Through the big window #23

It’s official! ‘I am getting old.’ All the signs are there, grunting at the merest exertion, sighing after each slurp of tea, shaving my earlobes, trimming nose-hairs, finishing off my wife’s sentences, standing outside with the bags while she shops and even falling asleep at any given moment; but the final act I find myself doing is talking to myself. Not earnest conversation, or even expecting a response, just regular 4- or 5-word sentences, self-comforting phrases if you like. ‘That should do it,’ when attending to some small repair, ‘Yeah, I’ll go there first,’ when planning an errand or ‘I’ll fix that later’ if something requires attention. Obviously, there are more if I recall but I don’t wish to embarrass myself by making you think I’m a bumbling loner, it’s more about absent minded meanderings. I don’t mutter when in company, accepting the fact that my parents as they became older would certainly chat to themselves, especially expletives should such language be required. ‘God’ was regularly taken in vain, and I still throw in that phrase ‘God is good!’ now and then, all this not necessarily about belief, but because my childhood was during a time when we were encouraged to practice Religion; a practice which had its uses, like attending Sunday School to attain a free seat on their annual Charabanc trip to the seaside. A lesson learned by all children of austere times, ‘give a little and get a little back.’ But Sunday School was more relief than Rote-learning; we were told interesting stories and it was always warm inside on winter days. We never really knew who our teachers were, what they did as a day job and if they really believed what they were telling us, but there was no corporal punishment, after-school work and need to attend every week. We kids were always depended on to help at home during my early years, especially running errands or reminding dad busily propping up the local bar his dinner was on the table. Interruptions were common even encouraged during lessons and not once did the teacher lob his keys, the board duster or any such missile at my head. I recall the biggest threat uttered my way for being class-clown was being made to sit with the adults all the way to the seaside, YUK! Nothing like REAL school.

My mother was a great one for age old adages. Her received wisdom evaluated critically from the many books she read, although where she found the time with 14 children is beyond my imagination. I can instantly recall her muttering inwardly, usually some Scottish aside like ‘wheesht yer bletherin,’ ‘ach weel!’ or ‘ma boab,’ and her regular complaint if I managed to get my small body between her and the warmth of our single coal fire sarcastically enquiring, ‘wiz yer faither a glazier?’ which meant as a fully signed up member of the Ardwick and West Gorton Street Arab society to avoid further Celtic earache I disappeared from view. Maybe while us kids were outside running wild my parents were traipsing about our two-up-two-down hovel muttering incessantly and only sealing their lips when one of us barged in through the unlatched front door. Golden silence-maintained secrecy, and the odd request as to what I had been up to, and who was I hiding from? But looking back it now dawns on me that soliloquising, or talking to oneself, more than likely begins during childhood. Chastisement, or what was amusingly called ‘fetching us one,’ usually resulted in a red and very sore earhole, ringing bells traversing from one ear to the other, and me swearing to myself, “one day he’s getting it!” Whatever ‘IT’ was nobody knows, but all kids were of the same mind when getting a heavy clout around the chops, our mutterings almost certainly meant instant death to the paternal assailant, even if it was just a bullet from my two-fingered gun as he strode purposely to the pub. I recall his idiomatic mutterings were ‘Old Lancashire’ and usually indecipherable to me even though I find myself repeating them to this very day. Sayings like ‘yer puddled,’ or ‘touched’ were obviously about my intelligence, and I never discovered who the ‘Piffy’ was I was meant to fight. When in a half-decent mood, I was a ‘Gudgeon,’ and if in his bad books, ‘Seghead.’ I never knew why ‘I couldn’t lick an Ice-cream Cornet,’ when I obviously could, and why ‘I didn’t know I was bloody born,’ when I obviously did. Still, although he was a ‘nowty bugger,’ and threatened regularly to ‘stop my gallop,’ he was dad, and the only one I knew. On some days I could even be found hidden from view behind the greengrocers dustbin patiently waiting. “Gotcha!” I would whisper to myself as I fired and before riding off to team up with my pals smiling whilst imagining him drinking from his pint glass of bitter, it seeping out of the newly created bullet holes. “You didn’t expect that did yer Cowpoke?”

Talking about AI, well I know we weren’t, but it seems the whole world and its cousin is. During a pensive moment of daydreaming where I subconsciously lift my feet up as wifey vacuums, lean forward while she plumps the cushions and foot the ladder whilst she sweeps our chimney something struck me while I idled away time. As a child I loved Comics, we baby-boomers could not get enough of them, from the cartoonish Dandy or Beano type to the more teenage genre of Eagle, Rover, or my favourites Lion and Tiger. Harry our paperboy, who to my reckoning was a long-retired Circus midget, would deliver those last two to our dilapidated hovel every Tuesday along with the nightly Manchester Evening Chronicle. Then at the weekend the Sunday Pictorial, Scottish Sunday post and Weekly News would arrive, some of which contained comic pages such as Oor Wullie (Our Billy) and The Broons (The Browns) for which we would impatiently have to wait to laugh at their antics after mother had first read her newspapers from home.

I always tasted just a hint of one-upmanship reading their madcap antics for which none of my friends would have access. But in exchange they would pass on to me certain tid-bits from The News of the World, it strictly verboten from gliding through our letterbox, and me jealously drinking in every salacious tincture. The only problem was that being the youngest of 5 lads meant I was regularly last to get my mitts on either, or impatient friends knocking at the door meant my Sunday read would have to wait. ‘Look!’ I’d say to myself, ‘If Alf Tupper the Tough of the Track can eat a Fish and Chip supper after working all day in his garage, turn up late for his athletics meeting and then give his opponents a full lap start, yet still beat them easily, I could put up with being last in line too; let’s go!

Oh yes, where were we? AI is not a new phenomenon. How can I say that? Simple! All has been prophesied. HG Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov are just 4 authors of many who had the imagination and knowledge to entertain readers with predictions of robots, starships, lasers, space-travel and exploration; it was called Science Fiction. Yes I was a fan as a child, taking in the exploits of Dan Dare and his many journeys to different planets, imaginatively titled Q1, Q2 Q3 etc. Him fighting alien life, invading vegetation or two-headed, fire breathing monsters before travelling through time back to Earth, all tasks undertook as second nature. All this taken in and swallowed whole whilst I was still ascending carpet-less stairs up to a freezing bedroom carrying a flickering candle in a saucer every evening before even duvet’s were discovered. Why were we still living like troglodytes? Where, and how did all those predictions grow? Of course, as far as I am concerned, look no further than the writers, inspirational highly imaginative storytellers of my childhood. Comic illustrators and authors alike dropping through my letterbox bringing me tales of the past, the present and more importantly, the future. Luminaries like Frank Hampson and Don Hanley filling my head with so much futuristic shenanigans I slept with one eye open until I was 49. In fact, I recall a Dodger Caine story in the Tiger Annual of 1958 where he fooled some fellow classmates into thinking he had invented a line-writing electronic Robot to undertake that time-consuming punishment meted out by unforgiving wearisome schoolteachers, Lines; one thousand lines sir? No problem! Fetch AI. Of course, it was his best friend Tubby Travers hidden inside an old tea-chest magnetically operating a suit of armour which fooled the onlookers; Mechanical yes! prophetic? certainly. Take a bow visionary.

Remember, I was a child of the streets, my narrow imagination only ran to girls underthing’s, Mrs Roney’s washing line and books such as Health and Sunshine, The Nudist or Modern Sunbathing. The Moon was made of cheese, the stars were polished in Brigadoon while Pluto was only discovered in 1930 because Butch, his cartoon nemesis ran off with the neighbours bitch. My earliest nightmares were only ever created listening to Alfie Bass playing Lemmy in radio’s Journey into Space, or when watching Andre Morrell starring in Quatermass on Television in the early 60’s, my older brother Robert threatening us repeatedly because my brother Neil and I would unashamedly follow him into the toilet during the advertisements. All I wanted to do was escape my domestic travails. But this grasping at freedom somehow meant I got left behind whilst my playmates quickly matured. Yes! I knew the difference, and when the girls we knocked about with eventually stopped hitting me during their earlier maturation point, I even got to wrestle with one or two.

It was while sitting around and enjoying my first brew at Beyer Peacocks my first ever job that I entered the adult world with a jolt. There were about 10 Fitters, 2 Labourers and 3 apprentices in the gang I was placed with, and the Monday morning talk would invariably revolve around the previous weekend’s events, and usually involved drinking beer. New words soon entered my lexicon, words such as Flange, Beaver, Kecks, Man-in-the-boat, Hand job, Blow job, Plating and Muff-diving. I may as well have been sat in a Chinese Laundry and them all speaking Mandarin for what I could decipher. Innocently I asked the Journeyman I was apprenticed to if they kept all those parts they were chatting about in the stores. I have never seen so much tea and toast spluttered about and grown men corpse into laughter and grasp oxygen whilst crying real tears. Phil the aged labourer actually required medical attention after nearly swallowing his false teeth. I was so embarrassed that I got up and made my way across the factory yard to where my brother Robert worked and explained why, which embarrassingly created the same response. Needless to say, I soon grew up.

August 1964, not so green as cabbage looking.