Not The Best Policy

This year’s Christmas story is a tale of deception gone wrong, from the early nineteen-seventies.

“You idiots, you scoundrels, you rogues and vagabonds! Be sure thy sin will find thee out!”

Brendan’s impression was spot-on. It was as if Grimston Stewart was right there in the room with you spouting his pretentious, second-hand drivel. It was all there: the rhythms, the cadences, the clipped intonation, the rolled ‘r’, the arrogance.

“You riff-raff! You ne’er do wells! You scum of the earth!  ...”

Brendan could stretch and twist his face to look as silly and pompous as Grimston too, with all the quirks and mannerisms you didn’t notice until pointed out. You could imagine Grimston in his Noel Coward dressing gown, posturing like some vain intellectual exhibitionist: Oscar Wilde or Aubrey Beardsley, perhaps. The only thing missing was the long cigarette holder.

“I shall not dull my palm with felony. Honesty is the best policy.”

Grimston was a fake. He would have you believe his clever quips and jibes were his own invention, but we knew he got them from a dictionary of quotations hidden in his room. Nick, the other member of our shared house, had a theory he was really called Stuart Grimston but had changed it to Grimston Stewart to sound more impressive. I thought Grimston sounded like a dog’s name. At least it wasn’t hyphenated – not yet.

Whatever his name, we were making the most of his absence. Grimston had left for a winter holiday with wealthy friends, and the shared house was less censorious without him; and noisier. We could stay up late drinking and smoking, playing our guitars, singing vulgar songs, having beer-mat fights and shouting foul language at each other. We could leave the lights on, bottles all over the floor, bins overflowing, the toilet filthy, crumbs on the kitchen table and the sink full of dirty plates, like “the dunghill kind who delight in filth and foul incontinence.” House sharing works best when everyone is compatible, but Grimston, some kind of accountant, did not fit in, the wayward liberals we were. There is always one.

His absence was fortuitous because the scheme Nick had conceived would have sent him into a torrent of protest, with or without acknowledgement to the Bible, Shakespeare and other luminaries from his dictionary of quotations.

“We shall find ourselves dishonourable graves,” mimicked Brendan. 

“Hasn’t anyone thought of this before?” I wondered. “Three hundred quid each just for telling a few stories! It seems so easy.”

“It is,” Nick reassured us, “as long as we think it through properly and don’t say anything stupid ...”

“Les absents ont toujours tort.”

“... like that!”

It certainly seemed a fascinating idea. For Nick, it was a project – an intellectual exercise with a profitable conclusion. Brendan just liked the thought of the money.

Nick went through it again. We were to hide all our valuables in his lock-up garage, disarray the house to give the appearance of a break-in, go back home to our parents for Christmas, and on our return report the burglary to the police and make an ‘authentic’ insurance claim for the loss of our possessions. We congratulated ourselves on the ingenuity. It was so simple – the perfect crime.

We ransacked the house according to plan, broke open the cellar window, forced the locks on our room doors and decanted the contents of drawers and cupboards on to the floor. Late at night we discreetly packed our possessions into Nick’s car and transferred them to the seclusion of his garage: our guitars, my hi-fi, Nick’s bicycle and Brendan’s camera. No one saw us at all.

Back at the house, elated, phase one complete, a big bottle of Strongbow each, we rehearsed our interview with the police.

“Now tell me again,” said Brendan in his best Chief Inspector Barlow voice, “where did you say you were at the time of the break-in?”

“Er – staying with my parents,” I replied unconvincingly.

“I see. Do you have insurance?”

“Yes, thank goodness.”

“It’s an insurance fiddle isn’t it?”

“No, I was away visiting ...”

“Don’t lie to me you piece of filth.”

“Honest! It’s true. I really was ...”

Brendan switched into his Grimston Stewart voice.

“Honest implies a lie. Isn’t that right Chief Inspector Barlow?”

I only hoped the investigator assigned to our case lacked the analytical aggression of television’s Detective Chief Inspector Barlow.

Suddenly I realised we had overlooked one important point, the one critical mistake.

“How do we explain why our rooms have been burgled, but not Grimston’s?”

Nick and Brendan were taken aback. How could we have forgotten that? Either we had really to break into Grimston’s room and steal his stuff, or we had to invite him to join in the scheme. The first seemed a whole level of dishonesty higher than insurance fraud. The second was out of the question, Grimston would never participate.

We stood outside Grimston’s door.

“I am no petty villain,” preached his voice. “You must reinstate the status quo and make good the damage, or I shall report you to Her Majesty’s Constabulary.”

“Shut up Brendan,” I said. “It’s not funny.”

I kicked at Grimston’s door in disgust and turned away, only to turn back on Nick’s gasp. It had not been locked. The door had swung open.

“That’s not like him,” said Brendan, for once using his own voice.

Nick disappeared into the room and quickly identified the reason for the lax security. Grimston had taken most of his things with him. Typical! He trusted no one. All we had to do was tip the remaining contents of his drawers and cupboards on to the floor to give the appearance of a search. There was nothing anyone would have wanted to pinch, but Grimston would believe we really had been burgled.

In one drawer we found the notorious dictionary of quotations. Nick picked it up.

“I think this will have to be stolen,” he said triumphantly.

The plan was exceeding expectations. Not only would Grimston be speechless when he found out about the burglary, he would not be able to look up anything to say about it either.

We could now put phase two into action. The three of us went home for Christmas to secure Barlow-proof alibis. Grimston, returning from holiday, was first back, and went to the phone box to report the crime to “Her Majesty’s Constabulary”. When I got back a bored, solitary policeman was wandering around. I passed off my anxiety as distress. We had to answer one or two simple questions, none of them unexpected. Next day a fingerprint man visited and went through the motions of dusting a powdery mess of graphite on doors, windows, mirrors and drawer handles, but left without finding anything sufficiently well-defined for evidence. We submitted our insurance claim. Grimston even claimed for the loss of his silly dictionary. Well, he had been the one to insist we took out insurance in the first place.

The total value was impressive. The insurance company wanted to see receipts for the most expensive things. We each had a stereo and records, and I had a tape-deck as well. Guitars, fan heaters, cameras, slide projectors, electric toasters, books, clothing, the house television set and Nick’s bicycle brought the total claim to nine hundred and thirteen pounds, over three hundred each after Grimston’s miniscule claim.

And there was a bonus. Within a week Grimston had left. The area was “a den of iniquity unfit for habitation by righteous souls”. There would be no one to ask awkward questions as to how we had recovered our possessions when the time came to move them back.

Luckily, we did not retrieve them immediately. A few days later a detective constable visited the crime scene.

“It’s a good job you were insured,” he said. “There have been a lot of break-ins in this area recently. I have to say that unfortunately there is very little chance of recovering your possessions.”

Afterwards, we judged it safe to go for our things.

Nick had not been to the garage since the day of the ‘crime’. There wasn’t room for his car and in any case, he was worried someone might see inside and become suspicious. So we were already a little apprehensive when we drove round under cover of darkness. Nick turned off his lights and opened the door. It was difficult to see but I knew something was wrong. Nick felt it too.

Nick returned to the car and flashed the lights, flashed them again, and then put them on full beam. The garage was empty. A broken panel at the rear told us what had happened.

Brendan spoke first, in his own voice.

“The world’s full of bloody criminals. We can’t even claim on insurance ’cos we already have.”

I could see Nick’s thoughtful face in the headlights, and then it was he, not Brendan, who began to speak in quotations.

“Our worldly goods are gone away,” he declared. “We are wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities.”

Things were worse than I thought. In that awful moment I realised what had happened to that ridiculous dictionary of quotations.

Back In Time For Tea

Our Messy Kitchen, 1974

The BBC Back In Time series is having another outing, this time as Back In Time For Tea – that’s tea in the sense of evening meal from the days of breakfast, dinner and tea. If your evening meal was called dinner and your mid-day meal was lunch, you were either posh or a Southerner. The new series does take place in working class Bradford after all.

Episode 3, set in the nineteen-sixties, saw the Ellis children having to get their own tea: Fray Bentos Steak and Kidney Pie, Angel Delight and Mr. Kipling fruit cake.

Oh yes, steak and kidney pie in a tin! I remember it well! It’s what we ate in the shared house. Those steak and kidney pies were delicious – succulent pieces of steak and kidney in juicy gravy. The pudding version was good too with suet instead of puff pastry. You can still get them, although internet commentators tend to imply they might not be as good as they once were. Is anything?

For the first time, the arrival of ready meals in the late nineteen-sixties made it possible for single lads living in flats, bed-sits and house shares to eat well without the needless mental and physical exertion of planning, shopping and cooking. Deciphering a recipe, patronising butchers and grocers, and assembling a steak and kidney pie from scratch would have been well beyond the ingenuity of spoiled brats brought up by their mothers to expect everything done for them, but wielding a tin opener and turning on an oven was just about within their capabilities. This was especially true of the five social misfits, connected through schools and workplaces, who in 1970 moved into a strange back-to-front house off Monk Bridge Road, with its rear to the road and front to a narrow path beside Meanwood Beck.

My previous year in Leeds had been spent in Monday-to-Thursday lodgings where meals were provided. It was good home-cooking to keep hunger at bay but the snooty husband of the elderly couple I lodged with charged in guineas rather than pounds: five guineas a week, that’s five pounds five shillings, £5.25 in new money, equivalent to around £75 now in terms of price inflation, and £150 in terms of earnings inflation. Perhaps that sounds reasonable compared with housing costs today, but it was nearly all I earned as a trainee accountant. My contribution to the shared house rent was less than half as much.

At first we ate together, taking turns to serve unimaginatively greasy concoctions of sausage or fried eggs, with chips and baked beans. One lad’s weekly pièce de résistance was spaghetti Bolognese with so much liquid it would slop over the edge of your plate when anyone knocked the table – “as if we haven’t enough on our plates already,” someone said. The local fish and chip shop was a regular beneficiary of our largesse too.

But convenience foods were just beginning to appear and our diet quickly changed. Why go to all that inconvenience of peeling, boiling and mashing potatoes when you could get Cadbury’s Smash? It wasn’t too bad if you put plenty of butter in. Instant mashed potato with a Fray Bentos pie and a tin of peas or carrots really filled you up. Finish with strawberry or banana Angel Delight (a powder mixed with milk to make an instant mousse-like desert) and it was heaven. You were living like a king.

Probably butterscotch Angel Delight: I preferred banana or strawberry

Individuals came and went and the sharing arrangement moved to a new address off Brudenell Road in the Hyde Park area. Mostly, we now ate individually at different times. I still had an unhealthy reliance on the “Up-Steps Fish Shop”, but as there were as yet no Chinese or Indian takeaways, pizza or kebab shops nearby, fish and chips was the only bought in meal. For other days, Vesta dehydrated packet meals were now available: food for bachelors from Batchelors.

“Come on a Vesta Package Tour” read the advert, to India for beef curry (“not too hot”), Italy for beef risotto (“the real taste of the Continent”) or China for chow mein with crispy noodles (“You like, yes?” – would they dare say that now, or wish you “bon appétit” with the chicken supreme from France, or claim that the Spanish paella had “a touch of Olé”).

The noodles looked like translucent strips of plastic until tipped into hot oil upon which, spitting and sizzling, they crisped up like expanding polystyrene into gnarled and crunchy yellow whorls. Except that there always seemed to be one or two that didn’t work, and stayed hard and sticky enough to pull your fillings out. The curry looked like a packet of something you might collect from a crematorium until you added boiling water and it reconstituted itself into peculiarly light and watery chunks that were supposed to be beef. The risotto seemed best, especially when you fried the rice in butter (with extra Uncle Ben’s rice to bulk it up) and then added the meat and vegetable powder with a bottle of Newcastle Brown instead of water. The only time I’d had rice at home was as rice pudding, and other than spaghetti, it was my first experience of exotic food. It was mouthwatering if you overlooked all the monosodium glutamate, although you usually had to fire up the toaster before bed time, even when you had eaten a ‘serves two’ sized packet.

I never prepared anything from scratch. Vegetables, spaghetti hoops, even potatoes, came out of tins. Frozen foods such as fish fingers, beef burgers or the delicious boil-in-the-bag cod in butter sauce were all bought on the day as we had no fridge. Everything was heated by hob, grill or oven, as microwaves would not be common for another decade. I bought a ‘cooking for one’ cookbook which made out that everything was so simple, no one need end up dipping grilled fish fingers into a jar of tartar sauce, which was the only recipe I took from the book, although they were better with piccalilli. And much to the bewilderment of my family, I retain a weakness for tinned oranges with Carnation evaporated milk.

Nearly all of these convenience foods remain available, but as a vegetarian convert I wouldn’t eat them now. However, we did try banana Angel Delight with our tea the other night. Surprisingly, it was just as good as I remember.

Inclusion of the clips from the BBC Back In Time For Tea programme and the Alamy Vesta image are believed to be fair use. The stills are clipped from single frames and linked to the programme web site. The Alamy image is linked to its source. The Vesta image is also available at The Advertising Archives.

See also:

  Strange Brew (Back In Time For The Weekend 3)

Weekend in College (original post)

A shorter version of this piece was posted as a New Month Old Post on the 1st November 2022

You been tellin’ me you're a genius since you were seventeen,
In all the time I've known you, I still don't know what you mean,
The weekend in the college didn't turn out like you planned,
The things that pass for knowledge, I can't understand.

It was as if Steely Dan’s phenomenal ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ was aimed directly at me, cutting through the pretentiousness to expose the stupidity beneath. It was actually four months in college rather than a weekend, but it might just as well have been a couple of days for all the good it seemed to do, the anticipation of arrival smothered in a gloomy blanket of disillusion. I detested myself as much as Becker and Fagen derided the girl of their 1972 song. It was painful.

City of Leeds and Carnegie College (through rose-tinted glasses?)

After four mind-numbing years in accountancy, I had decided it was not the career for me and applied to train as a Secondary years (High School) science teacher at City of Leeds and Carnegie College. An easy interview led to the expected offer, in fact the second I’d had, the first having been while still at school. The iron railings along Church Wood Avenue brought a powerful sense of déjà vu, as if the last four years had never happened.

I have no doubt now that neither offer should have been made. At that time you could get in to train as a teacher with five G.C.E. ‘O’ (Ordinary) levels, which I had. As regards ‘A’ (Advanced) levels, the prospectus said “It is assumed that the [specialist] subject has been studied previously to the Advanced level of the G.C.E.”, which meant you did not actually need to have passed. That was me exactly.

‘A’ level pass grades used to run from A down to E. Below that was grade O for an ‘O’ level equivalent and F for an outright fail. I had D, O, O and F. What a doof! The D was in General Studies, a subject you took without formal study and which often didn’t count. The F was in maths. The O grades, also in effect fails, were in my specialist subjects, biology and chemistry. And although I did have the required ‘O’ levels, they were all poor grades. Ordinary level passes then ran from 1 down to 6, with grades 7 and below being fails. In biology and chemistry I had 5s. 

Now I don’t want to sound ungrateful, or miserly, or an academic snob. I am proud of my ‘O’ levels and there must be plenty of outstanding teachers and other successful people whose qualifications were no better than mine on leaving school. Swots do not make the most inspirational leaders. But really, it beggars belief that anyone could become a Secondary science teacher with nothing better than weak ‘O’ level passes in their specialist subjects. They must have been desperate to fill the places.

Of course, I was now regarded as a mature student, supposedly replete with a brimful of valuable life experiences, and had progressed part-way through professional accountancy exams.* The college interviewers even used flattery in saying that in talking with me they were surprised my exam results had not been better. Surely, they should have told me to go away and re-sit my ‘A’ levels and reapply. Anything less would be to risk inflicting my limited knowledge and ineffectual learning techniques upon other poor innocents.

I was awarded a grant of £501.80, today’s inflation-adjusted equivalent of around £5,500, and almost £10,000 in terms of income growth. No fees were payable – course costs were never mentioned then. No wonder they stopped it. A list of set books from Walker’s Bookshop in the Headingley Arndale Centre cost me £15.09½. I kept some of them for years, and still have the outstanding two volume ‘Plant and Animal Biology’ by Vines and Rees, which is too wonderful to let go.

The campus of Leeds and Carnegie College, now part of Leeds Beckett University, is one of the loveliest in Britain. It was built in 1911 in a hundred acres of parkland that once belonged to Kirkstall Abbey. Hares ran free in the woods and each spring brought an inspiring succession of leaf and flower. The magnificent main building (now known as the James Graham Building) dominated a sweeping rectangular lawn called the Acre, lined by solid halls of residence named after ancient Yorkshire worthies: Fairfax, Cavendish, Caedmon, Leighton, Priestley, Macauley and Bronte. Carnegie Hall, the Physical Education college, was to the rear of the main building, and there were several newer buildings (post-dating the aerial photograph) including another hall of residence (R. W. Rich Hall) and the Science Block where my course was based.

City of Leeds and Carnegie College from the air (around 1960) and in plan (around 1968)

The Principal, L. (Leo) Connell, M. Sc., Ph. D., urbanely greeted the new students below the splendid pipe organ in the Great Hall (sadly destroyed by fire in 1978) and then left us to our tutors. Mine was a Mr. Uncles who joked about being an uncle-like character, and the Head of Biology was a Dr. Calder, both of them near to retirement. The names of the other staff escape me now.

One of my difficulties was that as a day student, an outsider who had elected to remain off-campus in my seedy shared house, I was not a member of the friendly community in their cosy study bedrooms bordering the grassy Acre. Living out meant missing out, such as on the music groups and other societies I might have enjoyed. Being older than the others, I felt awkward entering the student lounge, where loud music drifted out through the door flaunting the easy friendships within. While the Carpenters sang that they were on top of the world, Steely Dan mocked that “college didn't turn out like you planned”, and Carly Simon told me “you’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you.”

I did make a few friends, but none lasting. There were troupes of stunning but unreachable Amazonian goddesses among the female physical education students, of whom I was not the only worshipper from afar. Remarks about being in need of some physical education ourselves were traded in whispers between the weedy male science students.

The course quickly became tedious. Chemistry classes were interminable. It was little different from school and I began to sink into the old malaise. In biology I remember one technician’s idea of humanely despatching live rats for dissection was to swing them by their tails to crack their necks on the edge of a bench. We spent one afternoon using rectangular measures called quadrats to sample the plant species growing in the Acre lawn. When it came to collating the group data, my accountant’s brain had added up the numbers almost before the others had got out the calculators. Among the other subjects was English. In one tutorial we began to read through a play, and it gradually dawned on me that some of the others were not fluent readers at all. It was astonishing. They were training to become teachers for goodness’ sake.

First year students were sent out on four weeks’ teaching practice during the first term, and I soon found myself in a Comprehensive School in what was then mainly a council estate on the outskirts of Leeds. The first two weeks were entirely observational, but during the second we got to plan and teach a few lessons ourselves.

It was a stroke of luck that my best lesson happened to be one my teaching practice tutor came to see. It was an introduction to the Bunsen burner. I stood silently in front of a chattering first-year class, slowly setting up the equipment as if not yet quite ready to start. I turned on the gas and struck a match, and by the time I had adjusted the air supply a couple of times, changing the flame from flickering yellow to roaring blue and back to yellow again, I had their rapt attention, all without saying a single word. Later they tried the Bunsens themselves, all happy and engaged in what they were doing. There were other successful lessons making oxygen and other gases. Do they still let schoolchildren do these things, or is it thought much too dangerous now?

Fortunately, no one saw my worst lesson, delivered to some kind of third-year rural studies class. For some forgotten reason it was about trees. This was long before anyone talked about aims and objectives and lesson plans, and the national curriculum was decades away. I think I had simply been asked to dream up a topic and teach it. I had no idea why and neither I nor the kids were particularly interested. Things gradually deteriorated into a near riot from which I was reprieved only by the end of lesson bell.

The school had little of the liveliness of the grammar school I had attended myself, and some of the staff made no secret of their dissatisfaction. “Here I am with a First Class Honours degree in English,” said one recently qualified teacher, “and I’m supposed to teach kids who have no interest in reading anything at all”.

One of the games teachers was interested only in his horse. “There’s always something wrong with it,” one of the others told me, “he’s always calling the vet, and yet he says he plans to race it.”

“It sounds like he might beat it,” I quipped.

One of the best teachers was just a little older than me, but had been teaching for several years and was already in charge of the biology department. He was an independent thinker, advertised by a thick beard, dark woolly pony tail, and shaggy ringlets that somehow conveyed the impression of dangling rams horns. Unusually for someone of his age, his thick-rimmed spectacles hung on a cord around his neck like granny glasses. He knew his subject thoroughly and could hold the children spellbound. Yet even he seemed to have reservations about his role. Soon afterwards he started a pottery with his wife, as I discovered many years later when I came across it by chance on holiday.

Another mature student, previously a joiner but now aged twenty-eight with a wife, house and family, said that the course was surpassing his expectations. That was not my experience. Doubts grew as we broke for Christmas and I returned temporarily to my old employer to earn a bit of money. I realised then, the uninspiring course, the mediocrity, the dismal school I’d seen, it was not what I wanted to do. Despite a satisfyingly good first term’s marks and teaching practice report, I told my tutor I wanted to leave and was sent to see Leo Connell in his study. Graciously, he made no attempt to dissuade me. So that was it, hopes and dreams dashed by another abandoned course of study. What was to become of me now?

I heard subsequently from one of the other students I was by no means the last to leave. From Friends Reunited I can see that some of my contemporaries went on to successful teaching careers, but many others never taught at all. During the year that my course would have finished, the press was rife with accounts of unemployment among new teachers. Successive governments had failed to match the number of training places to a decreasing birth rate, and local authority employers were finding themselves short of money. That year, around two thirds of newly qualified teachers were unable to find jobs. One poor girl in London had been guaranteed a teaching post with the Inner London Education Authority the previous year, but had stayed an extra year at college to complete her Bachelor of Education degree. Despite her improved qualifications she was now having to look for work outside teaching.** Perhaps it was fortunate I did leave.

It was thirty years before I visited Beckett Park again, to attend a conference. The passage of time gave rise to quite an unsettling experience. I was haunted by half-remembered faces and snatches of conversation from a particularly intense episode in the past: here is where I usually managed to find a parking space for my Mini; across there is where I resented Dr. Calder telling me I would have greater authority if I stood straighter and walked with shorter steps; that window, in Leighton Hall, is the study bedroom where a girl I seriously fancied took me one afternoon for nothing more than a cup of coffee and a long talk. 

Ghosts apart, everything looked much the same, although buildings that were new when I first went, as with so many other cheap nineteen-sixties structures, had been demolished and replaced. Most of the original Edwardian campus had survived of course, although internally the main building was unrecognisable, not least because the quadrangles had been roofed over. The original halls of residence were now mainly staff offices and teaching rooms, and most of the displaced students were bused in from off-campus. I suppose the more organised and enterprising ones walk or cycle to eke out their inadequate finance. There are no £10,000 p.a. free rides now. I only had to repay part of the second grant instalment. I was not penalised with a huge student debt for my mistake. 

Smoke gets in your eyes. You can convince yourself anything is right when you’re desperate enough. I realise now that college was a substitute for university, for which I lacked the entrance qualifications. I thought teacher training might be similar, but it wasn’t. It was a dreadful knock to the confidence, especially after having to face down a fair amount of criticism to go. “Short hours and no real responsibility,” was what one colleague thought of teachers. “There’ll soon be no need for them; computers will make them all redundant,” predicted another.

Luckily, I soon found work with another firm of accountants. What else was I to do? 


* The difficulty with professional accountancy examinations was that in order to progress at each stage you had to pass all subjects in one sitting. I had the self-destructive capacity to fail subjects I had previously passed, so even passing those previously failed left me stuck at the same hurdle. 

** See for example The Times 31st May, 1976, page 6 “Is the Government going to waste £10,000 on William Burns?” and The Times 15th June, 1976, page 4 “30,000 student teachers still seeking jobs”

The Exorcist

(the was reposted on 13th September 2019) 

When my son was about eight, he wanted to know what was the scariest film I had ever seen.

“Well,” I said, “there are quite a few, but one of them is so scary that even its name is too frightening to say.”

No eight year-old would let me off that easily, and when it became obvious he was not going to give up I said that I would only tell him when he was eighteen. For now, all I was prepared to say was that it began with an ‘e’. “The rest is too terrifying to think about,” I repeated.

“Excalibur” he said without hesitation, trying to guess.

“I don’t think there is such a ....”

“Yes there is,” he said, “what about The Executioner?”

“Even if it was I wouldn’t tell you,” I said after again having been corrected about the existence of such a film.

“Excrement,” he guessed. I really doubted that one, but not wanting to risk being found ignorant a third time I simply repeated what I’d said already.

This continued on and off for the next few weeks, with him trying out the names of various films, or anything he imagined might be the name of a film, beginning with ‘e’, and me continuing to repeat I was not going to tell him until he was eighteen.

“Ectoplasm?”

“I’m not saying.”

“The Epidermis?”

“I’m not saying.”

“Endoscopy?”

Wherever did he learn these words?

“The Exorcist,” he said one day, eyes bright in triumph.

“Look, I’ve already said, I’m not going to ...”

“Oh! For goodness’ sake,” my wife said, “just tell him and then we can put an end to this stupid game. Otherwise we’ll have all gone mad long before he’s eighteen, assuming we’ve not strangled you first.”

“It’s too frightening to think about,” I persisted lamely, “even the title.”

It must have been around April, 1974, that I first saw ‘The Exorcist’ at the ABC Cinema in Leeds, soon after its U.K. release. Masses wanted to see the most talked about film of the year, and Leeds audiences were swelled by swarms of Bradfordians whose local council had banned it.* Three of us from the rented house we shared, myself, Nick and Brendan, joined the queue that stretched along Vicar Lane, creeping slowly forwards. A clergyman and a couple of helpers walked up and down handing out leaflets, trying to persuade us that the film was the work of the devil. I saw no one leave the queue. Upon reaching the door we were told “Sorry there’s only one seat left, and it’s the last one”. Nick and Brendan pushed me forward and went off to the pub trying to hide their relief. I nervously went inside to see the film on my own.

I have never been so petrified in all my life. I sat in the dark clutching the arm rests, flesh creeping, my face twisted into a rictus grimace, involuntary tears streaming from my eyes. It is the quality of the sound as much as the images that makes cinema so powerful, and they had the volume right up, especially as the nauseating voice of the ancient demon Pazuzu rasped from the throat of Regan, the twelve year old girl possessed by his spirit.

Nick and Brendan saw it fairly soon afterwards, and a few weeks later we decided to see it again. The second time the cinema was three quarters empty. A few rows in front of us, on her own, was an old witch of a woman rustling a big bag of popcorn, cackling loudly at just about everything she saw and heard.

“Whoa! What a shot!” she shrieked as Regan’s vomit blasted Father Damien Karras, the exorcist, in the face, lodging behind his spectacles like a clump of green pus. “Bet you can’t go round again,” she squealed after Regan’s head had spun full circle, cracking and crunching the neck. And she just snorted hysterically when the demon told Karras how his mother spent her time in hell.

It put the film in an entirely different light. For the next few weeks our house grated to the sound of Exorcist impersonations. Loud rasping shouts of “Karras, Karras,” scraped like sandpaper from room to room as Brendan raucously yelled “your mother cooks socks in hell” all the way down the stairs from his attic bedroom. It is a good job the walls of our terraced house were thick enough to avoid disturbing the neighbours. It was very rare to hear any sound from them at all.

It truly was a shocking film, but it also has hilarious aspects some will always refuse to acknowledge. In Miami, Father Mark Karras, an Orthodox priest who had conducted exorcisms for real, sued the creators of the book and film, alleging they had based the story on him, having fictionalised his name, personality and professional life. He claimed that some characteristics of the film were so offensive he had been exposed to public humiliation, embarrassment, scorn and obloquy. William Peter Blatty, the book’s author, was forced to testify that he had never previously met nor heard of him.**

And then there were the town councillors and eccentric individuals who wanted the film banned, such as the outspoken Dr. Rhodes Boyson, a Conservative Member of Parliament with unruly mutton-chops and a pantomime Lancashire accent (all Lancashire accents are pantomime to Yorkshire ears), who had previously been a headmaster. Indeed, in a large number of towns, including Bradford, the film was banned, resulting in ‘Exorcist Bus Trips’ taking groups of people to neighbouring towns where it was showing. Later, the video version was not officially cleared for sale in the U.K. until 1999.

But my favourite proscriber has to be the Tunisian government who banned the film on the ground that it presented “unjustified” propaganda in favour of Christianity.*** I wonder what their idea of anti-Christian propaganda might be.

*                   *                  *

In the end I did hold out without revealing the film’s name until my son was eighteen, in spite of his repeated assertion “It’s The Exorcist, isn’t it?” and my refusal either to confirm or deny it.

“Only someone with an autistic spectrum disorder could be so obstinate,” my wife kept complaining. I know they secretly think I’ve got Asperger’s Syndrome, and I also know they must be wrong, because if I did have Asperger’s Syndrome, I would find it difficult to empathise with people, and I wouldn’t know what they were thinking, would I?

Shortly after conceding that my son had been right all along, the film was shown very late one night on television, and I videotaped it.

“Don’t you dare watch that while I’m in the house,” my wife said. I doubted I dared watch it while she wasn’t. Eventually, one morning when alone, I found the courage to put it on. I could only bear it for ten minutes before I had to turn it off due to boredom.


* It was rather inconsistent of the two city councils because two years earlier we had to go to the Bradford Odeon to see ‘A Clockwork Orange’ which had been banned in Leeds. 

** The Times 30th May 1974 page 9. Father Mark Athanasios Constantine Karras later became the Archbishop of Byzantium.

*** The Times 11th March 1974 page 2 and 25th February 1975 page 6.

Reproduction of The Exorcist poster is believed to constitute fair use.