, like not fidgeting during a sermon, not remaining seated when you were supposed to kneel, or not playing with your wodge of Potty Putty during the dead quarter-hour when everyone joined the queue for Communion.
I’d been an altar server for a year or two, and I knew the rules. I was a strict little Papist gauleiter, a stickler for correct form. Any junior acolyte who rang the gold three-dome shamrock of bells in the wrong place during the Mass would get a vicious ticking-off from me or from Thimont, my friend and co-adjutant in the altar-server army, just as he had once abused my stupidity when I’d been a bungling starter on the altar steps.
Now he and I stood on either side of the priest in his white-and-gold chasuble, waiting in our off-white vestments for the dame in the pristine cloud to arrive before us. As she drew level, she was joined by a sweating chap from the front pew who had got up to stand beside her, nervously pulling his fingers as if trying to make his knuckles crack, along with an identically-dressed other chap by his side, the pair of them quaking slightly.
The priest asked the bride and groom some simple questions at dictation speed and they repeated everything he said like parrots. I wasn’t impressed. They seemed so nervous. Would the priest speak harshly to the lady if she got a word out of place? Would he say, ‘No, that’s wrong, you stupid boy,’ to the man, as the Religious Education teacher at school ticked you off if you got a bit of the catechism wrong? Would they both wind up in detention?
It was a pivotal year, 1962. The Kennedy assassination, the Profumo scandal and Beatlemania were just months off. The old world of the Fifties, had I realised it, was about to change for ever. But at home in Balham, south London, life was still shrouded in Fifties gloom. It was a monochrome time. The smell of beef sausages lingered in the hallway where I drove my Dinky Toy Bentleys at reckless speed down the banisters, and constructed Airfix models of Fokker triplanes and Sherman tanks, and supervised pitched battles of tiny plastic soldiers – British Tommies and German desert rats – with their feet disablingly clamped onto tiny skateboards.
My mother read The Lady, a shiny magazine of unimpeachably correct, upper-class rectitude, which featured small-ads for nannies and cook-housekeepers in its latter pages. I was devoted to a comic called Valiant, full of the exploits of adventurous misfits in jungles, war zones and minor-league football clubs. My father came home from the surgery in Latchmere Road for his supper at 8 p.m., drank gin-and-orange cocktails that smelt of clinics and tut-tutted over pretentious arty documentaries (like Ken Russell’s film of Elgar) on a TV show called Monitor.
Sunday family outings in our Renault Dauphine took us to wasp-infested picnics in Cannizaro Gardens in Wimbledon, the suburb where my sister and I went to school during the week. We went to church twice on Saturdays, morning and evening, as well as the be-there-or-die mandatory Catholic attendance on Sunday mornings. It was a grey, craven, mind-your-manners time, with no hint of the rebellion to come.
Back in church that day, everyone seemed to be in uniform: long grey suits with graceful tailcoats, black-and-white suits with shiny lapels, ladies’ hats with farcically wide brims and fussy arrangements of flowers that could not possibly – not in a million years, I sternly and silently informed them – keep the rain off in the event of a June cloudburst.
I was impressed to see that everyone had made an effort. The uniform at Donhead, the prep school which Thimont and I attended, was a pale blue blazer and shorts with a white shirt and white socks, and the photographs of my first day there show a boy beaming, fit to burst with pride at having joined the army of normal boys at last, after spending too long in the mixed-infants hell of the girly Ursuline Convent one road away.
At the age of eight I was an unusually conservative kid, anxious to do right, keen to conform, one of nature’s milk monitors and junior prefects. I was probably insufferable, but I knew that I knew right from wrong. The son of sternly moral, right-thinking Irish Catholic parents, I was as straight as a poker and as square as a boxing ring. I served mass in the school chapel and once a year (a head-spinning privilege) I’d be called on to make the bleary-eyed, late-evening journey to Farm Street, the London headquarters of the Jesuit brotherhood, to serve with my mentor, Thimont, at the Easter Saturday vigil Mass in front of the country’s most seraphic Catholic top brass.
My eyes were fixed on the glory of service. I had no ambitions beyond being good and perhaps one day, if I kept away from bad company, graduating to the rank of Master of Ceremonies on the high altar in Westminster Cathedral.
While the choir, at the wedding, were singing the ‘Ave Maria’, and the bride and groom were signing the register somewhere out of sight, I leaned over to Thimont, my coserver, and said, ‘Teapot, who’s the bloke in the grey suit who was at the altar but wasn’t marrying the woman?’
‘He’s the best man,’ said my friend, who knew such things.