The Thing is…. Bono
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tantalising world just across the water, even though I had never been there myself.
One major tradition in my family was the big annual summer holiday. In those days, ordinary families didn’t vanish off to the Algarve or Tuscany, and we always went to exactly the same place: Bettystown in County Meath, about thirty miles from Dublin and five miles from my father’s home town of Drogheda. We would go for about a month, to give him time to catch up with his family, and I loved it.
We’d rent a house right next to the sea with a grassy bank that led straight down to the beach. It would be a proper old-fashioned summerhouse, with wooden walls like a chalet, and we would play on the beach all day long, even if the weather was lousy which, of course, it often was. When the tide was out it was a long way to the sea, the water was bitterly cold, and the totter back up the beach to the house felt like torture.
Movies were always big news in our house. My father would take me to the Stella Cinema in Mount Merrion – which, sadly, is now a furniture shop – and the Ormonde in Stillorgan, which, I’m glad to say, is still open today. The Stella was a grand old-fashioned picture house, with two ornate kiosks to buy your tickets and your sweets, and beautiful sweeping staircases up to the balcony that we hardly ever sat in. I used to love seeing the usherettes walking through the cinema selling ice cream from their trays.
The movies were always screened either Mondays to Wednesdays or Thursdays to Saturdays, with a different bill on Sundays. Normally, there were double-feature screenings and my dad took me to a lot of Westerns. Saturdays would often be comedies, including some really, really bad ones interspersed with Pathé News.
As I got older, I would sometimes go to evening showings that began at 7.30, with friends from school. Sometimes we would be too young to see the films without a grown-up with us, so we would have to wait outside and ask an adult if we could go in with them. They would usually say yes because they knew us from around Mount Merrion, and they weren’t X-rated movies – they just finished at 11 p.m., and unaccompanied kids had to be out of the cinema by then. There would be about ten of us, and once we got in we would make a beeline for the front row.
I have so many memories of wide-eyed nights in the Stella. I saw Wait Until Dark, the famous movie with Audrey Hepburn as a blind girl. Friends who had seen it already told me it had a really terrifying scene. At one stage Alan Arkin, playing a villain, killed one of his own guys by ramming a car into him. I thought, ‘Was that it? Big deal!’ I relaxed – and a few minutes later, Audrey went to close a fridge and a man leapt out of it at her. Mother of Jesus! Thinking of that scene still gives me goose bumps to this day!
I was an avid moviegoer as a kid. Any trailer that I ever saw, I longed to see the film. I was an absolute sucker. I remember when I was slightly older, Jerry Coyle and I went to the Ormonde to see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which had a real effect on me. Even at the tender age of 15, I thought Maggie Smith was brilliant.
Maybe I was always going to host a movie show, because as a kid I would write reviews of every film I saw in a little book that I made from pieces of brown paper stapled together. I would carefully write out the title, the director and names of the stars and then give it a critique and a mark out of ten. I am not sure my critical faculties were too honed back then; the only film I ever gave ten out of ten to was a totally obscure war film called Tobruk, starring Rock Hudson.
I read quite a lot as a kid – my mother made sure of that, and our house was full of books and literature. I was big into Enid Blyton with her Famous Five and Secret Seven and their mad adventures that always ended with farmers’ wives giving them sandwiches and lashings of ginger beer. Her Island of Adventure and Castle of Adventure stories were the best. I was also fond of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books – but when it came to reading, my major obsession was comics.
It started with the Beano and Dandy, with all the characters I can still picture now: the Bash Street Kids getting slippered by the teacher, Little Plum with his feather coming out of his head-band, Dennis the Menace knocking lumps out of Walter the Softie. In one story I particularly remember, Dennis came out of school with a book marked ‘Sums’; Walter’s was called ‘Harder Sums’. My sister Miriam got the Bunty and Judy, and when she got too old for them, I started buying them instead. I didn’t care that they were aimed at girls: the stories in them were just as good, especially the Four Marys, Lorna Doone with her magic dancing shoes, or the unfortunate heroine who would have her saddle loosened by horrid, wicked types who schemed to thwart her chances of winning the local gymkhana.
In my teenage years I took a bit of a step up with the comics, and – yes, I know this is sad – I can still remember the sequence that used to define my week. It was the Hornet on a Tuesday, the Hotspur on Thursday and the Victor on Friday. That was the big one: Friday afternoon, home from school, reading the Victor and eating fish and chips with the weekend ahead was definitely a major highlight of my week. I always sat at the same part of the kitchen table. I’d place the comic in the cutlery drawer, read bits as I digested the food and push the drawer back in when I went to the plate for a little more.
The Second World War stories didn’t really do it for me. I could take or leave Matt Braddock VC or Captain Hurricane and his pint-sized batman Maggot Malone. Captain Hurricane had a ‘ragin’ fury’ every week and would use guns, grenades and his filthy temper to wipe out ‘krauts’ and ‘slant-eyed goons’ – not terms you tend to hear in today’s more enlightened, politically correct world. I much preferred Morgan the Mighty or Alf Tupper, the ‘Tough of the Track’, who always ate fish and chips before and after winning a race.
The Hornet always seemed to me to have the best stories and illustrations. Every week it had a serialised non-pictorial story over three or four pages in which Paul Terhune tried to solve some mystery or other, each instalment invariably ending on a cliff-hanger. As soon as a story finished, after about ten weeks, I would immediately go back and read the thirty or forty pages in one go. My favourite was a rather unlikely tale called ‘Invisible Bullets from Nowhere’ in which Terhune tried to work out why random citizens were being shot but nobody could find the shooter or the bullets. It transpired that a disgruntled employee at the local observatory high above the town had fitted the giant telescope with ice bullets and was taking pot shots at pedestrians he held a grudge against. Well, it made sense at the time.
Just reading the comics was never enough for me. They used to have competitions that I was soon compulsively entering. Quite often, I won. The first time I saw my name in print, I absolutely loved it. My mum used to read the Irish Catholic, and they had a competition asking readers to fill in the missing words in a limerick. I knew the answer because I had heard it before – in fact I can still remember it:
There was an old man quite weird,Who shrieked, ’Tis just as I feared!Four owls and a wrenTwo larks and a henHave just built their nest in my beard.
I sent my answer in to the Irish Catholic and won £3, which was a small fortune to me. I wrote them a letter saying it had been fantastic to win, and they printed that too. The biggest buzz was just reading my name in the magazine: D FANNING, DUBLIN.
Fired by this triumph, I was soon entering all the competitions in my weekly comics. The Valiant asked readers to send in a cartoon, so I got hold of a copy of a religious magazine that we used to have in school called the Word. It had a cartoon of two guys on a pulley hanging off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, too far away to clean the windows, and I traced it and posted it to the Valiant. Let’s face it, it was plagiarism, pure and simple, but the £1 postal order came in very handy.
I had no conscience about how I won the competitions. Once, I copied a joke from the Beezer and sent it to the Topper. I won. The question was ‘What is the definition of a phone kiosk?’ and I said ‘A chatterbox’. They also asked for a definition of an alarm clock and I said ‘Something that scares the living daylights out of you’, which I thought was absolutely hilarious.
I entered and won so many competitions that the people at the DC Thomson offices in Scotland must have been saying, ‘Jesus, not another one from that Irish guy!’ The prize was normally a postal order,