Murder At Oil Drum Lane

Arguably the best British sit-com to visit the flickering one-eyed beast Galton & Simpson’s Steptoe & Son has a special place for me, sat up watching it as one of the few things that wasn’t classified as outright rubbish by my Dad alongside The Likely Lads and Dad’s Army. It was typically for Galton & Simpson extremely well written and in much the same way as they worked Hancock, with a very small cast. The interplay between two characters requires tight scripts and decent actors, and budgets did not allow vast numbers of sets. Aside from the usual ‘going abroad’ films that everything in the 70s suffered from Steptoe & Son was a genuine classic. But where did it end?

Well in 2005 we found out, or at least I’ve just found out that we find out, Ray Galton penned for the stage the last of the Steptoes, set in 2005, with an aged Harold in his 70s returning to an Oil Drum Lane now the property of the National Trust. Towards the end of the original series Harold was all set to finally leave his awful father with Joyce, only for Steptoe snr to reveal she was in fact his sister. The play covers much alluded to or shown in the series, from Harold’s captivity by his father (literally so in the war) to the affair with Joyce, and in this we learn that in the end they might have made it rich since amongst all the junk they had in their possession a rare Gutenberg Bible. Fearing to lose Harold Steptoe snr hides it and Harold finally inflamed beyond all reason kills his father, fleeing to Rio. Now in 2005 he returns, only to be visited by the ghost of old Steptoe. He too dies in the end, furious again when he discovers the bible was not after all lost, of a heart attack.

He is discovered by Joyce, now a nun, who makes sure Harold is buried next to old Steptoe and the two ghosts now trapped together fade away arguing over where they’ll end up, but certainly, and horribly, together.

Truly.

And how marvellous is that?

With any luck then we’ll be due for a third series of Spaced by 2028.    

Billy Baxter, Butchery, and Poaching Lions At Longleat

We were hunting up houses around Bricester this weekend and coming home had cause to pass through our old haunts up around Cockermouth. Big enough to be a town, small enough to be nearly unique in that its occupied and Georgian high street boasts almost nothing resembling a chain store. The cities might have all the amenities, but you can go long miles without finding a real butcher in them. When we lived in the next village from Cockermouth our little shop was pretty good, and our bakery was wonderful. Cockermouth has three excellent butchers, grocers, a sweetshop, toyshop, everything you could reliably want. It even has a posh lane where you can dwell over coffee and make choice selections from an uppity delicatessen should that be your thing. I like that, I miss it when such things aren’t there and whilst it does have the usual supermarkets tucked out of sight then the meat you’d normally be used to from ‘em isn’t fit for ghouls.

But the best was Billy Baxter.

Billy’s is right down in Wiltshire where so too I lived some mumblety years ago. Before children and responsibility (and probably decimal currency). Billy was a butcher with a sideline as a baker and nothing came pre-packed. You wanted a pork chop, he’s show you the carcass. Rabbits and pheasants (and whatever else he’d scrumped the night before) hung by hooks. And Billy was something special. We got on really well. Just as I had odd walks and a host of odder people I’d meet on them most days, then Billy was the king. He came from Durham way, lived in a sprawling tumbledown house, shot to competition standard and was invincible. He once cut off the best part of a finger and not having liked the hospital on his previous visit just cleaned both bits and stitched them right back on. And it worked too.

He’d always round prices down. Really down. The week’s meat might come to twenty-eight quid – call it twenty. I thought I knew how to skin a rabbit until he showed me a better way. Nothing like a slow morning playing with dead animals and small, sharp knives to wile away the summer. He’d confuse people if you took them in to pick up a dozen of his famous sausages. You had to order months in advance for Christmas because everyone – everyone, went to Billy. There was no best-for-restaurants with Billy, it was all the same and it was all good. We were rather dull with goose. If we’d wanted lion he’d have probably been seen next day striping up his land-rover for a quick jaunt over to poach up Longleat.

And he was fair. I went in there once and before I could open my mouth he handed me a small sack of bread rolls, because he’d over baked and it was gone lunchtime. Then asked what I wanted and a bit shamefully I had to admit ‘bread’. He laughed and that was that, waggling his finger as if I’d gotten one over on him.

So I hope Bricester measures up. Ramsay Campbell reckoned there was nameless horror there, and he ought to know. Or was it Gordon Ramsay? I’m easily turned about. But not round Billy, because Billy Baxter was the best, a character from a Roald Dahl story never written.   

Peter Griff & I, Hot Tea And Cold Streets

King’s Cross, Three Slides from True

The pub is battened down with railway sleepers and a single vast sign that despite the dents and heat blisters still advertises Pears Soap. We’re drinking tea from a tin mug and every third sip Peter Griff takes another from a bottle he keeps like a book in his coat pocket. It’s too cold for April. There’s not a cloud to be seen yet everything is damp with a dead man’s sheen across the road from an oil spill that runs all the way down to the Caledonian Road. Peter’s been loading and removing the five bullets from his revolver since we got here, lining them up and looking down the barrel where it breaks like a shotgun as if to spy who-knows-what. It’s a miserable day but we’re packed to the ears with egg and sausages thrust upon us by his aa further south. Peter’s ma is from an Ealing comedy. Something from the 40s or 50s, bright as burning gold, the mother everyone wished they had.

                          Every time I take my hands from my pockets they freeze. Every time I put them back after taking the hot mug they feel colder. We’re here to change the world for the better, something Peter’ll be good at if he’ll only let himself. It’s good to see him, I’ve been worried. He has to walk with a stick after misjudging a jump to the ground from a zeppelin, and I wasn’t surprised to hear him tell the story because on the list he doesn’t like (of the things he does well) then having a pair of big bold ones is probably somewhere near the top. Probably half the trouble.

                          I make some passing jibe at people we both once knew and he laughs, because it’s probably nice to be in some company where people want to. I’ve got a cushy life really. Wife, kids, I honestly don’t even look at other women. Seems like the people I know still that we knew together are in the same place whereas those likewise he still sees are competing to see how far up shit street they can live. We both look round when the flatbed goes by, slowing to take a corner with some trouble. In the back twenty spotty idiots in black glare at us, kids with lightning flash armbands.

                          “Don’t give ‘em an excuse,” I say.

                          Peter doesn’t hear, just stares at them until the lorry in a stink of a diseased engine vanishes from sight and towards the station. He puts his Webley away. He asks me, “You armed?”

                          I’ve got a sten gun in the bag, but it’s a piece of shit and say so.

                          “Pub’s’re open,” he says to change the subject. He can see I’m uncomfortable with the current one.

                          “Not that one,” I nod over the road.

                          Then, “Where’s this mate of yours? This ‘Collector’?”

                          He’s on his way. Last I heard he was likely to be delayed, and is. There’s a shop in Paddington that sells memorabilia and he’s heard that there’s a first edition Book Of Enoch to be had there. I’m not concerned even though this London is what happens when a war leaves behind socialism and ends up years later in something in quite the other direction. The young hate the old and we’re both of us here not looking the sprightly youths we once were. Peter says, “I’ve spoken to a few people, this idea of yours...”

                          “Oh aye?” there I go betraying my time up north.

                          “He likes it.”

                          “That’s good.”

                          He looks happy, if wary. You can be a good person that’s done some bad things, you just have to look forward. To see what life can be. And he deserves it because if you judge a man by those that love him then having met his ma then I doubt I’ve ever met anyone more deserving.

                          Distantly we can hear the thub-thub-thub of a dirigible. French almost certainly, and set to drop bombs on the docks. It’s a right miserable Slide this one and next time I’ll drag him to a better one. There’s poison in the air, and the milk is always sour.

                          So we drink our tea black and amuse ourselves with the metaphor.

Adventure Calls!

Adventure calls!

Whilst the good lady believes we are off to view new residences over the next few days, I and my fellow members of that worthy establishment This Vicious Cabaret have been pegged at short notice for dire doings. I have little to go on as yet but there is talk old friends, of music hall, a mysterious tramp steamer and the filthy plotting of that harridan of horror, the ever smug (and delectably dangerous) Miss Brunner.

Boo, Miss Brunner!

Worry not, I’ve escaped from worse scrapes, and yet will too. More anon, but not till Tuesday. Where before things will be quiet here at the Slide.

Normal service will be resumed once doings dire, are done with.  

Workers Playtime

Before I blogged I still wrote regularly. Indeed and whilst it’s what I do for work then with it there are still millions of words sat on the computer. This is a piece from a while back that doesn’t so much go anywhere but was an exercise in getting-all-the-setting out of the way. It is entirely what it is and no more. A doodle. It’s cluttered, somewhat messy, but a bit of fun doing nothing otherwise.

Homes For All and here the outermost line of that great success and failure Keynes Progress crowded the entrance to the Necropolis Railway, making it grand. All along the lower side of Westminster Bridge Road the ugly tenement blocks squeezed through. In places over much older buildings where so few remained. There were others like the Necropolis, she could see the spire of Christ Church and knew that close by the gated grounds of Bethlem Royal Hospital pushed back the Keynes too, even if (as she had to remind herself) Bedlam was no more and the hospital as so many things no longer royal. Keynes Progress that ran in its broken teeth manner here to where it thickened close to London Bridge, Lambeth and the Elephant & Castle. Thence south, and ever cluttered to Herne Hill and Lewisham. A new city to abut the old, a new and clean environment with housing for millions but even then not millions enough. Now but forty years later rotten, wretched and horrible. Four decades to look older than the likes of the frontage of the Necropolis where as ever families stood in orderly lines to escort their lost to Brookwood Cemetery.

This had been intended to be a good address. Not as grand as those that ran along the more enduring freshness of the south bank, but a place for government and international trade here leaning against the whorish old aunt of Edgehill Station. And there was a name that remained despite the lack of a King. There was name that continued no matter that every sign and station post said Westminster Bridge Station. That grand dame of the railways that stretched from bridge to bridge and renamed for the one - though even the clippies on the busses gave tickets to Edgehill. The road stank of the railway. Something no one here noticed, a smell of smoking tin and hot ozone. The crackling of the so-modern power lines left the top storey of Keynes Progress empty no matter the crowding, for a family might do without space but it would never miss out on Workers Playtime, Harry Secombe Presents or Just A Minute. The wireless had not been without wire for years and she thought on that as did every time she passed along the road where at Number 100 Kenneth Horne House she knew spies read the papers and picked at news from Russia, Holland or Columbia.

No one looked at her. No one looked at anyone in London. She had once witnessed the scene close by in Edgehill where a lad from the west country had been stopped by the station’s Constabulary for the suspicious behaviour of nodding to, and even greeting, everyone he passed by. It was a relatively recent change she thought, certainly she could remember people passing the time of day back no longer ago than the 1940s. Admittedly then one could hardly have walked through Edgehill without being robbed naked. Certainly not with one’s luggage, and then the most common call had been from the flocks of ladybirds with their mock dandy clothes and love by the minute. You never saw that now. Crime had no colour. Thieves were just thieves. The cly-fakers still had pockets to pick but the dragsmen had no carriages and if the maltoolers might still steal in a crowded bus they would never recognise the name. Some remained of course where those that had once been ladybirds worked for a Hector or changed a little so that a mug-hunter was now just a mugger. She could not remember what people had called a murderer. She supposed it did not matter since neither would anyone else outside of her family, and they be unlikely to wonder at just another murder (and would call it murder even if they had). In that they would have been wrong. For she did not commit murder, she would never do anything so dry, so dull sounding. No, she had assassinated. The difference between what she had done and some accidental battering she thought to be rather profound. And even if anyone had looked at her what would they see? Another woman in the boiler suits most here, and more southwards, wore, because they were effectively free. A woman in heavy boots repaired and resurrected year after difficult year. Like so many others.

            Yet in the Necropolis they wore suits, they wore skirts and if they wore boots then those polished with Cherry Blossom or Wrens, or at need tallow or dripping. You could see the latter as dogs would lick them and have to be kicked away, ruining the shine. But not here. She tugged off her baggy cap. A touch of individuality only in that it was the same touch as half the people also passing by affected. Cricket style, slightly peaked and hers marked with the Admiral logo similarly stylish in that it was preferred by so many. She stopped to pay her respects and there too she was not alone in company with anyone else over the age of twenty-one. Just for a moment to see the family of the dead, a young woman weeping and an older man stiff in his Camphor-smelling red tunic. Another old soldier, who in his case wore ribbons from Ireland and Cumberland. She almost regretted what she had done then. She had not known the family had a hero in their ranks. And that was truly how she felt about those that had fought. Especially in that nasty little conflict when it had been nastier still along the borders and the Lakes. Where King Rupert, deposed, had sought and won the support of a Scotland that had long forgotten the history of Covenant and Popery and instead had welcomed all the oil that their North Sea now provided. Good for Scotland, not much either way for the now octogenarian Rupert who was said to live in paranoid fear of English assassins from the Socialist Intelligence Service or ever since Princes Gate and the Persian Embassy siege a commando raid from the now famous Socialist Air Service.

She laughed. In the years since England’s rather wet revolution it was as if they had to use the S word on everything just to remind themselves, all things to the contrary, that was what they were. Apart from all the personal ownership, and the way people were allowed to keep the titles, and the grants for new businesses – and frankly everything else. The English had just not been very good at revolution. The excesses of the eternal Stuart line might have gone on still she thought, had the absolute power of the monarchy not been challenged by chaps in shorts smoking pipes. Russia had put down its own uprising with cavalry and machine guns. Britain had ousted its King and then had to look around for what to do next almost over the course of an afternoon. It had taken longer for the King’s train to reach Scotland than it had for the revolution to be complete. But then England was such a little country compared to the gaudy desperation of the Dutch and the bloody strife of Russia it had probably seemed a bit impolite to make too much of a fuss. One or two of the mourners noticed her smile, hurriedly she moved on.

Poor Sebastian (she recalled) had been left on the steps of Buckingham House ready to defend Queen Greta from a mob that had never arrived. Instead two days later he had been asked to show the Members of the new Parliament, sent to deal with such matters, to where the glamorous old Swede had sat and taken tea with them and where she had agreed whole-heartedly with the exile of her despised husband. And so Sebastian had stood there with his old service revolver in hand whilst she agreed that the sprawling palace was owned by the state. Had agreed a stipendiary rent for her apartments and there she remained to this very day. She was indeed rather happy to see most of the old parklands opened up as whilst old as she was it had been terribly dull for her for so many years being the only one that had cared to feed the ducks. People still referred to her as the Queen, just as they called Rupert the King. Just in the manner as if not actually of here.  The Scots had got Rupert and shortly thereafter, all that oil. The English got to keep Queen Greta and in many ways seemed to have gotten the best out the whole thing.

If there had been issue there might even have been a restoration by now but as there was not then England it seemed would muddle through. After nearly four hundred years of increasingly mad, bad and frankly embarrassing Stuart rule people were still relieved, as if a slightly dotty Aunt still given to wanting to know what had happened to slavery had finally passed away. At least Rupert had married outside the line. Ever favouring the arts and the theatre he had become entranced with Greta, a starlet and at the time one of most desired of international film actresses. Once it would have been unthinkable for the Royal heir to marry a commoner, but since his father the-then King Charles VI had thought himself to bbe the Under Gardener it had been something of a relief to the Court to think they might make the end of the century without a monarch with one eye and three testicles. So England was socialist, which upset Rome no end. But which had on balance pleased the god fearing Columbians who whilst god fearing because it was part of the Covenant actually just did not want others to be Catholic. England was no longer a long distance ally of jumbled South America - and that was good enough for Uncle Nate.

Passing a tobacconist she nearly bowled over a greying man who she caught and steadied before apologising for the rudeness. She released him adding that her thoughts had been elsewhere.

‘Excuse me but have we met?’

She thought not, adding ‘I’m sure I would have remembered.’

He smiled at the pretty compliment but persisted, ‘Perhaps it was some time ago? School maybe? Or did you work at Comyn Ching & Co at some point.’

            ‘I’m afraid not.’

            It was a fine day if close and the old man too seemed to remember a time when people might pass the time of day. If he did then he was probably armed as many old people were, a sap perhaps if not with a cane many might not especially need to get about. He blew out his cheeks, ‘Surely you went to school? Milburne perhaps?’

            ‘Again and I’m afraid not. Now if you’ll excuse me?’

            But he was not to be so easily put off, falling in step as she made to walk away. He pondered, ‘My dear lady I cannot possibly be mistaken, perhaps you were once involved with the Army in some capacity?’ he noticed something, nodding. “Indeed yes, I think I have it. You were one of those politicals? Up north – Cumberland? Or if not, then something to do with the political, there was a commissar?’

            ‘Perhaps.’

            ‘I was only a young Lieutenant of course, in the Corps of Signals. A frightful time,’ he shook his head. A sad figure now and noticing her expression made a noise in his throat as if to distract her. ‘I am looking for my son,’ he said to change the subject. He walked with her still until coming to where a stream of people wound down one of the many sets of steps to Edgehill Station she joined them, ducked and merged with the shoal of boiler suits, and was gone. 

The 39 Steps

I had cause to be browsing The Independent’s website today and it highlighted an article from last year, where Sameul Muston produced a piece on the 10 Best Spy Novels. At number one I found John Buchan’s The 39 Steps. I confess I came to Buchan through the Hitchcock film but as regular readers here have doubtless picked up I’m rather a sucker for the 1930s, and no less for a little daring-do against agents of a foreign power. It was also a coincidence (and they’re lovely when they happen) because after a fulsome morning’s work I was browsing before turning to working up more notes for a game I’m running soon.

                          I love games, proper role-playing games. I’ve not used a commercial set for more than twenty years and the group I play with I’ve played with in some cases for thirty years now. We meet irregularly, not least because Tolly Maw is a long bloody way from anywhere – but also because my Q works half the weekend so it’s a rare and wonderful thing when we can play at all. Back in ’95 I started a game by the name of The Great And Secret Show (no real relation to the Clive Barker novel, I’ve just always liked the name). Since we don’t meet up for an evening we meet up for weekends – at least, and commonly two or so times a years over a Bank holiday. Often it’s been GASS, starting Friday and then nigh constant till late Sunday. It started in 1936 and over the last eleven sessions they’ve crossed the decades, mostly scuttling away from anything a bit frightening, crossed the world in pulp style, taking over countries and defeated old gods (well one, but it was particularly frightful fellow), ventured as far afield as Sommer Isle and even Mars. Every person they’ve met, every place they’ve been, has been from a novel or a film, from myth or history however remote or unnoticed. It’s drawn on Kim Newman, Michael Moorcock, and Christopher Fowler in style and everything for everything else – and it’s now the end of the century, and it’s the end of the world; and it’s the end of the game.

                          No really.

                          Whilst each session has been in normal terms three, four or more there was ever a finite limit. The century is that limit. Games tend to dribble out. I hate that. I have strong views on lot of things to do with games. I’ve been playing ‘em for decades and apart from a few weeks with the DHSS everything worky I’ve done has been in some way game-related. I’ve become tired mostly of being told what to do as a player. That sounds petulant and perhaps it is, but if the game is a story that tells people where to go, what to do, and how to do it – then roll a few dice, then there’s not much point in having player’s at all. It seems odd in games that characters mostly oppose, or destroy, and of course do what they’re told. Not so in GASS. They did as they wished and now all they did or did not do has come together with all worlds one, with night upon them, and curiously the last gasp of humanity living it up in tiny jazz clubs. One character having decreed that all he wants is for his children to be safe and outlive him begins the session with just that (and rather worried that’s all he’ll do). The characters have throughout been jolly nice chaps. They’ve pretty much killed no one – which is not the thing in rpg games, but after all – that would be murder!

                          And it’s a coincidence because that very first session in 1995 was the ’39 Steps’, with much the story intact although given the sort of slants and changes you’d expect. So it pleased me greatly to stumble across the article on this very day. When on their intent I’ve continued in an hour here, and hour there, to fill in and plot and wait ultimately to see what particular rabbit they pull out of the hat.

                          Because like a good novel I wait to be surprised!

                          Because that’s why you have players, else just write a novel. I do that too, so I know the differences.

                          And it’s the last session in a few weeks. That will be it for GASS. No more, the characters then if they see it out at all retired. The story closed, the shrouds pulled down and the door put on the latch – if not perhaps the lock. And it will be a little bit sad. But then there’ll be beers and doubtless a visit to a very nice Tai I’ve found locally.

                          For once no dribbling out, for once complete, for good or ill, and by their own hand.

                          Starting all those years ago, with the 39 Steps.    

Aunt Minerva - Don't Look Now

He hated himself even as he did it. A little drunk, the evening light, the grass was wet and the ground about the pond muddy with new grass and old weed. Every time it rained the pond seeped on the side by the garage his father had built. His father had been, like so many of his generation, idly competent with his hands. A salesman for Sutton Seeds his father had still built the garage with bricks unloaded in many journeys from the boot of the old Austin Dorset and mortar mixed with his own father’s spade. Somewhere in the tangles of the garden’s rear between the rusted mower and the wartime barbwire of the field was that spade. That spade and a hundred other tools handed down and added to until Phil (that could wire a plug but couldn’t hang a door) had needed the garage and in a fit, naked, had thrown them into the nettles and the spreading rosemary.

Phil missed his father. His father that had smoked surreptitious cigars in the garage, who had worked on two-stroke engines or tinkered with rusted clocks away from the house, and whose worn collection of Tit Bits Phil had found when the old man had died and the house had passed to him. He had come home, never feeling that in the bedsits of Earl’s Court nor later his little flat behind Liverpool Street. But home was small, and home had been empty, and the village hadn’t had the complications of London. And it certainly hadn’t had the girls.

            Phil had been surprised to learn almost fifteen years ago that he was handsome. He had never been that in the village, not hereabouts, not to the local girls. Even Lizzie Standish that he had watched through school and hidden away with, he alone, in the little bathroom in his teens. The little bathroom his father had made from the box room, plumbing and tiling it himself. Phil had seen Lizzie Standish in the post office the very day he had come back. Lucky escape...

            In London Phil had enjoyed himself, especially with the foreign girls, the back packers and the travellers passing through. A month had been about his limit before he found himself even when happy, in love he thought once or twice, chatting up another and taking her back to his bedsit, and then his little flat, switching off whoever he had been seeing right up until he had seen them. After a month, and normally less, they had usually tired of him too. The film posters and the hunting up of rare showings. The strange friends, or acquaintances at least. The pubs and the banter, the exchanging of stills, even reels, under the table like they were totting drugs rather than celluloid. There would always come a point when the girl would ask (or worse, laugh) at his obsessions. Scoff at how much he might spend on a rare print of The Valley Of Gwangi, or a signed photograph of Ingrid Pitt. Phil never hid it. Phil was proud of it. And Phil had heard of other prints, special prints. In the pubs and the places where they met, in a fanzine once or twice, talk, conspiratorial rumours of special films. Of Aunt Minerva.

            In the garage built by his father Phil kept Julie Christie.

            Not Julie Christie, but Laura Baxter. Julie Christie the actress was in London still to his insider knowledge. Laura Baxter had lost her son and her daughter to drowning. In his garage Laura Baxter came grieving from the hospital.

            The garage had two padlocks and a very good, very noisy alarm. Phil promised himself this would be the last time.  Inside and the garage was a perfect replica. The lamp was actually that in the film. He changed now, hopping with one foot caught in his trouser leg. He fished in the pockets for a small mirror to check his appearance. He looked close enough with the hair and the moustache, a little like Donald Sutherland, enough to be John Baxter. Enough he knew for Laura in the moment not to notice.

            In a recess, in the fourth wall, was the projector. Already threaded that little left of the film. Phil, now John, made sure that everything was it should be. That what was here was what was there. He had the eye for it, the eye of a collector. He washed his hands, leaving them wet. Wet was important; Phil knew his films.

            Worried, nervous, guilty, but horny Phil reached for the projector. He paused momentarily but the thought of his wife, of Laura, of Julie Christie was enough to outweigh any shame he felt. The film was rare. It wasn’t a part of the original production, it was that which had been cut out, the bits cut so that the print could intersperse in the original the couple readying themselves for dinner. That arty, cut, cut, cut – and this was the pieces filmed and unseen, between the pieces edited it and shown.

            Phil closed his eyes and turned on the projector.  He was going to fuck Laura Baxter, Julie Christie, again. He would open his eyes (he knew just the moment) just as she stepped free from the screen. And when it was over she would be gone. Until the next time, and there would be a next time. It was no different he thought than his father in this garage with his Tit Bits. Technology moved on. Phil could not replace a tile on the roof but he had his own grieving Julie Christie. And she never scorned his love of film. She was his love of film.