Television
The Bushman cometh
Martyn Harris
In 1986 Andrew Weston-Webb was a sales and marketing manager in the City, earning £40,000 a year with a company car, telephone, computer, nice house, a wife and daughter (Forty Minutes, BBC2, Tues- day, 9.50pm). `I was working all the hciurs under the sun, coming home, flopping in front of the telly and falling asleep there. The whole fabric of whatever a marriage means was collapsing in front of my eyes.' So he faked his death, forged a passport and disappeared to Australia where he lived among the aborigines. Today he is the `Battersea Bushman' living in a south Lon- don council flat with furniture from skips and an exotic girlfriend called Meena. He makes his living from a market stall, selling refurbished junk that he finds along the shore of the Thames. He has even lost weight, conquered his booze habit and improved his dress sense.
On the face of it Weston-Webb's is one of those stirring renunciations which Philip Larkin so envied in Toads:
Lots of folk live up lanes With fires in a bucket Eat windfalls and tinned sardines
They seem to like it.
Every man wonders, from time to time, why he doesn't shout, 'Stuff your pension' and spend his life 'swaggering the nut- strewn roads' or crouching, `stubbly with goodness in the foc'sle' — which is another poem, I know, but the point is the same. Past the age of 40, a grownup must accept that he is, in all important respects, a husk. The endless dramas of self-reinvention: of diet and exercise; art, alcoholism and adul- tery, are all deferments of that fact.
Weston-Webb's crisis was complicated because, so far as we could tell (it was never quite explicit), he had been caught by the police, peeping through bedroom win- dows. `I risked my, life and my marriage and the waters broke as it were. The dis- covery was made, and my wife decided she did not want to live with such a man.' His explanation now, is that he was starved of love as a child (one day someone will say they were a victim of too much love, but it hasn't happened yet). He spent his child- hood at the boarding school where his father was a master and his mother a house mistress — whom he had to call 'Sir'. On Sunday afternoons, with all the other boys, he had to write a letter 'home' — 'Even though I could see my parents from the Art Room window.' He was never given a cud- dle, never kissed, never told he was loved. `I wanted to strangle my mother even when she was dead.'
Excluded from a proper family, his voyeurism, and his obsessive picking over the leavings of other homes, could be seen as a sad attempt to infiltrate the families of others, but like all ambitious theories it col- lapsed before the particularity of a life. A fellow old boy of the school remembered Weston-Webb as a bully and a conformist; and wondered how real his new anti-mate- rialism actually was. He appeared, after all in the Observer's 'Room Of My Own' fea- ture a few months ago; the junk stall seems to be booming, and the Battersea Bushman is, as its author acknowledged, a damn good marketing name. Directed by Joanna Clin- ton Davis, and produced by the excellent Paul Watson, this was a deliberately ambiva- lent piece, whose central and topical ques- tion was where do childhood influences end and individual responsibility begin? Alternately glib and plausible, sympathetic and manipulative, the Battersea Bushman was a tantalising symbol of the fact that you never escape your past, but neither can you blame it entirely for your present.
If you want to have a tantrum, I'm afraid you'll have to go to the kitchen.'
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