Unreasonable Behavior Read online

  It was hardly the Slade, yet I felt as if someone had given me a passport, a key to a locked garden full of colour and light. For one thing, there were girls at Hammersmith, and I had never been in a classroom with girls before. Of course I displayed no breeding, kept up my disdain for anything female, and so gained no quick favours with the girls, but I was among people with expectations altogether different from those of the boys in The Bunk. It was as if a wand had been waved over Finsbury Park and I had been spared for a much nicer life.

  Then suddenly the bottom dropped out of my world. My father, who of all the family had been most thrilled to see his lad win a scholarship, became critically ill. As the attacks grew worse, and he began rapidly to lose weight, I would stay awake at night willing him to live. But the odds—with a million coal fires in those days pouring smoke into the winter air—were against him. One night he was taken away to St Mary’s Hospital in Highgate, which looked like an old workhouse. My brother and I were sent to a neighbour’s house where the family was quite posh, the man having a job at Harrods’. I sat stiffly in their parlour leafing through something called the National Geographic Magazine. At home we sometimes saw the News of the World, and I would glance through Picture Post and a magazine called Illustrated while waiting my turn in the barber’s shop, but I had never before seen photography of the sort that was displayed in the pages of the National Geographic. I became absorbed and forgot the dread of my father’s sickbed until the policeman called at the door. (There were no telephones in our houses in Finsbury Park in those days.) I remember the hushed conversation with the adults and knowing without being told that the worst had happened.

  My father, once a well-set-up man of 5 ft 10 in., weighed little more than six stone when he died. He was forty years old. A friend once said to me in later life, ‘It doesn’t matter how old you are, the day your father dies it’s like being kicked in the balls.’ That is a pretty accurate description of how I felt. The scene of my father laid out, the burning candles and the smell, is one I shall never forget.

  I was fourteen, and there was no question now of staying on at art school. The elder son was expected to take over the role of father and start to earn the family keep. At least finding a job in those days was not a problem, though few of them led anywhere. My mother’s mates on the railway soon had me working as a pantry-boy on the LMS dining cars. I used to go from London to Manchester on a train called the ‘Comet’, the 9.45 a.m. special for businessmen, which would return from Manchester in the early evening. It was interesting to see those grimy satanic northern cities, with their tall factory chimneys belching dark smoke, before the Clean Air Act which might have kept my father alive if it had arrived much sooner. Besides, I had freedom. I was leaving Finsbury Park every day and travelling all over England. I would make the best of it.

  Internally, I was angry with God—if He existed. He had taken a liberty in removing my father from me, the one person in my life who had made the misery of poverty seem irrelevant. I would disown God. A strength arose in the midst of the pity I was beginning to feel for myself. On the surface I kept up the flippancy, slinging plates out of the train window as we passed over a viaduct, to see what effect they would have. I was Jack the Lad, with thirty shillings in my pocket, and sometimes double that in tips. But the buried resentment burned, not very deep down.

  5. HUNTING DOGS

  I spent my first savings on a Teddy Boy suit. It was navy blue hopsack, and it cost £7.7.6 in Stoke Newington High Street. With it went the obligatory suedes with thick spongy soles, brothel-creepers (blue of course), and a black bootlace tie. I wore the outfit on my first date, with a girl in Hornsey, and it poured with rain. My hair hung down and the suit was shrinking on my back as we made our way to a dance in Highgate at a place called Holy Joe’s, or St Joseph’s Church, near where my father had died.

  This was sophistication, though the kid in me was not buried far beneath the surface. On evenings when the old lady had to work late, I would be Michael’s protector. Despite my age, we still shared the same bed, and we would lie there and listen to Valentine Dyall, ‘The Man in Black’, reading a series of radio horror stories, with the blankets pulled over our heads to keep out the bogeyman.

  At the same time, I was trying to train myself in all things that interested men. The bridge between boyhood and manhood for me was motorbikes. There was a boy down the road who kept his bike in the bedroom. He had trays for the oil laid out across the floor—he could, so he said, do an oil change and have his girl at the same time. To the rest of us in Finsbury Park this seemed to be the essence of cool. I swore that one day I too would own one of these machines. In the meantime I rode pillion.

  I left the railway when I got a job at the cartoon animation studio W.M. Larkins, with a fashionable address in Mayfair. I had shown some of my art school drawings to the boss, Peter Sachs, a Jew who had escaped from Nazi Germany, and he let me in on the ground floor as a messenger boy. If things turned out well, he said, he would allow me to mix colours.

  Colour mixing was not to last long, for it turned out that I was partially colour-blind, and certainly not up to the subtlety of animation. I was all right when I stuck to blues, reds and yellows, but my browns, beiges and greens were less secure. I went back to running messages, too inexperienced in their eyes to be taken into the dark room. The only photography I had ever encountered was sitting with my sister in Jerome’s in the Holloway Road, having our portraits taken for the family.

  Mayfair touched me in other ways. I became very conscious of my appearance. I was not conceited, but I fretted about not having enough money to buy clothes. Walking from work out of the Underground at Piccadilly, I would catch sight of myself in the window of the Rolls-Royce showroom as I turned into Charles Street and go to work on the arrangement of my collar and cuffs. I also remember swinging round into Berkeley Square and smelling the scent of that wonderful shop Moyses Stevens, looking at the orchids in the window with water running down it. It made me aware of a different world, a world far removed from my biking mates and the boys from The Bunk, who were now emerging from their first confinements in corrective or penal institutions. Mayfair held out the promise of escape from Finsbury Park and all that.

  But not yet. I bought a Velocette 250, with a fish tail and girder forks, which would throb along at fifty miles an hour. I felt like an ace at Brooklands, with no such things as crash helmets in those days. We would drive out in formation on Sundays, down the A10 to Collier’s End, where we would dive off an old survival dinghy from the war into the ice-cold river. We would eat some continental food at a cafe on the way home and then bomb the rest of the way up the arterial road to Finsbury Park. We were no Hell’s Angels, and they were great days of freedom, with friendships quite different from the relationship I had with my old Bunk boys, the hunting dogs, who were now hanging out in packs looking for trouble.

  Despite my biking friends, I still needed the mad dogs. Intimidation was always strong in Finsbury Park, and there was a force-field all the time trying to draw you into something mischievous. I avoided thieving, but gang warfare was a stronger temptation. There was suppressed aggression and a lot of resentment in me. I wanted the respect given to those serious street fighters—the swaggering elite of the Seven Sisters Road, where the tribe had a name: The Guv’nors. In a corralled car, the tribe would strut their stuff at dance-halls or harry the whores in Shaftesbury Avenue. One or two did become ponces, but the sexual level then was little more than a flick through the carefully censored nudes in Health and Efficiency. On Saturday nights the tribe would turn up in force at the Royal dance-hall in Tottenham. A refusal to dance from a girl was hard to bear in front of this mob, and you’d hope for salvation in the rumbling sound at the start of a good punch-up. That would make the evening and set up an electric air when you walked in next week.

  The Guv’nors

  With The Guv’nors, though they were predators themselves, you f
elt safe from other predators, like the bigger, older criminals who lurked in the background of our neighbourhood, and the police. The police were our natural enemies. If you were caught in a cul-de-sac by the coppers, as I was on one occasion, you could be sure to be on light duties for the next week. All this, of course, was just before the first wave of coloured immigration in Britain. In some ways we were like white negroes, the out groups. Though we were a funny kind of negro, since most of us were as bigoted and racist as they come.

  When it came to the time for national service, I was a pretty fractured personality. I had come to like my job in Mayfair, and the people there were kind to me, but I felt as if they could see ‘Finsbury Park’ indelibly written across my forehead and ‘working class’ on the other side of my head. I couldn’t see how I was ever going to be much more than a messenger in the world. I was sure of one thing. I didn’t want to go into the army and be pushed around. A few years of Bill Haley had shaken all enthusiasm for the soldier’s life out of me. So I smarmed my way into the air force.

  6. TANK WARFARE

  ‘There you are!’ we were told. ‘One of the wonders of the world, so you’d better wonder at it.’

  We had been marched up to an RAF bus, ordered on board and driven into the desert to see the Pyramids. To us recruits, the Pyramids seemed dull and expressionless heaps of stone. The highlight of our day was the barney that erupted as we were getting ready to take the bus out. Some Arabs (or wogs, as with shameless lack of concern for ethnic sensibilities thugs like us called them in the Fifties) had been pressing us to buy some glass jars. Few objects were less suited to the needs of people on twenty-seven shillings a week and living under canvas. Some of the lads had resorted to direct action by snapping down the bus windows, sharpish, on the vendors’ fingers. Jars would be tumbling in and no money would be going out. The Arabs then mounted a spirited counter-attack.

  At eighteen I wasn’t really ready for civilised behaviour, much less the Pyramids, but I was slowly beginning to get the hang of service life. They had said to me: ‘Right, McCullin. You’re in films. We’ve got a whole load of tins of film at Queen’s Flight, RAF Benson, in Oxfordshire. They need numbers painting on them. There’s a million of them.’ It was an underestimation. They had mountains of Second World War air reconnaissance film. Painting numbers on the cans was a long way behind whitewashing coal in terms of interest. I thought, I’m not going to do this, and there was wide support for this view in my little group. We mounted a guard on the ridge, to keep lookout for the sergeant who periodically wobbled our way on his bike, stowing the playing cards and grabbing the paint brushes only when he hove into view. We controlled our output by our sightings, as they say in the RAF.

  Don (back row, right), RAF, 1953

  Don, Fonthill Road, Finsbury Park, 1955

  Don, Oxfordshire, 1954

  My thoughts turned to foreign parts. I had been told that the Canal Zone was a God-awful posting—this was two years before Suez—so I applied for Hong Kong. Naturally, I got the Canal Zone. Those who had applied for the Canal Zone landed as inevitably among the skyscrapers, junks, and almond-eyed ladies in slit-skirts of the Far East.

  I was posted to a barbed wire compound in Ismailia, close to the spot where Lake Timsah turns into the Suez Canal. The heat hit you like a hammer.

  As soon as I arrived they put me in a tank. It bore no resemblance to the glamorous army machine of the same name, but resembled a vat, the size of a large room, with deep rusty sides, full of acid crystals. My tank was the most inglorious part of the process of aerial photo-reconnaissance. It was where the films got developed, in bulk. My film cartoon experience amply qualified me to clean it out.

  Every morning I was lowered into this object for the day’s work. As a treat, I would later be allowed to stir the noxious chemicals, or even get a go on the map photostat machine.

  We had to do guard duty three nights a week, for which we were issued with a Sten gun, a most ill-conceived weapon which could fail to hit a London bus at ten paces. Occasionally I would catch people coming into the camp to steal and hand them over to the RAF police who would then phone the local police. You’d see this Egyptian policeman coming along the side of the Canal, complete with fez and cane. We would drive up, salute, and perform the usual courtesies. The offending detainee would sometimes protest that he was only trying to retrieve something that had gone on to the wrong side of the wire, and the policeman would fetch him a clout round the earhole; much to my pleasure, for I would be thinking that if it weren’t for him I would be in bed. I had a pretty ignorant attitude.

  One of the photographers urged me to take the photographic trade test. It would mean more interesting work, and more money. So I took the written test, and failed. Suddenly my life improved. I was still a photo-assistant but the RAF decided I should have a better posting. I was let loose on the Mau Mau in Kenya. It amounted to exchanging the inside of one large tank-like structure for another, this time a huge aircraft hangar housing bombers, where we slept. It was overrun with rats. At least the army performed the guard duties.

  My elevated role in the Kenya emergency was to work what was called a bulk-processing machine for Bomber Command, Nairobi. The bombers came back daily with 3,000 or more pictures of Mau Mau country, or bombing patterns, or both, to be developed at speed. I was the speed. The Canberras were the worst, from my point of view. They could take pictures from six camera mountings simultaneously. The intelligence people used these pictures for the next day’s offensive against the rebels. For me the work was hectic, and not very interesting.

  I was more appreciative of Kenya itself. Nairobi was a charming colonial town in those days, with Great White Hunters in safari hats trooping in and out of the Stanley Hotel. In my time off I made a new sortie into the high life, persuading the daughter of a Dutch farmer to teach me how to sit on a horse. My horizons widened still further when I made friends with some of the bomber crews in our hangar.

  They would let me fly with them as supercargo on their raids on the Kinangop plateau, then a Mau Mau stronghold. I enjoyed the raffish, Dam Busters air about the whole proceeding: these chaps in helmets and goggles with stuff all over their noses saying Bravo, Wingco. In fact the Lincoln bombers, with my illicit extra weight, were a bit unnerving. You realised what a struggle they had to get off the ground and stay in the air when they leapt what seemed 1,000 feet after they had released the bomb load.

  Sometimes, on the way back, they would fly in low by Kilimanjaro, so we could get a sight of the zebra herds and elephant and wildebeest on the plains of Amboseli. On occasion, I managed to go up with Harvards, the little fighter escort planes. They used to strafe the jungle in true Hollywood war-movie fashion and lark about in the sky on the way home.

  In all this, at such a callow age, I never gave a thought to the damage being done to the villages below, or to the rights and wrongs of the colonial situation. To us, the Mau Mau were monster baddie Indians, well known from the bloodcurdling tales in the Other Ranks’ Mess of atrocities and unspeakable oath-taking ceremonies. As to Great Britain’s right to throw its weight around on another continent, that went without question. We were all Labour of course in Finsbury Park, but when it came to anything foreign, I was a super patriot, well to the right of Alf Garnett. My country could do no wrong.

  It was an outlook commonplace then, but being overtaken by events. My service career was a kind of extended Cook’s tour of the end of the Empire. I was posted to Cyprus. In Nicosia, Eoka terrorists, in the name of enosis, union, were gunning down unarmed British soldiers as they shopped with their families on Ledra Street. Ledra Street would acquire the name Murder Mile. But, away from the capital, at RAF Episcopi, near Akrotiri, we were in another world. We emerged from our tents in the morning to crags soaring in clean air, a blue sea directly below, and the stones of the site of the Temple of Apollo glowing in the Mediterranean light. In off-duty hours we learned scuba divi
ng.

  Sometimes we would ride shotgun, or more precisely Sten gun, with the escort cart that went into Nicosia. This was not too dangerous as Eoka rarely attacked armed soldiers. It gave us a chance to see the city and to gain some insight into the deep instability of the island: the smouldering animosity between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots. The only thing that seemed to unite them was the pleasure of blasting songbirds on Sunday mornings.

  A more lunatic, but to us enjoyable, way of travelling round the island was as part of a football team which used to play the other bases. On the dangerous mountain roads we would always be coming up on trucks heavily laden with grapes, heading for the factory. As we passed it would be like Clouzot’s film The Wages of Fear—hair-raising. The lads would all be reaching out and trying to make instant wine as we inched past. And the truck driver would be trying to bawl us out while not plunging into the ravine at the same time.

  Civilised encounters with the local population did not figure large on our agenda. One evening we had a supervised night out, under guard, at a bar in Limassol. It was some PR exercise connected with the fact that there were visiting MPs on the island who wanted to be assured that the servicemen and the local population were getting on famously. We simply were not ready for mixed society. On this rare human opportunity, I seized the chance to make eyes at a pretty Cypriot bar girl. It cost me an arm and a leg in purchased drinks just to make the eyes. I tried to consolidate my advance by manoeuvring the chairs for a closer encounter. My proffered chair missed its target, her descending and shapely rear end, and the poor girl landed in a heap on the floor. It led to a brisk end to the cavalier career of this particular Virgin Airman.