1955 : Singapore – and going to school in an army truck
Selerang Primary School was the place where I learned about gold stars, deception and fakery. Each morning after breakfast my brother and I would stand outside our house in Singapore and wait for the three-ton army truck to arrive. That was how we were taken to school – in a huge khaki-coloured three-ton army truck. We wore light cotton shirts and white shorts and our satchels were full of bits and bobs – as well as pencil cases and exercise-books.
When the lorry arrived the large brawny driver would get down from the driving seat and hoist us up and then manoeuvre us into the back of the truck. The back of the truck had two benches on either side and there was so much space between the two benches that we were free to mess around and play all sorts of games. We used to kiss the girls and they would mainly shriek – with a mixture of delight and horror. Not all the girls were exactly the same; one of them really liked to be kissed – but in the main they were more restrained and ladylike. In fact, it wasn’t easy kissing the girls because the truck would bounce over the bumps ands fissures in the road and we’d arrive at school well-shaken and stirred. Our kisses would be well aimed but they’d usually miss the mark.
School was light and airy and fun. If we did what the teacher wanted we would be given stars. The stars had three colours – gold, silver or bronze. I liked the silver ones best but we were encouraged to go for gold. I wasn’t that interested in the disciplines of learning but I did once get a gold star – although the circumstances in which I got it were rather odd: a singing class was taking place. I had (and have) no talent for singing; none whatsoever. But the singing teacher was full of enthusiasm and she urged us to sing with our mouths wide open. I tried this – but after a while I ran out of breath. So I carried on opening my mouth as wide as possible even though no sound was coming out. The teacher suddenly saw me and expressed her delight at my efforts. ‘Well done,’ she exclaimed and at the end of the lesson I was given a gold star. But it worried me: I knew that I did not deserve the gold star but simultaneously I also learned that people could be taken in, that they could easily be deceived – and that appearance was not reality.
1960: Henry V
The film, ‘Henry V’ was a 1944 adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play of the same name. I was taken by my parents to see the black-and-white film in a cinema in Farnham, Surrey in 1960. I used to think the cinema was called the ‘Palace’ but it wasn’t; it was called the ‘Regal’. (Cinemas thought highly of themselves in those days.) Although I scarcely understood most of the screenplay – I adored the ‘look’ of Lawrence Olivier as the warrior king and I also idealised the beautiful princess Katherine played in the film by Renee Asherson. I was captivated by her; entranced; everything about her was perfect. I wanted to be Olivier and, with luck, I could reach out and touch Renee Asherson. The battle scenes were good, too.
Of course, I had absolutely no idea that the film was made near the end of World War II and was intended as a morale-booster for Britain. Years later I learned that the film was partly funded by the British Government.
1961: The hill and memories of a cycle ride
I was aged 11 and my brother was aged 12. We lived in a detached house in Fleet, Hampshire. Fleet, at the beginning of the 1960s, was the kind of town that had many advantages – such as the folk-music club at the ‘Station hotel’ and the coffee bar in the high street. The town was divided on class lines – and that was an advantage because it served to educate young people like me about the sociology of the nation. My brother and I played football, and went tracking in the woods behind our house, and collected the bits of weaponry left over from the exercises that had taken place on the nearby army training grounds. We both had good solid bicycles. Mine was very heavy and a little too big for me; it was called a ‘Zeppelin’. We had lots of things to help us with our cycling: lovely leather saddle-bags and gloves with holes in, and capes to keep off the rain. We had school-books and a sandwich box with sandwiches – and each day we had to cycle 7 miles to school.
But the real challenge on the ride to school was the hill. Beacon hill.
The long approaches to Beacon hill began at Crookham crossroads. The road edged alongside some desolate army barracks before passing through a short tract of wooded land. My brother and I cycled on and on, steadily and silently, as the road climbed gently towards the hill. Then, as we passed the lane that led to Butler’s farm the road began to rise steeply; it curved upwards: and we began the ascent of Beacon hill.
We did not dare to look towards the summit. We had to concentrate on standing upright and looking no more than a few yards in front of us. We had to find a rhythm; we could not speak to each other; we knew we had to keep our momentum going as we struggled against the unforgiving hill.
We stole a glance at each other; we both feared that the hill would break us – but we hoped that we might defeat the hill. We went on and on. In our imagination we heard the voice of our father urging us to keep going, urging us not to give in. And through his voice we refused to let the hill beat us. It took about five minutes to get to the top and then we coasted along for more than a mile until the trembling in our legs had ceased and we could, again, breath easily. We had won.
Sometimes, when we misbehaved at school we were made to write out the lines from Kipling’s poem ‘If’. My brother and I liked the poem because we knew that every time we ascended Beacon hill we had done even more than ‘60 seconds worth of distance run’. And, in this way, we were made in England.
1962: Stanley Shepperd and MAD
Stanley Shepperd was the son of an American Pan Am pilot. His family, the Shepperd family, was posted to the UK in the summer of 1962. They rented a huge house in north Hampshire. Stanley’s mother, Mrs Shepperd was called Elinor. She came from Connecticut; she wasn’t overly upset about living in England: it was something to do with it ‘having culture’. Mr Shepperd was called ‘Shep’. He wasn’t so keen on the idea of being stuck in the UK. So, to console himself he had his car – an Oldsmobile – shipped over from the US to his new, albeit temporary, home. But since he was a Pan Am pilot he was away for most of the time and he hardly ever got to see his Oldsmobile. Still, the Oldsmobile looked great parked on the front drive of the huge house situated in Reading Road North, Fleet, Hampshire.
Life being what it is, Mr Shepperd, the pilot, wanted to know what he should do about his children’s education. He asked my father who replied: ‘Why not send Stanley to the Grammar school in Basingstoke?’
Mr Shepperd took this advice: Stanley Shepperd was duly sent to Queen Mary’s grammar school in Basingstoke. I made friends with Stanley; we travelled to school together and, for a while, we sat next to each other in class. Stanley was a quiet American. Instead of listening to the latest pop records that his older sister Judy played ceaselessly on her new-fangled GE stereo-player, Stanley liked to make paper aeroplanes; he would sometimes spend a whole day perfecting the design of his paper ‘planes. He would launch them from his bedroom window and watch them glide over the heather-lined lawns of the garden below. Then he would evaluate how well his emerging designs compared, one with another. After a while Stanley reckoned that he had invented the most aerodynamically-efficient paper aeroplane that it was possible to make: ‘Gee, this plane sure can fly.’
Stanley Shepperd – who was just 14 years old at the time – used to get a copy of Mad comic sent over to him from the States. Mad was totally different from English comics – comics like the Eagle and the Beano. By now I was great friends with Stanley, and I had never seen anything like Mad. Mad was bitingly crazy; it was about lifting the veil concealing all the lies, nonsense, deception, and falsehoods that were on offer via the cultural colossus of media-marketed America. Mad saw through the idea that all those washing powders could wash whiter than white. Mad mocked the American dream; it saw lunacy everywhere and the dream-as-nightmare.
Besides reading Mad and making paper aeroplanes, Stanley applied himself to his studies at the Grammar school: He did amazingly well at Pure Maths, Applied Maths, Physics and Chemistry; he got top marks in all his ‘A’ levels and went on to study at MIT. At MIT he did brilliantly and then, after graduating, he did pioneering and original work on the mathematics of ellipses and orbits – and so he helped space rockets and satellites to do their thing. Right now, there is probably a satellite that is where it is because of Stanley Shepperd. He’s probably famous; who knows …
[I think he owns an island somewhere in New England. Reports are that he still wears only plain black trousers with plain white shirts. Stanley always had a thing about predictability; this is just as well if one remembers that his mathematics had something to do with getting things into the right place in space. Satellites in weirdo orbits would be alarming.]
Let’s get back to Mad magazine. It’s still going after all those years. And, seemingly Mad, like Stanley, has helped us get to where we are today: in 1977, Mad achieved its 25th anniversary; the New York Times had this to say about its initial effect:
‘The sceptical generation of kids it shaped in the 1950s is the same generation that in the 1960s opposed a war and didn’t feel bad when the United States lost for the first time and in the 1970s helped turn out an Administration and didn’t feel bad about that either… It was magical, objective proof to kids that they weren’t alone, that in New York City on Lafayette Street [where Mad was produced], if nowhere else, there were people who knew that there was something wrong, phoney and funny about a world of bomb shelters, brinkmanship and toothpaste smiles. Mad’s consciousness of itself, as trash, as comic book, as enemy of parents and teachers, even as money-making enterprise, delighted kids. In 1955, such consciousness was possibly nowhere else to be found.’
Mad is often credited with filling a vital gap in political satire in the 1950s to 1970s, when Cold War paranoia and a general culture of censorship prevailed in the United States, especially in the literature for teenagers. The rise of cable television and then the internet had, however, diminished the influence of Mad, although it remained a widely distributed magazine. To a large extent, Mad’s power was undone by its own success: what was genuinely subversive in the 1950s and 1960s is now pretty much the norm. In 2000 I bought a copy of Mad whilst I was living and lecturing at the City University in New York City. The imbecilic face of the grinning gap-toothed boy – the annoying face of Alfred E. Neuman – was still on the cover.
Go Ask Alice 