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Adventures of a Suburban Boy
By John Boorman Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2003 John Boorman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-2765-9
CHAPTER 1
Light and Shadow
If you plant oaks you necessarily take a long view. As with children. Both are acts of faith in the future of a precarious planet. When I came to this simple Georgian house in the Wicklow Hills of Ireland some thirty-four years ago, the ancient oaks I inherited cast their spell on me. They rooted me to the place. Although I was drawn away to distant forests and wild rivers, making movies, I have returned to raise my children and tend my trees.
The great pioneer film director, D. W. Griffith, believed that film was the universal language promised in the Bible that would herald the Second Coming; and so it must have seemed in the glory days of the silent era. In the first twenty years of the last century, film swept the world, effortlessly crossing barriers of class, race and nation. A measure of the speed of this revolution was that scarcely five years after his arrival in Hollywood, Chaplin was the most famous man in the world, and probably the highest paid.
In The Lost Girl, D. H. Lawrence describes Nottingham miners watching those early films: while they looked at the live music hall acts out of the corners of their eyes, embarrassed, uneasy, they stared at the movies, unblinking, mouths agape, like men in a trance, mesmerised.
The power of film lies in its links to the unconscious, its closeness to the condition of dreaming. In my dreaming youth, like so many others, I was as entranced as those miners, coming to believe that film was the ultimate art form, that it could include everything and everybody, reconnect us to all that had been taken from us. I was born in a faceless, mindless London suburb amongst people who had lost their way in the world, who had forgotten who they were, and had fallen from grace.
In the Arthurian legend, the Grail was lost because men had sinned against nature. The world became a wasteland. The Fisher King's wound would not heal. Only by finding the Grail could wholeness, harmony and oneness be restored, and the King be healed, and grace restored.
I have sought that lost grace in the film-making process, where the material things of the world — money, buildings, sets, plastic, metal, people — disappear into a camera and become nothing but light and shadow flickering on a wall: matter into spirit, the alchemists would say. Memories are even more shadowy and insubstantial ...
1933: Semi-Detached Lives
I was born in a snowstorm, according to my mother. My father set out on foot to fetch the midwife and by the time they struggled back through the blizzard, my head had already ventured into the world.
In the morning, my father left for work as usual. My sister had been parked with grandparents. In the meantime my mother was alone with the newborn child. She recalled those few hours of solitude as the happiest of her life. The house was muted by the silence of snow. Exhausted from the storm, the earth lay quiet. Rosehill Avenue, the suburban street she detested, was transformed, its banality concealed for the arrival of her son. The husband to whom she was never reconciled was conveniently absent. She fell into a reverie of perfect grace and I was enfolded within it.
So my first memory is not mine but my mother's. What I do remember is her face and voice as she told that story, the memory of a memory.
The poignancy of lost perfection, the long shadow that exquisite happiness casts over ordinary pleasure, can make for a life of discontent. For soon the snow melted and the street reappeared, nude and nasty, and her life needed to be lived.
Fifty-five years later I set out to make Hope and Glory, a film of my childhood in the London Blitz. I began by putting down the incidents and episodes that had hung in the memory, but film has its own imperative: as I started to shape these recollections, imagination asserted its function, and I began to invent scenes between my parents and Herbert, who was my father's best friend and the man my mother loved all her life. I also embroidered my fifteen-year-old sister's relationship with her French-Canadian lover. When I showed the script to my mother and my sister Wendy, they were shocked. How could I possibly have witnessed and recalled these intimacies? Some of the scenes I thought I had invented had occurred in reality, it turned out.
We define ourselves in the stories we tell of ourselves. We hone them; repeat them until we no longer remember the memory, but only the story of the memory. Especially if one is involved in transforming experience into fiction, the functions of imagination and memory become conjoined, but just as we recognise truth in fiction, we can also sniff out the fake in fact.
When I brought my mother and her three sisters to the film studio to inspect the set that reproduced our Rosehill Avenue sitting room they were delighted with its accuracy. They had only minor caveats: 'The wireless was in the other corner,' and 'Your mother always had a vase of flowers in the window.' Working on the designs with Tony Pratt and in the act of writing, long-buried memories were exhumed. In a book of period wallpaper samples I found the very design we had in our living room. It was profligate, but I had new blocks made and reproduced it. After the four sisters had made their small adjustments to the room, they pronounced themselves satisfied. My Aunt Billy said, 'It's almost perfect. What a pity you got the wallpaper wrong.' Was it her memory at fault or mine?
I reconstructed Rosehill Avenue for Hope and Glory on a disused airfield at Wisley in Surrey for a cost of three quarters of a million pounds. When I went back to the real Rosehill Avenue I found it did not resemble my memory of it. It was too small, not long enough and had a bend in it. I built the memory — an endless, dead-straight street stretching to the very centre of London, where St Paul's Cathedral could be seen festooned with barrage balloons.
The film of Hope and Glory is now a patina, overlaid on my memories, and writing this memoir becomes an archaeological dig. Movies exist only frame by frame; the rest is memory and anticipation. As in life, now is the only reality. A film can be rewound and be seen again, but in life the past is a murky place where imagination may be more reliable than memory.
I was born in 1933 at 50 Rosehill Avenue, Carshalton, a monotonous street of semi-detached houses similar to four million others that were built between the wars. My father bought the house with a deposit of fifty pounds and paid off the mortgage at seventeen shillings and sixpence per week. The purchase price was £676.
As home-owning members of the new lower middle class, my parents were dismayed when council estates began to spring up around Rosehill Avenue, rehousing London's slum-dwellers. Like other owners of semis, they had only a murky view of their place in the class system, but they aspired to a vague gentility, which was affronted by these invading hordes. They noted with mounting horror that Wendy came home from school swearing and talking 'common'. She caught doses of working-class diseases like scabies and scarlet fever, and eventually tuberculosis. She also absorbed an incipient socialism from these fugitive kids from Bermondsey.
She argued incessantly with our father. He was not a snob, certainly never disdained those he considered below him, but he deeply respected his superiors and felt threatened if things and people were not properly in their places. He had fought in the First World War and was a sentimental patriot, a passionate royalist, a dogged Tory. He insisted that whenever the National Anthem was played over the wireless we all stood rigidly to attention, chin in, chest out, shoulders back, fists clenched with thumbs pointing down the seams of the trousers. He once caught me lying in bed with the National Anthem playing on my crystal set. 'On your feet,' he commanded. It was a cold wartime winter night and there was no heating in bedrooms then.
I whimpered a rather inventive excuse: 'If I stand up, the lead on the earphones is not long enough, so I wouldn't hear it anyway.'
'You don't have to hear it, son,' he said in his paternal imparting-of-wisdom voice. 'As long as you know it's playing, you stand up. You don't need to hear it.'
'But Dad, it's freezing.'
He weakened, his manner softened. 'Just this once, then. But lie to attention. Remember, thumbs pointing down the seams of your pyjamas.'
His views were thinly thought out and, when challenged by Wendy, he would go white with rage, tremble and bark out inarticulate defences of his besieged positions. His anger would cause him to mangle his usually immaculate platitudes into gloriously surreal non sequiturs: 'I will not stand by and listen to you insult the country I fought and died for.' He had to choke back barrack-room insults he would dearly have loved to hurl at Wendy to refute her political heresies. Red in the face, words twisted and strangled in his throat, he would bowdlerise some savage curse into monumental ineffectiveness.
'You don't know your ... your ...' (Oh, to find a euphemism for arse, yet preserve the alliteration) '... your apron from your elbow.'
Wendy would argue that being a Tory was against his own interests, that he was sustaining the class that oppressed us. But voting Conservative was a way of reassuring himself that he would not slip down into the dreaded working class. Thus was England's class system shored up.
My mother inculcated in me a horror of the semi, and later I was ashamed of my origins because of the disdain heaped upon the suburbs by architects and intellectuals. The middle classes mocked the aspirations of this new lower middle class — 'Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!' wrote John Betjeman shortly before the war.
Four million built between the wars! The semi was neither a detached house standing in its own grounds, nor a unit in a working-class terrace of joined-up cottages; it was a half-hearted, halfway house to respectability. Four million of them! So twelve, sixteen million people lived in them? Where did they come from, these multitudes? Where are they now? Many, like me, have never admitted to being semi-dwellers. I grew up wishing I had been higher born; then in the sixties, wishing that I could claim to be lower born. Ironically, sixty years on, most of those houses are still cared for, pampered with double glazing and cherished with patios, unlike the Radiant Cities that came later, the new towns, the tower blocks that have fallen into dismay. The great Le Corbusier's manic followers came like shock troops bringing more destruction to England than Hitler, just as the Victorians demolished more Wren churches than the Blitz.
Was there ever such a stealthy social revolution as the rise of this semi-detached suburbia? They all missed it, or got it wrong — the academics, the politicians, the upper classes. While they worried about socialism and fascism, the cuckoo had laid its egg in their nest and Margaret Thatcher would hatch out of it.
In London the Underground system pushed out spokes from the smoky and grimy hub and the new semis clustered around each station or ribboned along the new bypasses. Where did they come from, these millions? Some had slipped down from the middle class, losing their money in the Depression; most were dragging themselves up from the working class. They came from all parts and stations, disowning their lowly past, anaesthetising it, so that most of the children I knew had no notion of where they came from, no memory of family history. We were wary of each other, kept ourselves to ourselves. Privacy protected our uncertainty about how to behave. In the thirties we were enjoying a new prosperity. There was a garage for the Morris 8 or the Austin 7. On Sundays the car was ceremoniously wheeled out from the garage, washed and polished, and the parents, with their two little tots in the back, would motor off to the seaside or to Box Hill or to the zoo at Whipsnade. They were homeowners, and they had the freedom of the road.
The private, inward-looking world of the nuclear family was taking shape. These dormitories, ten minutes' walk from the tube, with no roots and no past, were home to a new phenomenon, as yet unnamed: the Commuter.
With the bonds of traditional society severed, they found themselves in a comfortably snug void. Filling that emptiness was the wireless. It played all day, banishing the dread silence, yet I never heard a reference to the semi-suburbs in those BBC programmes. The broadcasts came from a distant land where people spoke in alien accents as remote as the universe that unspooled each week at the Regal or the Odeon in American movies or snobbish English ones. We never imagined meeting such people or sharing their experiences, which isolated us still further. We lacked the skills to reflect on what we had become. We could not fathom ourselves. We took on the daft, foolish looks of institutionalised people, never certain how to speak or walk or behave. Grief embarrassed us; we shrank from gaiety, turned our faces from any kind of public display of feeling.
As yet, in these streets, there were no shops, no churches, no sport, no pubs. During the day the men and the young were siphoned out to work and school; the wives were left to clean and polish, listen to the wireless. Down these deserted streets, trading on the dreams and loneliness, came men knocking on doors selling sheet music, magazines, vacuum cleaners, brushes, the man from the 'Pru' collecting the weekly insurance premiums, the hire-purchase payments on the furniture, and on and on. My mother would dig anxiously into her purse and sniff, seeking both money and sympathy, one of the many things that filled me with shame. It was worse when she was sniffing out money to buy me something. I determined that I would free myself as soon as I could from her brave self-sacrifice, fill her purse with money so that she would never again have to scrimp and scratch.
Architects were contemptuous of the semi, not least because they were totally uninvolved in its design and construction. Those tasks fell to 'spec' builders, who surely expressed the deep unconscious fantasies of a people oppressed by the patronising values of their betters.
The past was wholly annihilated. Everything must be new and newly made, preferably in chrome and Bakelite. Oh, how they broke free of the weight of tradition! The sun rose in stained glass over the front door, its rays splayed out on the garden gate; even the settee was shaped like a sunbeam. The 'spec' builder lured us with promises of fresh air and sunlight, flowers and lawns, a refuge from the sooty cities and smoky slums. They offered us Tudor gables, leaded panes, bow windows — eclectic fragments from pre-Industrial Revolution England. We had a teapot that was a chromium globe reflecting the whole universe, or at least the whole of our semi. The china, the cutlery, the carpets and curtains — all new, all in novel shapes and patterns. Clocks, vases, electric fires, cookers, streamlined and gleaming, all machine-made, banishing the craftsman, untouched by human hand.
Health and hygiene were all the rage. Hitler and Mussolini were much admired before the war for their initiatives improving fitness and encouraging sport. Health usurped religion in this churchless but not godless world. We were convalescents from the Industrial Revolution and needed several generations of fresh air and proper food to recover. Oh, what the English inflicted on the English: misery, deprivation and bondage on a scale quite equal to that visited upon their colonial vassals. Half the population was wrenched from the land and into city slums where its past, its ways fell out of mind. And now here were the survivors fleeing to those new suburban streets, fugitives from the shocks not only of the Industrial Revolution but also of the unspeakable horrors of the First World War and the privations of the Depression. Forget all that. Don't look back. Reach forward into the smiling new world of semis and sunshine, lawns and indoor lavatories. If you got through the Great War, escaped the mines, the foundries, the mills, then take comfort in amnesia and embrace the new fantasy, Arcadia for all.
We wore collars and ties now, and bowler hats. This was a new army of clerks, pen-pushers, a legion that leapt up to man the new 'service industries', and who, after but a few years, would be made extinct by the button-pushers, the computers.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Adventures of a Suburban Boy by John Boorman. Copyright © 2003 John Boorman. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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