Autobiography Read Free Page B

the talk of the entire country. In telly-land, Miss World and the Eurovision Song Contest are the highlights of each passing year, not only because they are competitions, but because we who know so little are allowed a view of the greater world. I recall Miss Brazil in 1970 waving at the camera as she walked into the final, and it was she alone who made me wonder about Brazil. I recall Spain beating the United Kingdom by one vote in the dying seconds of the very last count in the Eurovision Song Contest of 1968, and thus I wondered about Spain – my jotter on my knee, my own private scoring system profoundly at odds with the final result. There is no such thing as Mr World ,perversely enough .
    Little Big Time with Freddie Garrity shows kids in a pop-opera fizz, and slaps us all back to where we live and how we live. The wretched kids who sing on Opportunity Knocks make my heart bulge with jealous rage, and I know I must molder in silence for many tears to come. Tarzan is Ron Ely, a dimple-smile of warmth from a man who lives without electricity and sanitation, with a chest broad enough to safely land a 747 on. Tarzan is a far cry from Torchy the Battery Boy , but he emphasized once again that all action and adventure with moments of meaning happen in a place called elsewhere, and never in the sad soil of Manchester. James Darren wears the same sweater in every episode of The Time Tunnel ,buthe’s the one for me to be, and it is he I shall be when bedtime casts out all light. Thunderbirds are an international rescue service operating from a private Pacific island, where doll-brothers Scott, Virgil, Alan, Gordon and John are anything but problem kids. How could a boy possibly be named Virgil? Thunderbirds launch their space and sea crafts with a shout of ‘F. A. B.!’ and their fearless London Agent is Lady Penelope. They are, of course, animated puppets, yet they are as real as I am. But how real am I? The introduction for supersub Stingray warns how ‘anything can happen in the next half hour’ , and, of course, it usually does. Troy Tempest and his partner Phones battle the evil Aquaphibians – terror fish who menace the oceans. Marina is a mute girl from an undersea world who swims her way through the seductive opening sequence making even the misfortune of muteness seem well worth having. Mystery and Imagination issixty foggy minutes of rattling drama so unsettling that I can sleep only with the bedroom door open wide to the landing light – the light! the light! the light! – my heart’s lighthouse.
    My sister and I would play every day in the attic with great blocks of chalk and strips of colored Plasticine. Mother is a critical guide, and Dad is playful although fist-ready with the outside world.



He is constantly called upon when family feuds demand the physical, and he is always there and always unafraid in the days when physicality ironed matters smoothly, and recipients backed down without offence. Often the scrapper spirit is thought crude, but it solves the problem when there is no one else to protect. Mother is Mother, and never Mum (or the ghastly Manchester ‘Mam’); she is glamorous foremost, and then she is other things. Dad plays amateur-league football and enjoys a laugh, whereas Mother does neither, yet her glamor stops traffic whenever she walks me to school. Wolf-whistles follow us as we walk through Hulme, past the fastidious little BBC where Billy Fury and the Beatles have played, and past the Hulme Hippodrome where Mother will work for a while – a hall of theater cocktails and glamorous speculations. The new Hulme Library is where Jackie and I prowl each day once St Wilfrid’s pulley raises its drawbridge, and books transport the mind until Mother appears to cart us homewards. Around the flashy library, the cobbled streets of terraced houses are dark cabins with their lights out, with windows like eyes facing downwards, awaiting the chop.

Asphalt, dust and diesel fuel wrap around