Are you talking to me?: A Life Through the Movies

Did I say 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.

* (#ulink_2e40a0f4-b6e4-569f-af87-771d4d3a51b7) 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) (#ulink_489c6f22-4c21-5e77-a548-8788f3ab2e9c)

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.

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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 teeth. The man’s legs pounded on the swirly, heavy-duty Berber carpet. My mother grunted with the exertion of keeping the spasming patient 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.

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‘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. How frightening could that be? Back beside the fire, I saw that Miss Giddens was looking for her young charges in the dark upstairs rooms of the old house. As she moved along a spooky corridor, the wraith-like figure of a young woman suddenly glided across it and disappeared into the wall.

‘Who was that?’ I said. There was no answer.

‘Who was that lady?’ I asked, more loudly.

‘It’s obviously a ghost,’ said my sister. ‘She’s haunting the little girl.’

Icicles prickled up my back. My mother looked at my father, possibly imploring him to send me to bed before something awful happened, but he was engrossed in the TV. Minutes later, Miss Giddens found both Flora and the little boy, Miles. The children leapt upon her with jolly shouts and playful embraces. I breathed more easily. Then Miles, shouting with glee, put his arm around the governess’s neck and started playfully to strangle her. ‘Miles,’ she said. ‘I can’t breathe …’

I didn’t like this film one bit. I picked up my funny book again and tried to read, but the words wouldn’t connect. My eyes seemed magnetised by the television screen. I couldn’t stop myself watching. Soon it was Deborah Kerr’s turn to hide in this horrible game. She found a hiding-place behind one of the curtains in the old house’s dining-room, and stood in the moonlit darkness, looking worried and awfully vulnerable.

And when I next trusted myself to look, something terrible was happening. We were looking more and more closely at Miss Giddens’s worried, handsome face and – Oh no, oh no! – just behind her, and through the window, a man suddenly appeared, out in the garden. He was gliding towards the window, was creeping up on her with frightening intent as she stood there, in hiding, oblivious to the danger. His face was looming up out of the darkness, coming to see, coming to look in, coming to get her, coming to …

I froze, as if I’d been immersed in icy water. Sensing some awful presence behind her, Miss Giddens turned round – and there, filling the screen, was the face of the awful man glaring at her. He was swarthy, black-haired, and he looked at her with eyes of pure hatred. His face was dark, his eyes the eyes of the Maniac in the film hoarding beside St Mary’s church, as mad as the patient I’d seen in my father’s waiting-room. He was the worst person in the world – the embodiment of everything evil – and only the glass in the window separated him from the innocent governess.