The road from Ryde Pier
Hugh Massingberd
BABYCHAM NIGHT
by Philip Norman Macmillan, £15.99, pp. 332, ISBN 0333900979 1 n his recent essay in these pages about George Orwell, Philip Hensher ruminated about the novelist's fascination with bad smells. For those of us brought up in an age before deodorant, the washing machine and the nannyish 'Health and Safety' regulations, such an obsession seems perfectly natural. What could be more evocative than a description of, say, a peculiarly postwar pong?
Certainly one of the strengths of Philip Norman's remarkably well-observed memoir of his boyhood at the end of Ryde Pier on the Isle of Wight in the early 1950s is the minute detail of his olfactory sensations. He conjures up a diverting collection of whiffs, a positive aromarama, ranging from the fermented pear juice that went into making Babycharn at his cousins' factory in Shepton Mallet to the sweat of the women working in the kitchens of his parents' restaurant, from the fish caught at the pier-head to the BO of Grandma Norman ('not over-fond of washing'), from the feral odour of uncured fur capes to filthy 1950s school food. Ah, memories, as Wallace Arnold would say, memories...
As the book is published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Queen's Coronation, it is unfortunate that the author, whose power of recall otherwise appears to be so comprehensive, has managed to get the actual date wrong. 'Coronation Day', he repeatedly asserts, fell on 3 June. In fact, it was the previous day. Doubtless news travels slowly to the Isle of Wight.
Indeed the island's suffocating insularity is brilliantly captured, along with the authentic flavour of the Fifties, that climacteric decade when the old world finally foundered. Norman is particularly good at pinning down the period's concern about class. All the consequent social awkwardness and embarrassment about gentility and respectability is laid uncomfortably bare. His own precise position in the social scale puzzled him. Although the family were engaged in the pub trade, there were stories of landed ancestors in the West Country and his father had been transformed by service in the RAF from 'a lower-middle-class Clapham boy to the rank of Wing-Commander'.
By temperament, this pent-up pessimistic character was quite unsuited to the calling of seaside huckster and he took out his frustrations in adultery. The author's account of the collapse of his parents' marriage makes painful reading. 'Won't you come back to us, Dad?' he recalls pleading. 'Mind your own business, Philip', was the toneless response.
Happily there is much warmth in the loving descriptions of his redoubtable Grandma Norman, a Somerset stalwart with 'a wonderful smell that was all her own, compounded of leather handbag, Jaeger coat, peppermint and grey hair that might not have been shampooed for six months or more'. She would lavishly dispense showers of sweets and West Country endearments: 'Hello my little lamb, my little precious, my little duck, my little bit of fluff, my little bit o' fat, my little bit o' all right
Withdrawn, guilt-ridden and self-effacing, though desperate for his parents' attention, young Philip developed two ambitions: 'first to be old, second to be ill'. In pursuit of the first of these, he would immerse himself in the old ladies' world of Grandma Norman and her relations: 'I smelt their liniments and poultices and surgical bandages and corn-plasters, heard them peeing with a hollow patter into chamberpots and emitting what Grandma Norman called "rude below-noises".' But his plan to be an invalid badly backfired when his pretence of rheumatism led to his being packed off to hospital as a polio suspect.
Even as a boy he dimly realised the irony of having started this masquerade in order to get his parents to love him more: he had succeeded only in making himself 'more unnoticeable than ever'. At one stage he was abandoned to the extent of having to live alone. To a younger reader's unspoken incredulity as to why he did not make some sort of fuss, the author answers with the haunting refrain, '1 was not that sort of boy.'
I found much of this pretty harrowing, and occasionally had to put the book down for a breather when the intensity of the detail became too much. Fortunately, though, there is light relief to be had from the author's amusing vignettes of such eccentric characters as his Uncle Phil, who dressed up in drag on New Year's Eve; big-breasted Doreen in Grandma Norman's Creamery Cafe, who complained of the taxi-driver's attentions (`You've got a lovely pair there, dear'); the tram conductor, who commented on the intelligence that the Wing Commander was shacked up at the end of the pier with a champion skater, `Whoar! He's all roight
for the noight, then': and Nick Olson 'of BBC fame', the Pier Pavilion organist, with his notice bearing the legend 'PLEASE EXCUSE ME WHILE I GO AND HAVE A DRINK.'
The story ends, appropriately enough, with the Suez crisis of 1956, which effectively ended that extraordinary era, but such is Norman's skill at evoking period touches that I trust a sequel is in the offing. I remember a haunting television play of his featuring a father's heartless reaction to the death of the son's musical hero (Bloody Holly) at the end of the 1950s, which would suggest that we can look forward to more atmospheric agonies,
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