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Richard
Beenham, who lives in London, sent this
tale before, but it slipped through the
net (I blame the fact that I've moved computers).
Anyway, after getting in touch again recently,
he was good enough to re-send it, and here
it is . . .
[Warning, if you're offended by coloquial
expressions for bodily fluids, look away
before the end!]
'I
love your book. You're slightly older than
me (I'm 33, slightly apprehensive about
turning 34 in April) so there are some references
you make which occurred before my memory
kicks in at the age of 3 in 1974. Nonetheless,
having come from a happy and secure background
myself, with every page comes a welcome
flicker of a long forgotten memory, however
mundane it may be. I too used to collect
the Doctor Who cards from Weetabix,
and still have them along with all my Star
Wars and Superman bubblegum
cards, stored in one of those large plastic
margarine containers you don't see outside
of canteens these days.
'My dad is a retired teacher and my mum
is a soon-to-be-retired social worker. I'm
the oldest of three, and if I bear any scars
from my upbringing, they are simply the
result of the mistakes parents make with
their first offspring which they learn not
to repeat with their siblings. So I've turned
out OK I think. I was born and brought up
in Atherton, just by Bolton, but skip forward many
years via a late start at university at
24 in 1995 (Bretton Hall in Yorkshire, breeding
ground for The League of Gentlemen and very
sadly soon to close) and a subsequent move
to London in 2000, and I now live with my
girlfriend Lucy in Richmond just by
Kew Gardens. There's a nice view of the
pagoda from our kitchen window.
[Pic to make Richard feel at home .
. .]
'I'm
trying to make a career as an actor but
there's not much acting going on at the
moment. My last job was wearing a woolly
hat and spouting Chinese whisper-type euphemisms
in the Heinz Salad Cream idents during Emmerdale
last year. As my agent doesn't call me nearly
as often as I'd like, I am in a Proper Job,
which obviously is a temporary thing until
I'm lucky enough to get enough work to make
a living solely as an actor. Temporary as
in I've been there for over four years now!
'I've
done bits and pieces along the way but The
Break is as elusive as it ever was. That's
the business for you! Still, in my Proper
Job I'm working right next to your old haunt:
I work at the National Blood Service in
Tooting, just behind St George's Hospital.
I come through the Medical School every
day, and until last year was allowed to
drink subsidised Guinness in the student
bar until some spoilsport in the student
union decided that Blood Service employees
were no longer allowed that special privilege.
I also work part time in the Prince of Wales
in Wimbledon, just opposite the Centre Court
shopping centre.
'Anyway, the memories I'd like to share
concern the golden year of 1984. For some
reason which eludes me, this year has always
stuck out for me. Maybe it's because I turned
13 that year and so entered the "difficult"
teenage years. Maybe it's because it was
a particularly hot summer. Beyond that I
really couldn't say.
'Our equivalent of Down The Field was
Up The Rucks. The Rucks were basically the
slag that had been dug out of the ground
when digging the Hulton Colliery, known
locally as the Pretoria Pit, a mine
which exploded on December 21, 1910 (for
an account of the disaster go
here).
The slag had been landscaped and integrated
into the local woodland in an attempt to
make it more attractive. Slag is, after
all, a very unattractive word, and therefore
perfectly suited to huge, imposing man-made
hills of grey clay. Nonetheless, despite
the trees, to this day the tell-tale shape
of a typical mining slag heap can clearly
be made out.
'Across the field from The Rucks was what
we referred to as The Big Lake, although
it was not particularly big. Windermere and
Coniston – those are big
lakes. This was a puddle by comparison.
You'd certainly not see Donald Campbell
crashing Bluebird there. The Big Lake, and
the woods which surrounded it, was private
property, and the fishermen who fished it
did so by permit only. The Big Lake fed
the stream which ran down at the bottom
of our street.
'Naturally, it being private property, we
spent a lot of time there. There was the
special thrill of being somewhere we shouldn't,
and we were constantly on our guard should
a bailiff appear. Bailiffs were the mythical
guardians of The Big Lake. In reality, local
estate workers, but in our minds they took
on the fearful mantle of Those By Whom We
Should Never Be Seen. The consequences of
being seen by a bailiff were dire –
we all sincerely believed they carried guns
and were legally allowed to shoot at us for
trespassing. Many was the time that one
of our number would suddenly appear and
quietly and urgently say, "There's
a bailiff coming!", whereupon we would
scarper and hide in the bushes. Of course,
in most cases there wasn't a bailiff coming
at all. Whoever would provide the warning
had just made it up in order to introduce
an element of drama to the day. I know I
did at least once.
'There were occasions when a real bailiff
would appear, and a chase would ensue. I
remember a van screeching to a halt about
20 feet in front of us on the private
road that ran around the perimeter, and
a man and a dog spilling out to give chase
as we scattered. I hid behind a large bush
and nearly filled my gusset as I saw the
man and his dog go charging past. None of
us got caught that day. But once or twice
we did get caught by a bearded, bad-tempered man
with a broken shotgun over his forearm,
who scared the hell out of us by telling
us what he would do if he ever saw us again. We
were right back there the next day.
'Up The Rucks and The Big Lake, we did the
things that boys our age did – erected
rope swings, made dens, jumped across streams, that
sort of thing. Looking back now as an adult,
the jumping across streams seems the strangest
pastime. We took great pleasure in finding
the highest, the widest, the riskiest places from
which to jump across the stream, and a pecking
order was soon established by who was the
most capable stream jumper. Presumably the
thrill was a combination of the danger of
miscalculating your jump and ending up in
the stream, and the primal joy of that precious
second or so flying through the air.
'What strikes me now is the fearlessness
with which we went about it all. I'd never
do that nowadays. It was the same with the
rope swings. On your standard rope swing,
usually there were two options – run
up and swing forwards and back again to
land, or the slightly more ambitious run
to the side and out for the full 360 degree
swing experience. One of ours was over
a particularly malodorous pond, another
was over a small natural basin. Thankfully
it was on the latter that the rope snapped
in full orbit as I undertook the daredevil
360, and I landed hard at the bottom. It's
a wonder I didn't break anything.
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'Similarly,
on our bikes we were equally fearless. There
was a purpose built BMX track in the nearby
Lilford Woods, and in 1984 we regularly went
there. Most of our group had proper BMXs.
I, on the other hand, had a Grifter. Not the
most lightweight or aerodynamic of bicycles.
No deterrent for me. I attacked the Table
Top and Killer Whoops with as much gusto as
I could muster, and it's a minor miracle that
I lived to tell the tale, many were the nasty
spills I endured. I emerged from all of them
relatively unscathed and to this day I've
never suffered a broken bone.
'As an aside, a few months ago when cycling
home from work through Wimbledon Common, I
worked out a short cut which took me down
a dusty, bumpy downhill track and brought
me out just by the A3, which I cross to get
into Richmond Park. I do like to get a decent
speed going when I hit this track as it provides
a hint of the excitement I used to feel
as a boy. Approaching a small rise and realising
my speed was going to cause me to leave the
ground at the top of it, I felt a sudden surge
of adrenaline and went for it – I pedalled
hard to increase my speed and experienced
a joyous rush of boyhood excitement as I left
the ground for a few moments, landed perfectly
and DIDN'T FALL OFF. It became a regular feature
of my ride home until the summer months passed
and increasingly wet weather forced me to
take an alternative route. I'll be back there
come summer again though. It'll be the end
of me I'm sure.
'One aspect of messing about in the woods
which seems exclusively and inextricably tied
to the early 80s is the proliferation of pornography
in the bushes. You just don't get that any
more. It's like white dog shit. You never
see it these days. Up The Rucks, there was
loads of it. It was a regular pilgrimage we
made – me, Wayne Stirrup, Wayne and
Gerad Calland (not a misspelling – his
name was spelt without the second "r"),
who were two of a brood of five brothers from
a Jehovah's Witness family from our street,
Carl Dibnah (nephew of Fred), and Stephen
Wilcock from across the road. And it was the
real deal too: none of your soft-focus
"rude ladies". This was full-on,
up close, legs open, men and women really
doing it, no holds barred kind of stuff. There
were stories too, although the pictures were
obviously of more interest. There was a small,
hidden clearing with a particularly high
concentration of porn, and it was to this
place we would regularly go to scour the images
and "feel a bit funny" whilst nursing
adolescent erections. Privately, of course.
This was an age when self-awareness is creeping
in, so even though you're all harbouring stiffies
you'd never dare admit it.
'I clearly remember seeing a torn-out page
with something on top of it. Now, I was a
bit of a late bloomer and as such had yet
to experience what is politely referred to
as a "nocturnal emission". My own
private fumblings had yet to bear fruit. I
didn't really know what real sperm looked
like. But I assured everyone that
what was on top of this page was exactly that.
Someone, I said, had "spunked up"
all over it.
'Of course they hadn't. It wasn't spunk at
all. It was bird shit. Wayne Calland, slightly
older and presumably more experienced in these
matters than I, confirmed this, much to my
embarrassment. Deep down I knew it was really
bird shit, but I was so keen to appear knowledgeable
that I denied it to myself and ended up looking
and feeling rather silly and naive.
'One day, we decided we were going to have
a picnic at The Big Lake, so we packed up
some sandwiches, crisps, broken biscuits and
various other things, and set off the usual
route – up the lane that ran across
the back of our house and into The Rucks,
over the barbed wire fence and on to the farmer's
field which lay between The Rucks and The
Big Lake. We stopped at a tiny pond in the
middle of the field, which we had christened
The Perch Pond and in which we used to fish
a lot. Presumably someone had caught a perch
in there at some point. It was here that we
decided to have our picnic.
'As this was a farmer's field, and of course
was private property, we lived in similar
fear of the farmer as we did of the bailiffs.
The advantage here though was that if
he approached in his tractor, we could see
and hear it from a distance and make our escape
easily. He unfortunately suffered from chronic
emphysema, and therefore sounded like Darth
Vader after a kicking. So if he approached
on foot, we could hear him from a distance,
and as running was obviously out of the question
for him, escaping was easy.
'The man who approached us on this day, however,
was not the farmer. Neither was he a bailiff.
Middle aged, slim, glasses and grey hair,
he seemed amiable enough, and we seemed happy
enough for him to sit with us at the pond
and pass the time of day. He just seemed to
be some bloke taking a walk in the woods.
He asked us what we did at school, what kinds
of things we did to occupy ourselves during
the holidays. Innocuous chit-chat.
'And then, from completely out of the blue:
" So, have you started wanking yet?"
An awkward silence followed. We genuinely
hadn't seen this coming. None of us knew what
to say, and suddenly felt distinctly unnerved.
He seemed to sense this.
" Pardon me asking, like, but I know
lots of lads your age. They come round my
house all the time and they tell me stuff,
you know, and I help 'em out, like, and they
tell me stuff like that 'cos they know they
can talk to me, like, so don't be afraid.
I know what lads your age do."
'We were still a bit shocked, but between
us seemed to have mustered enough common sense
to know that this was not the sort of conversation
one expected from a middle-aged male stranger.
We decided it was time to go. We stuttered
out our polite excuses and walked quickly
in the direction of The Big Lake. We should
have gone straight home, of course, and told
our parents. But I honestly don't recall if
I ever told my parents about it (I rang my
dad just now to see if I did – it's
the first he's ever heard of it so that answered
my question! He says if I had, the police
would instantly have been called and he'd
have remembered).
'This was, after all, 1984. Paedophiles had
yet to be invented. It wasn't until the following
year, with the Cleveland affair, that terms
like "child abuse" crept into the
national vocabulary. This was years before
every tabloid started hysterically screaming
at us that our kids aren't safe and encouraging
mobs of ill-educated halfwits to burn paediatricians'
houses down. The reality of what might happen
if you talked to strange men was implicit
rather than rammed down our throats –
it was just generally accepted that they might
do "bad things" to you if you accepted
their offer to see their puppies. Nothing
more was said and no questions were asked
– you just accepted it as a given and
avoided talking to strangers. No such
gentle reminders for kids these days.
'Adventures in The Rucks and The Big Lake
would continue for another year or so before
the rigours of teendom really took hold, and
the allure of wandering aimlessly around woodland,
swinging on ropes and jumping across
streams gave way to wandering aimlessly around
the streets, sitting on walls and trying to
look disaffected. 1984 just seems to stick
out very vividly for me as an endless summer
full of fun, adventure and almost being snared
by a possible child molestor. It occurs to
me now, having written all this down, that
maybe the reason it sticks out in my memory
so much is that it was perhaps the last great
summer of innocence for me, before adolescence
kicked in and I finally realised that spunk
really didn't look like bird shit at all.
'Well, I've gone on for far longer than I
planned to here. Sorry about that! I hope
you find at least some of it an interesting
read.'
Oh
yes.
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Contact
Andrew at happy@wherediditallgoright.com