ICE CREAM, I SCREAM, EYES STREAM
I had that front page stuck up on my bedroom wall for years.
So, as I say, it was now very quiet in our house.
I didn’t miss the Daddy. I’d loved him, for he was my daddy, but I’d never liked him very much. I blamed him for all the bad traits I now possessed. Whatever you learn in your childhood stays with you for life. It colours your opinions: it structures your thinking. You are programmed when young. You can never alter your basic programming.
I can’t blame the Daddy for all the mistakes I’ve made in my life. That would be absurd and irresponsible. But I blame him for most and that is enough for me.
So, as I say, and I’ll say once more: it was now very quiet in our house. And as I’d always loved quietness, I was grateful for it.
And, as I said, everything changes. The present soon becomes the past and is gone.
The borough was changing. The old streets were coming down and new blocks of flats were rising to take their place.
This was now the nineteen sixties. Change was fashionable. And I was fashionable too. I was a mod.
And I was a homo.
That might come as a bit of a surprise to you. It did to me, when I finally found out what the word meant. I was rather disappointed about that, I can tell you. I’d thought that it must mean something really, really bad. I didn’t expect it just to mean that. I’d been doing that for years. I went to an all-boys school and everybody did that. We did that whenever we got the opportunity. Doing that took our minds off the fact that there weren’t any girls around for us to do that to. And when you did that to boys, you couldn’t get them pregnant, so you didn’t have to marry them. So I quite liked being a homo.
Ultimately I didn’t stick with it, though.
You could say that I tried to be a homosexual, but I was only half in Earnest.[6]
But things were definitely changing.
I wandered down Moby Dick Terrace one day, wearing-in my new Ivy Shop loafers with the gilt bar and low-level Cuban heels, to discover that Mother Demdike’s hut had gone. Workmen were laying the foundations for a new three-up, two-down, with an indoor lavvy. I asked one of the workmen what had happened to the witch’s hut and indeed to the witch herself. But the workman told me that he knew nothing about any old witch, he was just laying the main drains.
He was a nice-looking workman, with tight jeans that flattered a pert little bum. I asked whether he’d like to come out to the pictures some time. The workman took umbrage at this and called me a poof to my face. And he said that he’d give me a kicking if I didn’t clear off pretty sharpish.
I have always found homophobia offensive and I don’t take kindly to threats of violence. I took the workman quietly aside and discussed the matter with him. And then I hurried on about my business.
But I wondered over Mother Demdike and her hut. I recalled the hag telling me that one day she and her kind would be gone and forgotten. Gone, as if in a dream that vanishes upon waking.
And indeed she was gone.
Dave was also gone for a while. To a young offenders institution. They say that if you want to learn how to be a real criminal, then prison is the place to go. If you’re not a crim when you go in, you’ll certainly be one by the time they let you out again.
It isn’t utterly true. Criminals in prison can’t really teach you very much. Because, let’s face it, if they were any good at being criminal, they’d not have ended up in prison, would they? Their advice and their criminal knowledge really isn’t worth much at all. The only criminals whose advice is worth taking if you wish to pursue a life of crime are those who have never been caught. And those criminals will never give you any advice at all. Because they will deny to their dying breath that they are criminals.
Because how can they be classified as criminals? They’ve never been convicted of a crime!
Dave came out of the young offenders institution full of all kinds of rubbish. Theories on how you could commit the perfect crime. I argued with him that there was no such thing as the perfect crime. Silly, I know, but I was a teenager.
Actually, if you’d like to commit the perfect crime just once in your lifetime, I’ll tell you how to do it. It’s a secret, so you’ll have to promise me that you won’t pass it on to anyone else. Do you promise?
All right, I’ll tell you what to do.
What you need to have is a bank account that’s in credit to more than one hundred pounds, a hole-in-the-wall cash card and a sombrero. If you have these, then this is what you do.
Put on your sombrero,[7] go to the hole-in-the-wall when there’s no one around, insert your cash card and order up one hundred pounds. When the money appears through the little slot, very carefully ease out the middle twenty-pound note, leaving the rest where they are. Then wait. After a couple of minutes the cash machine will take back the money. It will credit one hundred pounds back to your bank account. Leaving you with twenty pounds in your hand. This is of course illegal, so I would be committing a crime if I encouraged you to do it. Or in fact even told you about it. So I won’t.
Instead I’ll continue with my tale. The Daddy was dead, I was an uncommitted homo (because now I’d left the all-boys school to seek employment). Mother Demdike was gone and all but forgotten and Dave was back from the young offenders institution.
It was Thursday. And it was seven o’clock.
I met up with Dave at the launderette.
“I can’t believe that you still get a feed out of this,” I said to Dave, as I watched him watching the washing going round and around.
“A feed?” said Dave. “Speak English.”
“You still enjoy this stuff,” I said. “It still excites you.”
“One day,” said Dave, “you’ll appreciate it for yourself. Oh God, there’s a spin cycle coming up. Don’t talk to me till it’s over.”
I kept silent and left him to his pleasure. I went outside and lit up a Passing Cloud.[8]
They don’t have Passing Cloud cigarettes any more. Few folk remember them now. Wills made them. In a flip-top pink packet, in two rows of ten. Oval, untipped cigarettes, with Big Chief Passing Cloud on the front, smoking a clay pipe. I never understood about that. But we had some really classy fags back in those days. Balkan Sobranie, Spanish Shawl, a perfumed cigarette, Three Castles, Capstan Full Strength.
Those were the days.
And, frankly, I miss ’em.
Presently Dave emerged from the launderette with a pale, young face and a bit of a sweat on.
“That was nice,” he said. “I missed that in the nick.”
“Didn’t they have a launderette in there?” I asked.
“No,” said Dave. “You had to wash out your undies in the slop bucket.”
“Were you ‘the Daddy’ in there?” I asked. “Did you have ‘bitches’?”
“I think you’re in the wrong decade,” said Dave, shaking his shaven head. “We had snout and screws and vicars with long hair who taught us how to turn dolly pegs on a lathe.”
“Will you be going back, do you think? Or, having paid your debt to society, will you henceforth be a model citizen?”
“I liked the food,” said Dave. “I think I will become a repeat offender.”
“Each to his own,” said I. “What shall we do tonight?”
“We could break into the sweet shop and steal humbugs.”
“Not keen,” I said. “There’s a dance on at the Blue Triangle Club. Pat Lyons and the Second Thoughts are playing.”
“Is it booga-booga music?”
“It’s Blue Beat, I think.”
“Let’s go, then. I’ll nick some parkas from the cloakroom.”
We went to the Blue Triangle Club.
Every other day of the week, the Blue Triangle Club was a YMCA sports and social hall. But Thursdays were different. On Thursdays there were bands – real bands with guitars and amplifiers. Most of the bands had Jeff Beck in them. You couldn’t really have a band back then if Jeff Beck wasn’t in it. He was “paying his dues”, which was what you did in those days if you wanted to become famous as a musician. You didn’t go along to auditions that were being shown as a TV series, you learned your craft. You paid your dues. And you ultimately became Jeff Beck.
7
Hole-in-the-wall cash dispensers have CCTV cameras, so keep your head well down and you won't be recognized. If there is any trouble, you can always say that your cash card was nicked by a Mexican and it wasn't you that did this.
8
I know that I mentioned that I smoked Woodbines, but they did give me a terrible heaving cough, so I switched to Passing Cloud. Just in case you were wondering.