People Are Strange

I don’t watch telly these days so I’ve only seen one episode of Beautiful People, but I bought the book the other day from Prowler and it’s hilarious! The author, Simon Doonan, dedicates most of it to reminiscing about the colourful and varied characters that surrounded him growing up in Reading.

There’s a lot of affectionate reference to his mother - a strong, stylish woman who not only looked after her immediate family but an assortment of other needy relatives and friends. There’s crazy aunties, a lobotomised grandma and a plethora of curious personalities encountered on a trip to Butlins.

It makes me feel like my own childhood was quite dull and boring, but thinking about it I’ve remembered a collection of rather more colourful or "diverse" characters that I came across along the way.

I think I’ve mentioned before the two women that lived together that my mum would firmly refer to as THE SISTERS, as clearly any exposure to homosexuality would cause your child to grow up to be one. Just a few doors up from them was a very glamorous woman who looked like she had stepped out of a 1950s fashion catalogue.

She was always flawless with perfect long dark hair, Betty Boop lipstick and seamed black stockings. Her pristine appearance led her to be treated with suspicion by her fellow women folk, who suspected her of having ideas above her station. She had two kids but I think she must have had them before she moved in because there was lots of harrumphing about it - “Hmm, you can’t imagine that one pregnant, can you? It would ruin the line of her frock. Do you think she bothered with the hair and lipstick when she was eight months gone?” I started to feel like I was the offspring of Cissy and Ada off the Les Dawson show.

Further along was a slightly pikey (white) family with two fat daughters. The mother took a job at a local takeaway and then gave birth to a third child who was quite clearly half Chinese. No one said a blind word about it as it was considered impolite to mention these things back in those days. I think the father was overheard to have expressed his concerns but, to his credit, he carried on regardless.

Darker happenings further along this cosy domestic setting at a house where a generally odd-ball family resided. The parents both suffered from mental illness and as their first son, Malcolm, got older, it became obvious that he too was as barmy as a fruit bat. All hope rested on the youngest son, Rupert, who seemed in full possession of his marbles. He became the talk of the street when he signed up to join the armed forces but, sadly, the day before he was due to leave decided to hang himself in his bedroom. My guess is he had joined up to escape the clutches of his insane family but in the end just couldn’t go through with it. I don’t know what happened to the rest of them.

Often, around the estate, you would see a man who was constantly walking. He had some kind of ailment so his head permanently lolled to one side and sometimes he dribbled. He would just walk and walk and walk, at all times of the day and night you would see him. He never said a single thing to anyone and was clearly perfectly harmless, but he would sure as hell creep me out if I encountered him at two in the morning.

I don’t look back on these people with any affection, but it does make me wonder what other David Lynch-ian characters were lurking behind the façade of the respectable suburban town I was living in. I think I had some eccentric relatives on my father’s side but I didn’t meet them as they were all off doing their own thing. I know he had an Aunty Charlotte who had a husband and two children she showed very little interest in. When the husband died and the children had grown, she took to wearing leathers and hanging round with a biker gang. It’s clearly where I get my unconventional streak from.

I would like to give a final special mention to my friend Kathy’s mum, Pauline Walker – a staunchly religious woman; a prolific breeder and member of the Union of Catholic Mothers. She stopped Kathy from "playing out" with me when we were teenagers as she said I was encouraging her to go shop lifting. In hindsight she was probably right, but really … where’s your sense of humour?!