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

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СКАЧАТЬ you know, had lunch with them. It was important that he was American because we were in love with American things – the cars with the sharky fins, the Western guns, the tough-guy fist-fights, the space suits, the fact that, according to 77 Sunset Strip, American policemen chewed gum all the time and actually got to shoot people. Most of all we liked their accents, and sometimes tried to imitate them. They sounded like English accents on a slide, a drawling, don’t-care voice, far more appealing than the stuck-up, sit-up-and-beg accents of British people who read the news and appeared in quiz shows.

      But was this really Brando, the famous actor-hero of whom I’d heard so much from my clued-up, movie-going friends? He wore a light-blue fancy-dress outfit, a comical hat and a red cloak like Superman’s, and my first reaction was of distaste: he seemed a bit of a garçon de Nancy as we called cissy actors on television. His hair was pulled back off his forehead and worn in a greasy ponytail, and his face was pulled back with it, so that his eyes were oddly slitty and Chinese – and he talked in a weird, affected, fastidious neigh of British distaste, as if he could hardy bear to say anything at all through his clenched teeth. He seemed about as heroic as the adjustable mannequin that posed in the window of Arding & Hobbs. He came aboard flanked by two ladies of fashion, one English, one French, who flapped and dimpled like flamingoes among the creaking sheets and elderly timbers of the merchantman, until they were shooed ashore by the captain.

      He and Captain Bligh were soon having a row about why Brando had bothered going into the Navy.

      ‘The Army didn’t seem quite right,’ he told the captain, ‘and affairs of state are rather a bore …’

      Ratha a bawww …

      Captain Bligh pursed his skinny mouth with distaste. Well, I thought, this is going to be fun: one nasty, face-chewing man in long white socks, and one Chinky-faced, oily-haired clot with a foolish accent and a cloak, who was happier with silly women in ringlets and picture hats than with daggers and swords and stuff.

      But once Mr Fryer, the dependable first mate, said, ‘Set topsails and headsails,’ we were away on a voyage and I was happily away too. There was an unstoppable swing to the voyage, and the narrative on which we’d embarked, a feeling of being swept up in it all as if you’d been press-ganged aboard and you wouldn’t be able to get off, even if you wanted to. It was like being on a ride at Battersea funfair – a place I haunted for weeks every summer – when you’d ridden the long train to the top of the Water Splash and were turning into the long slide down to where the water lurked, and there was nothing you could do but sit there amid a lot of screaming strangers, and scream along with them.

      The Bounty hit the open sea, to the strains of ‘Rule Britannia’. The sailors swarmed up the rigging, spread themselves out on the crossbars like slivers of marmalade along a thin slice of toast, dropped the sails and watched them fill with wind. There was surge. There was heft and swell. There were creaking timbers and sailors doing baffling things with ropes. But things soon took a turn for the worse at deck level.

      Seaman Mills, played by Robert Harris, the devil-may-care Irish troublemaker among the roistering matelots, was accused of stealing some ship’s cheeses.

      Fletcher Christian listened to the complainant with a superior smile and dismissed the whinger condescendingly. ‘Was there something further you wished to discuss? Early Renaissance sketching, perhaps?’

      Below stairs, surrounded by his mates, Mills blamed the captain, who, he said, had asked him take the cheeses to his home. Suddenly we were involved in a hurricane-lamp-lit subversion, as Harris recklessly urged his fellow rank-and-file scum to believe their captain guilty of pilfering. Unluckily, Bligh chose just that moment to descend the gangway, where he stopped to listen to Mills’s accusations. The thuggish sailors fell silent, but Mills was unstoppable: ‘It was the captain helping himself to the ship’s stores,’ he shouted into a mortified silence. ‘The captain’s the thief, not me!’

      Behind him, Bligh and Mr Christian took stock of what had been said. For us schoolboys, it was a terribly familiar scene, familiar from a dozen classroom encounters when we’d performed a hilarious impersonation of the Maths master while the Maths master watched unnoticed, from the doorway.

      A nasty smile twitched across Bligh’s razor mouth.

      Christian recommended cancelling the mouthy Irishman’s grog for a month.

      ‘Two dozen of the lash will teach him better still,’ grated Trevor Howard. ‘All hands on deck to witness punishment, Mr Christian, if you please.’

      Along the row of seats, Mr Breen leaned forward, looked to right and left, and said, ‘Boys? This man is going to be flogged. It may get rather nasty. If any boy wants to sit on my lap, now is the time …’

      Film and reality suddenly merged. We were all, choir and altar servers and teachers and actors alike, suddenly complicit in an act of collective sadism. We schoolboys were suddenly hands on deck, forced to gaze at a punishment ritual, whether we liked it or not. Nobody took Mr Breen up on his kind offer, for fear of seeming a wimp. We sat there, entranced by our first exposure to the delights of sadomasochistic teasing.

      For minutes that were like hours, the hapless Mills was filmed sitting on a bunk, wondering how savage his punishment was going to be. We were obliged to look very closely at Richard Harris’s handsome, sunburnt face. He appeared half in love with his distress, while a dangling rope behind him suggested a death that might soon overwhelm him. One of the sailors offered him a cup of grog, but he waved it away. All his brave buddies fell silent. And then Quintal, the second mate, dragged something out of a storage cupboard and brought it down to the floor, there to ferret out, from its rummagy depths, a long red crimson sock with a draw-string neck. We watched its retrieval with collective foreboding, as if we were all, individually, the miscreant sailor looking at the thing that was about to lacerate his flesh.

      But of course, we knew all about this stuff already. In the early Sixties, it was a matter of no great consequence that schoolboys could be flogged with a ferule, a short rod made from a whalebone encased in leather. If you forgot your sports kit twice in a row, or were caught fighting in class or throwing paper darts or cheeking the bovine Geography master, you might be sentenced to four or six ferulas, or (if you were really evil) nine or (for unimaginable depravity) twelve. At 4 p.m., when the lessons were over, you presented yourself outside the headmaster’s study, where pipe tobacco smells mingled with the sweat from your fear. You joined the queue of chastened youths, who all, in those days, simply accepted that they were about to be whacked and brutalised as a normal part of the school routine.

      When it was your turn, you knocked on the door and, at the words ‘Come in!’, turned the handle. Inside the room, everything looked posh and stately, the living room of a successful gentleman-scholar, with a humidor smelling of cigars on the antique desk and a gramophone softly playing some sobbing Italian operatic tenor.

      You had to say, ‘Six ferulas, please, sir,’ in a polite, Oliver-Twist-asking-for-more voice that was the second-worst thing about the experience.

      The head would write something in a little book (‘Walsh – 22 May 1961 – running in crrdr – 6f’) and stand before you, with one hand behind his back. He would beckon with his fingers for you to extend your arm, palm upwards, and from its hiding place the whalebone would suddenly appear, soaring up then crashing down on your innocent flesh in a vivid trajectory of blurred malevolence, and a noise like ‘Whop!’ that didn’t seem to suit the astounding, metallic pain that shot up your arm. You would put the bruised limb somewhere behind you and extend the other arm, with a kind of stunned fatalism, and that hand would be whopped in turn. Then the first hand again, rising from the depths of wherever it had sunk, like an animal returning to a vicious master out of some sad, vestigial loyalty, СКАЧАТЬ