The Writer

Dodgems

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“They’re called dodgems for a reason, Isabella. They’re not bumper cars, they’re dodgems. The aim is to *avoid* being bumped.”

He loved fairgrounds. It was the one thing I could guarantee whenever he came back home – a trip to Battersea. ‘Anyone for the seaside?’ he’d joke. Mother would always demur.

The park was schizophrenic. Half the rides were set in someone's (a man's) idea of an olde world English village. The other half was space-age themed. For the first few years, I was too small to go on the bigger, faster rides, which meant residing in olde world.

We’d sit in vintage cars running on rails, me pretending to drive and Daddy providing commentary on an imagined race with Graham Hill up ahead. Or he’d buy me a head-sized plume of pink floss and chauffeur me around the central lake in a tiny buzzing motor boat. I can remember how the wooden stick of the floss would rasp against my tongue.

We’d sit together on a gilded horse, looping round and round and up and down to the sound of a dopplered Wurlitzer. ‘Giddyup’, he’d say. ‘Don’t let go!’. And he’d hug me round my middle and I’d breathe in the smell of his jacket.

By the time I was eight he would let me ride a horse on my own. With each rotation I’d seek him out and see him stood in the same place, hollering and waving  ‘til the end of ride. Sometimes he'd do a double take as if he’d caught sight of me for the first time. Sometimes he'd hide behind someone else and then jump out.

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The fairground was one of the few places I could see him as a joyous person, fun to be with, laughing without any sign of the distance or sadness that modulated most of his attempts at a shared joke or a lark. He’d shoot corks at little tin men and win me a gonk, smack coconuts with wooden balls, bounce ping pong balls into goldfish bowls, hook yellow plastic ducks from a piddling stream. He’d banter with the stall holders, his voice becoming louder and more piratey, like an old Kentish hop-picker. And he’d always win more than he lost. I never came away with anything less than three fluffy toys and a bag of sweets.

As I got older, we entered the space-age with its spinning, dizzying, lurching, up and down, round and round, humping, bumping rides. Daddy loved it. He was particularly expert at shifting his bodyweight on the waltzers - the Cavalcade of Swinging Cars! We would spin non-stop at a dizzying rate ‘til my ears popped and my head rang like a sailor after a storm.

He would roar and wave his hands in the air on the water chute, savouring every moment -  the slow cranking climb, the sudden rush, the swoosh and the splash.

And he’d wait behind me at the top of the Joy Glide helter-skelter, both of us with our scratchy frayed doormats in our hands and a liberating glimpse of the river. He’d promise not to go too early, but then jump on soon after me, so I could hear him skidding and scuffing nearer and nearer all the way down, calling to me – “I’m coming. Hurry up. I’m coming!”

Dodgem
His favourite was the Dodgems. We’d always wait a while before targeting the car we wanted, with fuzzy 50s rock n roll music blaring out of filthy speakers in the ceiling, and him shouting in my ear, pointing out which ones had better electrical contact and which ones were sluggish or needed servicing. He’d never let me drive on my own. Even as I got bigger he’d insist on squeezing in with me and sharing the driving.

And we’d wrestle for control of the car. Any moment he thought I might bump into the side or into another car, he’d grip my driving hand fiercely and yank the wheel hard. So proficient was he at driving that he could turn the car on a sixpence and would sometimes show off by insisting on driving backwards for the entire ride, avoiding any kind of crash, even though he knew all I really wanted to do was bump and bump and bump...

Every fair visit he’d tell me how the makers designed the cars so they were deliberately hard to control and naturally veered and zig-zagged in what he liked to call ‘a promiscuous and irregular path’. "A path no daughter of mine will be taking," he would add. He'd brag about teaching Elvis to drive a dodgem in 'Roustabout', how terrible Richard Attenborough had been at driving jeeps and how he'd raced his ancient Mercedes against famous drivers and film stars  of the Fifties with names I'd never heard of: Mike somebody, Peter somebody, Jimmy somebody, all of them mangled up in car crashes long ago, forgetting they were meant to be dodging instead of bumping.

We20-p26-mems-battersea-park-fun-fairROTOR-SMALL
And as the afternoon died and the lightbulbs on the giant windmill started to glare and glitter in the dusk, we’d always end with the Rotor. He'd be the show-off who'd start off with a handstand, his trousers sagging down to reveal his embarrassingly long socks and thin white legs. We'd start spinning and all stick to the wall, and then the floor would sink. There he'd be, stuck upside down to the wall like a pigeon that had smacked into the front of a train - his eyes closed, playing dead, pretending to be so unbothered by it all that he could fall asleep. The centrifugal centre of attention he'd be, until some weakling puked up and we all got splattered. 

And then home, later than had been promised, with mother always sitting primly in the sitting room with her third gin and Cin and a fag on, sourly fretting to Daddy about me being taken to ‘such a place’.

Just after my 12th birthday it was all over. Three children killed and dozens injured on the ancient The Big Dipper. The carriages had broken free of their haulage rope, failed to brake, hurtled backwards down a steep incline and smashed through the barriers at the bottom. Carnage.

‘It was always a health and safety nightmare that one,’ said Daddy. ‘No proper maintenance.’

‘I told you so,’ said Mother. The whole fairground shut down and we never went back.

Essex
That next year, Daddy started taking me to the movies instead. We went to see ‘That’ll Be The Day’. I squirmed in my seat worrying that Daddy would see how much I fancied David Essex, with his deep brown-eyed stare, his thick black hair, his cheeky reedy East End voice. Daddy didn’t notice. He was too busy pointing out errors –  how the fairground scenes were set up, how Essex handled the dodgems, how Ringo Starr loaded the lorries. “They’ve never worked a day on a fairground in their lives,” he whispered loudly. I could hear people behind us sniggering.

And then there were the sex scenes. Grubby behind the rides sex. Back of the caravan sex. And I was watching it with Daddy. Had that been going on at Battersea, while me and Daddy romped and spun, drove and rode so innocently? Was this the kind of life that Daddy had been living with chums like Mike, Peter and Jimmy? Suddenly the fairground became, a less innocent place, a place one maybe shouldn’t go with one’s father.

I blushed my way through the rest of the film, steadfastly looking straight ahead, keeping my hands very still and firmly on my lap, cradling a Kia Ora drink, but never daring to put the straw to my lips. 

Every moment David Essex grabbed and mauled another girl, I imagined my father looking across at me to gauge my reaction, monitor my emotions. The film went on forever – David at the fair, David leaving the fair, David going home, David getting married, David having sex with his best friend’s girl, David arguing with his mother, David getting a job, David quitting a job, David buying a guitar.

When the credits finally rolled and the lights came up, I was so relieved I thought I might wet myself. I jumped up out of my seat and pushed past the rest of the people in the row. I didn’t even say sorry. I just wanted to get away and hope Daddy would take me home without asking me any questions – “What did you think of it? Did you like that young fellow? He’s a pretty boy, isn’t he? Hardly Elvis though”

But when I looked round to check he was following me, he wasn’t there. I couldn’t see him. And when I stopped to check, I could see he was still in his seat, slumped down, flat out.

He’d spent the whole second half of the film fast asleep., dreaming, no doubt, of one more circuit of the dodgems, one more ride on the flume, or another upside-down performance on the Rotor.


Dundee: the mildly terrible thing

“I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”

When Mother was filming ‘Mary Stuart: The Musical’ she insisted on taking us on location. It was the summer holidays, and she was too mean pay the money required to keep an au pair or a nanny to look after us in London.

Papa was still in the U.S and useless. There appeared to be no-one else in our family tree who could be trusted with children. I was 14 and Chris was 7.

The trip was sold to us as a ‘Highland Adventure’. I had a copy of ‘Catriona’ thrown at me. Chris was sold the line that he might meet Sean Connery or Dennis the Menace.

In the end, we spent a good deal of our time in a hotel called The Chestnuts in Dundee. It was a delapidated Victorian pile, with views of the river, old sock-coloured woodchip on the walls, the stink of old lamb stew and cigarettes in the carpets, and one black and white television in the bar. Mother was not used to slumming it and complained volubly every day about why a house or flat had not been provided. It was an early indication of where mother’s career was going at the time.

The good news was that Mother had found an au pair after all - for Chris at least. It was me.

While Mother was filming, or whenever she was being driven off in all directions in search of a decent restaurant or a cocktail bar (In Scotland? In the 1970s?!), it was my job to keep Chris amused. Note that I say amused rather than safe. I’m not sure anyone up there was very concerned about safety. We’d often watch the locals working by the river and it didn’t look like anyone was interested in keeping themselves safe. So many near misses and casual injuries – a leg squashed between two boats, a hammer just missing a hand, drills cutting into boots, planks on heads. All of it dismissed with an unintelligible gargle of swears and laughter.

It was a miracle that I kept Chris as safe as I did. And only once did anything mildly terrible happen – and even that has been exaggerated in family lore. Mother uses to it to prove how bolshy and irresponsible I could be. Chris uses it as an example of what a maverick he pretends to be and how I always wanted to kill him. Papa just laughed about it. But then used he used it in one of his films. For him I think family life, life in general, was just material. It was never real for him. It didn’t touch him personally.

For Mother, who had no skin to speak of that might protect her from the outside world, every minor event was a personal attack. I surmise now that she used the alcohol to thicken her skin or to soften the blows of modern life - or both. Now I’m older, I wonder if it had always been that way for them or had they been a bit more normal in their youth? Just from the little reading I’ve done about the 1920s and 1930s it doesn’t feel like there was such a thing as normal.

Anyway, you probably want me to tell you about the mildly terrible thing.

It was about two weeks into our Dundee ‘vacation’ and after breakfast Chris and I were left to our own devices. This was becoming normal. Some responsible adult  - not Mother - might ask me what plans we had for the day and I’d usually lie and say we were going to the library or to the Soviet-style town square where we could sip Kia-Ora in our duffle-coats, under a multicoloured parasol that dripped peaty rain drops onto the grubby granite paving slabs.

We’d more often than not end up puddling our way along the estuary, since both of us weren’t that used to the great outdoors and found it thrilling to be able to spot otters and squirrels and birds we didn’t know the names of.

We’d skim stones, throw seaweed at each other, eat marmalade sandwiches and ruin our shoes. I actually didn’t mind goofing around with a brother half my age. He was always rather jolly as a kid and always up for stuff, but also quite content doing nothing much. We both liked collecting pebbles and crappy rusty bits and bobs that centuries of boat industry had left embedded in the sand. The weather was rarely bad enough to keep us indoors. Yes, it would rain, but only for half an hour until the sea wind would blow the clouds away and replace it with gushing blue air and spit-spots of water bashing our faces and turning our hands bright pink.

That day, I decided we should have a bigger adventure. Chris and I had talked a lot about the bridge and what might be on the other side. We’d discovered there was a pedestrian walkway between the two roads all the way across the Tay. Sandra, the hotel maid I had become pally with, told me it was wild over there with a nature reserve, woods to explore and sandy beaches. I trusted her judgement by then, given she’d seen Marc Bolan play live twice and also went to the local arts cinema and could talk in a clever way about Bertolucci and Chabrol. She also mentioned the airbase which meant I could lure Chris over there with a promise of seeing jet planes.

So off we went. I figured from a map that was on the hotel lobby wall that the bridge was only a couple of miles across and it was another couple more to get to the nature reserve. So we wouldn’t be walking more than a couple of hours each way. We had the sandwiches and the drink we were always given and I figured we’d probably find a shop or a café somewhere along the way if we needed it.

Nowadays I find it odd that nobody stopped to ask us where we were going – two kids walking down the middle of the bridge, the only two people walking across the bridge with cars and lorries whizzing either side of us. From the hotel we must have been two little specks of dust moving along a straight pale grey line in the middle of the tarmac-coloured bridge receding into the distance across the vast blue-iron river. Did Sandra watch us from a window and fail to say anything to anyone?

We were lucky with the weather. It was actually quite summery. Hot enough for the insects to come out and bite us. Chris got tired very quickly and I had to keep waiting for him to catch up. He’d finished all his drink before we’d even got over the bridge and then complained bitterly about being thirsty. I told him we’d be able to drink from the streams on the other side, the water being so pure. Somehow he’d got to know about parasites, liver flukes and the like, and wanted to tell me about stories he’d read about people with giant worms crawling out of their arses and weird tiny beetles that took over your brain and made you want to jump off high buildings. I’d not really heard him talk like this before and was wondering where he got these books from. Still, it was quite entertaining to suddenly realise your little brother might be a freak after all. I’m guessing something about the walk across the bridge had triggered something for him – that we really were free to do and say what we liked without reference to Mother or Papa or what 'others' might say.

We made it quite easily to the woods and then the beach, albeit a bit hot and bothered. And we did drink from a little stream and I joshed with Chris about how his brain was now going to be full of bugs. As we came to the sand dunes a military jet skimmed over the sea, swooped up towards our heads, and then floored us with a belly-shaking boom. Chris leapt off a dune and screamed. To our left I noticed a flock of little brown turds  - seals!

“Let’s go look at the seals”

“Let’s go to the airbase,” said Chris.

“That’s too far away.”

“You said we were going to see the planes,” said Chris.

“We just saw a plane.”

“I want to go to the airbase,” said Chris.

It’s not always clear where one’s breaking point is, is it? Especially when it comes to siblings. They can be annoying and unreasonable in so many different ways, and in a variety of settings, and yet nothing will set you off. Long car journeys listening to utter bullshit and incessant whining whilst being elbowed and kicked – no problem. Foul table manners and impossible food fussiness endured year after year. Emerging and evolving opinions formed without any real thought or reason tolerated because, well, it's your brother and one day he will grow up and not say that stupid stuff. Fantastically judgy comments about your own looks and behaviour that have to become the proverbial water off a duck’s back knowing that it’s not his fault it’s just the world he's growing up in.

And all the time you are forced to believe that via the connection of blood he must be OK really, that in the main he’s a good little egg who’s heart is in the right place.

And then one day, over what might seem nothing at all, you snap. The mildly terrible thing happens.


“Misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous”

In her teenage years, Mary Godwin spent many months living with a Non-Conformist family in Dundee, far away from the distractions of London; most notably, far away from the distraction on one Percy Shelley, always irrepressibly keen to hook up with Mary in the local St Pancras churchyard.

 In Scotland her ‘habitual residence’ was ‘the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay’. Unable to get graveyards and Percy off her mind, she was also a regular frequenter of the Howff, an ancient burial ground near the river, perhaps most famous for the Witch’s Stone, purportedly the resting place – if indeed she rests – of Grissell Jaffray, the last witch to be burned in Dundee.

 Go there today and you will almost certainly see a small pile of coins resting atop the Witch’s Stone. Superstitious visitors like to leave a ‘piece of silver’ on the stone. It’s not clear whether the payment is made to ward off evil, or to acknowledge the injustice of Jaffray’s execution. Or both

 Extract from ‘Mary Shelley: Making of a Monster’ by Isabella Shure

 

"It's all downhill to Dundee" they used to say, presumably referring to the slight but constant decline of the bridge from one side of the river to the other.

I definitely had a sinking feeling as I ran across the bridge that day. I won’t say it’s been all downhill since then. Not for me personally. But maybe for the family in general it was a staging post on a descent into disaster.

I wasn’t particularly fearful for Chris, being on his own. I knew he was a resilient little kid. We both had to be. And he was old enough to look after himself. It was about time, anyway, that he did something for himself by himself, rather than me always chaperoning him and calling the shots. It’s all very well being the eldest, the big sister, but when you’re also standing in for your parents so much of the time, it’s hard. As someone once said, people who do nothing make no mistakes.

At this point I had no idea that Mary Shelley had spent time as teenager in Dundee. Only later did I make the connection. People tend to think I was drawn to Shelley precisely because of my experiences in Dundee, but this is not the case. It was years later that I was drawn to her story. Maybe I had some sixth sense at the age of 14 that this was a place where monsters were born.

But which one of us - you might ask - was the monster?

If you’d asked me back then, I would have had no problem with telling you it was my mother: vain, inattentive, bitter from experience, envious of others, increasingly alcoholic, fawning like a little girl towards men in power, mean and spiteful to women who she felt were any kind of competition, inattentive – careless even – when it came to me and Chris. And yet she was undeniably impossibly talented, charismatic and smart. It was in my teens that I truly learned to resent her, both for her strengths and her weaknesses.

When I got back to the hotel, I sought out Sandra rather than raise the alarm directly at reception. I tried to sound as jokey and casual as I could about losing my brother in the countryside and asked Sandra what I should do. I was a bit surprised and hurt by her immediate look of horrified puzzlement at my seemingly laconic approach to mislaying a 7-year old boy. She grabbed me by the elbow and dragged me to the manager’s office. I’d read about kids getting this kind of treatment as they were marched to a headmaster’s office or upbraided in the workhouse for asking for more, but I’d never experienced anything like it in my own life. So even though I knew I had something to answer for, I burned with anger and only gave up the necessary information in surly monosyllables, with eyes firmly fixed on the swirly mustard coloured carpet.

You, reader, might be saying at this point that the monster was me.

I had been in sole charge of a 7-year old boy, had whisked him off into the middle of nowhere and then abandoned him. Put as bluntly as that, it sounds rather terrible. But I will still insist on calling it ‘the mildly terrible thing’, because I don’t believe the situation Chris found himself in was in any way life threatening, and it was rather his choice to walk off in the opposite direction on the beach.

When he was found there was not a scratch on him and he had nothing terrible to relate about what had happened to him. To be fair to him, he never publicly blamed me for anything, and didn’t even whine to either parent. If I really was a monster I’d suspect that Chris rather liked the idea of getting me into trouble (perhaps that would make him the monster?) but, as the years have gone by, I now rather suspect he, like me, would have liked the whole thing brushed over. But that was never going to happen with mother around.

The manager called the film company. The film company tracked down the producer, who sent an assistant to drive out to the location where mother was filming. There were no mobile phones in those days so I had to face a rather doomy few hours waiting for her to appear. The manager made me wait in his office rather than allow me to retire to my room. I had nothing to do but sit and wait. No book to read. No comics. No felt tips or notebook. No cassette player or radio with earphone. I remember the wallpaper has a regency red and gold stripe on a cream background. It had bobbled in some parts and there were even as few tatty holes that allowed the plaster to show through. The room smelt of polish and dusty fabric. As a recall all of this, I wonder why I didn’t just get up and run away. Disappear like Chris had. It would serve mother right to lose us both. And while they all rushed off to find Chris I could head off in the other direction and be gone for hours before anyone noticed.

When she did arrive, she was dry-eyed and distinctly unhysterical. She’d had time to plan her demeanour. She’d rehearsed the stoic and haughty role she would play.  She’d also already composed in her head the statement she would make to the local press. Before meeting the manager and the local police she went upstairs and changed.

She’d definitely decided on the best way to make me feel as disastrously culpable as I could be, not by tearing me off a strip or humiliating me in front of others but by dismissing me instantly and refusing to see or talk to me until Chris was found. No food or drink was sent up to my room and I didn’t have the nerve to ask for anything. I lived off the ice in the freezer box at the end of the corridor, stole packs of shortbread off the housekeeping trolley and cleaned my shoes on the noisy revolving brushes by the lift.

When Chris inevitably turned up, mother selected the two military policemen who looked most like Montgomery Clift to stand with her has she wrapped her arms around her darling boy and posed for the press photographers. And then she was straight on the phone to Daddy to explain to him the obvious next course of action. She could not cope with the kids. This kind of event was bound to happen. He had to take more responsibility for his son. How was Chris expected to grow up as a normal well-adjusted man without his father playing an active and present role in his life? How was mother expected to fulfil the demands made upon her by the film studio, by the television production company, by her agent, if she was supposed to be in sole charge of two children?

It was time for Peter to step up and take his turn at parenting. But not – oh no – taking on the both of us. No, she wanted Peter to take Chris.

For me she had other plans.


Dear Aunt/Uncle/Stinker/Gran/Clot/Pen-Pal

09/02/75

Dear Daddy

 Miss Leslie says I can only write to you once every half term because it is so expensive to send letters to America. Either that or I should write to Mummy less. I would write to you every week if I could, so please do not think I am ignoring you.

 I want you to know that things are better here. Mummy did send me a new pillow and I have started making friends. I got a distinction for my French translation this week and in hockey I have been playing in the 2nd XI.

 I have started reading the newspapers so that I can know what is going on in the outside world. It also gives me things to write about in my letters that might interest you. For example, did you see that two deep sea divers disappeared this week – one in Norway and one in Holland? I was wondering if there was some giant sea creature going around swallowing them up. It would make a rather good film don’t you think? Also, a woman called Margret Thatcher is taking over the Conservative Party, the first woman to do it. Miss Leslie is very pleased about that and says it shows us all what it might be possible to do when we leave school!

As you know it is my birthday soon and I was wondering if you are still thinking of buying me a camera like you said. I don’t want a Polaroid after all. Some other people here have them and the photos don’t come out very well and you only get a few photos in a cartridge, which is quite expensive. I would much rather have something like an Olympus Trip 35, please, which is not as expensive and the rolls of film are easy to buy and quite cheap to develop. If it’s easier for you, you could get Mummy to buy it for me and send it to school. They sell them in Boots.

I hope Christopher is doing alright with you. He hasn’t written to me or anything and Mummy says she hasn’t heard much from him either. But I suppose, as she says, no news is good news. I hope you and he aren’t cross with me. Perhaps I can come to America in the summer and see you both. Although there is some kind of summer theatre thing being organised here that I might maybe go on. My new friend Lucy is definitely going and it might be fun to share a tent with her. I’ve never slept in a tent before. I also think I might be quite good at acting.

Anyway, no more news for the moment. I will try and write again when Miss Leslie lets me. I hope you are well and that you are enjoying the work you have.

 Lots of love

 Isabelle xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

This is just one of the letters I find wrapped up in a neat bundle in one of his desk drawers, written by me from boarding school, kept with their original stamped envelopes, his New York address felt-tipped in red in my loopy handwriting.

I have not kept any of the letters he wrote to me. I do remember that, as part of his reply to this one, he sent me a ripped out a page from a Molesworth book (he ripped a page out of a book – I was shocked!). The page was entitled ‘The Self-Adjusting Thank-You Letter’. It’s a ‘funny’ template for writing a standard letter from school.

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He suggested it would make life easier for me if I couldn’t think of anything interesting to write next time. I’m sure he just thought he was being light-hearted and amusing in a friendly way, but I took it to mean that he felt my letter was soulless and mechanical and I was being too greedy by asking for the camera so directly.

In the end my letters did become rather automatic and less frequent. Perhaps it’s the nature of boarding school that one become more and more independent and self-reliant as one gets on. It is, in part, what parents pay for, isn’t it?

Also letter-writing on Sundays after chapel wasn’t something you had to do after a certain age. Instead I would queue for the payphone in the library and make a quick 10-pence call to my mother just to remind her I was alive.

As I browse through the letters I do find myself thinking about the things I didn’t say rather than the bland list of sporting and academic achievements I tended to reel off, alongside the rather pathetic pleas to be taken seriously, to be invited to stay perhaps, to be loved…

Lying by omission is perfectly acceptable family behaviour - we all know that. And I can’t think of anyone I went to school with who told the whole truth to their parents about what went on. Much of the time, the parents don’t want to know anyway. Again, in part, it’s what parents pay for, isn’t it?

I think we all knew that the school was happy to keep secrets too.  Week-end drinking, light snogging, the occasional catfight did not require a letter home  - just Saturday detention, being confined to the house (‘gateing’) or some kind of community works, like going to the local OAP home and helping the terminal ones cough up their last few flobs of phlegm into foam cups, or creosoting a fence.

Some slightly more terrible things happened occasionally – proper cruel bullying, someone getting their face stuck to a tin of glue they’d been sniffing, an overdose, an outbreak of cutting our legs and arms with crappy penknives, selling ciggies (and hash) to the 13-year olds, a cricket scoring hut getting smashed up (by the boys!), someone deliberately hurting a horse.

Classphoto

Generally, though even these crimes went no further than to the parents of those involved; by which I mean the rest of us were expected to maintain the conspiracy of silence. Just once, a newspaper picked up on a midnight drinking spree by about a dozen of us and decided it was time for a bit of private school bashing. But given I wasn’t named and the punishment was temporary suspension and to be sent home two weeks before the end of term with a letter to parents (that I immediately destroyed), I easily brushed even that one under the carpet by explaining to mother that we’d all been give leave to concentrate on exam revision. I knew she couldn’t really care less.

Hilariously… no not hilariously… infuriatingly, my father berated me later on with not being honest and frank in my letters about my boarding school life. This from a man who never told anyone anything remotely honest and frank about his own childhood.

There he is sentimentally packaging up my letters home and storing them in a neat little memory box. Meanwhile, I continue as his executor to empty the desk drawers, cabinets and cupboards in his house, with more and more skeletons of hypocrisy clacking and flumping out.

Why was he so keen to hold me to account? He must have thumbed through these letters  - checking over what I’d written, before writing to me in 1986 demanding to know if all the things I’d written in ‘Pull My Hair’ were true.

Bastard! A man who never admitted himself that he went to private school. A man who basically made up a story about the first 20 years of his life. A man who never honestly shared anything about his past with his children – that man was accusing ME of being secretive, of holding out on him!  

Sometimes I wish I had never written ‘Pull My Hair’. It was written before I had found my feet as a historical fiction writer, and it is most definitely in my eyes a stone-cold failure both in style and content. As I recall, I think I’d been reading Martin Amis’s back catalogue at the time. He was much loved by editors and agents. Don’t ask me why.  

I was at an age when, out of all his early books, ‘Dead Babies’ resonated most with me. I too had been to drug-fuelled weekends in country houses where things hadn’t gone as well as hoped. No, none of my friends were as vile or as funny as any of the characters in ‘Dead Babies’, but that’s what I liked about the book – everything was amplified and coarse and slightly artificial. Everything my life wasn’t at the time.  I liked the idea that you could take something from one’s own experience and turn it into something more brutal and exciting and entertaining. Let me stress I am not claiming to be in the same league as Amis as a writer, but then again as a misogynist w***er I am also not in his league either, so… swings and roundabouts.

My father, having read about the book in the newspapers (rather than actually reading the book) decided I must have based ‘Pull My Hair’ on my own experiences and took it upon himself to write a letter to me that was both a disingenuous ‘mea culpa’ for sending me away and also an admonishment for never telling him how terrible it all must have been.

I seem to remember in my (possibly pompous) reply that I assured him school had not been that bad and that the book had almost certainly been initiated by my agent telling me to both  ‘write what you know’ and ‘write more like a female Amis’. My zinger was this: ‘Daddy - readers don’t honestly believe James Clavell was ever a samurai or that Edith Nesbit grew up around trains’.

What burns still, though, is that my father thought I’d been secretive. Dishonest even. Him! Peter Shure thought I was dishonest. The man who had lied to everyone about who he was, where he came from, and even in his screen persona had traded on his ability to seal himself off and remain compellingly inscrutable as he slept through life.

Yes, I can accept that we all keep secrets from each other. Sometimes we have to. But I expect a fair trade. The secrets we keep should be of roughly the same size and significance as those that are kept from us - don’t you think?


Daddy, What Did You Do in the Great War?

Daddy _what_did_You_do_in_the_Great_War_

"There's nothing good that comes out of war. It's simply hell on earth, and people survive, and people don't."

Michael Cimino

During my last year at school, Daddy bought the house in Sussex and based himself more regularly in Britain. It was, he said, 'his turn to take me on' in the holidays.

Mother was not that far away, near Chichester, but she had no use for me at that time.

She was supposedly helping to care for Michael Wilding in his final months, projecting to the world her saintly side that she believed had been  unrecognised during the awards season, her performance in ‘Mary Magdalene’ having been painfully overlooked.

While she was there, Michael’s death was announced in the newspapers prematurely at least twice, if not three times, each time with a quote from Mother that she always claimed she’d never said.

Chris was finishing up his schooling in America, such as it was, but would be flown in for Christmas and sometimes Easter. He’d slouch around the house in smelly clothes, turn on the TV, raid the fridge and play horrible music on his Philips tape machine without asking if anyone minded. He was only 11, nearly 12. Every night after supper, he and Daddy would play Connect 4 while I did the washing up. They had Chris lined up for Winchester next. I would smirk to myself amongst the suds about how that would go. I gave him two terms at best. (And I was right).

As the only woman in the house, I was expected to clean up after the men all the time, and do most of the cooking. Daddy called it ‘earning my keep’ or sometimes referred to it as ‘developing my wife skills.’ He liked to joke that ‘A’ levels and Oxbridge exams were all very well, but they didn’t teach you very much about life.

“And what kind of life are you thinking of?” I shot back at him once. “Yours or mine?”

“Stand down, Isabella. No need to be like that.”

“No seriously, Daddy. Tell me what you’ve learned from the university of life. I’d love to know.”

“I know the value of shutting the hell up!”

And that was indeed true. If there was one thing my father was expert in, it was that – shutting up.

By the end of January 1979, it became just him and me. School was done. Oxford interviews done. Entrance achieved. Very little celebration – a glass of champagne with Daddy, an announcement in the newspaper organised by Mother. Eight months of nothing loomed. And silence reigned.

Snowstorms had hit the whole of the UK and it was decided Chris needed to be shipped out early in case Heathrow ground to a halt. A week later, the blizzards came back. The snow drifted up against the windows. The cars were buried, the driveway iced up. The power went off.

Daddy and I existed in a candlelight world, meeting on the stairs or in the kitchen. He’d mutter a greeting as he made a sandwich. I’d shake out some corn flakes. We’d both shiver in front of the living room fire, each with three jumpers on, cupping the tepid tea he’d managed to confect with hot water from an old camping kettle.

The scene seemed perfectly set for some kind of heart to heart. I waited for him to ask me something, anything, about how I was feeling, how I thought about going to Oxford, how it might be, what I was looking forward to, what I was scared of, what books were on my reading list, who my friends were, what plans I had for the summer…

Nothing. Just the slurp of the tea and long blank stares into the flames.

I tried another tack and started asking him about him. He shifted uncomfortably in his armchair.

“What the blazes would you want to know about that for?” His old wet red-veined eyes peered at me accusingly.

“You never tell us anything, Daddy. Not about your actual life.”

“Well, what is it you want to know?”

“Well, what about the war, Daddy? I did a whole project for my History ‘A’ level about the war last year and you never helped me with any of it. But you were there! You were in the war!”

“Not quite.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not quite in it, as you might mean. I was either up above it in a plane, or I was in a prison camp out of the way of it. Either way, I wasn’t ‘in’ it.”

“But you must have seen things, heard things.”

“Oh I saw things. Blast me, yes.”

Slurp. Stare. Silence.

The dirty drizzly English rain came to wash the snow away. He brushed the slush off the cars and scattered grit and sand on the driveway. Stomping into the kitchen in his wellies and duffle-coat – Paddington on deck, a walk-on part secured in ‘In Which We Serve’ it looked like – he announced we should ‘get out’.

“No good being cooped up here.”

“I don’t…”

“No ifs and buts, Izzy. We’ve been stuck here for too long. Let’s go into town. The cinema, maybe!”

Always the cinema. A safe place for sitting in the the dark in silence.

“Look in the newspaper. See what’s on.”

I paused sulkily. I had books to read. A duvet to hide under.

“You can choose.”

The options at the big cinema were ‘Superman’, ‘Jaws 2’  or ‘Halloween’.

“Halloween! Oh I’d quite like to see that. My friend Donald’s in it. Complete rip-off of some of Ponti’s Eye-Tie films I’ve heard but…”

Amazing how talkative he could be once it was a film he knew about, or he’d been in, or someone he knew had been in, or someone he loathed had produced it. Where had the gloomy quiet little mole in front of the fire gone?

“The Deer Hunter’s on at The Dome,” I said.

“Dear what?”

“The Deer Hunter. Michael Cimino. It’s meant to be good.”

“Cimino?!” Here it comes. Another story.

“Cimino?! He’s a blasted ad man, isn’t he? I did ads with him way back – United Airlines. Cigarettes. TV ads. Can’t be the same man surely.”

“It’s a Vietnam film, I think.”

“Not another one, dammit. Can’t we go and see something jolly.”

“Like Halloween?”

“Well, what about a comedy then? Isn’t that Neil Simon thing on anywhere?”

“You did say it was my choice.”

Deer-Hunter-18 copy
And to his credit, he kept his word. Off we zoomed in the MG, rain and cold air leaking through the soft-top roof onto my coat, the air heater blasting burning fumes into my face and onto my knees. No talking. Just Daddy leaning forward over the wheel, wiping the misted-up screen with his forearm, the engine screaming in a low gear, as if we were in an ambulance racing to the rescue of some decrepit Sussex pensioner with only minutes to live.

He bought popcorn before we went in.

“Want some?” he asked.

“I don’t think it’s that kind of movie, Daddy.”

“Nonsense. I known a lot of chaps who get squeamish about war movies. But it’s never bothered me.” And he scooped up a huge handful of fluffy yellow clusters and stuffed them in his mouth as if to make the point.

Munch munch munch.

The steelworks looms over the town. The local gang of steelworking pals josh each other on a muddy track going to and from work. They drink in the local bars. They shoot pool, sing and play-fight. They flirt with local women. They get into trouble with their moms.

Daddy carried on munching volubly and deliberately for the first half hour, and then turned to me, whispering too loudly: “Are you sure this is a war movie?”

Munch munch munch

One of the pals is getting married. A big wedding scene full of doomy symbolism and drunkeness. A stag-do up in the mountains  - hunting deer. Guns and death. Talk of being drafted. More trouble with girls…

He started to look repeatedly at his watch, meaningfully. Then he sighed.

Munch munch munch. 

An hour in - the screen explodes with fire. Within seconds, a group of villagers grenaded. A young woman and baby gunned down. A soldier immolated by a flame thrower. Pigs feast on his charred remains. Another bombardment. Sudden cut to riverside bamboo prison. The gruelling, relentless, torturing Russian roulette sequence commences.

No more munching. Silence.

Twenty minutes later, Daddy got up from his seat and walked out. He wasn't the first. Several women had already left, hand on mouth, swallowing their sobs. A couple of young men sloped off to the toilets to throw up. I sat in my seat and wonder what to do. Was he coming back? Was he OK? Was he just trying to ruin this for me?

I decided to stay. I couldn't say I was enjoying the film. My stomach tightened into a sickening knot. I was disgusted. Appalled at what these men were having to endure, to swallow, to keep inside themselves but keep on living. And then try to live normally. But what is normal when you’ve held a gun to your own head?

I sat there for what seemed like an age. Two hours. Three hours. Daddy never cam back. When the film finished I found him sitting in the lobby. He’d found a can of beer from somewhere and he was sipping it gingerly with his head down. He’d been crying.

“Are you ok?” I asked stupidly. He looked up.

“Good film, was it?” he said accusingly. “Good bloody film!?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I don’t know why.

“I thought he was an ad man, Cimino.” He wasn't really talking to me any more.

“Are you OK, Daddy?”

“You’re not meant to show it, you know. You can’t really show that. It’s not for other people to know. They shouldn’t have to. Why show that?”

“It’s just a film, Daddy.”

“Just a film?! What the blimmin hell would you know? You're just a girl. It’s bloody war, Isabella. It’s BLOODY WAR!”


Spot-Peter

Sleeping shot in war movie
In my second year at Uni I acquired my first boyfriend, Dan. 
He was a sweet, smart, funny boy, quite short with brown curly hair and a permanent grin stamped on his face, as if his school years had been an absolute ‘gas’ and his mater and pater had always made him feel like a little prince. 

I dropped him fairly quickly when it became clear he was showing an unhealthy interest in Daddy. 

To be fair, I think he was rather excitable generally about managing to get a girlfriend with a vaguely famous parent. His father was the managing director of a regional manufacturer (of metal grilles). His mother was a volunteer at the local hospital. By comparison, my parents must have come across as Burton and Taylor. 

Dan’s favourite post-coital conversation was to ask searching questions about what it was like having a famous actor as a parent, and then he’d start to suggest movies, TV shows and even adverts he might have seen Daddy in.

“Was he in the Terry’s Chocolate Orange ad? It looked like him.” (No)

“Was he that man sleeping at the beginning of ‘The Dambusters’? (Yes)

“Did he ever play a Spanish gangster in ‘Minder’? There’s an episode where they get involved with the Spanish mafia and one of the heavies is always sleeping in every scene.” (Possibly yes, although I didn’t know this at the time)

I think Dan thought he was being amusing and that I’d appreciate him all the more for being playful and vaguely disrespectful in a jaunty kind of way. This was 1979 after all and we were all rehearsing for the ironic Eighties by talking in air-quotes and referencing second-rate movies every other sentence. A life in a TV indy or a hip ad agency surely beckoned for Dan. 

Annoyingly, after I dumped him we remained friends. It was hard to avoid anyone in Oxford to be fair, so it was best not to fall out too viciously. It was also advisable not to be seen to be caring too much. About anything.

Dan, decided he still wanted to hurt me for chucking  him, in the most painfully indirect and I’m-not-hurt-really way he could think of. Or perhaps he was still genuinely obsessed with Daddy. Either way, his regular source of joy, whenever friends gathered in a room to drink and smoke weed and listen to ‘Regatta de Blanc’ by The Police (endlessly), was to instigate a game of what he liked to call ‘Spot-Peter’.

It was a simple game at first. All one had to do was think of any scene in any film with someone either asleep or dead in it, and then ask me: ‘Was that your Dad?’. 

It was a game that very much appealed to the boys in the room, who prided themselves on their encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema. In their early teens it had been music - “name all the guitarists who ever played for the Yardbirds” - but at university it was film. And it wasn’t just high-minded arthouse film, although I recall both ‘Nosferatu’ and ‘Jubilee’ had only recently come out that year and had made them all cream their jeans. 

They prided themselves on wittily blending the low with the high, quoting lines from films like ‘Escape From Athena’ (“Telling bad jokes doesn't make a man a collaborator”) or ‘Avalanche Express (“He’s a monster - with feelings”) and then hooting with laughter, as if they had discerned something in the film other lesser beings (the women in the room) could not see or hear.

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'Spot-Peter' allowed them both to display their knowledge of obscure film whilst seeming to laugh at what they knew. Most of them also enjoyed the kind of mean thrill young men can get from making a young woman feel uncomfortable.  

“Is he the killer that lies under the bedsheet in the girls dormitory in ‘Festa Fatale?”

They already knew Daddy had been making a slew of trashy slasher movies in Italy. They were just the right kind of film for showy humanities students to be in the know about - foreign, violent, garishly stylish, with a  satisfying stream of nubile teenage girls in distress.

“Is he the security guard with his feet up in the guardhouse in ‘Valley of Eagles’? One of Terence Young’s early movies, I might add..." 

Daddy was useful to them, in that he had made any number of cameo appearances in a lot of post-war British movies. Some of them I didn’t even know about until this game was invented.

"Did your dad ever work with Terence Young on a Bond movie?”

How easily they could use 'Spot-Peter' to jump off into their other favourite game of movie connections - from Peter Shure to Terence Young to Sean Connery to… ?

I kept very quiet about Daddy’s connections in real-life. If I told them about hanging around with Ursula Andress at the Battersea Funfair, her heavily disguised in headscarf, sunglasses and one of Daddy's ghastly blazers, I’d never have heard the end of it. I never even told Mother about that. Besides, it was not my style to show off. I preferred seething in silence. 

After a few weeks, the game widened to spotting Daddy in and around the town. Anyone who dressed oddly or had an eccentric way with them was immediately claimed as Peter Shure. 

“Was that your Dad pretending to be a tramp on that bench?”

“Was that your Dad who was standing in front of us in the tobacconists sampling a Sobranie?”

This part of the game I preferred. I could lead some of the more gullible stupid boys into believing Daddy did indeed like to rehearse his characters and try them out on me in the wild, to see if I would recognise him. As far as I am aware this never happened, although Christopher, my brother, once claimed he’d seen him out the back of one of the dingy venues his band always played in, pretending to be passed out in an alley. I choose not to believe that story. 

I suppose there was the benefit in ‘Spot-Peter’ of learning things about Daddy’s career that he’d never bothered to share with me. A flirtation with Claudette Colbert, for example, whilst playing a narcoleptic bandit in a tepid Malaya-based thriller. Or his role as Jacob in the second part of John Huston’s ‘The Bible’ that never actually saw the light of day. 

The top know-it-alls of the Spot-Peter clan loved to trump their rivals with films that were never released, or legendary ‘lost projects’ by cult directors. For all I know they made many of them up. Did Daddy spend a lost six months developing a movie with Polanski? Not that I knew of. But this was all part of the escalating arms race that the game became.

It felt like it lasted half a lifetime, but when I look back with a bit more calm than I could muster then, I realise it can only have lasted half a term. By the time Lent Term started and the new decade had dawned , the caravan of primping media cognoscenti had moved on. I had acquired a new beau from the law faculty, a boy who gave not two hoots about films but preferred to talk about politics and Charles Dickens. I was of no further interest to Dan and his cronies.

And yet I still find myself after all these years playing ‘Spot-Peter’ in my head. The man lying in the corridor, overcome with smoke fumes in 'The Towering Inferno’  - was that my father? The old man whose fallen asleep on the bus and missed his stop. Is that him? In a funny way, the game that was designed to torment me, now gives me comfort. Daddy can still be with me. Each time I see a sleeping man on screen, or a marginally odd character in the street, there he is. Whenever I want or need him, all I have to do is play Spot-Peter.

Years later I bumped into Dan at a book festival. He was with a boyfriend.

Dan, it turned out, had always been bisexual with a strong preference for men. His boyfriend was a well-dressed wealthy lawyer who spent far too long in the pub trying to convince us that ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’ was an underrated work. Dan raised his eyebrows at me and smiled. The grin had become kindly, soft and tired, betraying the kind of humiliation and hurt the world imposed on all of us in our twenties. I waited for him to ask after Daddy. He didn’t. We have been friends ever since.


“I wanna be loved by you, just you, nobody else but you.”

To say I didn’t know my father very well is an understatement. For the first five years of my life he lived in another country and would appear just a few times each year.

My strongest memories are of film festivals where my mother would hold me aloft like the infant Christ and display me to a noisy mob of press photographers. My father would lean in, touch my mother on the shoulder and grin winningly at the cameras. I don’t remember him ever holding me.

Christmases were equally public. We ate out a lot and attended various parties. I would spend a lot of time sitting under tables playing with toys. I was particularly keen on a set of plastic animals I could spend hours bossing about as head of my own personal zoo. When the opportunity arose I would cut up some felt with scissors and make basic waistcoats for the lions, ponchos for the giraffes, ties for the racoons.

It was my father who bought me the animals – it was his go-to pocket gift, picked up at an airport; an easy cheap way of  making him look as if he had remembered me and understood my likes and dislikes.  

"Oh what’s this Izzy? It appears a crocodile has managed to stowaway in my luggage. How strange!"

"Can you believe it, Izzy? Two hippopotami in my jacket pocket! How did they get there?"

Daddy’s appearances fell away once Chris turned up and my parents got divorced.  At the same time I became ‘precocious’, and a little bit angry, I suppose. I had learned (from my mother presumably) to be rude and judgemental about Daddy, quite often to his face.

I remember he took me to the UK premieres of a rather strange arty version of ‘Alice In Wonderland’ in which he played the Dormouse. Afterwards I told him it was silly and nothing like the book (I had never read the book). I remember also asking him rather pointedly why he didn’t get a speaking part. There was silence all the way home after that.

My zoo became very shabby. The paint rubbed off the tigers. All the reptiles went missing (I blame Chris). I chewed the hands off most of the monkeys and very few animals kept their tails. For some reason, I acquired an outsized Donald Duck figurine who now became the violent leader of a pack of delinquent penguins that roamed free across the zoo, menacing any other animals that got in their way. I remember enjoying using felt tips to dot all the white animals with purple or yellow spots. Eventually all the toys got ‘tidied up’ into a small wicker basket and removed to God knows where. I never saw them again.

Without the zoo to manage, I made it my business to watch every old film that came up on the TV, so that I could best Daddy about his knowledge of cinema. My favourites were Marilyn Monroe movies. She was always so funny and sad and glamorous and rather messily ugly, smart and dumb, powerful and weak all at the same time. All the things that I could become, I thought.

I was watching one of her movies on my own once. It was at Daddy’s house. It must have been one of the weekends when Mummy didn’t want us. It was ‘Niagara’ I think and Daddy came in the room and said, ”Oh I know this film. I met Marilyn Monroe once you know”

I ignored him.

“Can I watch this with you?," he asked politely.

I paused for a bit knowing it would annoy him.

“I don’t think it’ll interest you," I said pompously. I must have been 8 or 9 by then. “It’s all talking, so not your type of film.”

I carried on staring at the screen. Daddy stood for a moment. I wondered what he was going to say. But then he quietly left the room.

For the next few years, I was more likely to see Daddy on the television than in real life. Until Chris could start walking independently without reins, it wasn’t really practical for him to try and look after us. After that he would take us on trips and sometimes we’d go on a longer holidays to France or Italy. He liked taking us to fairgrounds and steam fairs. too. If he was in a good mood he’d take us round all the stalls – throwing small sacks  at coconuts, firing cork guns at tiny metal horse racers, spinning us round in little tea cups, screaming and laughing on the ghost train, bobbing up and down on the merry go round horses with that weird steam organ sound dopplering away in one moment  and then slamming back into our ears in another.

Daddy would laugh like a mad pirate. Because I didn’t see or hear him very often his voice was always a surprise to me and at these points of light hysteria I fully expected him to shout out ‘Shiver me timbers’ or ‘By Davey Jones locker!’   It was the one time when I could say I saw him obviously enjoying himself with his kids.

At the more improving events – art galleries and museums and the like – his inner pirate was put away, replaced by a rather nervous, nerdy short man with lightly Brylcreemed hair pushed into a comb-over.

Without Mother or an art director to guide him he had no idea how to dress. Sometimes he’d turn up looking like a tweedy schoolmaster with patches on his elbows and thick brown trousers with turn-ups. The very next week it would an explosion of Carnaby Street colour. Depending on where he’d been filming he’d sometimes turn up in element of national dress: boots from Scandinavia,  a suede hat from Germany, or a crazy purple 'blouson' from Paris.

On one occasion he turned up to collect me from school (a rarity), dressed in a red jacket with yellow trousers and showy suede boots. He just needed the appropriate hat to go full pirate.

His car was always embarrassing too - way too sporty for a man of his age and appearance. There was a red Triumph Stag I remember and, for a while, a white MG with a Snoopy sticker on the boot.  I made it very clear that I hated him for that and took every opportunity I could to explain how naff 'Peanuts' was. His response was to repeatedly buy stupid Snoopy merchandise for me, to replace the zoo animals presumably - Snoopy playing cards, a Woodstock jean patch, a poster with Lucy saying something crabby on it.

It never really left either of us, that urge to put each other down and best each other. My plan as a child was to reject and humiliate him as much as I could, as I felt he had rejected me. By the time I hit my twenties I'd become expert at hurting his feelings.

In 1982, for example, I’d just finished at Uni and was yo-yoing between him and Mother in London whilst I tried to work out what I really wanted to do in life. Over the breakfast table he was telling me off for going to the premier of 'Britannia Hospital' the night before with with Mother – she’d always been rather keen on that crowd, boozy beggars all of them.

"Quite why someone of your age and intelligence would want to go and see such nasty trash I do not know. I thought you were better than that."

"You’re just sore that there wasn’t a part for you, Daddy."

"Don’t be ridiculous," he said as he dug out out the last bit of boiled egg out of its shell.

“No, no, there was a perfect part for you right at the beginning in fact. Some old man gets wheeled into a hospital out the back of an ambulance." I buttered my toast in the same careful malevolent way my mother would have done. "Nobody bothers to look after him and he croaks right there on a trolley before the titles have even rolled."

Silence.

"Perfect for you."

“Gar," he said. " You can be right little bitch some times."

He rose from the table and disappeared up the stairs.

I switched on the radio and remember listening to 'Goody Two Shoes' by Adam and the Ants as I sipped my tea. How will I kill him, I wondered? Shall I smother him with a pillow or drown him in the bath?

 

 


'My Life Looked Good On Paper'

Extract from ‘Pull My Hair’ by Isabella Shure (1984) 

“Yes of course, that sound lovely. And so kind of you.”

Isabelle waved her arms wildly, desperately mouthing ‘no, no, no’. Her mother stared back at her blankly.

“The girls have probably been cooking this up for a while. Ah yes, thick as thieves. Lovely. The whole weekend? Gosh. How wonderful. I imagine she’s already packed her bag. You know what they’re like. No. No that’s no problem. I can drop her round about seven. So lovely. She’ll be so pleased. Thank you. Thank you so much. See you then. Goodbye.”

 No no no no. No!

“I don’t wanna  go.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Izzy. Your friend Deborah is so keen for you to stay.”

“She’s not my friend.”

“You’re just being silly.”

“She’s two years above me!”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

==

Oh dear. Little Fizzy Izzy. You’re gonna be my best friend ever. We’re gonna have a dee-licious time together. Keep hold of her! You and me are going to have a whaa-ale of a time. You know what? We should hang out in the hols. I mean it’s nice an’ all how we get to play in the changing rooms and in the dorm, but really I think I want you all to myself. Fizzy little Izzy. Oooh I can feel you getting wet jus’ thinking about it, yeah? You wait til you see my bedroom. My mum’ll talk to your mum. They’ll be so happy we made friends, yeah?‘We’ll have all the time in the world. Ooh yeah, that’s it, isn’t it No. No moaning you little bitch. Keep hold of her. I’ll do what I want. All day an’ all weekend. You know what that is, bitch? That’s the smell of your fizzy little fanny on my finger. And d'you know what that finger is? Your dad’s cock.

 ==


A Six Week Tour

“Some say that gleams of a remoter world

Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber,

And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber

Of those who wake and live.”

863px-Bataille_de_Montereau _18_février_1814

Extract from ‘Mary Shelley: The Making of A Monster’ by Isabella Shure

It was Mary’s idea to travel through an area of France where, just a few months before, war had ravaged the land.

They could just have easily made their to Switzerland by a more pleasant and comfortable route, but Mary wasn’t thinking of this as a honeymoon. The opportunity to see at first-hand how Napoleon had ravaged a great nation and squandered the promise of the revolution was too good to miss.

The escape from England had been dreamed up initially as Percy’s typically headstrong reaction to censure by London polite society and, more particularly, criticism and loud protestation from Mary’s father. It was also a golden opportunity for Percy to have his way with Mary (and with Clare, Mary’s half-sister, if he could) undisturbed by any authority that might frown upon his sexual proclivities.

Like every other young man with a poetic mind and a raging libido, Shelley had read Byron’s ‘Childe Harold’ and understood the rumours about what the mad, bad lord has been able to get up to on the Continent.  Percy may have sold the idea of an elopement to Mary as a chance to see the world, to live like free artists and create great literature, but his underlying motives for wishing to live on the Continent were almost certainly based on his desire for freedom of quite another kind.

Mary’s journals show how deeply she was in love with Shelley and would do anything for him. But she also had high-minded thoughts about living a more independent life as a free-thinking woman.

It’s no coincidence that she packed her mother’s own travelogue ‘Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark’ in her luggage. Mary Wollstonecraft’s eclectic and emotional book, written soon after not one but two suicide attempts, is not just a series of reflections about her travels throughout Scandinavia but is also a deep dive into the self and society, encompassing thoughts about nature, the liberation and education of women, the insidious effects of commerce, prison reform and much more.

“The art of travel is only a branch of the art of thinking,” Wollstonecraft wrote.

It’s very likely that her daughter Mary took this to heart when planning her own romantic adventure. By entering France so soon after the defeat of Napolean and his exile to Elba, she was dreaming of being one of the first English writers to visit the battlefields and produce a powerful and convincing anti-war treatise based on documentary evidence of the unconscionable acts of violence committed by both sides.

Mary and Percy had always been energetic anti-war protestors, seeing the European conflict as yet another example of how the levers of commerce and political power were being manipulated by the ruling class in order to cow and suppress the general populace.

But just like Byron, there was a part of Percy that sneakily admired Napoleon for his ambition, his authority, his reach, his charisma. For Mary, Napoleon was just another powerful man whose imperial values ran counter to Mary’s dream of a republic in which women were not just treated equally but could rise to take leading roles in society.

She had only just escaped the advances of her over-bearing and controlling father (and rescued her half-sister from his clutches at the same time). She was not about to spend her time writing eulogies to another archetypal male dictator.

Instead, she dragged Percy and Clare to the sites of Napoleon’s final desperate battles – to Guignes where Bonaparte’s doomed campaign was planned; to Provins, site of intense fighting between the French and the Austrian army; to Nogent where the Cossack army committed unspeakable war crimes over many days; to the villages of St Aubin and Echimine, laid so low by the fighting that virtually no buildings were left standing and the local citizens were reduced to living like rats.

Perhaps Mary might have had more time to write down her impressions of war-torn France if Percy had not strained his ankle quite early in the journey, requiring him to be fussed over mightily and dragged along the route on the back of mule.

Clare was no help, constantly finding everything to be ‘picturesque’ and ‘the prettiest place I’ve ever been’ as she mooned over derelict barns, broken trees and charred empty fields. She was only sixteen and ecstatic to be away from home and close to Percy. Under his tutelage, Clare was beginning to learn that there was something about the romantic imagination that rather liked ruined landscapes. The war didn’t so much appal her as light her adolescent fire.

Mary must have been somewhat disappointed to find her fellow-travellers were not suitably horrified by what they were finding. It also can’t have escaped Mary’s notice that Percy was sharing his affections quite freely between her and Clare. After all, the three of them slept together in single rooms (and sometimes barns) most of the time they were abroad. What went on between the three of them can only be guessed at. But it must have detracted from Mary’s more serious literary intentions.

The trip in the end turned out to be a wasted opportunity. After just a few weeks the money had run out and the three supposedly care-free spirits were having to contemplate returning to London, where both Mary’s father and Percy’s wife lay in wait.

On top of that, the worst had happened for a woman who had aspirations to be an independent artist. Mary was pregnant. Yet again, a wild bid for freedom had only led to more constraint and lack of opportunity. Mary knew that a baby would always take her away from her work. She wanted children but not at any cost. And she was deeply anxious about what her father’s reaction would be to the news.


Fell Asleep. 1 June 1990.

With the coroner hinting that the body would be released within a few days, we were finally ready for a family pow-wow about what to do with Daddy.

We gathered around Mother’s kitchen table in her Kensington apartment. It was decked out like a Provencal cottage, if said cottage happened to be quite near a John Lewis. It was a grand cauchemar of gingham, reclaimed wood, whicker and patterned tile. Combined with Mother’s painfully strong bitter coffee, I was in instant migraine territory. I had made a promise to myself not to irascible and snippy. It was going to be a hard promise to keep.

Chris had flown in from New York that morning. He looked thin and pale and unwashed. His leather jacket smelt of patchouli oil and Germanic train stations - that peculiar gas cocktail of hot dog, brake fumes, rubber and sweat. God knows where he’d been.

I felt sad looking at him. He’d been a rather beautiful little boy: light olive skin, deep brown eyes, thick eyebrows, slightly bucked teeth that plumped up his top lip and made him very kissable, and a thick shag of black-brown hair, like a mop-top gone wrong.

Now he looked like a drowned dog. His once lustrous hair sagged off his head in long slicks. One of his front teeth was chipped. His lips were cracked and coloured like he’d been drinking a lot of cheap red wine on the plane. For our pow-wow he’d put on some basic old school NHS glasses with thick lenses. Perhaps he thought this made him more grown up and serious, a proper mourner, but to me they just amplified the sense of a boy gone wrong, of various bits of him giving out and giving up.

Mother, with her busy little hands, was twisting her coffee cup round and round, whilst trying to fix me with what she must have thought was a haughty gaze.

“Well, it’s very nice to have you both here at the same time. Every cloud, and all that.”

“Someone had to die to make it happen,” said Chris, eyes down, grinning to himself.

“Shall we just get on with it?” I said snippily, heaving a bulky lever file out of my bag and banging it onto the table.

“Gosh, you have been busy,” said Mother.

She had a rather brilliant way of turning even mildest observation into a nasty little put-down. No wonder Chris has self-esteem issues.

“Yes, there is quite a lot of admin.”

Both of them sipped their coffee sulkily and said nothing.

“But I’m ploughing through it.”

Still silence.

“The only big thing we really need to agree on today are the funeral arrangements. Depending on what we decide, I can start to tot up the cost and take it out of what Daddy’s left behind.”

“We’re on a budget then,” said Chris grinning again. He knew as well as I that Mother would have plans. She may have even had one of her dreams about how she expected things to be. Personally, I was never very convinced these dreams were even real. They appeared to be very useful in dictating what must be.

“I’ve been advised by the police that cremation would be best.”

“Police?!” gasped Mother, unsure whether to be shocked or thrilled by this revelation. She'd always loved showing off to the police.

“Apparently it’s not a good idea to have him buried.”

“But…”

“There’s every possibility that some idiot will want to dig him up or even steal him.”

“Good grief.”

“Couldn’t we just keep it secret?” piped up Chris.

“What do you mean?”

“We could bury him in a remote location. Not tell anyone.”

“And how long do you think that little secret would be kept? I’d give it two weeks before the papers found him.”

Seemingly from nowhere Mother produced a scrap of paper and placed it on the table.

“I had rather expected a headstone,” she said faux meekly. “I’ve prepared an inscription.”

She pushed the paper towards me with both bony hands. I flipped it over and affected to read it with the seriousness and respect one would expect from an executor.

PETER SHURE

 

Actor

 

Fell asleep 1 June 1990

 

Aged 70

 

“One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more.”

 

“Well, that’s charming,” I said, pitching my own lack of charm carefully.

“Let me see,” said Chris, leaning over and grabbing the paper, scrumpling it a little as he did so.

He lifted up his glasses and screwed up his eyes. Perhaps he couldn’t afford varifocals.

“This is neat,” he said. “Well done Ma.”

Mother beamed at him.

“Well, we could have a plaque somewhere, I suppose,” I conceded. “We could choose a crematorium with a suitable memorial garden.”

“Or we could  put it somewhere special,” replied Chris with some excitement as a avaricious idea popped into his head. “We could hide it like in Dartmoor somewhere, five miles from anywhere. Or… or up a Scottish mountain! And it could be a kinda game or puzzle for fans to try and find it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Like that Golden Hare book. You remember that? It had all kinds of drawings and poems in it with clues for finding this golden hare buried in a secret place. We could do that! Make a book about where Pa’s memorial stone is. Maybe we could scatter the ashes there.”

“Chris…” I paused.

Count to five, I told myself. Don’t say what you’re actually thinking. What the hell was wrong with him? We hadn’t even disposed of the body and he was already dreaming up some hare-brained publishing scheme. I guess he’s as broke as he looks, I thought. I should try to be kind.

“A plaque would be nice,” said Mother, reaching across and taking back her piece of paper. “But I’m not sure I could get up a Scottish mountain, Christopher.”

Of course. Mother was looking for a piece of her own theatre. Where would the press photographers be? Who would hear her eulogy, apart from me and Chris? She probably already had a particular outfit in mind, and it probably wasn’t designed for a hike across Dartmoor. While we’d been speaking, she was probably trying to conjure up the name of the most glamourous crematorium in Britain. 

“All I’m trying to avoid is any nutter from OFOPS* trying to dig him up to prove he isn’t actually dead - or taking photos of him ‘sleeping’ and selling them to the tabloids.”

“Oh Izzy, how could you?” said Mother.

“We have to be realistic.”

“What’s unrealistic about a memorial plaque in some place,” pitched in Chris.

“OK, OK.”

We’re ten minutes in and they’re ganging up on me. They swap a supporting look and think I don’t see them. I am forced to be the grown up again.

“Ok. We have a memorial plaque. We have Mother’s inscription on it. But let’s at least put it in a memorial garden that is managed and unlikely to be vandalised.”

We all paused to take in the idea of a compromise we could all accept.

“Charing is very pretty,” said Mother.

Of course she’d come prepared. How foolish of me. I’d forgotten that she’d been to a number of thespy funerals already. Perhaps in one of her ‘dreams’ she’d already recognised the location I’d already selected.

“Kent and Sussex has a garden, but the deer are always getting in,” she continued.

I was thinking of Barham,” I interrupted whilst opening my clunky box file and digging out the prospectus. “It’s in Kent. Not that far from Daddy’s house.”

“Not far from where he died,” said Chris.

“Well that doesn’t have to be a ghoulish thing,” I replied. “He did like it down there.”

“How would you know?” snapped Chris sharply.

He tried to give me a hard stare through his stupid googly glasses, but lost his nerve quickly and looked away. Mother took in a breath as if she was going to speak, take charge in some way or summarise what I’d decided and thus make it her own decision. But then she stopped. She was looking at Chris with what appeared to be genuine concern. I hadn’t noticed that he’d started crying.

“We can go and take a look at it if you like,” I said as gently as possible. “It’s a nice place.” I looked across to Mother. “And easy to get to.”

She’d stopped looking at Chris. She'd no doubt quickly moved on to imagining in her mind's eye the big day. The outfit. The demeanour. What flowers to bring. Where to place the photographers. The interviews afterwards. Drinks at the wake. Who to invite..

“Let’s have some more coffee and then talk about some other stuff,” I suggested.

Chris lifted his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He sniffed and sat up. Like his mother he was quick at recovering from grief.

“Ah, the money!” he said with enthusiasm. “Payola!”

 

*OFOPS - the Official Fanclub Of Peter Shure