This post is as much a long overdue tribute to my grandmother on my father’s side as anything else. Her name was Florence, née Wright and she was the first of my grandfather Bertram’s three wives. To have married three times was still quite unusual in those days. His second wife was a secretary of his who, so the story goes, went mad, and the third a rather intimidating Scottish lady called Una, with whom neither my father nor I ever got on (I barely knew her to be fair, but when we did meet the vibes were not at all good). Florence was, I think, badly treated by Bertram and she was certainly treated appallingly by my mother, who thoroughly disapproved of Bertram in any case. For her last, deeply unhappy years she suffered the consequences of a very severe stroke which paralysed one side of her completely. In some ways, my father once said, it would have been better and kinder if the stroke had killed her outright.
Florence was my grandmother and I adored her. My father would take my brother and me over on Sunday mornings and from time to time we would be left there for the entire day which was always a much anticipated treat. Lunch was unfailingly my favourite: roast chicken, frozen Bird’s Eye petit pois and, crucially, crinkle-cut chips, whish I still make for my children in, in a way, her memory. Fruit pastilles were always distributed. Since I liked the black ones best, she bought me packets which contained only those. She was forever knitting jumpers for us and spoiling us with pocket money and subscriptions to a succession of comics and magazines. I remember the Beezer and the Beano, and later a scientific magazine called How It Works. But Valiant holds the most abiding memories for me. As well as standard cartoons like Billy Bunter, the Heavyweight Chump of Greyfriars, The Crows, The Swots and the Blots, and one about a family called “The Nutts” there was more semi-serious fare.
The meatier graphic stories of adventure and derring-do were mostly set during the Second World War or in areas in which today I have no interest whatsoever or very little: the football field, the boxing ring, the cricket pitch and the athletics track. There is a great deal of national stereotyping which would be totally unacceptable now. The main hero was Captain Hercules Hurricane of the Marine Commandos (with his sidekick, “bird-brained” batman “Maggot” Malone) who would say things like “Stone the flaming crows!” a lot as well as “Gnnnnnfffff!” and then go on to wipe out entire enemy platoons with his bare fists. Usually as a result of losing his short-fuse temper. He could tie a knot in the gun barrels of tanks.
In the annual in hand, a section on “Soccer’s Wonder Boys” has photographs of some of them sporting an alarming variety of mullets.
Another favourite was Detective “One-Eyed Jack McBane” of New York’s 94th precinct. The brilliant crime writer Ed McBain, a.k.a. Evan Hunter, could successfully have sued, which he thought about doing in regard to NYPD Blue, that great prototype of so many of the crime dramas which followed it. He was author of The Blackboard Jungle but equally as well-known for his 87th precinct novels, favourites of my mother’s. I am pretty sure that his main character, Detective Steve Carella, wore an eye patch like Jack McBane, but the novels’ great strengths were the plots and the ensemble cast.
Another Valiant stalwart was “Kid Pharaoh” who finds himself in the twentieth century, another was “The Steel Claw”, belonging to a man who became otherwise invisible on receipt of an electric shock, as was “Yellowknife of the Yard” who was both the son of a Sioux Chief and a detective inspector at Scotland Yard. Needless to say his methods were unorthodox. The racial stereotyping there is horrible. “Janus Stark” was another regular, an escapologist extraordinaire.
“Kelly’s Eye” featured an explorer who discovered a gem which when worn around his neck made him indestructible and a crimefighter utilised a small army of robots to go about his business. “Raven on the Wing” was an especially gifted footballer of Roma origins who would only play barefoot. I can also just about recall the “Wild Wonders”, who were reared in the wild somehow and could outperform everyone in the field of athletics, and a village cricket team, “The Test Match Terrors”, made up of an improbable miscellany of characters, each bringing a special, unconventional skill to the game.
Valiant is a guilty pleasure now, but it does bring back some very happy memories, especially of my grandmother with her blue rinse, her glasses and her kindly, smiling face. And crinkle-cut chips.
This must be my christening. I cannot identify everyone, but as you look at the picture, from left to right, there is Uncle Keith, a somewhat strange godparent and devout Methodist missionary in what was then Rhodesia, two along from him my mother’s father Trevelyan, a war hero who lost a hand in the First World War, of whom I was also hugely fond, then at the front, my mother and father and then Florence. On the far right is Bertram.
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