Books & Badges

Long before the world was internetshaped for nearly everyone, my world was shaped by the fairy stories handed out by Ladybird Books in the late 1960s. The series, titled 'Well-Loved Tales', retold fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, stories by Hans Christian Anderson, and the occasional English folk tale. It was the illustrations that seeped into my imagination. These lovingly painted images depicted a world that was familiar but strange: sunny and colourful places where horrible and cruel things happened.

I remember having The Gingerbread Boy read to me by my mum (1 ). Perhaps it appealed to me because of my ginger hair. He has a freshly baked smiley face and in his happiness, he skips and dances into the mouth of a fox. There is no happy ending. The final painting, by the illustrator Robert Lumley, is of the fox chomping his way through the little boy: ‘Then he cried, “I am half gone!” Then he cried, “I am three quarters gone!” And after that the little gingerbread boy said nothing more at all.’ The author, Vera Southgate, did much of the retelling in this series, and many of the images that have haunted me over the last fifty years were made by the illustrator Eric Winter: pictures such as Snow White lying in her glass coffin in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (2); and a gorillafaced beast in dandy clothes in Beauty and the Beast (3). However, the true horror came in the shape of Rumpelstiltskin (4): his funny little red cap and stripy tights, his big old face and little body, his furious dancing and his pointy boots. The woods never felt so innocent or so harmless after seeing such figures, and neither did the stories of my childhood. Years later, when I saw the film of the thriller Don’t Look Now (1973), it was Rumpelstiltskin I saw creeping around Daphne du Maurier’s Venice.

The non-fiction books Ladybird published were as beautifully illustrated as their fairy stories. From their natural history books, such as the one that helped me identify trees (5), I ended up at the lives of the Great Artists (6). It seemed that my journey from childhood would lead me from one mythology to another.

As I grew up, I could reach my dad’s bookshelves. My dad’s portrait of himself was conjured up from the books and the films of the British kitchen sink realism tradition. Initially, I was fascinated by the titles and then by the romantic idea that a fiction had grown out of the truth of my dad’s upbringing in the north of England. The first of these works to weave their way into my mental make-up was Alan Sillitoe’s film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) (7). I would have come across it in the late 1970s — just as I turned into a teenager. The main character, Arthur Seaton, stuck two fingers up to the world around him twenty years before the kids I saw hanging around on the Tile Hill estate or loitering without intent at school. The actor Albert Finney, who played Arthur Seaton in the film, even looked a bit like my dad in some old black and white photos. The Pan paperback I have of the novel has a painted image of Finney in the film, as if it’s from a Ladybird kitchen sink series.

My penguin paperback of Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving (1960) was published in 1970 (8). Despite London swinging away, I imagine life wouldn’t have changed that much for a Vic or an Ingrid Brown — two of the characters from the book — during the decade. The cover reminded me of a painting by Nevinson called The Towpath (1912), which I saw in an exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1980. For me, it was the beginning of the period when the real became romantic.

The Penguin paperback copy of David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960) has a rather sorrowful painting on its cover by the illustrator Allan Manham (9). It doesn’t reference the film at all and suggests an existential despair that a teenager like myself would have liked to associate with the arty and the foreign. The imitation of a Wild Woodbine cigarette box used on the book cover of Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar (1959) is a piece of grubby graphics that a young Peter Blake could have found next to a beer mat (10).

Another downbeat painting covers Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction (1963); my copy of the novel is full of tender line drawings by Susan Benson (11). It all went up a beat when it was filmed with a Manfred Mann soundtrack some five years later.

When the BBC repeated the screening of the television dramas The Nigel Barton Plays, it was just at the time that I was heading off to art school in the mid-1980s. Nigel attempts to reconcile his workingclass background with his academic and political aspirations. Ken Barlow finds himself in a similar fix in the first episode of the long-running television soap drama Coronation Street in 1960. This Penguin Modern Playwright edition avoids the familiar kitchen sink iconography in favour of typography that references a television screen (12).

I first came across the writer Royston Ellis who was featured in the Daniel Farson television documentary Living for Kicks (1960), when it was repeated as part of Channel 4’s TV Heaven in the early 1990s. Farson went on to write the biographies of Gilbert and George and Francis Bacon. He also devised the wonderful Channel 4 Gallery quiz show about art in the mid- 1980s, hosted by George Melly. Living For Kicks looks seriously at teenage disaffection and an emerging housing crisis. Rave (1960) is a book of poetry by the twentyyear-old Royston that takes on many of the themes he discusses in the documentary (13).

The 1960s are bookended here by Keith Waterhouse’s There is a Happy Land (1957) and Barry Hines’s Kes (1968). The cover of Waterhouse’s childhood memoir is dull to say the least, which is a shame because this edition, intended for use in schools, has some wonderful photographs and snippets of text (14). These relate strongly to B. S. Johnson and Julia Trevelyan Oman’s Street Children (1964). The cover of Kes, meanwhile, shows a treated still from Ken Loach’s 1969 film of the young David Bradley giving the world the two-finger treatment (15). Oddly enough, we studied Kes at school.

Literature wasn’t really part of the playground conversation. One of the few books that appeared in the pockets of kids at school was Richard Allen’s Skinhead series (16–24). By the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a revival of fashion and music associated with mods and skinheads. At the centre of this revival was the Coventry-based Two-Tone Records label, so all of us in Coventry were very excited. When I first saw the cover of one of these books, I was fascinated to see people who looked like the people I knew. I recall the novels being handed around school like cigarettes. Many of the copies opened by themselves at the sex scenes or the violent scenes. I don’t recall ever having finished one. The covers alone told a little play for today with each character cast outdoors as though they had been banished from any form of domesticity. Richard Allen was actually the pen name of James Moffatt, who wrote pulp novels under several names for the New

English Library. Funnily enough, by the time his first Skinhead novel was published, he would have been nearly fifty. The characters tend to be violent and abusive and the pages are littered with racism, sexism, and sexual violence.

It’s curious that Kubrick’s 1970 film A Clockwork Orange was released in the same year as the first of these books. Kubrick himself withdrew his film from British release three years later in response to allegations that it led to copycat violence. Richard Allen, however, went on to write a further eighteen novels exploring and exploiting a number of youth subcultures. These ranged from Suedehead and Bootboy to Glam Rocker and Teeny Bopper Idol; the series was crowned off with Punks and Mods Rule in 1980. In many ways, the covers of these books document an undercurrent of British culture. They led me from childhood to adolescence and to the point where I was teetering on the brink of a Nigel Barton-style exit from Tile Hill.

The wearing of badges was a way of showing allegiances, a way of saying what you were and, more importantly, what you weren’t (25). The badges of mine that have survived include one that reads 'May the Force be with you', which I bought at the cinema when we saw Star Wars in 1977. In 1979/1980, nearly every youngster in Coventry wore a Two-Tone badge of some description. A Saturday didn’t go by without a trip to Poster Place in the city centre to buy a handful of badges. I found or stole The Who’s The Kids Are Alright badge and I think I bought The Jam badge at a concert. Joy Division was a story in the music press and a badge before I had heard one note of their music. By the time I’d saved up enough for the album Unknown Pleasures (1979), Ian Curtis had killed himself and the band was no more. My Joy Division badges set me apart from other kids at school. No one seemed to know who they were or what they meant, which was the whole point really. In summer 1981, my dad took a photo of me in the garden, casting his own shadow with mine which lay on the cut grass; he wrote on the back: 'Judd "Joy Division"

T-Shirt and suede boots' (Fig. 2 showing me wearing 26). The very last set of badges I wore before insincerity took over related to The Smiths: a couple of album covers, and a curious image featuring Joe Orton, who never figured as a cover star as far as I’m aware. Or is it Murray Head?