Authors: Kim Newman
* * *
Without knowing it, you’ve already been lucky. You are born in the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading in 1959, to middle-class parents with a comfortable income. In earlier centuries, other countries or different social classes, your survival chance would be a single draw from a pack of cards. In some cases, a draw from only the suit of spades. In others, a draw from the face cards of spades.
Your birthday is 4 October. Your astrological sign, should you care, is Libra. The only non-living sign in the Zodiac. The Scales. There’s an amusing irony there, if you’re disposed to consider it. Your nationality is British. Cecil Rhodes is alleged to have said that to be born an Englishman means that you take first prize in the lottery of life.
You are delivered at a quarter to nine in the morning.
‘A boy,’ your mother is told.
She smiles at you, weakly. Your delivery has not been as traumatic as the twenty-hour ordeal which, three years ago, produced your sister, Laraine. Still, you’ve demanded all her strength. During birth, your mother thought she was enduring the most extreme physical pain you’ll put anyone through in your life. Whether she is right is almost entirely your decision.
Your mother is Louise Frances Marion, born Louise Frances Mason in 1931. After school, she worked in a bank, where she met your father. Since marriage in 1952, she has been a full-time housewife and, latterly, mother. Your father is Harold Collin Marion, born 1923. He served in Burma in the war and is assistant manager of a high-street bank.
Physically, like many boys, you take after your mother. If you let your hair grow and shave your beard, you will at eighteen look much like she did when she married.
Nurses fuss around. The umbilicus is severed and tied. A great deal of mucus discharge is wiped off and tidied away. The afterbirth is disposed of. In 1959, they don’t believe in leaving a healthy mess alone.
Somewhere, a wireless is playing, the Light Programme. The first music you hear is ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ by The Platters. Your first sight, upside-down, is your exhausted mum, her hazel eyes bright with tears.
All this you will forget.
Once born, you have the power of self-determination. You do not have a complex understanding of the world, but you are born with a tenacious will.
You can choose not to draw the first breath. Or the second. In which case, leave now. Go to 0.
* * *
You’re still with the programme, as they will say in the 1980s. I’m glad. Nobody likes a quitter.
You’re professionally slapped on the bum. You open your lungs and squeak, instinctively sucking in hospital air. Oxygen tickles your alveoli, passes into your blood (you are Type O) and heads for your brain. Congratulations: you are sapient. Your thought processes are already more intricate than those of the cleverest cat that ever lived.
Your dad is allowed in, smelling strongly of Players Navy Cut cigarettes, and you are presented to him. Everyone is thoroughly satisfied with you. You are a cynosure, the object of everyone’s attention and approval. Your first smile brings universal delight.
Enjoy it. This may be the last time.
* * *
Your parents have had the usual name discussions. Mum wants you to be Rhett or Melanie, after characters in her favourite book,
Gone With the Wind
. If you’d been a girl, Dad would’ve allowed Melanie, though his choice (for no reason he could articulate) was Morag. But your sister has a slightly recessive R and Dad doesn’t want you to be Rhett in case you can only pronounce the name ‘Whett’. He puts his foot down and insists you take his mother’s maiden name, Keith.
Though your family are only Christmas and Easter C of E, you are Christened. Keith Oliver Marion.
Gifts from historical circumstance and the National Health shower upon you: vaccinations against smallpox, diphtheria and polio. You’ll almost certainly not get tuberculosis. You’ll be a bottle baby. You’ll live in a comparatively warm, clean house. You will not be ignored.
Again, you’ve been dealt a better hand than many born in other times and places. You live hundreds of years after the plague was driven from Europe, a century after infant mortality was the favoured method of contraception within many English marriages. Barbarian hordes do not descend on Reading in the early 1960s, sweeping from house to house, slaughtering men, enslaving women, tossing babies on spears.
Certain elements of your future are assured. By your parents’ standards, you’ll be properly fed and clothed. Education to a certain standard is guaranteed. A National Insurance number has been set aside for you. You won’t be conscripted into the armed forces. Unless you are declared a lunatic, convicted and imprisoned, or elevated to the monarchy, you will have the right to vote.
From time to time, as you sneer at a plate of spinach or struggle with long division, people – mostly your parents – will tell you that you ought to be grateful. Unless you turn into some sort of saint at an early age, which is about as likely as being made King, you won’t be able to give more than a grudging admission that yes, you ought to be grateful. You not having known any other life, ‘ought to be’ will never translate into ‘are’. Don’t feel too guilty about it. It’s not really a flaw in your character, nor in the collective character of your late baby-boom generation (though your parents, sensibilities shaped by rationing, think it is).
It’s the human condition.
Alone in your skull, you can only imagine the outside world. You can never
know
. You can’t
truly
experience – though empathy, art and observation offer approximations – what it’s like to be someone else living another life. You can only be you. The sooner you get to grips with that, the less mental anguish you’ll suffer over the question.
Again, unless you’re some sort of saint. Do you want to be a saint? Seriously? Most saints suffer on Earth. Many villains prosper. Remember this. It will inform the decisions you’ll be asked to make.
Then again, there are many definitions of ‘suffering’ and ‘prosperity’.
* * *
In 1964, your mother has another child, James. He is born with a slight harelip. You are delighted, at least at first. You were afraid you would have another sister, who would gang up with Laraine, whom you think of as ‘bossy’, against you. A brother, you feel, will reinforce you in the undeclared war with your sister. This is an emotional, not intellectual, perception. As soon as James develops a character, you – and Laraine – grow out of it.
You have many toys. Two teddy bears, Acorn and Big Ted. A wooden fire-engine. A clockwork train. A box of lead soldiers passed down from an uncle. Lego bricks enough to build a Great Wall. Slightly later, spaceships and dinosaurs will invade the toy-box, joining faithfuls whose popularity peaked years before you were born. The toys of your parents’ childhoods are still familiar objects to you. Decades later, it might strike you that you were of the last generation to take equal delight in tin spinning tops and plastic Daleks.
You, James and Laraine have books and are told stories.
Teddy Bear Coalman, Upside-Down Gonk’s Circus, Little Noddy Goes to Toyland
. Later, as you start to recognise letters and words, Mum reads
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
and
Winnie the Pooh
to you. Your sister reads Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, and you are impatient to catch up. Soon, you start on Tintin and Biggies.
You and Laraine learn
The Big Book of Riddles
by heart and madden your parents and other grown-ups by chanting, ‘What’s big, red and eats rocks?’ or, ‘Where do policemen live?’ until they wearily (and mendaciously) reply, ‘I don’t know.’ Then you scream, ‘A big red rock-eater,’ or ‘Letsbe Avenue,’ and collapse in helpless laughter.
* * *
Your favourite book, which you read until its covers fall off, is
The Buccaneers Annual
, a collection of illustrated stories about Captain Dan Tempest, an adventurer who has sworn allegiance to the Crown and preys only on Spanish rogues. It also has articles about real-life pirates like Blackbeard and Captain Kidd, with black-and-white pictures (which you colour with crayons) of their exploits and fates. It takes you a while to realise the annual is based on a television series which finished before you were born.
During the pirate craze, you plead with your indulgent parents for model galleons and cannon. You prize Herge’s
The Secret of the Unicorn
and
Red Rackham’s Treasure
above the other Tintin books. Dad reads a heavily abridged
Treasure Island
to you and helps draw maps on graph paper. The two of you construct an imaginary Caribbean archipelago, pinpointing the location of buried booty on each island. As you grow older, you and your dad won’t often have the time or the inclination to share enterprises or interests. Later, if you keep them, the maps will be worth more to you than treasure would have been.
You have a pirate outfit: a hat with the Jolly Roger on the crown, an eyepatch, a plastic cutlass. Your favourite game is boarding the dining-room. Mum worries you’ll hurt yourself (and the curtains) swinging from the rigging. Once, you are caught prising up loose floorboards under the bathroom mat. You tell Mum you are looking for treasure. Eyepatch, hat and cutlass are confiscated for a week. You feel like Dan Tempest during his months of unjust confinement in a Tortuga dungeon, and rejoice at the freedom of the high seas when your pirate accoutrements are ceremonially returned to you.
* * *
Unlike many of your contemporaries, you do not remember a time when your family did not have a television set. The first Kennedy assassination makes no impression on you, but you vividly remember the first episode of
Doctor Who
, in which two teachers learn that one of their pupils is from another planet and that her white-haired grandfather has a time machine disguised as a police phone box. Possibly, you later discover
Doctor Who
started the weekend Kennedy was shot and wonder how you can remember one but not the other.
In your childhood, Doctor Who is a more important figure than John Kennedy. William Hartnell will regenerate as Patrick Troughton before you learn that Harold Wilson, who has the same name as your dad, and Lyndon Johnson, whom you think of as the regenerated spaceman who was once Kennedy, are the prime minister of Great Britain and president of America. Jon Pertwee, on a new colour TV that is the envy of your schoolfriends, is the Doctor by the time you think you understand the difference between Labour and Tory. Tom Baker is in charge of the
TARDIS
when you hear Peter Cook on the wireless, explaining that ‘In America, they have the Republicans, who are the equivalent of our Conservative Party, and the Democrats, who are the equivalent of our Conservative Party.’
Dad was for Clement Attlee in 1945, but has voted Tory ever since. Nevertheless, he admires Wilson’s ‘get-up-and-go’. Mum, clinging to politics passed on by her father, has voted Liberal in the last two elections but will vote for Wilson in 1970. You should be old enough to cast a vote in the 1979 election, and may choose between Margaret Thatcher, James Callaghan, David Steel and Screaming Lord Sutch.
* * *
A year after James is born, Dad is (finally, according to him) given a managership, of a branch in Sedgwater, a market town in Somerset. The Marion family, which is still the universe to you, moves house. At the time, it seems the end of the world. How will you live without your familiar room, without your friend Gary Black from across the road, without the pirate’s cave in the cupboard under the stairs?
Within a week, you feel you’ve lived in your new home for ever. In the new house, which seems as huge as a mansion, you have your own room. You soon forget you ever had to share with your sister. Laraine, who alternates indulgence and hostility, is old enough to be jubilant at a safe haven free from the invasions of her baby brothers.
The vast back garden becomes a whole island, which you constantly explore. Dad tells you to stay out of the shed where he keeps his tools, frightening you with stories of poisonous spiders lurking in shadowy cobwebs that are spun faster than he can clean them away. Laraine has a horror of spiders, which you don’t want to admit you share. The one picture in
The Buccaneers Annual
you can’t look at shows Dan Tempest tunnelling out of a dungeon, surprised by compound eyes shining behind a curtain of black web.
Staying well away from the arachnid-haunted shed, you mount a serious surveying expedition, drafting in James as First Mate, and bury a tin of marbles – unpitted glassies, with swirls of colour – in a foot-deep hole, putting a dried bird-skull and a dead shrew on top of the tin before replacing the earth. You draw a map, marking the secret location of the treasure with a big cross. Somehow, despite the map, you never find the tin again. The treasure is lost, maybe for ever.
* * *
Dad would like a finned car like the ones in American television programmes, but buys a sensible, made-in-Britain family Austin. He drives into town every day. Your house is on the Achelzoy road, at the edge of Sedgwater, almost in the wild country. Mum learns to drive so she can do the shopping on Saturday mornings.
The family owns a washing-machine (Gran, Mum’s mum, still uses a mangle), a fridge, a three-piece suite, an electric oven, a ‘hi-fi’. Laraine lobbies for a transistor radio of her own, but you prefer a cabinet-sized valve set, which is put in your bedroom. The living-room contains a thin oval coffee table low enough for you to climb on and repel boarders, the kitchen has formica-topped work surfaces, all cushions and pillows are filled with foam not feathers.
* * *
Choices are made for you. Mum decides what to serve at meals, though as an infant you have a choice of whether you eat happily or reject with tears. Dad decides the family will move from Reading to the West Country. Your parents think you and your brother and sister should have separate rooms.
Mum resists her mother’s ideas of what children should wear and kits you out for kindergarten in what she describes (in a mocking tone that horrifies Beatle-mad Laraine) as ‘fab mod gear’: a blue bobble-hat, a tiny dufifel coat, yellow wellingtons. Since you can’t wear your pirate outfit to kindergarten, you make sure to carry your eyepatch in your pocket, so that you are secretly a buccaneer, if outwardly the image of Paddington Bear.