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As I write in the book, my main memory of the big freeze is scavenging for winter fuel on Westbrook beach as well as hoping that the weather might break soon so I could get to the nearest cinema for a celluloid fix. I’d managed to get myself down to Dreamland cinema just after Xmas of 1962 to catch “Hatari!” before the ice set in, my next visit a whole two months later on March 1^st, my eleventh birthday as it happened, when my dad took me to see “Bridge on the River Kwai”.

Over the Easter holidays, once the snow had finally melted away, I embarked on the now familiar Maynard ritual of taking two of my siblings to the cinema, this time to the Plaza in Margate High Street, without actually having enough money to pay for the tickets. Again. This time a genuine Easter miracle occurred when the manager took pity on the three bedraggled mites gathered in the foyer and let us in to see the film anyway, a Disney adventure called “In Search of the Castaways”. Take it from me, the film was much better than the poster.

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Next up was a double bill at Dreamland cinema of “Mouse in the Moon” and “Sons of Thunder”. The former was yet another in a long line of seriously unfunny so-called “comedies” that the British film industry insisted on inflicting upon the non-discerning cinemagoing audiences of the time. To me though, “Sons of Thunder” was the best of the Italian sword and sandal epics I’d seen up to that point and let me tell, you, I’d seen quite a lot in the last few years. Looking at it again fifty-eight years later on YouTube it of course doesn’t seem quite as good as I remembered but at the time I was totally enthralled by it. 

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In early summer I caught up with a couple of the big Hollywood road-show movies still doing the rounds, “The Longest Day” and “El Cid”, although by 1963 these “event” movies were starting to pall somewhat to the point that the form eventually bit the dust a few years later. 

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Christmas came early for me with the release of both “The Great Escape” just before I started secondary school and then a few weeks later “From Russia With Love”, to my mind still the best of the James Bond films bar none.

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Just before I thought things couldn’t get any better along came a film that to this day brings a huge grin of delight to my face whenever it plays on TV. Like a lot of kids of my generation I’ll always remember the very first time I saw “Jason and the Argonauts”, Ray Harryhausen’s masterpiece by a long shot . I held my breath in wonder as I watched Jason and his fellow matelots taking on the likes of the Harpies, the giant statue Talos, the seven-headed Hydra and, the best of the bunch, a gang of screaming skeletons looking to stab everyone up at the end. 

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It’s here where I digress from the book and show you a couple of images from an event I attended nearly forty years later in 2002 in which I got the chance to meet my hero up close and personal. I’m the grinning idiot between my new best mate Ray Harryhausen and Gareth Owen, producer, writer and another all-round good guy who arranged for me to sit at Ray’s table. Mr. Harryhausen brought along examples of some of the creatures he’d created for his films, including one of the skeletons that featured in “Jason and the Argonauts”. He told me he wasn’t sure but he thought it was also the model he’d used for the skeleton fight at the end of “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad”. It’s said you should never meet your heroes but in my case having quality time with Ray Harryhausen is one of the greatest highlights of my life. 

Apart from meeting my wife and the birth of my three children of course, he added hurriedly. 

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Finally, bringing 1963 to a close, two hugely enjoyable TV shows from my childhood that still resonate with me to this day. First up is “The Untouchables”, a gangster series based on the exploits of Eliot Ness, the Prohibition agent who helped take down Al Capone and if I’m correct aired on UK TV just as it was being cancelled in America. The other program that caught my attention was another American import, “The Outer Limits”, a ground-breaking sci-fi fantasy show featuring actors such as David McCallum, Donald Pleasance, Robert Culp and Bruce Dern. Dern appeared in one of my favourite episodes, “The Zanti Misfits”, in which prisoners from another planet are sent to Earth for incarceration but escape and cause all kinds of mayhem before they’re wiped out by us caring humans. 

PS. I can’t leave 1963 without referencing the assassination of JFK on November 22nd. Like a lot of people of my generation I’ve been asked quite a number of times over the years where I was when he was killed. I just want to state here and now that I had nothing to do with it. I was watching “The Harry Worth Show” on the BBC at the time which is almost a crime in itself. To borrow a phrase from director Howard Hawks that he employed when describing Danny Kaye, Harry Worth “was about as funny as a crutch”.

Join me next week for my in-depth exposé on the unspeakable horrors of secondary education in the 1960s.

Where do I start with 1963? The introduction to my very own school appointed bully who plagued my life rotten for almost two years? The beginning of my long-term fascination with the Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine? The embarrassment of riches that poured forth from the numerous cinema screens in and around Margate? The debut of two of my all-time favourite shows on TV? Let’s hold off on those last two items until next week and concentrate instead on how, during the first three months of 1963, I ran the risk of having my gonads frozen off on a daily basis before they’d even descended properly. Ladies and gentlemen (I am obliged to point out that there are of course other genders now available should those not be to your liking) I give you – the Big Freeze of 62 /63.

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The snow fell on an almost continuous basis from January right through to early March. The sea froze for over a mile, meaning that you could walk from Westbrook Bay to the end of the pier over by the harbour . The first image looks as though it was taken from the harbour wall, showing the frozen tide on Margate front. Note the Arlington Flats under construction in the background, a building that to this day continues to ruin the skyline along the promenade. The second image shows the harbour itself. I did not try walking on the ice myself on account of being a coward but I’ve heard a story or two about friends of mine who did and nearly regretted it on account of it wasn’t quite as thick as they might have hoped in some places.

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The photos above compare how the house we moved to in Margate looked at the time versus how it looks now,. You can see in the first image that the entrance to our house is located to the right of the entrance to the hairdressers. We lived in the floors immediately above, whilst the hardware shop next door is where I would be sent to purchase copious amounts of Esso Blue paraffin to keep the home fires burning in our gaff.

These are the pupils of class 4A of Garlinge Primary school 1962 / 63, the first and only school group photograph I ever appeared in. I’m the Asian kid you can see located on the extreme left of the first row. The melting pot that is my DNA continued to impose so many changes on my appearance during my childhood that I was forced to check in the mirror  almost on a daily basis in order to anticipate what kind of racist epithets would be slung in my direction once I got to school. If you’ve read the book then you’ll know that in the photo I am uncomfortably close to the bully who plagued my life for two years. On a positive note however my good friend Terry Hill (not his real last name) is sat at the other end of the same row. He doesn’t look like that now though. 

This is my primary school report in which you can see the teacher has stated I have “obviously suffered from having had several changes of school” which was the understatement of the year. I ran out of fingers trying to count the number of times I had been forced to change educational establishments since I started school at the age of five in Malta. Let’s just say it was a lot and leave it at that.

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The issue on the left above shows the magazine my mum unexpectedly brought home to me one day in June of 1963. I was so enamoured of “Famous Monsters of Filmland” I continued to beg, steal, borrow and steal issues of the mag from before and after that date right on into my late teens. The image on the right shows one of the earliest issues that has accompanied me on my journey in life up to the present day. And no, they’re not for sale.

And finally an image that signifies one of the greatest events of my generation, and which on occasion elicits jealousy from those who weren’t around at the time, the first Beatles LP, released in March of 1963. And no, I’m not selling this either. 

I forgot to include the image above in my last post for the year 1961. As you can see I was fairly active on the school sports field but obviously not good enough in any of them to make my mark in the world of sport. Having lost a lot of family photographs from our childhood when we had to hurriedly leave a number of dwellings due to non-payment of rent this is one of the few images of a personal nature that survived the chaos of my life in the early 1960s. I will therefore concentrate in this post on most things cinematic and televisual. The miserable stuff you can read in the book.

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1962 was a fairly threadbare year for me cinematically speaking, although I did get to see two of the most memorable films of my chequered childhood. First out of the gate was a great double-bill consisting of “The Pirates of Blood River” and “Mysterious Island”, the second of these films a wonderfully entertaining exercise in sci-fi fantasy that  I still revere to this day. I saw it at the ABC Regent in Chatham and sat open-mouthed whilst a parade of animated creatures including a giant crab, monster bees and predatory birds appeared one after the other. It knocked the main feature into a cocked hat and initiated my love for all things Ray Harryhausen, blessed be his name.

Towards the end of the year we found ourselves back in Margate, this time on a permanent basis as it turned out. In October my dad took me to see “Dr. No” and I thought at that point it was probably the best film I’d ever seen. This may have had something to do with the sight on the huge screen in Dreamland cinema of Ursula Andress slowly making her way out of the sea like a real-life Venus from a Botticelli painting. Being a tender and sweetly innocent boy at the time I was so overwhelmed by a heretofore unknown feeling of ecstasy and desire in my nether regions it was a miracle I was able to walk unaided out of the cinema at the end. I promised myself then and there that as soon as I was old enough I would save up my money and buy me a lady just like Ursula. It wasn’t until I was in my late teens that it dawned on me such behaviour might result in a long period of incarceration as a guest in one of Her Majesty’s houses of correction. I therefore did the next best thing and spent the money I’d saved on recreational drugs instead.

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Seeing as I wasted any spare time I had with my face stuck diligently in front of the TV my passion for cinema was nudged into second place – only for a while though. The programs I remember most from this period include the three shown above. 

Oh, and one other thing. We saw snow fall in Margate on Boxing Day of 1962, which was nice. Unfortunately….

As mentioned in the book there really was a washing powder called Omo back in the early 1960s. Us boys had a lot of fun calling each other boxes of detergent even if we didn’t know what it was we were actually laughing about.

I guess you had to be there.

Here are a couple of group family photos from round about 1960 – 61. The recently discovered black and white image shows us as a family of seven standing outside a building housed in the grounds of the hostel in West Malling. On the back someone had written the word ‘Homeless’. As you might also note from both photos all of my younger siblings suffered from an untreatable ailment that rendered the image of their heads impossible to capture on standard camera film stock. I on the other hand managed to maintain the ability when the occasion arose to project both a handsome toothy grin as well as a suitably miserable look at the thought of having nowhere to live.

The most memorable film of the year and one that will be seared into my consciousness forever was “The Alamo”, a big roadshow epic showing at the Odeon in Gillingham starring John Wayne as Davy Crockett. It took me a long time to get over the fact that John Wayne could actually die, even if it was only for a film. Great poster as well. In fact I think it was the very first one I ever bought. It has pride of place alongside my other JW posters including “The Searchers”, “Rio Bravo”, “Stagecoach”, “The Quiet Man” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”. Not that I’m obsessed or anything.

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My dad took me to the Regent ABC in Chatham to see “A Thunder of Drums” and “The Colossus of Rhodes”, one of a number of instances in which the second film was better than the main feature. I think it was also the first time I’d seen an Italian peplum movie, a short-lived genre that would be superseded in the mid-1960s by spaghetti Westerns. Interesting to note that “Colossus” was directed by Sergio Leone who of course made his name with the Dollar trilogy. And by the way I don’t care what anyone thinks – as a kid I loved those gladiator movies. There. I’ve said it. I’m out and I’m proud.

I also managed to catch “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” at the Ritz in Chatham, the movie that went on to spawn the later TV series. The scientific basis of the film that the Van Allen belt surrounding the Earth can catch fire is of course total bollocks. On the other hand when did Hollywood ever let authenticity get in the way of good old-fashioned entertainment?

1961 was also the year I discovered how much I hated “Coronation Street”. The foster parents I was lodged with at the time kindly let me stay up to watch “Rawhide” each week (now that was a good television show) but unfortunately it was preceded by half an hour of the hugely popular but to me deeply miserable saga of folk up North. Give me “Crossroads” any day of the week.

Back in England after father had been demobbed from the navy, we embarked as a family on a tour of Kent where we were ceremoniously ejected from a caravan park in St-Nicholas-at-Wade for non-payment of rent, invited to leave for the same reason from a one-bedroomed flat in Margate near the harbour, and then condemned to three months incarceration in a hostel for the homeless in West Malling before finding a semi-permanent base in the bomb site that was Gillingham.

Above is the archway our family sheltered in overnight down near Tivoli Dykes after being ejected from the flat in Margate as it was too late to visit the welfare office until the next morning. Just think, if I sell enough books they might put a plaque up there one day.

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As usual it was the time I spent in the cinema that impressed me the most, the films released in 1960 some real classics of the silver screen.  Here’s a double-bill my dad took me to see, the main film “Dinosaurus!” getting me into an altercation with a kid at school who maintained that as it had an “X” certificate I wasn’t old enough to have seen it. He reinforced his position by then punching me in the face. However, if you look closely you can see it has an “A” and not an “X” certificate. I rest my case your honour. “The Mole People” scared the living crap out of me though.

If there’s one film from that year which stands out as a highlight of my cinema-going career then it has to be “Ben-Hur”, the daddy of all Hollywood epics. My mum took me to the Ritz cinema in Chatham where it was shown in 70mm. It’s difficult to convey the impression the film made on audiences back in the day so all I’ll say is this. If you’ve only ever managed to watch the famous chariot race sequence from “Ben-Hur” on TV as opposed to a giant cinema screen then you’ve not really seen the film, just a visual palimpsest* of the original version. 

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Here are a few images I purloined from a brochure you could buy in the cinema about the making of the film. My mum didn’t have enough money at the time to purchase it but now, after only sixty years, I’ve finally managed to get my own copy through the magic of Ebay. Note John LeMesurier to the left of Charlton Heston in the last image. He played the doctor who’s just informed the villain Messala, played by Stephen Boyd, that unless they saw off both arms and both legs he’s going to die as a result of having been trampled under Ben’s chariot. Personally I’d have asked for a second opinion.

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Other movies that come to mind from 1960 include those shown above, “The Magnificent Seven” another of my all-time favourite Westerns. 

Finally, a big shout-out to another biblical epic, “The Ten Commandments”. This started  

a family tradition in which my parents would send me off to the cinema with a couple of my siblings without ensuring that we had enough money to actually get in and see the bloody film in the first place. 

* Something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form. My thanks to Umberto Eco for introducing me to a term I’ve been waiting years for an opportunity to use. My work here is now done.

The year 1959 got off to a great start when I found myself along with my three-year-old brother and one-year-old sister sequestered in a children’s home in Kent. I turned seven whilst there and in general we were looked after quite well. Having said that the image above shows a copy of “The Vikings” comic my dad sent me in the post that one of the carers ripped apart in front of me in disgust. Considering what usually happens in some children’s homes I’d say I got off pretty lightly.

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The home was just a few stops down the railway line from where my Gran lived. She was in total ignorance of the fact we were nearby but the rather grainy photo shown above from a local newspaper taken in April of that year gave the game away and before we knew it we were on our way to bonny Scotland to be reunited with our parents. Looking at the photograph more closely I think we had a pretty lucky escape. That huge Easter egg in the middle looks more and more like it’s housing a face-hugger from “Alien” every time I look at it.

We ended up living in South Queensferry just a few miles outside of Edinburgh on the Firth of Forth. I took a trip back to the town a few years ago and the school I went to is still there although the cinema I used to frequent has now been converted into flats.

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Here follows a few of the films I saw during my stay in South Queensferry including “Rio Bravo” which on occasion vies with “The Searchers” as my all-time favourite Western.

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We finally caught up with the rest of the world and got our very first television set whilst living in Scotland. The most memorable program at the time was an early Gerry Anderson  puppet show called “Torchy the Battery Boy”. As you can surmise from the images below it was the stuff of nightmares, especially for a severely disturbed young Sassenach like me. Also, the program was so badly produced it made Anderson’s next effort, “Four Feather Falls”, look like “Citizen Kane” in comparison.

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This is my final “Maynards” blog for 2020. Normal service will be renewed in early January, although after the events of this year I’m not sure what constitutes normal anymore.

Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year!

This is me in 1958 safely back in Blighty in Chatham, Kent, after spending two years in Malta. As you can see the Mediterranean diet did wonders for my teeth. Also, due to spending most of my waking hours in the sun I appear to have morphed from a stereotypical little English boy into a culturally appropriated Mexican kid called Pedro. You know the kind, the one you usually see in cowboy films hanging around town and waiting for the next stranger to appear so they can offer to look after his horse for a couple of pesos and a feel of his gun (although I might have misremembered that last bit).

Oh yes, I almost forgot. I Ieft for Malta as an only child and came back with a brother and a sister. I only asked my mum and dad for one of each but over time the family expanded to include six children, me, three brothers and two sisters. That’ll teach me to keep my stupid mouth shut.

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There were two picture houses directly opposite each other on Chatham High Street, the ABC Regent, and the much bigger Ritz. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It was at the Ritz that I discovered the delights of Saturday morning pictures where I got to see classic serials such as “Captain Marvel” and “King of the Rocket Men” whilst watching the same kid go up on the stage every week and claim a free ice lolly on account of it was his birthday yet again.

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There were so many films to choose from at the time and I got to catch most of them, “going to the pictures” being at least a twice-weekly national event in those days seeing as television was still in its infancy. In real terms this meant that, in December 1958 for instance, I could see “Tom Thumb” at the Regent one week, in the process dreamily falling in love with the actress June Thorburn as the Forest Princess, and then in the same week pop across the road to the Ritz with my parents to take a look at “The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw”, a comedy Western starring Kenneth More and Jayne Mansfield. I must confess that the sight of Jayne’s pneumatic charms barely contained within the confines of a large Cinemascope screen meant I very quickly forgot about English rose Ms. Thorburn back over the road in the Regent like the fickle swine that I was.

My mum was a big Kenneth More fan so she took me to see “The Admirable Crichton” at the Ritz where I asked in a very loud voice to a crowded audience how come his legs had grown back after losing them in “Reach for the Sky”. That was still the level of my understanding as to how the mechanics of film worked. Give me a break though. I was only six. And an idiot.

Check the following link out for further info on the Chatham Ritz cinema:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wetXtjFnHmQ

When I was four-years-old we moved to Malta and ended up living in Birkirkara which is apparently the second biggest town on the island. According to the internet it currently boasts 24,356 inhabitants. In 1956 there was just me, my mum and dad, a thieving git of an islander who stole my cowboy outfit at Christmas, and a dead dog. My waking hours were spent in a small cinema in the town that had a roof which miraculously retracted during the evening to cool the place down. It was in this picture house that I embarked upon a lifelong passion and obsession for film which I have used over the years as a shield to protect me from the pandemonium and uncertainty of real life. And long may that continue.

Here are some of the movies I saw at the time that have remained permanently imprinted on my retina for over sixty years which means I can rewatch them anytime I want to. It’s also cheaper than buying the DVD.

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As you can see John Wayne films were all the rage back in the 1950s and “The Searchers” was the best of them. The film made such an impact on me when I saw it in 1956 that I later sold off one of my children for medical experimentation in order to buy a genuine copy of the poster you see above. Don’t think badly of me though – I still call him every Christmas.

Here is a selection of some of the images from my early childhood that have somehow miraculously survived the journey through the chaos of my life.

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The photo above on the left was taken when I was one year old with my mum, who is about twenty-one at the time. Check out the groovy apron, which was mandatory back in the 1950s. The photo on the right looks like it was taken around the same time, me with my Nan outside her house in Dumpton Park in Kent. I used to love going to see her as she lived not far from Ramsgate which meant we were going to spend the day at the beach.

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Here I am on the left at about a year later with my auntie Brenda, my mum’s sister. We’re on a narrow-gauge railway that ran between Ramsgate and Dumpton Park. In between the stations the train travelled through a very long tunnel, the darkness lit occasionally with second-hand illuminations bought from Blackpool. It’s just recently been reopened – Covid restrictions permitting of course – and is well worth a gander if you happen to be in the area. In the photo on the right I think I may be wearing the very shoes that let me down the day I tried to escape the jaws of a killer tortoise. And if that doesn’t intrigue you enough to make you rush out and buy the book then I don’t know what will.

The image above shows me at the age of three, forced to model a cardigan and a nifty pair of shoes for a toddlers clothing catalogue.

I never saw a penny.

Finally, the poster from a film I saw when I was very young, the earliest memory I have of  going to the cinema with my parents. As I mention in the book I thought that’s where the kids actually lived and I wanted to stay in the cinema with them. In some ways I’m not sure I ever left the place, certainly not mentally anyway.

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the first of what I hope will be one of many posts I aim to create in order to accompany the publication of my thinly-veiled biography “The Maynards of Margate”. This is my very first attempt at trying to write, create and post a blog so bear with me whilst I try to master the art of modern-day online publishing and the intricacies of social media promotion.

All books have a starting point and “The Maynards of Margate” began back in 2016 when, whilst boring my three grown-up children with a story from my childhood for the umpteenth time, my eldest daughter rolled her eyes and said ‘Oh for God’s sake, get the violins out’. And that’s how it all began. I wrote a draft version under that title purely for family and acquaintances and then, with the encouragement of friend and mentor Mark Stay, successful novelist and scriptwriter extraordinaire and all-round good guy to boot, I expanded the original version into a longer book, adding a few more chapters along the way. A lot of the names have been changed to avoid litigation but essentially this is the story of my childhood as I remember it.

If you like my memoir then please recommend it to all your friends. If you don’t then keep it to yourself. After all, I’m trying to sell some books here.

PS. I’ll be posting a new blog each week based on each chapter. Hope you enjoy them.