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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.^*

      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 СКАЧАТЬ