Trivial Tales Of Everyday Madness: Different Worlds 4

Trivial Tales of Everyday Madness: Different Worlds 4 The earliest memory I have of helping myself to something I liked was at Ann Street School in the Hilltown area. We lived in old pre-war tenements with outside toilets before being relocated to the other side of town, but still central, to Gardner Street - number 38 - where we had a good view of the Law Hill when I was seven. (I knew that because I stood at our 'new' bedroom window looking down at a girl sitting against the wall on the same side. We were on the top floor and she was Jacqueline Martin). But at Ann Street we had been given these wide format little books with a couple of illustrations on each page, with short accompanying text underneath. I hadn't learned to read yet, but I was frustrated we had to leave them at the end of the day before I had finished. I still had some way to go and was intrigued by the story. I could follow it quite well by the illustrations. A paragraph of text was directly underneath each drawing. Then it came to me I could just take it home. But I hesitated because I knew I was doing wrong. I also sensed that if I asked I still wouldn’t be allowed. That it was a part of the school, and what they gave us was separate from home. (And why ask if you think you'll get a negative response!). In primary one we weren’t allocated homework, that I recall. Perhaps I changed my mind and left it in the desk or our teacher, a woman, came round and collected the books and I didn’t take it at all... It's odd. Both scenario's seem equally likely to me. I think I vacillated too long and the 'moment' was gone. Left to my own devices at home, I picked up a book my dad had felt lying around.. One of its long strips included a parody of Superman – Superduperman, where he’s kicking the crutches out of the arms of someone. The illustrations were intentionally grotesque, over the top. I couldn’t understand who or what he was supposed to be, the gags lost on me, but the drawings were amazing. I drew when I could; people with small heads and odd triangular bodies. Whether that was down to a child’s relative lack of hand to eye co-ordination, or a reflection of an emotional perception where I saw people as hard edged and angular, I don’t know. Other vivid memories are being left to watch episodes of The Outer Limits The Twilight Zone Doctor Who, most of which I found equally fascinating and terrifying. My dad's book was The Mad Reader, a satire of American TV shows. There was also Kurosawa's Rashomon. I'd caught the part where the warrior is caught on one of the landings of a house, oddly similar to ours I noticed, where he's literally impaled by an onslaught of arrows, or so I remembered it, and it was astounding. (I've seen it since, years ago, and it wasn't quite the Gladiator-like onslaught I remembered but it was intense all the same!). And a film about a boxer that ended in a huge parade through a crowded street with very tall buildings, the space between them awash with paper being thrown from the windows. Paul Newman in Somebody Up There Likes Me. The biopic of the boxer Rocky Marciano, released in 1956. The film ends with a huge ticker-tape parade in the streets of New York. I felt like I’d been on a long journey; as if I

had somehow went through his trials and tribulations along with him. Another memory is of my dad losing his temper with my mum and throwing his plate of mince, 'tatties' and peas into the fire where it smashed and lay in a heap over the burning coals. Being left alone and crawling around, and opening a cabinet and digging my fingers into a packet of some red and powdery substance pleasant to the taste before I moved on. Left alone, sitting on the floor in the bedroom enjoying the coolness of the bed quilt on my ear that seemed to be inflamed with heat one night, and moving my head to another part of the quilt as the coolness wore off and that small part of the quilt was warm. The heat and energy from me could be transferred to another substance. Crawling carefully along a section of wall outside, in the blazing sunshine, thinking “I’m five;” monitoring my own progress and self-awareness. Or the subdued amazement and puzzlement over being alive and here and now. Drawing fighter jets at breakneck speed, with gun turrets shooting at each other, trying to capture the reality of it, and frustrated it would come only as if in flashes, as my drawing could never be fast enough to sustain the illusion. Standing talking with a bunch of kids in the street, a younger one who stood there with his mouth open and an older kid who joked if he kept it open he’d 'toss a stone in (to) it'. Walking though a close after school, where an older kid is sitting on a wall, and stopping to talk to him as he had one of those little figures on the end of a wooden contraption he could lengthen simply by opening and closing the other end and so making the figure seem to leap towards you. Then he got up and seemed like a replica of his toy, as he was taller than I’d expected. Looking around a vast, bare warehouse or factory, as stark and alien as another planet in the bright sunlight. Spitting on the little blackboards we were given, our teacher dismissing my earnest objections that it was a far more effective or satisfying way to clean it than using the duster, which only smudged the board with chalk. Swinging a bag of groceries in sheer exuberance at being out, and watching in fraught surprise as a bottle of tomato sauce slipped out in an arc into the air and shattered against a wall I was walking by, and being anxious over what might happen when I got back, but somehow not getting into trouble for it. Maybe my dad was in. Some tension for some reason (maybe she was possessive) with the older sister of another kid I got along with and having the 'revelation' I could use my schoolbag as a weapon by hitting her with it by swinging it at her, and did, and it scared her off. The schoolbag was irrelevant of course. A more abstract fear during the winter months when approaching the flight of outside stairs from the back of our tenements and it was all in semi-darkness, and I was convinced that as soon as I turned into them and was hidden from view, the man who was waiting there would kill me. Yet no memory of the same when I had to use the loo outside. Probably because I was so close to the main door and adjoining flats where I would see the lights from their windows, and knowing I would never know anything about their lives. And a metabolism as regular as clockwork perhaps. My mother arranging the candles on my birthday cake for me to blow out, but I wanted them to be like I had seen on TV, enclosed in a sort

of Xmassy mist that had deeply appealed to me, and repeatedly trying to explain it to her, but she couldn't seem to understand what I meant, and neither did I have the vocabulary or concepts to explain I wanted the same 'mystical' effect as I had seen on TV; nor did I understand that it had been created with a screen over the camera lens. Waking up early on my sixth birthday while they were still in bed and laying into the toy drum kit sitting in the front room, making short work of the paperlike skin stretched across the surface of the drums with the wooden drumsticks that went with it. A surprise and disappointment, combined with some trepidation, but no one said anything about it; and anyway, there were other compensations; a comic annual or three and selection boxes; and oranges and apples in socks, which had little appeal for me but it was all part of the excitement and I... appreciated the thought. Santa Claus was interesting as a character in cartoons and films on TV and at school, but I was under no illusions as to who had supplied the goodies. (Neither would my mother have liked me to have given a make-believe character the credit, though she did later laugh about the tooth fairy when some money appeared under my pillow the following morning, after telling me to put my tooth under it; but that may have been unconscious glee on her part my teeth were falling out of my head). One day at school in the playground, possibly my first day and it’s all a bit strange and intimidating and I eye my situation and surroundings with a more than a hint of trepidation again, looking to see who might be approachable, and a kid my age, but confident, comes over and says “Watch this,” and puts a big piece of Milky Way wrapper in his mouth, then opens it and it’s gone. He does it again with something else equally unpalatable such as a penny and it’s gone. I’m gobsmacked, astounded. If it’s a trick, I can’t see how it’s done for the life of me. This kid has some kind of supernatural ability. The world is playing tricks on me. But I don't know anything about tricks. I took him at face value. I feel a weird sense of unreality. I almost prefer to deny it happened but I can’t deny the evidence of my own eyes. The world is a far stranger place than I had assumed, and at five or six I knew didn’t just vanish into thin air. It would have to be relegated to the back of my mind until I figured it out, sometime in the future, when I understood better how the world worked. For the time being it was as unfathomable a mystery as my mother’s blatant hostility towards me, if a more pleasant and interesting contrast. Tripping over the stand on wheels that supported the old blackboards and landing flush on my nose; it happened so suddenly, and my nose wouldn’t stop bleeding and a teacher is traipsing me all over the school to find the nurse, and I stand and wait while we visit one classroom after another, and I’m still stemming the flow of blood with a hankie, it just won't seem to stop, and when my mother opens the door to let me in but not quite and I push the door, she’s snarling at me to wait, until the obstruction is removed, then surprised and temporarily subdued to see the state I’m in, or I imagine she is, as I'm feeling very sorry for myself,

and because I was banking on that to offset the usual unpleasantness’. A tremendous hailstorm when visiting our Uncle Billy, my mother's brother, and Auntie Cathy, and I’m out playing with my cousins – two girls, who are fantastic, and other kids and we shelter in a makeshift den someone had made from wicker, and it looks as if the unrelenting downpour might even shatter it and never stop, it’s so heavy. Later after a lull, we watch it again from the windows of their tenement stairs, as it comes and goes in great waves. Or so it seemed to me at the time. My mother harshly reminding me to brush my teeth. I’m six, if that, and haven’t yet picked up the habit. “Brush yer teeth. Do you want them all to rot?” News to me, mater dear. A potentially pleasant activity needlessly turned into a chore. My dad coming back late from working in a bar, and not being able to get in, my mum telling him to 'wait a minute' as she removes the blockage from inside the door that leads into the tiny lobby, then the sitting room, and I can hear him complaining and knocking as she comes back out of the bedroom, where I thought I heard her talking to someone. We’re on the first floor. Years later, when I'm fifteen or sixteen, I figure out it was some loser, sliding down the drainpipe. Getting caught in another downpour one evening with another kid, while another took off, we partly sheltered under bushes that hung over a wall just inside the entrance to someone's house in a far more affluent area than where we lived, and I was wet and miserable, and would soon be back home to my unpredictable mother, but it was somehow counterbalanced, if with a painful poignancy, as if the awareness that I had the whole of my life before me permeated the darkness, making the world a strange and fascinating place. As did the imaginary girl I had come to picture sitting on the settee, watching TV, aware of me yet unaffected by the tense atmosphere that surrounded us, my mother oblivious to her “presence,” and I knew she existed only in my mind, but she was somehow oddly real. My mother could belittle me all she liked, but she was my secret as long as I kept it to myself, and because she couldn’t touch her or know about her, neither could she truly affect me. Other memories of the music my mum played on the cheap gramophone; the record player. Sometimes impossibly sad songs that affected me even then, with their concentrated vignettes of some lost love, or other romantic tragedy of some kind. I'd pick up the plastic discs with their assorted and sometimes colourful labels – I liked the symmetrical way some of them were cut around the centre, in slats, circling the hole, a few of which had different colours surrounding it in an arc, and as if emanating from it – and wonder how such sounds could be contained in a slight, pliable object. Something I would ponder over again and again fro years to come. Later, in Gardner Street, she played Dusty Springfield’s I Only Want To Be With You, feeling as if it permeated my emotions, along with others, such as the

Beatles' Hello Goodbye, the craft and melody of which, I marvelled at. When I played the B-side – I'd play her records when she was out – it was equally brilliant and emotive. (I think it's I Am The Walrus. I re-discovered it in my teens and it was even more electrifying). It was the same at school with Miss Leaburn. It's easy to forger she was probably still in her twenties, or early thirties, if that. Many afternoons were spent with a backdrop of music when the traditionally academic subjects were over for the day and we were introduced to something more artistic such as making symmetrical shapes from painting one side of paper then folding it, and cutting shapes into potatoes and dipping them into paint.... which had limited appeal for me. Or Hans Anderson style cut outs (without the intricacy.) Martha and the Vandellas' Band of Gold in the background as vivid now as it was over forty years ago. A lyric – 'All that’s left is a band of gold, all that’s left of the dreams I hold, is a band of gold'… impossibly poignant, that could be roughly but accurately translated as Do Something! But it was adult stuff, and of no direct relevance to me, yet the songs and their words would seem to somehow seep into my very being, as did Smokey Robinson and Joni Mitchell. Another song that grabbed me, though more so the tune than the lyrics was Manfred Mann'ss Mighty Quinn, playing in the corridor where John Reilly told me Lynne Edwards wanted to go out with me. Music to my ears; terror to my soul. Terror to something anyway. It was surely the most poignant or heart-rending of ironies that I liked much of the same music as my mother did. I could go through her records and cassettes and find much of interest if not all to my taste, but there was Brotherhood of Man's ’ Age of Aquarius', and The Mamas And The Papas' Califormia Dreamin'. I had no idea what that might be about and I doubt she ever did, but the melody was exquisite,, and a Clodagh Rodgers 'longplayer', the first track, Captain of Your Ship, a captivating melody, if so much bubble gum. And the Archie’s Sugar Sugar, and Young, Gifted and Black that so mesmerised me were also her records. But then by this time I was eleven or so. There were others not to my taste such as Shirley Bassey, her favourite artiste – though I loved Goldfinger. And later, Sidney Devine, who I thought was pretty dreadful. 'May The Bird Of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose' An aberration of sorts on her part. But then I was fourteen or fifteen when she developed a passing fixation on him. At least Bassey and Tom Jones (looking as if he’d stuffed a salami sausage down his trousers on one album cover) had done a couple of Bond theme tunes; another passing obsession of mine – as a whole. She was keen on Elvis; there were a few of his elpees. I far preferred his rock and roll tunes and the sultry earlier persona as in Jailhouse Rock, with his terrific, self-choreographed dance routines, to the cheesy ballads she seemed to like along with Tom Jones, and his tiresome Green, Green Grass of Home. But Elvis’ singing on quieter ones could be pretty sublime along with the melodies. He could also look a complete twat by in a restaurant with his date, getting up to sing a song in a film. ’There was also Harry Nilsson’s Without You, played so often along with that working class staple and homage to the ego, My Way, by her Jekyll and Hyde semi-alcoholic live in partner in crazy, and emotional parasite, over drunken New Year revelries, that the virtues of

Nilsson’s masterpiece were pretty much nullified for me, if not wasted on me, until I had the good sense to listen to it along with Bowie and Slade and Deep Purple, along with whatever else I picked up cheaply somewhere, such as Colin Bluntstone's Say You don't mind, and Python Lee Jackson's (Rod Stewart singing) amazing In A Broken Dream.- this while they were out carousing at the weekend. A pity that even then neither the sentiments of the song, Nilsson's, or PLJ, didn’t get through to me. But by then, Lynne had faded into an abstraction, almost, as I allowed dreams of future rock stardom to fill my thoughts, those dreams and aspirations seeming to merge with the persona of David Bowie, himself virtually indistinguishable from his Ziggy Stardust persona and creation. But then Lynne was gone for evermore anyway. To be transmuted into the melodies and androgynous persona of Bowie. But I'm getting ahead of myself again. In more ways than one.