Remembering Preston…

There’s no pattern to what I write about. You’ve probably guessed this by now. Ultimately everything is about me, things large and small that have, at some point, made an impact on me - so much so that I want to pass comment on them.

Linda Bellingham died today. I don’t know why I feel compelled to write this down but I do. I wasn’t a huge fan, didn’t follow her career, but she was always there somewhere in my mind and she definitely made me smile.

The first time she came to my notice was at the Odeon in Oxford one rainy Tuesday afternoon back in 1976. I was there to watch Confessions of a Driving Instructor, a soft porn carry-on-type romp of no great consequence. Linda was playing Mary Truscott apparently although I don’t remember much about her role, in fact I hardly remember anything about the film, but at some point she must have made an impression. I learnt afterwards that she used to live just up the road from me, Aylesbury way, so she was a local girl; I may even have passed her on the street – who knows?

Six very eventful years later I saw her again, but this time she was crumbling Oxo on the television - well not literally obviously. In 1983 I was 26 and Linda was 35, not much of an age difference at all, but she seemed to be made up to look older and her bald headed husband was positively ancient. I remember watching her unwrapping and crumbling that dark brown cube into her hotpot and thinking in a Robin Asquith type of way: ‘Cor, she’s a bit of alright.’ and then immediately regretting it. Back then the term MILF hadn’t been invented, but that’s what I saw as she juggled her Oxos.

Watching those ads through my soft focus eyes, Linda seemed to be everybody’s mum, all of my mates mums that I’d known at school only that little bit sexier and naughtier. She made me feel uncomfortable, this older woman with a young family, smiling knowingly as she savoured the aroma of the beef extract. She was the sort of woman you really fancied, but didn’t, and shouldn’t, but did, and should, and you didn’t even know why you did, or didn’t, or should, or shouldn’t, but you would.

I knew that feeling well. It was all very confusing and complicated.

If I’d been the nineteen year old youth I was back at the Odeon I could have understood it. But I wasn’t. I was a married man with children of my own and my wife at the time was around the same age as Linda. But there was something about Linda Bellingham, the way she looked, that made me feel like a fantasising teenager at a time when I was feeling very old - much, much older than my years.

Well I did warn you that it’s all about me - all very complicated and confusing, the parallels, but Linda played a part in all that in some strange way.  

Thanks Linda.

Hector’s house…

Looking back it seems that I spent my childhood worrying about things in a time when there was far less to worry about than for hundreds of years previously or since. No wars, no plagues, no workhouse; just times tables, not being good at football, other boys, the vague threat of nuclear holocaust, and home.

I wasn’t alone. There was a lot of worrying in my house. It seems in retrospect that there was a grey miasma hanging over us, maybe that’s what caused the constant arguments. It couldn’t have been the booze because neither of my parents drank. The pressures must have been bad though. I grew up believing that all parents took prescribed Librium and Valium, and it wasn’t until I discovered Lou Reed and learnt what these drugs were for that I realised that there must be some parents that didn’t.

To help me through whatever it was I was trying to get through I didn’t take calming tablets. Instead I took comfort from television. It was always on and back then there was Children’s Hour at five o’clock sharpish which I never, ever missed.

It’s Friday. It’s Five o’clock. So it must be Crackerjack!

My Children’s Hour habit stuck with me for years - way into my twenties. It was almost as though I was reluctant to let go of this peaceful part of my childhood and who knows, perhaps I was. I think that in some ways the boy in me didn’t want to go give up in a Peter Pan kind of way, although God knows what it was I trying to hang on to.

Along with my not-so-inner-child, that undefined worry stuck with me for years as well. Ill-formed, nagging, constantly at the back of my mind, through university into work and on into an unexpected married life. Television remained with me too, and I continued to watch children’s TV, pretending to watch it for the three young girl children that surrounded me, but really watching it for myself and comfort.

My anxiety was at its height in the autumn; for some reason the dark damp evenings making me worry even more. Was I trapped? Did anyone really care? Where was I going? Was I wasting my life? What should I do?

It was only when the evening came with pre-news Magic Roundabout, or Crystal Tipps & Allister, Ivor the Engine, Nogin the Nog, and my favourite The Herbs, that I could lose myself in childish absorption, my worries dumbed-down by the silliness of the adventures of Sir Basil, Lady Rosemary, Constable Knapweed, Bayleaf the Gardener, Mr and Mrs Onion, The Chives (the Onions' children) and that clumsy Tarragon the Dragon. 

We’d sit there, the four of us, in the dim light of the flickering television as Hector the Dog, Madame Zsazsa the Cat, and Kiki the Frog acted out tales that had no real story, not having to think about anything but the glove puppets in their beautiful house and garden. It was all very comforting for ten minutes or so and then the six o’clock news would come on and my worry would start up once more.

It’s years ago, but still I have no real idea what I was worrying about, why I worried, where I was trying to run to, or why I wanted to run away but never did.

I’m older now, and most of the worries that seemed so sharp when I was a child and a young man have long since disappeared. Things aren’t so pressing, winning not so important – maybe I have nothing left to prove. But sometimes when the autumn evenings come I feel a twinge of that old underlying worry and wish Dougal, or Noggin, even Roobard and Custard were still around to distract me into safety.

Yes, sometimes I’m still a silly old Hector.