Confessions of
THE Mail’s brilliant columnist Keith Waterhouse, who died in 2009, was a giant of modern literature. His best-known work, Billy Liar, was about a clerk in a funeral parlour who indulges in endless absurd fantasies. Now, his family have discovered a memoir
WE HADN’T a wireless when I was a lad in Leeds — we couldn’t afford one. And we all ran to the top of the street to see our first doubledecker bus. Everyone was poor. A newspaper was running a Boots for the Bairns fund, and I was sent to the Silverdale Poor Children’s Holiday Camp, and hated it. I looked wistfully across the bay at Morecambe, where we would have gone if we hadn’t been charity cases.
When Chamberlain said he was going to start the war — we’d got a wireless by then — I was sitting on the garden gate of the house we’d just moved to on a new housing estate. I was more excited about living in a house (after a downstairs flat) than about the war. War meant that school was closed for the longest holiday I’ve ever had — so long that it got boring. It meant the blackout, and catchy songs, and gas masks, and air-raid sirens, and my brothers getting called up, and me trying on their tin hats and hitting myself over the head with the poker because it didn’t hurt with a tin hat on.
By the end of the war, when I was 16, I’d gone through an intense period of nauseating patriotism — going to the length of standing up in the house when they played God Save The King on the wireless. On V. E. Day, I told two drunken Canadians who were shouting ‘Canada for ever’ not to forget Good Old Britain, to which they answered ‘b***s’. AT 17, I joined the Young Conservatives, attending four or five times and never paying any subscription. (At 17, one is inordinately proud of not paying any subscriptions.)
It was wonderful to saunter into the Conservative Club, being condescending to the porter and wondering if he thought I was rich. I got the same feeling I had as a child when I’d put on a limp to make people think I had a wooden leg.
Out of the haze of Conservatism, i t’s the Flannel Dance which I remember most. The Flannel Dance was my key to the other side of the tracks. It was the main battle in a fairly sordid personal war against being poor, or rather against living on a housing estate, which seemed far more disgraceful.
My private war had been going on for some time. I’d been pronouncing my aitches, and saying ‘yes’ in that silly way that Yorkshiremen used to saying ‘yur’ adopt when they’re swanking.
And I’d just got to that point of craftiness where, instead of persuading my mother to let me wear my brother’s best suit to go to the Conservative Club, I’d cheerfully wear an old sports coat along with a ‘don’t-give-a-damn-for-conventionaldress’ scowl.
Then along came the Flannel Dance. How it happened was that the secretary of the entertainment committee asked me if I’d like a ticket.
That was what did it. I hadn’t the faintest idea what a Flannel Dance was, but I knew that it was something superior to a dinner dance, and I knew that the sports-coat-and-scowl routine had paid a dividend.
The secretary was saying: ‘Here’s a dance that’s different because we’re leaving the monkey suits in the wardrobe this time. Wear what you’ve got on.’
HE was asking me to be informal. And by specially asking me to be informal, he automatically assumed that I spent most of my time being formal. He thought I had evening dress. He thought I went to cricket dances and tennis clubs.
I was enormously proud. No one who hasn’t been 17 and out of the bottom drawer can imagine how far more delightful it is to be invited to an informal ‘do’ than to a formal one.
I said yes, of course, and dug into my pocket far more eagerly than I need have done. I never went to the Flannel Dance — I daren’t — but from that day forward I was a changed man.
Pronouncing aitches was no longer good enough. I had to have a good address and good family and good clothes and a good school.
I dropped the ‘Estate’ from my address on Halton Moor Estate, so that ‘Halton Moor’ sounded like heather and foxhounds rather than a housing estate. Iraised my greengrocer father from the dead, made him captain of a destroyer cruising, somewhat unaccountably, in the English Channel, and killed him off again with glory. I split up my two suits and sports coat and flannels so that I had nine different combinations of clothing which I wore on successive days.
I began to read Punch. Instead of being terrifically proud of having won a scholarship to the Leeds College of Commerce, I spoke airily about taking a business course, dropping mention of scholarships altogether.
I ought to be ashamed of having been ashamed of my background. Unfortunately, I’m not. I think it was a definite climb up the ladder.
At 19, I got the Call [to national service] and went to an Air Force training camp near Bridgnorth, Shropshire. One boy who shared my confidences there eventually went back to Southern Rhodesia fully confident that the Temple Newsam Hunt did exist, and that its hounds did cross our land at Halton Moor so often as to become a nuisance.
Later, however, I was in a permanent camp that landed me among public school types, one of them ex-university. The least of them lived in a semi-detached house at St Albans, paid f or through the building society.
With these representatives of the top drawer about me there wasn’t much future for me as a gilded aristocrat. And so I became poor. I systematically betrayed nearly every god that I had set up at 17 and the Flannel Dance era came to an abrupt end.
NOT only did I restore the Estate after Halton Moor, but I inserted the word ‘Housing’ between Moor and Estate so that no one should be in any doubt about my background. Then I knocked up father again, giving him a barrow for his fruit instead of a lorry and making him bankrupt, leaving a house with orange boxes for furniture behind him when he died as a result of under-nourishment.
I denied my secondary school education, pushed my school-leaving age back to 14 and claimed to have worked in a string factory, cobbler’s shop, coffin-makers, and as a garage hand, rent collector, newspaper boy and ice-cream vendor.
I remembered how one day my mother, when there was no money in the house, had sent one of us to the Post Office to cash in two penny stamps so that we could have a tin of sardines for tea. (This happened to be true.)
I acquired an almost homosexual love for the miners, also for old age pensioners and other people in unfortunate circumstances.
I vouchsafed for the poverty of people whom I’d personally observed living for a week on bread that was consumed on the floors of houses in which every stick of furniture had been sold, but where the curtains had been retained for the sake of pride.
In most of my anecdotes, I’d bring in an image of myself when young, reading Plato or Das Kapital at home, after a hard day at the string factory. I thought so often and for so l ong about poverty, searching for new and entertaining stories, that often a lump would come i nto my throat and I’d actually believe that I was as poor as a church mouse.
And at length my industry was rewarded by one of my rich friends — the one f rom St Albans — prefixing an invitation to join in a discussion with the words: ‘ Now, you’re a self-educated man . . .’.
Meanwhile, the Conservative Party, never a strong attraction, had been replaced by the Labour Party. So, every day, as we sat on our beds waiting to be called out on parade,
I’d talk politics. Early on in the arguments, I created a catalogue of entirely fictitious statistics and quotations, ranging f rom the number of unemployed men who died from starvation during the General Strike to what Mr Churchill had said about the dockers.
Most of these went out of my head as soon as I said them. But as my opponent’s memory was usually as short as mine, I was able to put the figure of leading British Conservatives who’d supported the Fascists before the war at 20 on one day and 500 the next, without anyone noticing any difference. I ONCE read an advertisement in ‘Reveille for the Weekend’ which held that the average man doesn’t have time to read the works of Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and several other ‘must’ authors in their entirety and to enjoy life as well. It advised him to buy a book — a kind of synopsis of the classics — which would give him a working knowledge of them without the tedious business of reading them.
My attitude to Art was like that. I never read anything by Oscar Wilde, but I read a biography of him. Oh, and I always read Wilde’s epigrams when they were reprinted as space fillers in magazines.
I got acquainted with the Yellow Book and Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings without having seen either. I learnt how to pronounce ‘aesthetic’ and got to know what was on the Third Programme without once listening to it.
I regularly took books of poetry out of the library, but unfortunately never opened them. I even swore that I understood Ezra Pound.
In a notebook, I made a list of My Fifty Best Books. Most of them I didn’t even possess. It included:
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, which I’d never read.
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (I bought it, but have never read it except the bit about the moving finger).
Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray (I called it Dorian Gray because I couldn’t remember whether it was The Portrait Of Dorian Gray or The Picture Of Dorian Gray. I’ve never read it).
Shakespeare’s Sonnets (never read any of them).
It got worse. I affected a literary stoop, complete with frown. I never had fewer than four books bulging out of my side pockets, the outside one always having an impressive title visible to the public. A YOUNG man at 17 is one-fifth pedant, and my pedantry came out in the shape of English grammar. Every day a friend called Walsh and I met for lunch, and every time one of us ended a sentence with a prep- osition or split an infinitive the other would tell him about it.
Sometimes we’d do both in one sentence, and that would be considered highly funny.
When we got expert at this sort of thing, we began to tell other people — including a minister of religion who’d been educated at Oxford and Harvard — when they ended their sentences with a preposition and when they split an infinitive. If they did it too often, we cut them.
For this, we were considered snobbish. And as we didn’t move in a particularly grammatical set, we quickly lost our few friends.
This freed me to go to whatever heights of snobbery I wanted to, which I immediately did.
There’s no one quite so obnoxious as a working-class snob. And there are more working-class snobs than there are aristocratic snobs. HERE I am then, at 22. I’m married and I have two good suits and I drink Younger’s No. 3 and I smoke 40 cigarettes a day.
Once a week, we go shopping and then to the pictures, and once a fortnight up to my mother’s, and every Sunday night up to her mother’s for supper because that’s nearer.
I’m a newspaper reporter and damn proud of it. When I first got my Press card, I used to whip it out at every opportunity and flash it at people. I still do when the fit takes me.
I want to be a famous writer and have day- dreams about winning the Pulitzer Prize or something. Meanwhile, I’ve sold a radio play for 60 guineas and I’m going round telling everybody I don’t give a damn when they broadcast it, now I’ve got my money, but really I can hardly wait, I bet I’ve spent eight of my 22 years day-dreaming. When I was ten, my favourite daydream was to imagine myself plonked in a comfortable armchair in front of a fire that never needed any coal putting on. Everything I wanted was in reach.
THE chair had arms like tables instead of arms. On one was a lot of chocolate whirls , marzipan teacakes, mint imperials, Palm toffee, pieces of Swiss roll, Christmas cake, chocolate logs and nut cake; and on the other, bottles of lemonade, orangeade, Tizer and dandelion-and-burdock.
Sometimes I’d dream of having a whole nut cake all to myself — and I always told myself that when I could afford it, I’d buy one costing one and nine. I did, and threw half of it away, and I’ve never bought one since.
Later on, I’d dream of a little world, an island somewhere, inhabited only by boys and girls. I was the boss of it, and I wore a high hat like a bearskin but more complicated, and I had a lot of decorations and was held in high esteem. And later on still, it was a bigger world, probably the size of Lancashire, inhabited only by young people. I was t he President, also the editor of the newspaper, also the Prime Minister, also a lot more.
When the war started, we had to help out: 7,000 of us marched to war and only four of us returned. In the victory parade, we four — one of us in a Bath chair, me with my arm in a sling — limped by with our flag at halfmast, and people took off their hats to us and stood in silence.
Daydreams are also the lifeblood of a young man of 22. These days, I run a chain of magazines and newspapers, but I’m a reporter on them at the same time, and I’m also a barrister arguing brilliant cases for which I get cheered, and sometimes a Lord Chief Justice.
One day I want to be a columnist, so I sit down and make up fictitious breezy items. I’d also like to be a radio commentator, but I’ve never written an application for a job on
the BBC. I’d like to know all about music, but I don’t learn it. (Though when nobody’s in, I t urn on t he wireless and conduct the BBC Variety Orchestra with a ruler.)
I’d like to be Al Jolson, so whenever one of his records is on I make appropriate Al Jolson gestures and hope to God nobody comes in the room. I want to be the Prime Minister, and I stand in front of a mirror and make expressions that will move the public to various emotions.
And I imagine my dramatic rise to power, becoming virtual dictator, yelling abuse at my enemies but slipping shillings to children on the sly. The Observer runs a profile on me, and I move people to hysteria, like Hitler did. And I get shot, and I die, and they’re sorry.
I’ve thought of running the country as a limited company, with a board of directors instead of a parliament, and I’ve thought of starting a whelk stall at Knaresborough.
I’ve thought of spending a holiday as a minstrel and then writing a book about it, and I’ve thought of running a mail-order business. I’ve thought of 101 things and I’ve displaced them with 100 more. LIKE I said, here I am at 22. I’ve dabbled so long in ideals and the general salvation of man that it’s a bit of a blow to find that I’m more inclined to settle down with a mystery novel than to dig out the latest report on prison reform.
My ideas on politics when I was 17 and 19 look pretty daft. I think I’ve been spoiled for politics by a surfeit of theories.
Now, I just think: to hell with it. That’s not very nice, is it? But I’m afraid I mean it.
To hell with it. To hell with the Labour Party, the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party and the Communist Party. To hell with the Keep Left Group and the Keep Right Group.
Last time we saw the political me, I was 19 and Socialist to a fault. Being 19, of course, I couldn’t let the Labour Party alone — I had to keep probing it.
And being of a black-is-black, white-is-white turn of mind, as often as not I found it wanting. The offshoots of Socialism reached out and strangled me.
A young man with a world to put right does one of two things. He joins an organisation and tries to get peace on Earth by club vote and up-to-date subscriptions.
Or he does as I do, which is to have small arguments in pubs.