Recalling the incident of Mrs Flack and her terrifying hound the other day, I mentioned that I was kept occupied and entertained not by children’s television but by a comic. That set me thinking about the comics I read as a tot. At one time or another I was a devotee of The Beano, The Dandy, Wham!, The Topper, and Whizzer And Chips. I remember certain characters – Tupper of the Track, Billy Whizz, General Jumbo, and Grimly Fiendish, who bore a startling resemblance to the contemporary television person Dara O’Briain. They were all regulars, with their own strips, but for some reason burnt into my brain is another character who as I recall only ever appeared in a single story. This was an evil German secret agent called Weems, and I remember him simply because his name was Weems. It was the word, the sound, that caught my attention. And I have another fragmentary memory, of an episode in a story, which held me spellbound, but in this case I am not sure why.

The story itself I have forgotten. It was a western, and I was not a great fan of westerns. Sure enough, my brother and I played Cowboys and Indians in the Newty Field, but when immersed in my comics I had more compelling claims on my attention – evil German secret agents, for example. But there was this one episode in the story which I have never forgotten. A cowboy had somehow managed to get himself lost and abandoned in the desert. He was at the end of his tether and had collapsed in the dust. Above him, vultures wheeled in the sky. The text made plain to my infant mind that, when eventually the stricken cowboy perished of hunger and thirst and exposure, the vultures would swoop down upon his corpse and gobble him up. At least, that is what the text intended to make plain. But I somehow misunderstood it. I thought the vultures would swoop if he closed his eyes. Not if he fell asleep, and thus looked as if he were dead. No, the vultures were circling, waiting for him to shut his eyes for an instant, at which point they would swoop, and tear him to pieces with their savage beaks and talons.

Not surprisingly, my reading of the situation seemed the most terrifying predicament one could fall into. I practised lying in bed keeping my eyes open for as long as possible, desperately trying not to blink, to prepare myself for the inevitable time when I would be uprooted from a suburban council estate and tossed, alone and abandoned, into the desert. I kept an eye out for any vultures which might appear, looming with malignant menace, in the Essex sky. As a good Roman Catholic, I added a plea to be kept safe from vultures to my bedtime prayers.

What strikes me, recalling this in the cold light of adulthood, is the astonishing lack of basic common sense. No wonder my mother used to warn me, in her thick Flemish accent, that “one of dese days you will go out widout your head”. That head now contained the unshakeable conviction that vultures filled the sky and were simply waiting for a person below to shut their eyes. You did not need to be sprawled exhausted in the desert dust. You might be scampering along on your way to the Newty Field, for example, and blink, and if a vulture were in the vicinity, it would swoop down upon you and rip you to shreds. I lived in a state of terror.

Here is what I do not remember:

What became of the cowboy in the comic strip? Did he somehow survive, or was he pecked to pieces? It may be that I was so unhinged by the thought of malevolent circling vultures that I stopped reading, and there and then began practising keeping my eyes open.

When did it occur to me that I had never seen a vulture in the Essex sky? Or could I be sure I had not? I was, after all, myopic from an early age – possibly because I strained my eyes by attempting not to blink for protracted periods. All those birds up in the sky looked like vaguely similar blurs to me. I did know that a vulture was bigger than, say, a sparrow, but that was about as far as my ornithological knowledge went.

How long did I live in fear of vultures? There must have come a point where I felt my prayers had been answered, that I had been kept safe, and, most cogently, not only had I not been attacked by vultures but I had never seen or heard of such an attack happening to anybody else. The day must have come, I presume, when I was able to go about my tiny business outdoors without giving vultures a thought. If only I had kept a diary at the time, I could pin down the date, for it was surely one of the signal moments of my childhood, that day when I peered up at the sky, a blue or grey blur, and consciously closed my eyes, without a care in the world.

Long, long ago, so long ago that the Malice Aforethought Press was not even a twinkle in my eye, I wrote a poem entitled My Plankton Theory. Here it is:

All my life I’d waited
To announce my plankton theory
The public laughed
Top scientists jeered
When they heard my plankton theory

When I was a small boy
I swam in ponds and lakes
Then I grew up
Got diving gear
And I worked out my plankton theory

Now I’m about to die
I won’t go skindiving again
It’s in my head
On my deathbed
But I never, ever tested my plankton theory

As I remembered, there was another version of this in which I had a bauxite theory rather than a plankton theory. That can’t be right, because the middle verse would make no sense. The flaw in my recollection was confirmed when I came upon a big fat book of poems in the same paper-midden as I found the old Malice Aforethought Press mail order catalogue. It turned out I was confusing My Plankton Theory with a wholly separate piece, a love song entitled 40 Years Of Hell In A Bauxite Mine. I shall draw a veil over that one.

The point is that this book is crammed with over one hundred poems, written I would guess between 1980 and 1986, and they are almost uniformly dreadful. I can just about tippy-tap out the words of My Plankton Theory without running screaming into the hills to throw myself into a tarn, but only just. I find myself thanking the Lord and his angels and the hideous bat god Fatso and many another deity that Het Internet as we know it did not then exist, for there would have been a very real risk that I would have posted my verses for the world to read instead of scribbling them in a private notebook. Youth of today, be warned! Think before you commit your burblings to the interweb!

It is not as if I can excuse the drivel as the product of teenage angst, as I was no longer a teenager. I do not understand, looking back, why I was writing verse instead of prose. But verse it was, page after page of it. It is true that I had a very short-lived career as a performance poet, in those heady post-punk days when performance poets were all the rage. When I say short-lived, I ought to be clear and explain that I did one gig. This was in Norwich, in 1982, where I supported the amusing band Serious Drinking. (The amusing thing about them was that they pretended to be oiky proles but were of course university graduates, and at least two of them were in receipt of healthy trust funds. I suspect genuine oiky proles spotted the imposture without too much difficulty.) My approach at the gig was that, after shouting – yes, shouting – each poem (examples, Snackbar Hooligan and Ten Days In a Shed), I scrunched up the sheet of paper on which it was hand-scribbled and threw it into the audience. I think I was generally well-received, and I am not entirely sure why this remained my one and only appearance before I resurfaced on a stage, twenty years later, shortly before the dawn of the Hooting Yard you know and adore. I do recall feeling a tingle of pleasure when the Norwich gig was announced by John Peel on his radio show. I was billed as “Frank Key The Poet”.

Perhaps, in spite of the lack of actual performances, it was the thoroughly wrong-headed idea of myself as “The Poet” that kept me beavering away at verses for the next few years. I moved away from Norwich and was no longer in contact with any kind of local music scene where I might have been prevailed upon to spout my stuff to crowds of adoring fans. The big fat hardback notebook was, then, quite consciously, just for me. I am pleased to be able to say that I never badgered family and friends with it. Few experiences are as discomfiting as being trapped in a room with someone who says “Let me read you a few of my latest poems”, and I had been at the listening end of that particular horror often enough never to inflict it upon anyone else. But it does make me wonder why on earth I was writing all this stuff, and that it was all verse and no prose.

As for My Plankton Theory itself, the roots of this towering work lie in the late 1970s, when I recall watching a television programme – probably Horizon – in which it was confidently asserted that “krill is the food of the future”. Well, almost forty years on, here we are in the future, and I am not eating krill. At least, I don’t think I am. Maybe I ought to take a closer interest in packaging, and lists of ingredients, and modern food production processes. It may be that I am eating a lot more krill than I suspect, shredded or pulped and somehow injected into my breakfast cereals and snack items and smokers’ poptarts and so forth. But I envisaged a more explicit krill-centred diet, chains of fast food restaurants called Krill R Us or Kentucky Fried Krill, krill-based delicacies for the gourmet, or even that staple of science fiction imaginings, the krill-pill, which I would obtain from a Krill-O-Mat before zooming off on my jetpack. Alas, the future has not turned out quite as forecast. Thereagain, when I was a little boy I swam in municipal swimming pools rather than in ponds and lakes, I have never been skindiving, and I never, ever really had a plankton theory.

Further to yesterday’s potted history of the Malice Aforethought Press, I rummaged in a paper-midden and found a dog-eared copy of our 1988 mail order catalogue. I thought it might be of historical interest to reproduce some of the contents, in spite of the sinking feeling I had as I read my blurbs and shuddered at the, er, gaudiness of my prose.

All of these pamphlets are of course out of print, though most of the texts were collected in the 1989 paperback Twitching And Shattered. That, too, is out of print, but copies occasionally crop up on eBay or in secondhand bookshops or for auction here at Hooting Yard.

Preface
The Malice Aforethought Press was established in 1986 for the express purpose of scraping vegetable matter, rinds, and caked grime from the interior walls of a large iron bran-tub. However, this dreadful scheme met only with ignominy and ruin. Fleeing to a sanatorium in Greenland, the Malice Aforethought Press held a number of fruitless meetings with aviators, bonnibels, conspirators, dolts, ecclesiastics, fanatics, gaberlunzies, hacks, idiots, joskins, kakas, lepers, mahouts, notaries, obfuscators, polatouches, quaestors, revengers, succubae, tziganes, uhlans, vipers, wags, xemas, yahoos, and zealots. Halfway through this series of conferences, the sanatorium was uprooted from the sod and pitchforked into the demented ocean by an inexplicable force. Things looked grim. Saved from drowning by the intervention of a crumpled urchin, the Malice Aforethought Press returned to England, determined to enwrap the bran-tub in massive, fibrous blankets. Thousands upon thousands of eager volunteers had to be turned away, ejected into hailstorms through the rotting wooden portal which fronts our monstrous office. As a sop to these thousands, the Malice Aforethought Press has arranged to publish a selection of documents which lay bare the true history of the rusted cooking-pots stacked higgledy-piggledy in the corridors of a smashed-up building painted crimson…

Hoots Of Destiny
Three graphic stories. Many pictures, a few words.

1. Fun with gravel
2. L’Histoire du paving slabs
3. Why do potatoes exist?

Why indeed? An unclassifiable work of shining lucidity and brazen incorrigibility. The leitmotifs of this ridiculous publication, the keys to its charm, are many and various. One could perhaps single out an eyebrow, a hake, an inspirational choir funnel. Each copy is produced by our Frank on an individual basis; Hoots Of Destiny is part hand-drawn, part hand-written, and hand-coloured throughout. Each copy is dated, numbered, signed, and dedicated. So there. The perfect gift for bailiffs, Jesuit fathers, or menacing figures draped in grisly shifts.

Forty Visits To The Worm Farm
A hectic tale of malfeasance and calumny, set in an exciting worm farm. Whisks, turnips, and dangerous machinery abound, and the cast of unlikely characters includes Canute Hellhound, whose tremendous, ground-breaking lecture on the pith and nubs of wormery is reprinted in part. This pure and urgent work brings together the Sacred and the Profane, the Dim and the Doomed, and the Patron Saint of Worms with his Destiny. Our classic bestseller! The text is accompanied by four illustrations in which the author depicts his characters with withering intensity. If you buy only one book this year, you would be advised to seek medical help.

Tales Of Hoon
A magnificent collection of four crumpled yarns set in the dismal, sump-strewn land of Hoon, with the odd detour to its hinterland of purple hills and bauxite mines. A cast of hundreds, most of whom are called Ned, appears in these rum and preposterous stories. As a special treat, the texts are complemented by three maps and a really exciting A3 fold-out diagram, hand-coloured and unbelievably lavish. Each copy also contains a piece of sandpaper. Truly a labour of love; either that or sheer dementia.

A Zest For Crumpled Things
Twenty-six potted biographies of characters whose behaviour would be out of place in most of what passes for “fiction” these days. The texts make use of neologism, poltroonery, and reverential plagiarism of M P Shiel (1865-1947). Among those potted by Frank’s doolally pen are Maud Abdab, Cora Dwabb, Istvan Ick, Ned Lip, and Jodhpur Valentine. With twenty-six photographs from the author’s collection, rescued from an incinerator in the cellar of a ruinous building in the north of England.

The Churn In The Muck
A couple of stories; one about ponds, hotels, and hollyhocks, the other about hotels, hollyhocks, and ponds. More alphabetical excursions by Frank, who doesn’t intend to abandon this compositional device until he has well and truly wrung its neck. Biographical notes on the main characters are bunged in at the end for no apparent reason, shedding unpitying light on old favourites like Lars Talc as well as introducing some brand new gits, including Eileen Hollyhock and the Brothers Hellbag. Fully illustrated with four black & white plates by the author. A splash of colour is added by the insertion of a sheet of wallpaper in all fifty copies of this first edition, numbered and signed and all the usual shenanigans…

House Of Turps (in preparation)
The first volume in a projected series of 26 books in which the full and uproarious history of the House of Turps is dissected with a blunt pen-knife. This initial book potters about in the pre-history of the House, examining the events leading to its foundation, in particular the role played by a large number of inanimate objects including hammers, iron pots, wrestling-rings, and bandage paste. Future volumes in the series will lay bare the complete history of this remarkable institution, the whole adding up to what can only be described as a Bath of Learning, a Broth of Truth. Deceptively simple, even rambling, the construction of this first book is awesomely complicated, its intricate machinery a triumph of meldrum and binge. Illustrated by the author, as usual. Signed & numbered, as usual. Silk-screened cover, for once.

NOTE : That last blurb was written before I actually wrote House Of Turps. It remains the only one of the planned series of twenty-six ever to see the light of day. The cover was not silk-screened.

Here is a spot of small press publishing history, which might be of vague interest to a few readers.

‘Twas long, long ago, in the autumn of 1986 that my pal Max Décharné and I conceived the idea of publishing an anthology of our various drivellings. A decade earlier, Max had been a great enthusiast of punk and the DIY approach to making records – he realised his ambition of releasing a single while still in his teens. Why not do the same with the printed word? Neither of us, I think, was particularly aware of the thriving small press scene then extant, but we were only too conscious that I had a job in an office with a big humming photocopier to which I had access at weekends. We assembled fifty pages each of material, typed it out on an electronic typewriter, worked out the pagination by making a little dummy booklet, and voila!, we had an anthology. All we needed now was a title and a name for our imprint. Max had a job at the time which he absolutely loathed, and entertained murderous fantasies about his boss. Thus Stab Your Employer popped into his head without too much struggle. In the course of a phone call during which we discussed what to call ourselves, I cast my eyes along the bookshelf and spotted Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles. Hence the name of the Press was born. In retrospect, this does not seem a fortuitous choice, too redolent of an imprint dedicated to crime fiction. But we were young and stupid and impulsive, I suppose.

One hefty bout of illegal weekend photocopying later, we had fifty fat but spineless one-hundred-page booklets for sale. Ah yes, sales. Who on earth we imagined might buy this work of matchless genius, other than our friends and acquaintances, I cannot recall. Some copies we sent out on spec to persons we admired, to be met, of course, with resounding indifference – except in one case. Max had developed a great liking for the works issued by Atlas Press, and popped a copy of Stab Your Employer in the post to them. I do not think we understood at the time that Atlas was a shoestring operation with resources only marginally better than our own. As far as I know, what happened next was that Alasdair Brotchie of Atlas passed the booklet on to his friend, the artist Jane Colling, and Jane in turn brought it to the attention of her friend Chris Cutler, the drummer, one-time member of Henry Cow, and onlie begetter of Recommended Records. Chris was then in the early years of producing the ReR Quarterly, a printed-magazine-with-LP. Something I had written must have appealed to him, for I was then asked to contribute a piece for the Quarterly. Chris did not ask me himself, but delegated the request to a young man acting as a sort of typist/factotum for Recommended, Ed Baxter – who is today the benevolent dictator at the head of Resonance104.4FM. Thus were connections made that in some cases last to this day.

Max and I rattled off a second anthology, Smooching With Istvan, early in 1987. (It is in this booklet that “Hooting Yard” made its very first appearance, as recalled here.) Inspired by the sheer ease of producing works – though we did start paying for photocopying – we bashed out lots of pamphlets over the next couple of years. (There is a complete list of my own stuff here.) At the same time, Ed Baxter was tirelessly bringing into being the Small Press Group, along with allies such as Atlas and, from an older generation, the legendary John Nicholson. Max and I became keen and, I hope, useful members of the group, which arranged book fairs and published three, or possibly four, paperback Small Press Yearbooks. These directories, which included how-to-do-it guides and much else, stand as a fascinating record of activity in the last years before Het Internet changed the landscape.

Though Max and I never actually collaborated again – and, in truth, both Stab Your Employer and Smooching With Istvan simply jammed our individual pieces between the same covers – we issued our own works and expanded the press to publish others. These included Ginseng Fuchsia Lefleur, a Small Press Group friend from Canada, whose North American Freestyle Playpen Zen is possibly the rarest of all Malice Aforethought Press pamphlets – consider yourself very fortunate if you own a copy. I also fell in with Ellis Sharp, latterly of Zoilus Press and a great favourite of the Grauniad’s Nicholas Lezard. Ellis lived near me and my ex-wife used to cut his hair. She introduced us, and I think we were both surprised that we liked each other’s work. General Jaruzelski’s Sunglasses was the first Ellis Sharp work we published – the first piece credited to “Ellis Sharp” ever – and several more followed. It is as rare, I suspect, as Ms Lefleur’s outpouring. Bear in mind that many of these pamphlets came in editions of twenty-five, or even fewer. (I think one of my own pamphlets was limited to a dozen copies.)

The final Malice Aforethought Press publications were “proper” paperbacks – my own Twitching And Shattered, Max’s Beat Your Relatives To A Bloody Pulp and The Prisoner Of Brenda, and a couple of one-offs. Probably the finest thing we ever published was a selection of work by the great John Bently of Liver And Lights, another Small Press Group hero. The last book, which Max alone brought into being, was a collection by a member of the beat combo Fortran Five. My memory of this last is hazy, because I was whirling ever more rapidly towards the Wilderness Years. By the time I emerged from them, Het Internet had taken over the world, which was now, at last, ready for the true emergence of Hooting Yard.

I sometimes wonder what might have happened – or not happened – had Max not sent a copy of Stab Your Employer to Atlas.

One of the most memorable incidents in my childhood took place in the Newty Field. If I am to be wholly accurate, I would have to amend that to say it took place within my head. It was a dream, but so vivid a dream that for many years I insisted it had really happened. Reluctantly, I eventually conceded that the whole thing was phantasmal. For one thing, my older brother, who was “there” with me, had absolutely no memory of it. Also, on reflection, I had to admit the preposterousness of it as a real event. For all that, it stayed with me, and still does, and I can picture the scene as clearly as I did more than forty years ago.

You will be pleased to learn, though, that the Newty Field itself was all too real. Alas, I use the past tense, as it was long ago covered over with concrete and council houses. It was a patch of neglected woodland, overgrown and pitted with ponds, on the edge of the estate where I grew up. That being so, it was the natural destination for children otherwise confined to a bleak grey postwar suburban council estate with no other redeeming features I can recall. In the oiky parlance of that time and place, the ‘T’ in ‘Newty’ was never pronounced, so strictly speaking it was known as the New’ee Field.

It was not a field, as such. I suppose there must have been newts in the ponds, as well as sticklebacks and other such aquatic beings curiously beloved of children.

The one, dream, incident has overshadowed any other memories of time spent in the Newty Field. I cannot recall how often I used to go there, with whom, or what we did when we were there. I was never one for climbing trees, nor for collecting aquatic beings in a net. I suspect I enjoyed myself in the sort of aimless, dawdling, mucking about that used to keep children occupied in the days before television and computer games, and before paranoia about predatory paedophiles restricted children’s ability to roam without purpose. Perhaps countryside children still experience that kind of freedom. One reason the Newty Field has lingered in my memory, and my imagination, is that it was the closest thing to “countryside” accessible to me. Slap bang next to the estate, small enough not to become hopelessly lost, yet big enough to convince yourself that you were out in the wilderness. In trees and ponds and tangled bracken and clumps of thorns and nettles. As I write this, I realise that the Newty Field itself, at least as I remember it, is the fount and origin of what we might call the Hooting Yard landscape. A faintly squalid, sordid place, rather than one of bucolic beauty. A place where one squelches through muck rather than gambols in the sunlight.

So to my dream. My brother and I were pootling around in the Newty Field one grey autumnal day. It was late afternoon. I was about seven years old, he ten. All of a sudden, we were accosted by a little ganglet of boys, of similar ages to ourselves, none of whom we had ever seen before. They formed a circle around us, and I felt trapped and fearful. That it was a dream becomes obvious when I add that each of the boys had red hair, each was identically dressed in a bright green jumper, and each was armed with a catapult. It is rather like a skewed vision of the seven dwarves. The contrast of the red hair and the green jumpers was startling. Each had loaded his catapult with a stone or pebble. In spite of the fact that they looked almost identical, there was a clear leader among them, and he now spoke, though not before raising and aiming his catapult at us as if ready to shoot.

“Stay here and don’t dare move,” he said, “We’ll be back.”

And then they were gone, dispersing quickly into the trees. My brother and I stood, trembling and frightened, for some minutes before we decided the boys were not going to return. We ran home, a journey of no more than five minutes, completely unharmed, safe and sound. I have no memory of telling my parents what had happened.

Later, I suppose because it was preying on my mind, I did talk about it. It seemed so real to me that I think there must have come a point where the dream became a “true” memory. It was at this stage that my brother disclaimed all knowledge of what I was babbling on about, and I think my parents received the story with a sort of world-weary ho-hum acceptance before finding something more interesting to divert their attention. It was only in my teenage years, I recall, that the penny eventually dropped and I realised the whole episode had only ever taken place inside my sleeping head.

I don’t doubt that a brain-quack could have a (newty) field day analysing the dream and my vivid memory of it, still surviving after almost half a century. Of more interest to me is the realisation, today, of the place the Newty Field occupies in my imagination.

As an addendum, I thought I would search for “Newty Field” on Google. It was pleasing to note that it is one of those phrases, I forget the name for them, which yields only a single result.

I was even more pleased to discover that this single result is, in itself, inaccurate, and refers to the phrase “newly returfed field”.

But now I have given the Newty Field its rightful place in history, and in future Google will lead those searching for it to this very piece. I wonder if, among the searchers, will be a red-haired middle-aged man, dressed in a green jumper, thinking nostalgic thoughts of his six little pals, and their loaded catapults, and the two little boys they accosted on an overcast late afternoon in the 1960s, in the Newty Field?

I have never been much of a joiner. I can count on the fingers of one hand the clubs or associations to which I have signed up over the years, and almost invariably I have allowed my membership to lapse after the minimum period has expired. In the late seventies, however, I actually formed my own organisation. There was only one other member, and as far as I can remember it lasted about two weeks before being consigned to the dustbin of history. I am not sure what made it pop into my head yesterday, for the first time in decades.

This short-lived yet important society was the Dubbin Club. I am afraid I recall very little about it, save that it issued certificates of membership and it was intended that members purchase one tin of dubbin each month. I think in total one tin of dubbin was bought, shared between the two members, before the club petered out due to lack of enthusiasm. It may also be pertinent, in terms of the club’s collapse, that neither Member Number One (me) nor Member Number Two (my friend David) had any pressing need for dubbin, as we were not engaged in any sporting activity for which the rubbing of dubbin in to boots would have proved beneficial. In short, the Dubbin Club was an ephemeral private amusement between a pair of pals. I would not say it is a memory I cherish, and indeed I cannot for the life of me think what on earth we were doing, wasting what little cash we had on a polish or unguent for which we had not the slightest use. But I suppose I was young, and given to preposterousness of one kind and another, and it raised a few laughs at the time.

Over thirty years later, there is one point about the Dubbin Club that I still understand, which is the fact that dubbin is inherently funny. Now, we know from bitter experience that any attempt to analyse humour, or to explain a joke, leaches the life out of it and leaves it curled up, shrivelled and dead, so I am not going to be so foolish as to fret away at the intrinsic amusement value of dubbin. You will either share my appreciation or you will not. You will chortle along with me at the sight of a tin of dubbin, and at the very sound of the word, or you will not.

If, like me, you find dubbin amusing, you will be equally likely to see the comedy inherent in both swarfega and linseed oil. A few years after the demise of the Dubbin Club, I was pleased to note that the Monty Python team recognised the comic value of linseed oil, with that splendid line “Now, two boys have been found rubbing linseed oil into the school cormorant” from The Meaning Of Life (1983). Obviously the school cormorant has a large part to play in our uproarious laughter here, but we must not overlook the fact that, of all the goos or unguents or substances that could be rubbed in to it, linseed oil is almost certainly the funniest. Though I think it is significant that the line still works with dubbin or swarfega substituted for linseed oil.

Having said that I will not try to analyse the source of my hilarity, it does occur to me that both dubbin and linseed oil are intrinsic elements in what we might think of as a certain British twentieth century sporting milieu. We can imagine baggy-trousered chaps rubbing linseed oil into their cricket bats, and rubbing dubbin in to their football boots. These are the same sort of chaps, with their clipped accents and emotional repression and thorough decency, who amuse us today because, perhaps, they seem so impossibly distant from our own barbaric age. It is a vein of humour explored by many, the funny and the hopelessly unfunny, over the past fifty years, from Beyond The Fringe onwards. I think we ought to acknowledge that dubbin and linseed oil and, to a somewhat lesser extent, swarfega are important elements of it.

This was surely the – unconscious – motive behind the establishment of the Dubbin Club and its sadly curtailed activities. My friend David and I recognised, even if we did not know why, that dubbin was not just something that could be bought in a tin and then rubbed into boots, but was more than that – a waxy goo that signified a lost world, so the comedy was tinged with nostalgia, a nostalgia for a world that, if it ever existed, was dying or indeed dead before we were born.

The fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol, of whose doings you will have read here, belongs to that same era, as I trust is evident. Like Tupper of the Track, Bobnit Tivol is a clean-living and morally upright athlete, a far cry from the reprehensible scalliwags of today. His fictional world is richly infused with dubbin and linseed oil, though for his chosen sporting activities he wears spikes rather than football boots, and brandishes a pole-vault rather than a cricket bat. His coach and mentor Old Halob, on the other hand, comes from a different world, though a roughly contemporaneous one. Old Halob’s is a world of fog and trenchcoats and Homburg hats and Stalinism. It is in some ways a shadow world, the morally ambiguous, shifting and uncertain other side to the clean bright decency of the dubbin-and-linseed oil world of gentlemanly sport.

Perhaps it is time I revived the Dubbin Club for the twenty-first century. Those of you keen to join may express an interest in the Comments section. If sufficient numbers perk up, we can begin long and detailed discussions on such matters as the club’s constitution, purpose, and activities. Most importantly, we should decide on a coat of arms and a Latin motto.

I keep a list of every book I have read, which now goes back thirty years. (In January 1982, the first book I read was The Annotated Snark by Martin Gardner.) Almost always, I have a book on the go. As soon as I finish one, I begin reading another. There was a time when I was able to have several titles in my “current reading”, switching between them as I saw fit, but for the past couple of decades I have been a one-book-at-a-time reader. There is rarely any pattern or method to my reading. I flit from one thing to another, often jarringly. (The three most recent titles in my list are Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski, Race And Culture : A World View by Thomas Sowell, and – almost finished, about to be added – A Cup Of News : The Life Of Thomas Nashe by Charles Nicholl.) Occasionally I immerse myself in the work of a single author for book after book after book. I note from my list, for example, that in 1991 I went on a protracted Franz Kafka jag, and that the spring of 1993 was devoted exclusively to Vladimir Nabokov. It is not just writers of fiction who can keep me in thrall. I suspect I am about to plough my way through several other books by Charles Nicholl in the coming weeks, on Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Ralegh and Rimbaud. (The ability to lay my hands on all this stuff is entirely due to the paradise that is the London Library, which has had a seismic effect on which books I choose to read. I still cannot fathom why I spent so long living in London without being a member.)

Cursed, or blessed, with a memory so godawful that it approaches the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, I can forget a book within days, even hours, of reading it. One reason to maintain my list is simply to be able to recall what I have read in the past. Such forgetting makes rereading a pleasure, of course. It is no judgement on the worth, or otherwise, of a particular book that I remember little or nothing about it. Intriguingly, sometimes I can remember vividly the circumstances in which I read a book without recalling the content of the book itself. Again, scanning my list, I can quite clearly picture myself sitting beside a lake, on a summer’s evening in 1995, reading The Tax Inspector by Peter Carey. Other titles summon up less specific memories, but are resonant of times and places in the past.

My list, as I said, begins in 1982. For some years before that, beginning I think in 1975, there was a list now lost. It is those early years of my reading that I want to attend to. Without the aide memoire of a list, what I recollect is fragmentary. What interests me are the books I chose to read, in those early years of “adult” reading, and which ones I can remember.

One that I remember clearly is one I never actually read. I grew up in a house full of books. My parents’ collection, much of which I have today, was a mixture of classics and general fiction and poetry and blue-spined Pelicans and history and art and film books, a heteroclite jumble. One of my older sisters had a small collection of, mostly, Penguin paperbacks suitable for a budding intellectual of a certain stripe – Nietzsche, R D Laing, D H Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and Iris Murdoch. Why do I recall so clearly her copy of Murdoch’s A Severed Head, which I took from her shelf and leafed through, repeatedly, without ever actually sitting down and reading the damned thing? Reflecting on it now, I think the young teenage me identified something amusingly portentous in that title. Gosh, this must be a serious and significant work, I thought to myself, laughing at its preposterousness. It still seems preposterous. I have still never read it.

Was it the contents of those four small shelves in my sister’s room, rather than the more extensive collection downstairs, that set me on the path I took? If we’re going to have a budding intellectual in the family, it’s going to be me! And to hell with these English writers! Being, as I alas remain, an utter monoglot was not going to stop me reading foreigners in translation. Kafka! Albert Camus! Alfred Jarry! Thomas Mann! Did I understand any of what I read? I am not sure that I did. I was, for example, completely oblivious to the humour in Kafka. But there was another writer with a reputation for being bleakly serious whose humour I got immediately, and I laughed my head off as I read him (and still do).

The other great influence on my reading at that time was my English teacher, Richard Shone. (“Where does Mr Shone live?” “In a Dick-Shonery!” we chuckled.) It was he who introduced me to Samuel Beckett – the novelist rather than the playwright. My sister had a copy of Waiting For Godot, of course, of course!, but my aversion to the theatre, and more particularly my aversion to reading plays, meant that I had returned it to her shelf after the briefest of glances. I cannot recall how or why Mr Shone introduced me to Beckett’s Watt. It was a revelation. I still consider it one of the funniest novels I have ever read, uniquely mad and maddening. From there I moved swiftly to Molloy and Malone Dies and The Unnamable. My first attempts at writing were gruesome pastiches of Beckett. I can still spot echoes of those four marvellous novels in the stuff I bash out today.

I have no idea whatever became of Mr Shone, who would be I suppose in his seventies now, if he is still alive. But I think I can say that, by suggesting to me that I read Watt, he planted the seed of the mighty larch or laburnum or cedar or plane tree that is Hooting Yard. For which I owe him immeasurable thanks.

I remember the Latin Mass. Dimly, dimly, but I do remember it, in all its mystery. It was perhaps made all the more unfathomable because, until I was six or seven years old, we attended Sunday morning Mass in a pub. Not in a function room within a pub, but in the main bar area. Towels were draped over the beer pumps, that I remember. These were the only visits to a pub my family made.

Thinking back, I must have found the world a very confusing place, at least on Sunday mornings. All smartly dressed, we would walk together to this big pub on a crossroads, wherein a man in a black soutane would intone what must have struck me as gibberish, while performing slow ritualistic manoeuvres, against a backdrop of a counter lined with a row of unknown objects hidden under towels, behind which was a glittering array of bottles and glassware. I remember that when Mass ended, many of the parishioners, and the priest, remained behind, eager for the pub to open, but we always left to go home.

There was no Catholic church on the council estate where I grew up, and I assume the parish had persuaded the pub landlord to offer his premises to ensure our souls were saved. In my memory, I date the change to the vernacular Mass, and the longer walk to the parish church proper, as happening at the same time, when I was six or seven. Thus passed forever a curious feature of my childhood. I was old enough for it to have become a familiar, even reassuring, routine, and I recall a vague yet definite sense of disappointment with the new regime. I didn’t mind the longer walk – it took us through a park, with a playground and a duckpond and immense green well-mown lawns – but instead of the wood-panelled gloom of the pub, Mass now took place in a bright, modern church and, worse, I could understand the words. All the mystery was leached out of my Sunday mornings.

It took only a few years of that before, one morning when I was fourteen, I woke up with the clear conviction that the whole Catholicism hoo-hah – actually, no, the whole religion hoo-hah – was absolute twaddle. I have never seriously diverted from this view in the succeeding years, despite a couple of wobbles. My devout yet tolerant parents never made an issue of it, never forced me to attend that ghastly bright modern church against my will, though I remember my father telling me, with a strange admixture of the world-weary and the smug, that the day would come when I would return to the bosom of the church and re-embrace the faith of my childhood. Who knows?, he may yet be proved right.

I find myself wondering if my loss of faith, which really did seem to happen overnight, would have been quite so decisive had the Mass still been said in Latin, had we still celebrated it in the pub. There was something very seductive about those incomprehensible words. I would happily have swapped the pub for a church that was old and stony and cold and gloomy, but knowing the sense of what the priest was saying, and what I was bidden to respond, was fatal.

The name of the pub was the Moby-Dick. It is still there, on the crossroads. Not so long ago, I passed it, on the way to somewhere unconnected with my childhood, and I was pleased to note – for the first time, but also for the first time consciously checking – that the hyphen in the title of the novel is present and correct in the name of the pub. (Just as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is often given as 1984, so Moby-Dick loses its hyphen, to my minor irritation.) When tiny, and attending Mass, I was of course wholly ignorant of Melville’s novel. It was not among the many many books on the shelves at home – a huge number of books, the possession of which I thought was commonplace, until I grew a little older and learned that most of our neighbours on the estate had no books at all. But I did know that Moby-Dick was a whale, for so it was depicted, white and thrashing about in the sea, on the pub sign. I cannot remember how old I was when I learned of the existence of the book, though I do recall, as a teenager, buying the copy I still have, the Penguin edition bulked out with Harold Beaver’s remarkable critical apparatus. Years passed before I actually got round to reading it, and I read more of Melville – Bartleby The Scrivener and Typee and The Confidence-Man : His Masquerade – before I read Moby-Dick. Which, of course, if I am to insist on the hyphen, I should also take care to give its proper title Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. And typing that last word reminds me, all of a sudden, that the name of the road on which the pub is situated, one of the four meeting at the crossroads, is Whalebone Lane. I have no idea what possible connection there is between this road, far from the sea, and whales or whaling. No doubt I could find out.

I do know, incidentally, that close by, for many years, lived Eva Hart (1905-1996), one of the longest-living survivors of the sinking of the Titanic. There is a local pub named after her too.

Today would have been my father’s 87th birthday. In a change of tone from the usual Hooting Yard guff, here is a remembrance of him. Following Georges Perec’s Je me souviens (1978) and Gilbert Adair’s Memories (1986), I have written, in no particular order, a set of sentences each beginning “I remember…” There are fifty-eight in all, one for each year of his life. I wrote them at one sitting, as they bubbled to the surface. On another day I might write a different list of memories.

1. I remember he smoked a cheap brand of cigarettes called Carlton Premium.

2. I remember the Evening Standard ringing him up after he made disparaging remarks about Dr Rhodes Boyson, though I don’t remember the context, or how the paper knew.

3. I remember his love of crime fiction.

4. I remember his love of football, and that – uniquely among aficionados of the game? – he did not support any particular team.

5. I remember his hip-flask of Scotch.

6. I remember seeing him cry only once, when talking about his father.

7. I remember him using the nickname “Brucie” for my mother.

8. I remember when his choice of hat convinced some of our neighbours that he was a Russian spy.

9. I remember he read The Guardian and the Morning Star.

10. I remember he always called The Guardian The Manchester Guardian

11. I remember him wandering around the house with a tea-towel over his shoulder calling out “Any more pots?”

12. I remember he called Ready-Brek Fairex.

13. I remember precisely the style of his spectacle-frames.

14. I remember the way he referred to Norman St John Stevas as “Ste-VASS”.

15. I remember that he subscribed to a Soviet propaganda magazine called Sputnik.

16. I remember him dusting individually the books on the bookshelves.

17. I remember his habit of cutting off the corners of dust-jackets where the price was shown.

18. I remember him saying “The whole point is…”

19. I remember his afternoon naps on the sofa.

20. I remember his loud snoring

21. I remember him saying “It’s like Blackpool Illuminations” when a light was left on in an empty room.

22. I remember his psoriasis.

23. I remember him telling me that when he played football as a young man he was nicknamed “Twinkletoes”.

24. I remember his hatred of Reginald Maudling but also his insistence, when Maudling died, that one should never speak ill of the dead.

25. I remember his sentimentality.

26. I remember that Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942) was his favourite film.

27. I remember him taking me to a Manchester United match (at Upton Park?) and how his Manchester accent became unconsciously exaggerated when speaking to other fans.

28. I remember him saying “daft as a Toc H Lamp”.

29. I remember his puritanical streak.

30. I remember his dismissal of anything other than the plainest foods as “foreign muck”.

31. I remember him telling me how he had gone to the Chinese embassy to be given a free copy of Mao’s Little Red Book (which I still have).

32. I remember his fierce attachment to his mother.

33. I remember him polishing his shoes.

34. I remember that the bottle of Guinness he drank with his evening meal was “medicinal”.

35. I remember kicking a football around in the garden with him.

36. I remember when he wore a shirt with a collar that made him look like a priest.

37. I remember his collection of cigarette cards.

38. I remember the time he bought a hideous plastic rose in a glass globe as a birthday gift for my mother.

39. I remember him as an educator.

40. I remember him taking me to summer garden parties at the home of his colleague Mike Gibbs.

41. I remember learning that he had been very ill and almost died shortly before I was born.

42. I remember his brilliantine.

43. I remember him mowing the lawn.

44. I remember learning that he had all his teeth extracted at the age of thirty and had dentures fitted.

45. I remember his friend Jim Spraggins.

46. I remember him pontificating.

47. I remember him showing me the “grooves” on his hands that were the first signs leading to a diagnosis of motor neurone disease.

48. I remember his uxoriousness.

49. I remember his infuriating habit of tidying that which was already tidy.

50. I remember his insistence that one should always have an up-to-date atlas.

51. I remember, when I boasted that I had dodged my bus fare, how he reprimanded me for my dishonesty, his clarity about right and wrong.

52. I remember his supper of boiled egg and bread mashed into a pulp.

53. I remember how he hated Monty Python but loved Fawlty Towers.

54. I remember how he loved the Carry On films.

55.I remember his postcard collection.

56. I remember his big florid curly handwriting.

57. I remember that he always wore a vest under his shirt.

58. I remember clearly the last time I saw him, sitting at his desk, reading the paper, drinking whisky, on the morning of Monday 16 May 1983. He died two days later.