Video Nasties at Breakfast

I wasn't able to watch the film Assault on Precinct 13 again for over 25 years.

My parents were pretty liberal about the sorts of things we were allowed to watch on TV - they weren't the sort of 70s parents who thought that Tiswas and Grange Hill were going to corrupt their children (I knew some kids who had parents who thought that ITV was inappropriate in its entirety). We were allowed to watch all sorts of films and TV that were well beyond our reach in legal as well as accessibility terms. I still suspect that our viewings of 70s/80s american sex comedies were my parents' attempt at sex eduction.

And so it came to pass that Assault on Precinct 13 was rented from the dodgy bloke up the road who ran a video rental operation from his tobacco-smelling front room (until one of his technologically-challenged neighbours reported him and he had to transfer the whole shebang to a disused car sales forecourt on the other side of town).

Now, Assault on Precinct 13 was one of those films that was upsetting all sorts of people at the time. It wasn't quite being labelled a video nasty in the ways that Driller Killer and Texas Chainsaw Massacre were, but it was close.

My mum was working nights that week. She was working in the old folks home opposite the mental hospital. She'd come home smelling cold and slightly damp. She'd often cycle there and back on this awful, second hand, folding "ladies" bike. It was a light, metallic green.

So my dad, in her absense, let my brother and I watch this quasi-video nasty. But it was slightly longer than we expected it to be and our bed time came and we were sent to bed before the film finished.

He said he'd let us watch the end in the morning. And he did.

Big mistake.

Get up. Get dressed. Have breakfast. Go to school. That was the drill in the morning in our house.

Nowhere was "catch the last ten minutes of the video nasty you were watching the night before" part of the agreed routine. Mum came home during the said ten minutes and all hell broke loose - not because we were watching people getting shot, maimed and burnt alive by unrelentingly violent LA (?) gang members. But that the "proper" schedule wasn't being adhered to.

God she was angry. She was particularly angry at my dad. She was seriously, seriously angry.

The strength of her disapproval and the enormity of the conflict between my parents that the situation had created caused me a level of gut-twisting anguish that I have always, in a pavlovian fashion, associated with that movie.

I wasn't able to watch it, or consider watching it, without feeling a little (or a lot) of that gut-twisting anguish, for something like 25 years.

It's not actually that good a film.

Dad

So - to complete the picture. I've already mentioned the plywood fort offering and of course the golfclubs moment. But the majority of my dad memories are something like this.

My brother's O Level results. I clearly remember that Dad kept on going back to the sideboard, where the results slip was perched against the clock. He'd keep going back and he'd pick up the slip and smile. Clearly so pleased. Clearly so proud. They were, admittedly, very good results.

My GCSE results. My mum suggested that I call him to tell him my results. They were, admittedly, very good results. "Is that what you were hoping for?" was the response.

"How do you spell [such-and-such]"? "How do you think it's spelt?"

A crashing smack on the backside for (I thought) innocently questioning the fact that my brother was still playing the same piece in his piano lessons that he had been for months. The result was not only the said smack but also a tearful appearance, from around the corner, and the proclamation that "we can't all be f**king Liberace". No smack for the swearing - or for the suggestion that Liberace was the epitome of pianistic excellence. It was the 70s after all.

Sitting on the ottomon, watching his back as he shaved. Waiting for the moment when he'd splash water on his face, rub his face with the towel, and quickly turn around, roaring like a monster.

Screams of delight.

Brother

My brother always used to buy me thank you presents. After every one of his birthdays he would get me something to say thank you for the present that I'd gotten him. A Star Wars figure usually.

That was until one year when he said "if you don't mind - i don't think we'll do thank you presents any more".

I was gobsmacked - I didn't even realise that they were thank you presents. I thought he was just being nice. I was clearly taking them for granted but, equally, it was the last thing on earth that I would have expected him to have been doing in the first place.

He was the sort of brother who would arbitrarily come into your bedroom, sit on you, threaten to spit in your face and when your screams would bring a parent (slowly) running, he'd say that he was restraining you because you'd "gone berserk"! Oh the injustice! Oh the gut-clenching frustration of being the younger son!

He was the sort of brother who'd scream like a lunatic and the prospect of having to share something with me. The golf clubs incident is still pretty fresh in the memory. Not in the least because I didn't care that much. Seriously. Golf clubs.

And here he was buying me thank you presents. But not any more it seems.

And I'd never ever gotten him one.

Mum

I'm sure this isn't going to be the last time that I talk about my Mum. Indeed, she's already featured.

This isn't, I think, going to be one of those stories about an unnaturally strong attachment to a mother. For much of my childhood my mother appeared tired, impatient and angry.

That's because she was clearly all of those things.

She was working hard (nights as a nurse, a stint as a dinner lady - making ends meet kinds of things) whilst trying to make the time to be there for her family.

She could be wildly unreasonable (I will always remember a blow-up she had at me because I'd not done something that she'd forgotten to ask me to do - "I'm not psychic!" I shouted at her..."well you should be!" she shouted back!) but she could be gentle and poetic too (singing songs about Fred in the back seat of the car....putting together imaginative games for me and my friends at parties where you had to pretend to be different types of firework).

A lot of the time she seemed so disappointed. Life's letdowns were so crashingly tiresome but, at the same time, inevitable.

There's one memory that's always stayed with me.

I always knew that she was brainy and that she'd wanted to go to university but wasn't allowed to by her parents. I remember asking her how she felt about "having" to cook and clean for these three boys all the time instead of "going out to work like Dad". She said that that's what she was meant to do - that it was her lot in life.

I felt so sad for her. It seemed so wrong.

Waving goodbye

I can seriously only remember two things about nursery (pre-primary school). Firstly - there was the fact that every day, my mum would drop me off at the front door and say a quick goodbye. I'd then go to each and every window of the building, waving goodbye to her as she walked back down the street. I'd be devastated if she didn't turn around and wave at each instance.

The second is me sitting, cowering in a teepee with Carl, whilst a psychotic and hyperactic kid called Nicholas ran round and round the outside beating the walls of the tent with his fists over and over again. He was constantly out of control like this. He wore white trainers with green go-faster stripes on them. He's divorced with two children now.

Oh yeah - one more thing. Coathooks with animals on them.

What's your earliest memory?

Why do so many biographies feature (or even start with) the line "my earliest memory was this..."? Does anybody really remember something like that with any repeatable precision?

Surely it's a matter of a recollection here, an image or word there. Or maybe it's just me.

For me, yes, it's a number of things.

My mum hanging my teddybear by their ears on the washing line - I'm handing them out of the window to her.

Me sitting in the pushchair - it's Winter and there's a front to the pushchair to keep me in and keep me warm - and it starts trundling down the steps in the back garden towards the gate because the brake hasn't been applied.

Going into the kitchen before bedtime, wearing my PJs, to say goodnight to my dad who's on the floor making a fort for my brother and me out of plywood. It's got battlements and a portcullis which goes up and down thanks to a piece of string that's going to be broken in a couple of weeks time.

Rolling around on the floor of my recently cleared bedroom singing "playroom...playroom...playroom".

It's just one or two memories. I'm not sure if any of them are the first or the earliest. I can't think of anything else or anything more precise.

Do they say something about me?