Snuff Fiction

10

Personally, I had a great deal of time for the 1960s. I know that a lot of old bunkum has been talked about them. All that ‘if you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t there’ rubbish. But there was a lot more to those years than simply sex and drugs and rock’n’roll (as if this mighty trio was not in itself sufficient).

Yes, there was free love, for the Secret Government of the World had yet to invent AIDS. Yes, there were drugs, and many a young mind was blown and expanded. And yes, indeed to goodness yes, there was good old rock’n’roll. Or rather good new rock’n’roll.

But there was more, so much more.

For one thing, there were yo-yos.

You might remember yo-yos, they enjoyed a brief renaissance back in the late 1990s, and possibly you have one, gathering radioactive dust in a corner of your fallout shelter. But I bet you can’t remember how to work it, and I’ll also bet that you don’t know that the yo-yo was invented in Brentford.

Oh yes it was.

Norman Hartnell[5] invented the yo-yo. It was his very first invention. It is true to say that he did not invent it with the intention of it becoming a toy. He invented the yo-yo as a means to power his Vespa motor scooter.

Norman had this thing about alternative sources of power and it remained with him throughout his life. His search was for the free energy motor. That holy grail of science, perpetual motion. How the idea originally came into his head seems uncertain. But my money would be on the Doveston puffing it there.

By 1967, the year of which I now write, the Doveston had firmly established himself as Norman’s mentor.

Norman now ran the family business, his father having met a tragic early death in a freak accident involving handcuffs, concrete and canal water. The exact circumstances remain a mystery to this day and although the police questioned the Sicilians who ran the off licence next door, no arrests were made. Why the police should have suspected foul play in the first place is quite beyond me. And if they were thinking of fitting up the Sicilians, their evil schemes were soon thwarted.

For the Sicilians were all wiped out, a week after the death of Norman’s dad, in another freak accident. This one involving their letter box and a stick of dynamite.

They were the last Sicilians in Brentford and, in the words of Flann, I do not think that their likes will ever be seen here again.

Now, 1967 is remembered with great fondness for being the Summer of Love. Nineteen sixty-seven was the Summer of Love. There were other seasons, of course, and these too had their names. There was the Winter of Downheartedness, the Spring of Utter Misery and the Autumn of Such Dire Gloom that it made you want to open your wrists with a razor. But for some unknown reason, people only remember the summer.

I remember that summer well. For it was the summer of yo-yos and Brentstock.

Ah, Brentstock. The now legendary three-day festival of Love and Peace and Music. I was there, you know, I saw it all. Allow me to tell you about it.

For me it began one spring morning. I was feeling utterly miserable, although I have no idea why. I’d left school the previous July and gone from one job to another. They had all been menial and underpaid and I had been sacked from each of them. This, of course, presented no problem. There was full employment in the Sixties and no sooner were you sacked from one place than you could begin work at another. Sure, they were all crap jobs, but hey, it was better than being unemployed.

But in that spring I had a new job and one with prospects. I was employed by the Doveston. My job description was Overseer of the Plantation and I got to wear a special uniform with boots and carry a riding crop. It was a doddle. All I had to do was stride about, clouting migrant workers with my crop and telling them to get a move on.

It was the kind of job you only dream about.

So I’m still not sure why I was so miserable.

The Doveston used to have a catchphrase, which was; ‘Tomorrow belongs to those who can see it coming’. He was certainly one of the those. I remember him telling me that one day there would be no Mexican quarter in Brentford and I remember how I scorned the idea at the time. But he’d been quite right; by 1967 all the Pachucos had blown each other away and all the remaining Mexicans, mostly old women and little girls, lived in the shanty town of huts and sheds on the edge of the plantation and worked for the Doveston.

I should perhaps say something now about where the plantation was located. After all, it was the site of Brentstock.

It was located upon Brentford’s St Mary’s allotments.

Up until the middle Sixties there had been many allotment holders, each with their own little plot of land, rented from the council and yielding up its yearly crop of fruit and veg. But one by one the old boys who dug the soil died off and one by one their plots became available.

And one by one the Doveston acquired them.

And now he had them all but one. That one belonged to his ‘uncle’, Old Pete, and that remained untouched. As for all the rest, they were ploughed over and the great square of land, sloping gently to the River Thames, became a tobacco plantation.

I had scratched my head a lot about this. I’d always thought that it was illegal to grow tobacco without some kind of government licence. But apparently this was not true in Brentford. In Brentford it didn’t apply.

It was a tradition, or an old charter, or something.

So I got the job as Overseer. Uniform and boots and riding crop and all.

‘Sixty-seven brought in the first big harvest. And everything had to be done just as the Doveston wished it. Years of work had gone into this. Tobacco does not grow happily in a London suburb and this particular strain had been genetically modified.

The Doveston possessed many pages of notes penned by a certain Jon Peru Joans and with the aid of Old Pete he had created a fast-growing tobacco plant that was resistant to native pests and thrived on English weather. It was quite an achievement and those who were allowed through the guarded gate of the high barbed-wire perimeter fence marvelled at the beauty of the plants. Although not for too long, or they got a whack from my crop.

On the spring morning in question, the first harvesting had begun. Female workers toiled away and the Doveston and I lazed in raised chairs, toking on newly rolled cigars[6] and swigging colourless liquid from unlabelled bottles.

The Doveston dug into the hip-pocket of his fashionable kaftan and brought out something to show me. ‘I bet you’ve never seen anything like this before,’ he said, handing it to me.

I examined the object: two slim cylinders of wood joined by a narrow wooden dowel to which was attached a length of string. ‘You’re right there,’ I said. ‘I haven’t. What is it?’

‘It’s a down-and-upsy-down-again.’

‘That’s easy for you to say,’ I said. ‘But what does it do?’

‘It goes down and upsy down again. Look, I’ll show you.’ He took the item from me, looped the end of the string about his middle finger and let the item drop from his hand. When it had reached the end of the string he gave it a little jerk. It rose again and he caught it.

‘Incredible,’ I said. ‘That is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.

‘Are you being sarcastic?’ the Doveston asked.

I thought about this. ‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘But how does it work? Is there a little engine inside it? Or is it, as one might reasonably suppose, the work of some demonic agency?’

The Doveston reached over and took away my bottle. ‘You ye drunk quite enough of this, I think,’ said he.

I shook my head. ‘It’s not the booze. Although it might well be the tab of acid I had for my breakfast.’

‘Well, I can forgive you that. After all, these are the 1960s.’

‘So how does it work? It appears to defy gravity.’

‘That is what Norman originally thought. But sadly it doesn’t. It works by momentum, with a little help from your wrist.’

‘As do many things,’ said I. ‘Or at least one I can think of. So what is it for? Or isn’t it for anything?’

‘It must be for something.’ The Doveston turned the item on his palm. ‘Everything must be for something. You can do tricks with it.’

‘I can’t, you know.’

‘All right. I mean, I can do tricks with it.’

‘Go on then, show me.

The Doveston showed me. He sent the thing scurrying down again, but this time let it skim across the ground before jerking it up once more. ‘I call that one “walking the dog”.’

I clapped.

He then performed another trick, this one involving some intricate string-work. ‘That one’s called “rocking the baby”.’

I clapped some more.

He ran right through his repertoire. He had given a name to each trick. There was ‘spanking the monkey’, ‘worrying the pussy’, ‘splitting the beaver’ and one called ‘taking tea with the parson’, which involved such complicated manoeuvres that sweat broke out on his forehead.

‘You know what you’ve got yourself there?’ I said, when he was finally done.

‘No, what?’

‘Two bits of wood on the end of a string. Throw the stupid thing away before someone sees you with it.’

But somebody had seen him with it. In fact everyone working on the plantation had seen him with it. They were all standing and staring and now, to my amazement, they were clapping too.

The Doveston eyed his appreciative audience and I eyed the Doveston. He hadn’t given his permission for them to stop working and I felt it likely that he would give me the order to shoot a couple of the old ones as an example.

But he didn’t. Because now the workers were falling to their knees. They were bowing to the Doveston.

‘Yo Yo,’ cried one of them. Then, ‘Yo Yo,’ cried the rest.

‘What are they doing?’ the Doveston asked.

I shook my head in wonder. ‘They’re worshipping you. They think that you are Yo Yo.’

‘And who in the name of Virginian Gold is Yo Yo?’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘You don’t know about Yo Yo, because you didn’t go to St Argent’s, like me. The Mexicans may be Roman Catholics on the surface, but they also worship their Old Gods. Yo Yo is one of those. He screwed up in some way in Heaven and was sent down to Earth. Here he did good work amongst the farmers and ascended to Heaven again. Where he screwed up again and was sent down again, where—’

‘He did more good works and went up again.’

‘That’s it. Up again and down again and up again again. Just like your down—and—upsy—down—again.’

The Doveston smiled a most Godly smile. ‘Just like my yo-yo, you mean.

The harvest came in right on time that year. And it didn’t cost the Doveston a penny. He had me go straight round to Norman’s with a small bale of tobacco. This I exchanged for one hundred yo-yos, which the shopkeeper knocked out on his lathe in less than an hour. The Doveston paid off his workers with these and they were well pleased, bearing the sacred objects away to their huts with much bowing and tugging at forelocks. Or whatever the female equivalent of a forelock is. A forelock, probably.

And so the yo-yo craze was born. It soon spread across the borough and Norman, had he had the foresight to patent the thing, would probably have made a fortune selling them.

The patent was, however, taken out by a certain Mr Grad, who sold it on to a leading toy manufacturer for an undisclosed sum and a royalty deal.

It was many years later that I discovered Mr Crad and Mr Doveston to be one and the same person.

The yo-yo craze was born and how it spread. The case was, as it has so often been, today Brentford, tomorrow the world. There was trouble, of course. The Archbishop of Canterbury condemned it as ‘an evil pagan cult’, which increased sales no end. Mary Whitehouse called for questions to be asked in the Houses of Parliament and questions were asked. A member of the Cabinet gave an interview on the lawn before the Palace of Westminster, stating that yo-yos were in no way harmful and his own daughter was filmed by the news teams playing with one.

There were the inevitable scare stories in the gutter press about yo-yo deaths and suicides. There was an epidemic of yo-yo finger, caused by overtight strings cutting off the circulation and this had Mrs Whitehouse back on the phone, demanding that government health warnings be put on the things.

This, in turn, had the Cabinet Minister back on the lawn, but this time unaccompanied by his daughter, who was apparently in hospital.

‘YO-YO MADNESS’, as the tabloids were now calling it, eventually died a natural death. These things just do. Crazes come and crazes go and few, if any, know the reasons why. They are here today and gone tomorrow.

And tomorrow belongs to those who can see it coming.

But what about Brentstock, I hear you ask.

Well, what about Brentstock indeed.