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

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СКАЧАТЬ and the shipboard spats between Bligh and Christian. We had all, I think, learned collective outrage, although the actual chances of organising a decent mutiny at school seemed desperately slim.^* More important was the personal lesson I’d learned – about the power of words to help you stand up for yourself.

      A week later, at Saturday morning rugby practice, Mr King, the sadistic sports master, stopped our listless passing and tackling and delivered a pep-talk about our lack of energy and attack. We’d heard it all before. We knew he’d pick on someone to hurt, as he always did. He called out Paul Gorham, a small fat boy upon whose prodigious folds of warm flesh we used innocently to rub our freezing hands when nothing much was happening at our end of the pitch.

      ‘Gorham,’ he said, ‘you’re useless. Why are you not trying harder? Mmm? Mmmmmm?’

      ‘I don’t know, sir.’

      ‘So it’s just ignorance, is it, Gorham, rather than just indolence, mmmm?’

      ‘No, sir. I’m a defender, sir. I thought I’d better wait at this end, sir, in case they tried to break through, sir. And,’ he concluded pathetically, ‘it’s very boring, sir.’

      ‘Well,’ said Mr King nastily, ‘we must try and make life more exciting for you, mustn’t we?’ And, as he’d done a dozen times to a dozen other boys, he ran his hands over poor Gorham’s face, circled them around the boy’s cold-reddened ears and began to hoist him up off the ground.

      ‘Aaargh,’ said Gorham. His portly frame dangled agonisingly, four stone of small fat boy held up in the air by two straining lumps of cartilage and flesh.

      ‘Don’t do that, sir,’ I said, out of nowhere. ‘You’ll hurt his ears, sir.’

      Mr King put Gorham down and ambled over to me.

      ‘What did you say, Walsh?’

      ‘You’ll hurt his ears, sir, picking him up like that. My father’s a doctor and he says it damages the ear-drums.’ It all came out as a rush. It must have sounded a little too prepared, but I’d been thinking about Mr King’s casual savagery, and I was fed up with it.

      ‘Do not tell me what to do, boy,’ said Mr King. He sounded momentarily puzzled. Had the parents, urged on by my father, been talking about him? ‘This team is a disgrace to the rugby pitch, and you, Walsh, are one of the worst offenders.’

      ‘Yes sir,’ I said.

      ‘You run about aimlessly, you can’t tackle for toffee, you’re positively lily-livered in the scrum. You don’t even try to play rugby. And to cap it all – to cap it all – you are cheeky to my face. I don’t like your attitude, Walsh.’

      I looked into his eyes. They were a milky shade of blue. I’d never looked him in the eyes before. You didn’t look a teacher in the eyes. You looked at the ground. You muttered ‘Flippin’ heck, sir’ while he punched you in the stomach or hoisted you aloft by your ears. But for the first time, I looked straight into his blue eyes.

      The words came into my head, unbidden, perfect: ‘I assure you, sir, that the execution of my duties on the pitch is in no way affected by my private opinion of you.’

      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.

* 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 СКАЧАТЬ