Snuff Fiction

4

We were rarely afraid of anything much—although there was plenty to fear. These were, after all, the 1950s and we were living in the shadow of the Bomb.

Our parents worried a lot about the Bomb, but we had been given our pamphlets at school and knew that as long as you shielded your eyes from the big flash with a sweet wrapper and remembered to ‘duck and cover’, you’d come out of the holocaust unscathed. What fears we had, we saved for more tangible dangers. There were things you had to know in order to survive childhood and we were pretty sure we knew them all.

Snakes you had to be careful of. Snakes and the beetles that bite.

Of snakes there was much common lore, which was passed mouth to ear in the playground. All snakes were deadly and all snakes must die, it was get them before they got you.

Gunnersbury Park was the best place for snakes, or the worst place, perhaps I should say. It was well understood that the park fairly heaved with the buggers. They dangled from the trees, great anacondas and pythons, lurking camouflaged amongst the leaves, eager to take the heads off foolish children who dawdled underneath. The ornamental pond and boating lake were homes to water vipers, slim as hair and fast as Stirling Moss.

It was well known that if you took a piddle in the boating lake, they would swim up the stream of pee and enter your knob. Once inside they blocked the passage and you filled up with pee and died. The only cure was a terrible one: they had to cut off your willy.

Snakes loved to get inside you by whatever means they could. A boy from Hanwell, it was said, had taken a nap in the park and slept with his mouth open. An adder had slipped down his throat and taken up residence in his stomach. The boy, unaware of this, had eventually woken up and gone home. He was soon taken poorly, however. No matter how much food he now ate he remained all sickly and thin and complained of great churnings in the gut. His worried mother took him to the doctor, who placed his hand upon the boy’s stomach and realized the awful truth.

This boy was lucky, for he didn’t die. The doctor starved him for two days, then wedged his mouth open and hung a piece of raw meat above it. The hungry adder smelled the meat and came up for a bite. The doctor was able to drag it out of the boy’s mouth and kill it.

The snake was now preserved in a jar and many claimed to have seen it.

My friend Billy (who knew more than was healthy for one of his age) said that the story was palpable nonsense. In his opinion the boy would have choked to death had the adder been lured out of his throat.

Billy said that it came out of his bum.

But the threat was real enough and no one napped in Gunnersbury Park.

I do have to say that although I spent a great deal of my childhood in that park, I never actually saw a snake myself.

Which was very lucky for me.

The other great danger was beedes that bite. Earwigs were the most common, for, as everybody knows, these crawl into your ear at night and lay their eggs in your brain. Our local loony bin, St Bernard’s, was well stocked with incurable victims of the earwig. Their horrible howls could be heard in the night, as these cranial parasites drove them to distraction with their gnawings and scurryings.

Stag beetles were deadly and could take your finger off.

Red ants could strip a grown man down to the bone in less time than it would take his wife to boil a kettle of water.

Various spiders lived beneath the toilet seat, ever anxious to scuttle up your bottom and more than three bee stings would kill you for sure.

What with the snakes and the beetles that bit, it was a miracle that any of us lived to see our teens. But most of us somehow did and this was probably down to either good fortune in avoiding the snakes and the beetles, or to our good health, which was down to our diet.

We were smitten by disease and by personal vennin that bit like the very devil himself, but although the occasional epidemic wiped out a class or two here and there, our year survived all but unscathed.

And this was down to our diet.

It was not down to the diet our parents provided, the cabbage and sprouts and the rest. It was down to the extras we fed to ourselves. It was all down to the sweeties.

Now, it is no coincidence that we lose our taste for sweeties upon reaching puberty.[2] This is the time when we lose that ten per cent of our sense of colour and sound and smell without our even noticing. This is the time of the stirring loins, when sweeties lose their attraction.

You see, our bodies always know what they need and childhood bodies need sweeties. It is a ‘bodily instinct’, quite removed from the brain. If our childhood bodies need extra sugar, they send a message to our childhood brains. ‘Give me sweets,’ is this message. It is a message that must be heeded. Upon reaching puberty, needs change. Extra starches and proteins are required. ‘Give me beer,’ calls the body to the brain. But, you will observe, it rarely calls this message to a six-year—old.

Our bodies know what they want and what they need. And woe unto those who deny this.

Sweeties kept us healthy. We are living proof of this.

Although we didn’t actually know that we needed sweeties, we knew that we wanted them and curiously much common lore existed regarding the curative properties of certain brands of confectionery.[3]

A popular nursery rhyme of the day may serve to illustrate this.

And how true those words are, even today.

As children, we instinctively knew that the sweetie shop held more in the way of medicine than any branch of Boots. And any qualified chemist who knows anything about the history of his (or her) trade will tell you that most sweeties began life as cures for one complaint or another.

Liquorice was originally a laxative. Peppermint was good for the sinuses. Aniseed helped dispel internal gas. Hum (one of the pnncipal ingredients in humbugs) staved off dropsy, and chocolate, lightly heated and then smeared over the naked body of a consenting adult, perks up a dull Sunday afternoon no end.

And how true those words are, even today.

Our local sweetie shop was run by old Mr Hartnell. His son Norman (not to be confused with the other Norman Hartneil) was in our class and a popular boy was he. Norman was a born confectioner. At the age of five his father had given him a little brown shopkeeper’s coat of his own and, when not in school uniform, Norman was rarely to be seen wearing anything other than this.

Norman lived and breathed (and ate) sweeties. He was to sweeties what the Doveston would later be to tobacco, although he would never achieve the same fame. He would, in later life, receive acclaim for his scientific endeavours, which have been written of in several books and indeed will be written of here.

The Doveston and I befriended Norman. Not that he lacked for friends, you understand. He attracted friendship in the way that poo does flies. But, in the Doveston’s opinion, these were just friends of the fair-weather persuasion. Good-time Charlies and Johnny-comelatelys, buddying up with the shopkeeper’s son for naught but the hope of free sweeties.

‘What that Norman really needs’, declared the Doveston, one July morning, during P.E., ‘is the guiding hand of a mentor.’

‘But where might such a hand be found?’ I asked.

The Doveston showed me one of his own. ‘On the end of my arm,’ said he.

I examined the item in question. It was grubby as usual and black at the nails, with traces ofjam on the thumb. If this was indeed the hand of a mentor, then I possessed two of my own.

‘What exactly is a mentor?’ was my next enquiry.

‘A wise and trusted adviser or guide.’

‘And you think Norman needs one?’

‘Just look at him’, the Doveston said, ‘and tell me what you think.’ I glanced along at Norman. We were all lined up in the big hall, mentally, if not physically, preparing ourselves for the horrors of the vaulting horse. Norman had, as ever, been thrust to the head of the line by his ‘friends’.

He was a stocky, well-set lad, all big knees and podgy palms. And being the son of a confectioner, there was much of the sweetie about him. His skin was as pink as Turkish delight and his cheeks as red as cherry drops. He had lollipop lips and a marzipan chin, butterscotch hair and a mole on his left shoulder that resembled a Pontefract cake.

Norman stood in his vest and pants, having forgotten to bring his games kit. Mr Vaux, all tweed and cravat, blew his whistle. Norman made the sign of the cross, ambled forward, gathered speed, jumped and plunged headfirst into the horse.

The mighty leathern four-legged beasty took it with scarcely a shudder. Norman stiffened, did that comedy stagger which in cartoons is always accompanied by small birds circling the head, and then collapsed unconscious on the parquet floor.

There were no great cries of horror and no runnings forward to help. After all, we’d seen this happen many times and if you ran to help without permission, you got walloped with the slipper.

Mr Vaux called for injury monitors and we all put up our hands, for it was well known that Norman always kept a few toffees hidden in his underpants.

Our teacher did a ‘you and you’ and Norman was gathered up and stretchered from the hall.

‘What that lad needs is a mentor,’ I said.

The Doveston nodded. ‘You’re not wrong there.’

On this particular occasion Norman’s concussion was sufficiently severe to merit a sending home early and so, after school, the Doveston and I went around to his daddy’s shop to offer our best wishes and hopes for a speedy recovery.

It was Wednesday afternoon and the shop was early-closed. We knocked and waited and while we waited we gazed longingly through the front window.

This week it was dominated by a display for a new brand of American cigarette: Strontium Nineties. There were large cardboard cut-outs of fresh-faced college boys and girls, flat-topped and ponytailed, grinning and puffing. Speech bubbles issued from their toothy mouths, with phrases such as ‘Gee whiz, they sure taste good’ and ‘Radiating pleasure, yes siree’ printed upon them.

‘What do you think about those?’ I asked.

The Doveston shook his head. ‘I’ve read a lot about them in the trade press,’ he said. ‘They’re supposedly impregnated with a radioactive element which makes them glow in the dark. The Americans irradiate everything nowadays, it’s supposed to be very good for the health.’

‘They irradiate Coca-Cola, don’t they?’

‘Allegedly,’ said the Doveston. ‘Allegedly.’

He knocked again and we waited some more. I knew that the Doveston’s attempts to adopt old Mr Hartnell had met with no success and I must confess that I did not believe that his intention to become Norman’s mentor was altogether altruistic. But the lure of free sweeties and possibly fags was too much for me to ignore.

The Doveston squinted through the shop-door glass. ‘Someone s coming,’ he said.

Norman’s face appeared before us, somewhat grey and mournful. ‘Piss off,’ it said.

‘Hello, Norman,’ said the Doveston. ‘Is your dad at home?’

‘He’s gone to the wholesalers. Same as he does every Wednesday afternoon and he told me not to let any kids in. Same as he does every Wednesday afternoon.

‘Very wise too,’ said the Doveston. ‘So, are you coming out, or what?’

‘I’m ill,’ said Norman. ‘I’ve got a headache.’

‘We’re going to the fair.’

‘What fair?’ asked Norman.

‘What fair?’ I asked too.

‘The one on the Common, of course.’

Norman shook his aching head. ‘It doesn’t open until Saturday. Everyone knows that.’

‘It opens for me,’ said the Doveston. ‘I have an uncle who runs one of the attractions.’

Norman’s eyes widened behind the door glass. ‘You have?’ he said slowly. ‘Which one?’

‘His name is Professor Merlin. He runs the Freak Show.’ My eyes too widened somewhat at this. The Freak Show was always a big attraction. Last year there had been an eight-legged lamb and a mermaid. Both had admittedly been stuffed, but there were live exhibits too. Giants and dwarves, a bearded lady and an alligator man.

‘You’re lying,’ said Norman. ‘Piss off.’

‘Please yourself,’ said the Doveston, ‘but we’re going. I just thought you might like to see the dog-faced boy. They say that he bites the heads off live chickens.’

‘I’ll get my coat,’ said Norman. ‘We’ll come inside and wait for you.’ ‘No you bloody won’t.’

Norman fetched his brown shopcoat, the new one he’d been given for his ninth birthday. He closed the shop door and, under the disguised scrutiny of the Doveston, locked it with his own set of keys. And then the three of us shuffled off towards the Common.

I did have my doubts about this. We all stayed well clear of the fair until it officially opened. The gypsies there had very large dogs and no love for casual callers.

‘Are you sure this is wise?’ I asked the Doveston as we approached the circle of caravans.

The Doveston sshed me to silence. He had been explaining to Norman about another uncle he had who was a lama in Tibet. This particular uncle was skilled in the art of levitation, an art that could prove useful in all manner of activities. The vaulting of gymnasium horses, for example. The Doveston felt certain that his lamaic uncle might be persuaded to pass on the secrets of this invaluable art to Norman, in exchange for nothing more than a carton of Strontium Nineties.

‘Piss off,’ said Norman.

Some very large dogs were beginning to bark and between the high-sided caravans we could make out the figures of Romany types. Big-boned burly bods were these, with walrus moustaches and rings through their ears. Tattooed and terrible, hairy and horrid.

The menfolk looked no better.

‘Just wait here while I have a word,’ said the Doveston, hurrying off.

We scuffed our shoes about on the grass and waited. Norman fished a jujube from his pocket and popped it into his mouth. I hoped he’d offer me one, but he didn’t.

‘Gypsies eat their young, you know,’ said he.

‘They never do.’

‘They do.’ Norman nodded. ‘My dad told me. There’s only ever nine hundred and ninety-nine gypsies ever alive at one time. It’s because they have magical powers, like being able to tell the future and knowing where to find hidden gold. The magic is only strong enough to go round between the nine hundred and ninety-nine of them. One more and they’d lose it. So a new gypsy isn’t allowed to be born before an old one dies. If one is, they kill it and eat it.’

‘How horrible,’ I said.

‘That’s nothing compared to other things they get up to. My dad’s told me all about them.’

‘Your dad certainly knows a lot about gypsies.’

‘He should,’ said Norman. ‘My mum ran off with one.

The Doveston returned and said, ‘Come on, it’s safe, you can follow me.’

We shuffled after him in between the high caravans and into the great circle where the attractions and rides were being assembled. The tattooed moustachioed women toiled away, singing songs in their native Esperanto as they hoisted the sections of the Pelt the Puppy stalls and Sniff the Cheese stands into place.

The menfolk lazed on their portable verandas. Dollied up in floral frocks and sling-back shoes, they sipped their Martinis and arranged cut flowers into pleasing compositions.

‘That’s the life for me,’ said Norman.

And who could argue with that?