Dave Hill's Big Britain

Colin MacInnes: Absolute Beginners

It was Paul Weller being on Desert Island Discs that inspired me to root this out again. The setting is London, half a century ago. Its narrator is having words with his mother:

"She whipped round on me and said, 'You little rat.'

'Mother should know,' I told her.

'You're too big for your boots,' she said.

'Shoes,' I told her.

In and out she breathed. 'You've too much spending money, that's your trouble!'

'That's just what's not my trouble, Ma.'

'All you teenagers have.'

I said, 'I'm really getting tired of hearing this. All right, we kids have got too much loot to spend! Well, please tell me what you propose to do about it.'

'All that money,' she said, looking at me as if I had pound notes falling out of my ears and she could snatch them, 'and you're only minors! With no responsibilities to need all that spending money for.'

'Listen to me, I said. 'Who made us minors?'

'What?'

'You made us minors with your parliamentary whatsits,' I told her, patiently. 'You thought, "That'll keep the little bastards in their places, no legal rights, and so on," and you made us minors. Righty-o. That also freed us from responsibility, didn't it? Because how can you be responsible if you haven't any rights?"

Say something, Ma.

Pat Barker: The Man Who Wasn't There

Why haven't I read any Pat Barker before? I know I've meant to because I found a copy of The Man Who Wasn't There among the heaps of books I threw on to any shelf I could find while pretending to clear up before Christmas. Apart from a layer of dust - not all of it created by the builders - it was in mint condition, just as it must have been when I bought it however long ago that was, intending to read it and failing to. Well, now I have read it. Set in a small English town after the war, it's about a twelve year-old boy called Colin who doesn't know who his dad is and his mother, Viv, who works in a club and is in a relationship with a married man called Reg Boyce. I loved this passage:

Mr Boyce...made nervous by Colin's scrutiny, smiled, and started to say something about the value of team games in the formation of character. Colin made himself listen, and even responded. They talked about football and when that subject was exhausted they talked about cars. All the while Colin was wondering how to get rid of him. No point saying anything rude. Whenever he did that, Mr Boyce looked at him with a tolerant and wise expression. Brought up without a father, he seemed to be saying. What else can you expect?

And suddenly Colin knew what to do.

"You know me mam and me were on talking the other day. About what I ought to call you."

"Ye-es?"

"Well, you know, 'Mr Boyce' sounds a bit stand-offish, doesn't it? So me mam was saying she thought I ought to call you Uncle Reg."

"Good idea," said Mr Boyce, without a great deal of enthusiasm.

"I said, why don't I call him 'Dad'?"

Mr Boyce seemed a little startled, as if, Colin thought, somebody had just rammed an electric cattle prod up his arse.

"But me mam says, 'No. Colin, it's a bit early for that'. She says, ''I know it means a lot to you, son, but believe me it's better to wait till we're living together.'"

"She said that?"

"Yes," said Colin. "And I could see the sense of it. So that's what we agreed, Uncle Reg."

"I'll leave you two with the teapot," Viv said, coming back into the room. "I'll have to go upstairs and get ready."

Mr Boyce stood up. "No, well, actually, love, I think I'd better be going."

Wasn't family life great before the Sixties ruined it, when men could be men and women could be women, and the the politically correct brigade hadn't been invented blah, blah, drone, drone, seethe, drone, drone, yawn, yawn...

Amazon Kindle

At Comment Is Free, Alex Stein describes Amazon's brand new e-reader Kindle as "antithetical to what serious reading is all about." Dunno about that. True, I don't own a Kindle but I very much doubt - unlike Alex - that it will bring about the death of the book and at the same time hope it will create opportunities for writers to by-pass the plodding, high street-fixated conventionality of mainstream publishing and get their stories "out there" in new, exciting and more immediate ways. Apparently the Kindle may not work well in the UK due to the wireless network it uses. Should that problem be solved, though, Santa may be hearing from me earlier than usual this year.