Connery (Part 4)

Westler's Hotdogs are available in the foyer

When dad was drunk and mum was drunk, they were very funny, and they would dance and kiss and play jokes on each other and on us and they were also very affectionate with us. There were lots of hugs in our house. We were never, never, never neglected. It was a different time. I imagine if someone looked at this today, they would come to other conclusions, but trauma didn’t exist in the same way it does now. Abuse and all that wasn’t seen in the same way. It was more rough and tumble. Dr. Habbermas would come to very specific judgements: diagnoses. She wouldn’t be the last. The facility I am now in Whitby, they are always asking about my childhood. My upbringing. I think they would be a lot happier if I told them that I was an unhappy abused child. It would make more sense. My childhood would fit into a template and red flags would go up. But it wouldn’t represent what I felt then. Or what I feel now to be honest.  

People design childhoods differently now. I’m sure it’s better. Progress after all is something to be praised unequivocally, I suppose, but we weren’t unhappy. In fact, I look back on my childhood with great affection. I filled a washing machine that had been dumped in the quarry with petrol from the lawnmower and newspapers and set it on fire. An enormous woof like the fire was a cartoon dog and a big billowing spouting of flame and black smoke mushroomed into the Cumbrian sky and was whipped away by the wind. Sometimes I long to go back. Jump on the roof of the old Citroen V7. I feel nostalgia for home with the potency and ache of grief. The only difficulty with my parents – Larry and Mary – was how unreliable they were. They would sleep in the mornings until the mornings were afternoons. Promised trips out would be cancelled by a hangover or a violent row blowing up out of nowhere like a cloudburst on a sunny day. The flip side of this, the silver lining if you will, was that myself and Taylor became very, very, very independent, or self-sufficient might be a better word. We became the adults of the house. And this trained me for later life. If we messed up, no one was coming to pick us up or bail us out. If I missed the bus, I had to walk ten miles to get home and I did. You can walk ten miles. It won’t kill you. Come dinnertime or lunchtime, if you weren’t willing to go into the kitchen – the darkest room in the house, practically underground, like something a hobbit might live in – to hunt up some food; if you didn’t know how to use the grill or operate a tin opener then you would just get hungrier and hungrier and hungrier and, presumably, die.

Taylor became very good at cooking and I was okay, mainly because she would teach me, and I have always been good at copying. I’m obedient like that. As long as I had someone to look to, to look over the shoulder of. And Taylor was that for me. Taylor was a stunning human being, which is something everyone recognises today, but I ‘knew her when she was all fields’, as the saying goes. Sometimes when I think about all the flaws I have and the flaws that I came to understand my mother and father had, then it becomes something close to miraculous that she turned out the way she did. And she seemed to know who she was and who she wanted to be very early on. She was someone who came home, did all her homework at the back table with the angle-poise lamp giving her a puddle of yellow light, bent low over her books, sharpening pencils and testing the point on her fingertip, and when she was done, she took off her school uniform, then went for a shower and changed and then cooked a meal for everyone with whatever she could find, dodging mum’s clammy embraces, occasional slaps and dad’s silly jokes and occasional kicks. ‘Look at me,’ dad yelled and did what he called the robot. He liked singing and dancing, but Taylor ignored him and got on with the job at hand. I could never do that. I got into a sulk. Or threw tantrums. I got distracted. I wandered off. But knowing Taylor and admiring her so much, I at least had someone to imitate. To try and improve myself towards. I remember hearing a phrase years later, the nineties I’m guessing, ‘fake it until you make it’, and that’s how I worked with Taylor. I’ll just pretend to be her, at least for some aspects of my life, the ones she’s good at; like school. I was never sure if Taylor actually liked me or for that matter any of us. It didn’t make much sense if she did. If I was as capable and sensible as she was and I had to live in the midst of such chaos, it would take a gigantic amount of patience to just not go absolutely crazy and start tearing everything to pieces and throwing the pieces in the air.

After I met Sean Connery that first time, I didn’t go home and brag about it. I didn’t tell anyone about it. I was sure no one would believe me. I had – in those days – a reputation for having an overactive imagination. I liked playing war and as I moved about the house, walked through the village or over the fell, I would often assassinate imaginary armies of enemy soldiers, battalions of ninja attackers; stormtroopers, Nazis and terrorists all fell to my hand and my remarkable arsenal of weapons which I had secreted in hidden places throughout the house – panels sliding aside at the depression of a button – and the nearby countryside, hidden beneath trapdoors and gorse bushes. I’d lob grenades, shurikens and throwing knives, spray them with submachinegun fire and torch them with flame throwers. I had an amazing capacity for hand-to-hand combat – expert at the elbow to the throat combined with the backhanded punch move – roundhouse kicks and flying tackles, and I would disable and disarm my enemy, then garrotting him or stabbing him in the eye with a stiletto blade. Before going upstairs to the bathroom, I’d screw a silencer onto the barrel of my pistol and – pssssh, psssssh – adversaries would clutch their spouting wounds and clump dead to the ground, even the ones who tried to sneak up on me while I was standing waving a steady stream of pee into the toilet bowl.

‘Someone’s pissed all over the seat again,’ Mary would say and fetch me a clout around the back of my head. But it didn’t matter. The important thing was not to duck. Any evasion enraged her and she would grab you and hold you down and really hurt you. I mean, really.

Later, I would become dedicated in the art of not dying. An adherent of stubborn survival strategies. But as a child I was almost suicidal in my imagined bravery. I marvel now at how much I lacked in self-consciousness. Everyone in the village saw me at my games. The children thought I was weird, but some like Elliot Comb and Stephen Prett joined in. The adults thought me charming, or a little bit touched. Daft in the head. But also, knowing the family I spawned from, felt sorry for me. He makes his own fun. My parents just knew that I made up stories about adventures and my dad (I think) quite liked them. He loved watching films and TV shows and we enjoyed watching the same type of thing. He didn’t care about football or sport. He’d watch Starsky and Hutch and Magnum PI and later The Fall Guy, CHiPs, Manimal, V and The A-Team. We watched all the movies as soon as they came on TV which was years after they’d been on at the cinema. The one thing he didn’t let me down on was going to see movies at the cinema. We watched at least one film a week at the cinema in Barrow. It was a big place called the Ritz and then the Astra. It occupied a corner of Abbey Road opposite the railway station and it had a curved front and above the door a curved illuminated sign gave the names of the three movies showing every week with the certificates in brackets. When I finally went to school in Barrow I would walk down on Thursday to the cinema and watch the man with his ladder and a bucket of letters go up and change the names of all the films. The man smoked a cigarette in his mouth without once taking it out, his hands were always occupied, smoke blooming in clouds around his head, until the glowing ember at the end reached the filter and then he spat it out. ‘You again,’ he’d say when he spotted me. And sometimes, he’d let me in to watch the first film via the backdoor, so I didn’t have to pay. 

My dad would take me Monday night usually. He liked going on a Monday because he said it gave him something to look forward to on the worst day of the week. We were the first family in the village to have a videorecorder and we rented videos from the garage and watched them usually twice before taking them back. Even if they weren’t any good, we’d watch them twice just because we could. Getting our money’s worth. I had seen a lot of James Bond films. ITV had a season one year and showed almost all of them. And every Christmas the latest James Bond film was shown. Of course Roger Moore had taken over, but Sean Connery made a lasting impression. In Dr No when he shoots his would-be assassin, who had emptied his own gun into Bond’s pillow dummy bed: ‘You’ve had your six,’ Connery spits. Dad didn’t care for him much. He liked American actors more. Like Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood. He thought Michael Caine was wooden and Richard Burton was an old ham, but with a wonderful voice and he quite liked Peter O’Toole.

I loved Sean Connery; even more after I’d met him obviously. I liked him in Outland. Outland was one of my favourite films for a long time. A lone space marshal on the Jupiter moon of Io has to defend himself from company assassins after he discovers a drug is being used to make the workers more productive, but which also makes them violent and suicidal. I went to see it at the cinema even though I shouldn’t have been allowed in because it was an A, dad was with me and threatened to kick up a fuss and the lady at the kiosk really didn’t care one way or the other. Dad bought two big beakers of coke and when we were sitting in the cinema, he poured two small bottles of Bacardi rum into his. He smacked his lips when he drank, and we watched the adverts for Ki-Ora and Westler’s Hot Dogs – available in the foyer – and then the coming attractions and then the movie.

I would return to Hampton Rock all the way through the summer, in the vain hope of seeing Sean Connery again. The following day I’d gone back to search for his cigarette butt to keep as a memento but it must have blown away or been swept out to sea or something. The other times I just thought he might show up but he didn’t. As far as I knew there was no film being filmed around our place or I would have heard about it. Of course, there was a chance that the film was being made up in the lakes. That was a distinct possibility. There had been talk of a film about a giant pike, like Jaws, but with a big fish instead, but there was nothing in the Westmoreland Gazette or in the Evening Mail for that matter and it didn’t seem likely that Sean Connery would be in a film fighting a fish.

Sean Connery had said he was playing golf. So maybe it was just that. He could have been playing golf, though the golf course was not particularly famous or good even. It wasn’t even an 18-hole golf course. Mr. Comb, Elliot’s dad, played and we walked around with him once and what you do to play the 18 holes is just play the nine holes twice. There are slightly different teeing off positions but that’s all. There’s a hole on top of Hampton Rock.

By the time I was going back to school, I felt that it was too far away in time to tell anyone about Sean Connery and anyway I understood that most of them would think I was fibbing. Though it seems strange to say now, I didn’t feel it was that important. I was more concerned with Look-In magazine that I was collecting and which gave you the postal addresses of the stars on the back page and so I wrote letters to some of my favourite actors. Harrison Ford and Roger Moore, Lee Majors and Clint Eastwood, Mr T and William Shatner. I never got anything back. And sometimes it drove me mad having to wait for the post. I remember Weetabix had an offer for a special colour sticker album that you could send off for to tie in with the film Flash Gordon with a certain number of coupons and a postal order to cover postage. Allow 28 days for delivery. Of course I had no real concept of what 28 days was. I had barely learned what an hour was. Time was something that just randomly happened to you. Adults might say half an hour or three months and know what it meant, but I certainly didn’t. Every year the change of the seasons came as a surprise to me and even today I’m not entirely sure what a word like April really means. Or for that matter October. I’ve got June and December nailed down and I know what eleven o’clock means and eight in the morning. But I’m still hazy on three o’clock in the afternoon. I don’t feel it has any heft. If that makes any sense. When the sticker book finally came, I was so sick with apprehension, I ended up ignoring it and then chucking it on dad’s bonfire the next Sunday. As the flames forced it to crouch and curl into itself and disappear, I felt 28 days’ worth of trouble lift from my soul.

At school, we swapped Star Wars action figures and football album stickers. ‘Got it, got it, got it, got it, ohhh!’ we’d say as we shuffled through someone else’s pack. We blew up caps with cap rockets and toy guns. At one point, all my toys had been farm toys. Tractors, combine harvesters, gates and fences and walls and a hay bailer and little model animals, but then Stephen came around one afternoon in the middle of the summer with a big box of caps and we set about destroying all of the models. We stuck matches to them and caps and blew them up. We dropped them out of windows.

‘Wanton destruction,’ mum called it when she caught me with the remains of my combine harvester collected in a small paper bag. She thrashed my legs with dad’s belt with the heavy Pony Express buckle. It hurt so bad, I got a temperature and had to stay home from school and watch Sesame Street and The Sullivans and in the afternoon I watched a show about a court case which was done with actors but from a real court case. I imagined I was guilty and in the dock. Occasionally, the guilty person – the accused would say something – and they were always emotional and angry and the lawyers, or barristers or the judge himself would say something dusty and dry and usually withering. I made my own lunch which was potato waffles from the freezer. I grilled them and then fried two eggs and heated a pan of baked beans. I ate all of it even though it was too much and then had a huge poo.

The secret grew in me – the secret about having met Sean Connery – and became the first thing that I kept to myself. Later when I started lying, telling deliberate falsehoods rather than living in a fantasy world or some other childish invention, I would recognise these two things very distinctly. Like sweet and salty. They were both to do with the same thing – taste – but were at the same time totally different. Lying made you feel one way, and withholding a truth made you feel another way. Totally different. At night I could close my eyes and think over all the things that I knew that other people didn’t know. The things I had hid in the quarry; the contents of the black bins bags in the caravan that the groundsman of the golf course used as a tool shed; what happened to Allan and meeting Sean Connery. I knew all those things and I kept them to myself, even though I could have told people and it would have meant something. I would have perhaps become someone important in their eyes. Something more than a little kid which is almost an invisible, negligible thing.

They only care about you when you’re in danger – like when they have to decide who goes into the lifeboats – but that’s not for who you are but the fact you’re not yet properly someone and so they think it’s only fair that at least you get the chance to do that. And for me becoming someone was on the horizon, in the blue smoky distance. It wasn’t even worth looking in that direction yet. You had to keep paying close attention to what was happening around you. Where you were putting your feet.   

Ninjas belayed from rooftops; stormtroopers were on the march; Nazis stormed the house and the only person who seemed able and willing to resist them was me, with the occasional assistance of Sean Connery.