One Monday morning in 1963 a teacher, whom I remember with uncommon affection, bounced into our O level history class rhapsodizing about a new film he’d seen over the weekend. It was the story of a young undertaker’s clerk whose escapist daydreams were enacted through sudden jump-cuts away from the humdrum of everyday. One moment he’s using an electric shaver while his father berates him over a missing monkey-wrench; next, the shaver is a tommy-gun and he is mowing his old man down in a blaze of fire. Then, strolling past the football ground as the crowd roars for a goal, he becomes a dictator orating to a vast stadium crammed with his adoring people, before switching again to the persona of a scandalous writer, of whom newspaper hoardings scream: BILLY FISHER – GENIUS OR MADMAN? The film was John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar, a faithful adaptation by Keith Waterhouse of his own 1959 novel. I didn’t see the film for some time but soon got hold of the three-shilling Penguin, with its cover showing Tom Courtenay as Billy kitted out in a Panzer commander’s cap and fleece-lined leather jacket.
The novel is a beautiful collision between The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and The Catcher in the Rye, translated to the streets of Stradhoughton. This is a fictional West Yorkshire town derived from Hunslet, which stands across the River Aire from the city centre of Leeds, and is where Waterhouse grew up. I loved the novel from the first page, and I still treasure its vinegary sense of place and sardonic anti-establishment humour, perfect credentials for the wave of northern working-class fiction then rolling across Britain’s literary seabed. But Billy Liar went on to transcend the genre. Schlesinger’s film, the long-running stage play by Waterhouse and Willis Hall, which also became a school set text, the TV sitcom, the West End musical: these have combined to promote Billy Liar
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Subscribe now or Sign inOne Monday morning in 1963 a teacher, whom I remember with uncommon affection, bounced into our O level history class rhapsodizing about a new film he’d seen over the weekend. It was the story of a young undertaker’s clerk whose escapist daydreams were enacted through sudden jump-cuts away from the humdrum of everyday. One moment he’s using an electric shaver while his father berates him over a missing monkey-wrench; next, the shaver is a tommy-gun and he is mowing his old man down in a blaze of fire. Then, strolling past the football ground as the crowd roars for a goal, he becomes a dictator orating to a vast stadium crammed with his adoring people, before switching again to the persona of a scandalous writer, of whom newspaper hoardings scream: BILLY FISHER – GENIUS OR MADMAN? The film was John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar, a faithful adaptation by Keith Waterhouse of his own 1959 novel. I didn’t see the film for some time but soon got hold of the three-shilling Penguin, with its cover showing Tom Courtenay as Billy kitted out in a Panzer commander’s cap and fleece-lined leather jacket.
The novel is a beautiful collision between The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and The Catcher in the Rye, translated to the streets of Stradhoughton. This is a fictional West Yorkshire town derived from Hunslet, which stands across the River Aire from the city centre of Leeds, and is where Waterhouse grew up. I loved the novel from the first page, and I still treasure its vinegary sense of place and sardonic anti-establishment humour, perfect credentials for the wave of northern working-class fiction then rolling across Britain’s literary seabed. But Billy Liar went on to transcend the genre. Schlesinger’s film, the long-running stage play by Waterhouse and Willis Hall, which also became a school set text, the TV sitcom, the West End musical: these have combined to promote Billy Liar to a multimedia super-status that obscures the original novel’s true qualities. It has also – which is the point I want to make here – tended to blot out the rest of Waterhouse’s fiction, much of which is very good indeed. Keith Waterhouse was born on a housing estate, and was 3 when his father, an alcoholic door-to-door seller of vegetables, died leaving the family almost destitute (a psychologist might have much to say about one of Waterhouse’s favourite Aunt Sallies as a newspaper columnist: the ‘greengrocer’s apostrophe’). Having left school at 14, he worked briefly for a cobbler and then (like Billy) an undertaker. His career in journalism was launched by door-battering determination, first at the Yorkshire Evening Post and then the Daily Mirror, for whom his first freelance commission as a reporter was ‘to find a talking dog’. Throughout his writing life Waterhouse worked at a prodigious rate. As well as keeping up a regular turnover of plays and film and TV scripts co-written with Hall, hundreds of columns for the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail and comic non-fiction turns such as The Theory and Practice of Lunch, he found time to write sixteen novels. One of the very best of these is There Is a Happy Land, which was also Waterhouse’s first, appearing in 1957 when he was 28. The title comes from the street kids’ reworking of Andrew Young’s Victorian hymn:The story, told in the first person, is of a few weeks during a hot Yorkshire summer in the life of a unnamed working-class boy, aged about 10. Brought up as an only child by a resentful aunt, his life consists mostly of hanging out with other children. They roller-skate on the street, play games of ‘beddy’ and ‘hiddy’, sing mildly scatological ditties, wander around the ‘tusky-fields’ (rhubarb beds), climb the cliff face at a disused quarry and repair to a makeshift hut in the woods. But this is no prelapsarian childhood idyll. Waterhouse later wrote that, though he had attempted fiction since his late teens, it was not until he read Dylan Thomas’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog that he realized he had better stop basing his work on Wodehouse and turn to his own experience, however unpleasant. The idea goes back, as is clear from Thomas’s own title, to James Joyce, and the minimalism and directness of the child’s voice in There Is a Happy Land has more than a touch of the early Joyce (especially the Dubliners story ‘An Encounter’). Unlike Billy Fisher, the boy narrator lives in the here-and-now, superficially mundane but built on an understructure of fear that he struggles to comprehend. Waterhouse knows, as Dickens did, how easily children become victims of both their peers and adults – the latter attempting to impose their own distorted vision of childhood, the former playing endless, circular games of hierarchy and the humiliation of those lower in the pecking-order. The motives and intentions of others are all the more freighted with menace because, instead of being spelled out, they are veiled from the boy, glimpsed only in the periphery of his vision or caught in other people’s hints and mystifying allusions. We see very little of school in this ‘happy land’ until a local adult oddball is seen leading one of the other children away from a travelling fairground. This character had been regarded as a harmless friendly idiot – ‘half sharp’ in northern idiom – and the children are bewildered when their head teacher begins a ferocious inquest into the event, grilling each of them about it in turn. Of course – this being the 1940s – the exact nature of his concern is never fully explained.There is a happy land far far away Where they have jam and bread three times a day Just one big family Eggs and bacon they don’t see Get no sugar in their tea Three times a day.
The narrative is full of such evasions, as Waterhouse’s narrator tries to navigate his way uneasily through life. Sensing vulnerability, his playmates take advantage, bullying him with casual rather than systematic cruelty, which he can only stoically accept, as no means of escape offers itself. The linear narrative ends in tragedy and then, literally, with a whimper, which is the one possibly false note in the book. Billy Liar was eventually followed by a sequel, Billy Liar on the Moon, which finds its protagonist fifteen years older but little wiser. If there is a sequel to There Is a Happy Land I think it might be In the Mood, about another happy land which, by the time the book was published in 1983, was for the author just as far away. The difference is that it is rather happy. Indeed, the novel begins with an elegiac passage in which the narrator, Raymond, elaborates his own version of the ‘happy land’ metaphor: ‘I lived in a different country once . . . Youth was our visa to this country . . . These were our years and this was our green land.’ It is actually not a very green land, being the smoke-blackened industrial town of Grippenshaw, and yet another incarnation of Hunslet, Stradhoughton and the unidentified setting of There Is a Happy Land. But the land Raymond inhabits is not primarily a geographical location but a temporal and sensory one where ‘the air was crisp as apples and all the sad songs were sweeter’. It is the land of youth, of 17, in which ‘we were only visitors, yet it had no other inhabitants while we were there, at least none that we recognized. There were those whose shadows were thrown across our path sometimes but they were to us as aborigines must have been to the old settlers.’ Waterhouse’s ‘we’ is the whole age-group, but at the forefront are Raymond and his two friends, stepping freshly into the world of adulthood with a cockiness that is all too easily undermined. Just as they try out and discard pipes and brands of cigarette, styles of jacket and varieties of hat, so they assume various versions of manhood in search of one that fits. Looking back, Raymond realizes that ‘the supposedly formative years of my childhood were little more than a mechanical process of physical growth and accumulation of calcium, and that my true character and real destiny were defined and moulded in that instant, in less time than is needed to establish a chocolate soldier in a comic opera’. If realist fiction is the art of spinning myths out of reality ‒ ideally extracted from the writer’s own memory – the skilful realist understands this is not only things you can kick or eat or buy, but less tangible matter. In Billy Liar, it is illusions and fantasies. In the Mood, like There Is a Happy Land, turns on the pull of half-understood impulses, and the difficult demands on the ego of social ritual. Waterhouse’s precocious autobiography How to Live to Be 22 has a passage where in a series of short paragraphs he enumerates the ingredients of youth: ‘Youth is made of conceit . . . Youth is made of sex . . . of sex . . . of sex . . . of daydreaming . . . of selfishness . . . of laziness . . . of humbug . . . of action.’ Home life plays no part in In the Mood. Raymond and his friends work out their destinies at their first jobs, but even more at the bus stop and the telephone box, in the Kardomah café, on the municipal boating lake, under the spangled light of the local ballroom’s dance floor and, of course, in the double back-row seats of the Paramount cinema while an unwatched James Cagney film plays in front of them. To them, the thing that matters most, the only thing they are capable of thinking about for more than two consecutive minutes, is how to prove themselves as men by getting a girl with whom to lose their virginity, as fast as can be and (if possible) before either of the other two. This is the mainspring of the plot. As the friends stumble cyclically from humiliation to the promise of success, to further humiliation, they never lose faith in their ultimate triumph which, in Raymond’s case, is scheduled to occur on a carefully planned coach trip to the Festival of Britain. Like all long-term plans, the schedule falls constantly under threat from time and chance; beyond that I will only say that the whole novel, including its ending, is – for a Waterhouse novel – unusually cheerful. Like his greatest character Billy Fisher, Waterhouse found it hard to settle on a single identity – charmer or curmudgeon, naughty boy or responsible husband, adventurer or stay-at-home recluse ‒ and the same ambivalence can be seen in his writing. Much of the time he regarded himself as an entertainer. One of his books, Mrs Pooter’s Diary, became a hit play starring Michael Williams and Judi Dench; another success was Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, a farce about the barfly journalist played by Peter O’Toole. His long-running newspaper column was more satirical, freely lampooning pomposity and the abuse of language whenever Waterhouse found it. But, as a novelist, he hoped ‘to be considered just behind Priestley’, admiring his fellow Yorkshireman’s versatility and humanity. It is true that Priestley had demons of his own, yet Waterhouse’s world is generally darker than Priestley’s once you look behind the jokes. Most of his heroes are lonely misfits, expressing themselves through embittered internal rants against folly and humbug – a mode that becomes the entire substance of his late novel Thinks. In the Mood’s three youths are different, however. Their 17-year-old lusts are crude, and their empathy needs work, but Raymond and his friends are the warmest, happiest and most rounded creations in the Waterhouse canon. They are allowed at least some sugar in their tea.‘Now don’t forget, what have you got to do if a man asks you to go anywhere with him?’ ‘I’ve to say I’ve got to go home and then find a policeman, sir.’ ‘Do you know why?’ ‘No, sir.’ Old Croggy suddenly started talking about something else.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 48 © Robin Blake 2015
About the contributor
Robin Blake grew up in Lancashire and Yorkshire. He is the author of a series of historical mysteries featuring Titus Cragg, the coroner of eighteenth-century Preston, the latest of which, The Scrivener, was published in March. The US edition is entitled The Hidden Man.