We had no idea when we clambered into Lathom Hall as fourteen year old schoolboys that we were trespassing in what was left of one of the “finest Palladian houses in the country”, as Catherine Ostler informed us in the Daily Mail last week.

We also didn’t know that the last Earl of Lathom had been a hopeless hedonist who held dodgy parties there, orgies, I suspect, where guests dressed up as babies and were wheeled about in prams. We wouldn’t have understood if we had known…and, to be honest, it still seems a pretty odd thing to do to me. And we had no idea that he’d had to sell the entire estate in 1925 to pay off his vast debts.

The only thing my friend John Rimmer and I knew when we cycled up the long drive to what remained of this grand country house in 1955 was that it represented a local Lancashire mystery that just had to be explored.

For two boys growing up in rural West Lancashire, the very name Lathom Hall was heavy with romance. This was where the Countess of Derby and her family had been besieged by Roundhead soldiers during the English Civil War in 1644, after which the original Lathom House, more of a castle really, had been torn down, stone by stone.

The house we crept into had been built on the same site in great Arcadian style eighty years later. Unfortunately, by the time we got there, the main building, along with the vast landscaped garden, a Gothic dairy and hunting lodge, had, once again, been flattened. Two large wings, however, still faced one another. One was already derelict and being used for storing farm equipment, but the other was probably in much the same state as when left by the money squandering earl.

I don’t remember how we got in. We wouldn’t have broken a window or anything, we weren’t delinquents, but somehow we found a way, possibly through the cellars. Then we nervously began to creep around this once elegant palace, with its high ceilings and elaborate cornices, each room leading on to the next.

It was the staircases that excited us most as we made our way, scared stiff, up the building through dusty, echoing bedrooms and on up through the attics to a little tower with a domed roof, that stood symmetrically identical to another on the facing wing.

And that was where we found our “treasure”, a couple of large, ornate copper fingers, bent and  twisted and lying in rubble, presumably all that was left of what had been a clock tower.

Technically, I suppose, we were stealing, but we didn’t think of that as we took the fingers home, polished them until they shone, and then put them in the museum I had in a room next to my bedroom.

This was how John and I spent our school holidays, one craze following another, as, the following year, we went digging for Roman coins in the banks of a stream not far from Lathom Hall.

There, knee deep in water, we’d spend days like gold prospectors, digging out the soil and silt before sieving it through a riddle all the time looking for the small, dull grey discs we knew to be denarii. Over several holidays, one freezing in the snow, we were rewarded with a haul of over thirty coins before we lost interest in that particular pursuit and took up caving.

We didn’t tell our parents much about that particular escapade, but, knowing that a network of tunnels had been dug in the sandstone rock a few miles away, we set out to explore. Attempts had been made over the years to block the entrance to the caves but by sliding on our stomachs into a crevice between the rocks we managed to get inside, and, with torches, scramble off into the pitch blackness.

I’d die of fear if asked to do that now, or if any of my children had been so foolish, and I was relieved to learn later that the entrance to the tunnels had been concreted over. But we were fifteen. It was exciting, more exciting than the chicken farm we attempted on another holiday, where most of the chickens died, or the mushroom business we tried which would probably have poisoned us had it worked.

I’m not one of those people who think that today’s teenagers are missing out on excitement, in that their lives are stuffed with computers and electronic toys, rather than the self generated adventures of my youth. John and I grew up in totally different times and circumstances, when there were an awful lot of bleak, rainy days, too, when we just didn’t know what to do. Teenagers will, in every age, find useful and exciting ways to spend their holidays if they want to.

I’m just grateful to have been young when two boys on bicycles could roam freely, in every sense of the word, through their holidays, following hobby after hobby. Those memories have never left me. In fact that day nervously creeping through the rooms of Lathom Hall turned up, slightly disguised, in a recent novel I wrote called Kill For Love, in which an investigative woman TV reporter breaks into a Palladian mansion, just as John and I did all those years ago.

As they say, memory is the best gallery of all, and jolly useful to a writer.

Footnote: Studying the area on Google Earth it looks to me as though the building John and I broke into is still standing, probably converted into swanky flats or offices now.

Kill For Love is available as an eBook on Amazon

We’ve been watching quite a lot of frantic sex in our house over the past few weeks. It happens every year at this time, when BAFTA, the film and TV society for professionals, begin counting the votes for their annual awards ceremony in February, and DVDs of the latest movies are delivered to the homes of its 6,500 voting members.

In this way, along with the usual adventures of spies, detectives, criminals, pirates, vampires, wizards and quirky talking toys, the modern way of sex reaches us.

Or does it? Somehow I doubt it. I mean, if everyone in the country was having sex the way it’s portrayed in most of the movies we’ve been watching recently, it would suggest we’re living in a nation of super-athletes. And a look at any bus queue tells us we’re not.

There was a time when Hollywood bedroom scenes demanded that one foot stay on the floor at all times. As that was plainly impossible for anyone but a couple of contortionists, it was, of course, never tried, and, as was the intention, there was no sex on screen.

Then we got to the Doris Day/Rock Hudson romantic type of comedies where young, attractive, married couples in pyjamas would climb into single beds alongside each other, and, after a couple lines of more or less snappy dialogue, put out the bedside light and go to sleep. If anything, that was even more unlikely.

But was it any more foolish than the way movie sex is now so frequently portrayed, where the actors seem to have been given the direction “bonk as though your life depended on it, as athletically as you can and we’ll add all kinds of exaggerated sounds to make it even more exciting”.

Were these the instructions given to Daniel Craig before he and that Girl With The Dragon Tattoo went at it with such gusto, or to Michael Fassbender before he pretended to do similar things with all manner of people, and in all kinds of manic ways, in Shame?

Admittedly Fassbender was playing a sex addict, so I suppose some over-diligence might be expected in his case. But the bed crashing, the pulsating gasps, the sound effects magnified off the register, and the naked prostitute being addressed against a plate glass window half way up a glass tower block…?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen a lot of tower block windows in my life, but I’ve never seen that. I didn’t believe it, and I didn’t care. And when you don’t believe or care in a movie it isn’t working for you.

For the same reason I didn’t believe last year’s champion in the over-athletic bonking stakes either. That was Julianne Moore in The Kids Are All Right – but it didn’t seem right at all. On the contrary, it was absurd that her character, a lesbian, would suddenly get such a hetero rush for Mark Ruffalo that she went into what looked like frenzied, comic mortal combat with the guy.

I suppose the thinking behind such exaggerated displays of passion is, taking a lead from the porn industry, the more torrid the scene, the more we see and hear, the more entertained we’ll be.

But is that really the case? It seems to me that for sex scenes to really work as the film makers intend, the viewer has to identify with the characters and the emotions being depicted on the screen. Like porn, sex as a spectator sport can quickly become boring.

Despite the legend, it was tedious in the first of the much over-hyped Hollywood bonkathons, Don’t Look Now, which showed Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland at it like over intimate wrestlers. Poetic? I don’t think so. That was in the Seventies, and it was downright ridiculous by the Nineties when Jeremy Irons acted out his trysts with Juliette Binoche in Damage.

I know Irons was playing the part of an MP, so, I suppose, all things are possible, but the scenes of him banging the lady’s head on the floor in mid-passion were neither romantic, nor erotic. People in the cinema I attended laughed out loud. I wondered whether the movie should have been retitled Brain Damage.

Obviously viewers like to see attractive people without their clothes, be it in films, advertisements in magazines or on canvas framed on the walls of art galleries. That’s just the way we humans are. But by turning sex on screen into a display of strength, energy, physical suppleness with off the board sound effects added it seems to me the entire point is being lost.

Which brings me to an example of where, if we are to have depictions of a sexual nature on screen, and why not, it works rather better: Birdsong, the BBC’s two part adaptation of love, infidelity and the First World War.

Yes, there’s a lot of rolling around between glistening, starched white sheets, and the odd peeps at the unembarrassed breasts of a beautiful French actress called Clémence Poésy, but there are no gymnastics.

There doesn’t have to be. Having watched an hour of the soon-to-be lovers catching each others’ eyes and touching ankles, we are as much in love with the idea of them being in love, or, at least, in an enhanced state of mutual lust, as the characters are themselves. That’s how it is, or was, some of us will remember – or at least, that’s how we wished it had been.

In other words we, the audience, are not just uninvolved voyeurs of the passion, but feel we are the characters themselves. Now I know at my time of life, or indeed at any time of my life, I never looked much like Eddie Redmayne, but on Sunday night it was me that Clémence Poésy was looking at with those extraordinary eyes. And I’m pretty sure there were a few million married ladies around the country, who were thinking what she seemed to be thinking, as she gazed at young Eddie. That’s the magic of passion on the screen when it’s done right.

Obviously this filmic strand of Birdsong is just upmarket, literary Mills &Boon really, pretty people, gorgeous French setting, hot summer, stolen moments, impossible desire, all those clothes to take off, etc.. But at heart I bet most viewers (with the possible exception of hormone booming teenage boys with their Inbetweeners comic smut) are a lot closer to Mills & Boon in their romantic fantasies than to Hollywood’s utilitarian bonkathons.

And as someone who sees an awful lot of athleticism masquerading as desire on screen whenever the BAFTAS come around, it’s a rather welcome relief.

Ray Connolly’s novel about the making of a Hollywood movie, Shadows On A Wall, has just been republished as an eBook for Kindle.

Professional footballers up and down the country did what they are paid to do over the weekend.  They tried to score goals, and when some of them succeeded their various team mates rushed to engulf them in euphoric tangles of arms, legs and kisses.

Why such passion? They play twice a week. A goal isn’t that rare a phenomenon.

But then nor are prizes in acting for Kate Winslet who whinnied and hyperventilated in apparent astonishment when a couple of months ago she won yet another. Knowing that she’s brilliant, she must surely have stopped being surprised at her own success years ago. Everybody else did.

And why do we see the regular academic weep-athon when sixth form girls fall upon each other’s necks to sob with joy when they read their A-level results every August?

I’ll tell you why. We are all beginning to behave in the way we think we’re expected to behave. That is to say, the footballers, Kate and the sixth formers are over-reacting by way of tears, gasps and over-dramatic celebrations because that’s how they’ve seen characters over-react for years in melodramatically directed television soap operas.

“Life doesn’t imitate art,” Woody Allen declared some years ago, “it imitates bad television.” And that was in the days when bad television, at least in this country, was nowhere near as vapid as it is now.

So, welcome to our Phony World.

I’m not talking here about the way some of us make ourselves look – fake tans, fake bosoms, fake hair colour, fake teeth. Mankind has always tried to pretty or sexy itself up, whether it be by wearing cod pieces, make-up or bustles. That’s all part of the mating and status raising process. No. What I find odd is that absurd displays of cheesy exaggeration on television have been so absorbed by viewers they are now copied and considered normal behaviour.

They aren’t. There’s nothing normal about the ludicrous scowls of Alan Sugar in The Apprentice. What he presents is a laughable bogeyman in staged scenes of pretend tension. Yet you can be sure that little management Napoleons up and down the country are aping Sugar’s glares and rudeness in offices this very day.

Similarly the pantomime indignation of Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight as he tries to get a politician to answer an impossibly complex question with a single word, “Yes or No”, isn’t real vexation. He’s just playing a part – that of the entertainer interrogator.

It’s cod exasperation and he does it very well, considerably better than all those copycat bullies who no doubt use similar eye-popping smirks in schools, colleges, police stations, courts and offices everywhere, in risible attempts to display their interrogatory skills.

Nothing, of course, is remotely as counterfeit as that found in the virus of reality pop music shows with which Simon Cowell has infected television. Here contestants are encouraged to break down as though their entire families are about to be wiped out at any moment, when actually the very worst that can happen is a quick elimination from the next round; while in front of them judges over-act bullying, falling out, surprise and wet-eyed empathy as they parrot lines of crass banality. “Tonight, you own that song!” they lie, as television manipulation and phoniness reaches its nadir.

And from such flim-flam fakery, and similar less insidious earlier shows, it’s but a small leap before the sobbing virus finds the tear ducts of the young and impressionable. Hence the squealing and sobbing when exam results come through, with older teachers almost certainly thinking: “What’s all the fuss about? I didn’t go into meltdown when I got my results”.

But that would have been before a couple of generations had been born, nurtured and finally brainwashed by camera phones, unreal reality TV, pop videos, online profiles and all things visual. It wouldn’t surprise me if many young people of today feel they are almost living in their own TV programme.

Actually some of them are. On YouTube and our mobile phones we find elaborately rehearsed and stage managed weddings, marriage proposals and all manner of other, usually private, performances. Everywhere we look we find ordinary people acting out parts – perhaps none more so, perhaps, than the Rambo lookalikes of the Libyan civil war.

The movie The Truman Show, in which a boy/young man spends his days unaware that he’s living in a fake world specially constructed so that TV cameras can follow his every move, carried this to a satirical extreme. But then came Big Brother, where participants begin acting up for the cameras by copying the overstated behaviour of soap characters?

With celebrity now an ambition in itself, almost everyone wants to be a star. But sometimes the magnet of instant celebrity is not so warming. Were all those pious pilgrimages to Amy Winehouse’s home by fans carrying roses wrapped in Cellophane really displays of deep and genuine grief? Or were some of those people just turning up because they quite liked her singing, she was famous and local, there were TV cameramen there, and the laying of flowers at a scene of tragedy is what happens on the telly?

In such ways loss for one family may be transmuted into momentary fame for another, as shots of the apparent mourners get their ten seconds on the TV news.

Ah yes, the television news. Obviously by the very nature of their job newsreaders have to frequently announce pretty upsetting events. But does Fiona Bruce have to emote quite so much? She’s sitting there as a messenger, not an actress.

Happily it’s become increasingly rare to hear music used as an accompaniment to news items. But what about those documentaries where it’s poured on to the soundtrack like gravy to heighten tension or stir sympathies…thus turning investigation into entertainment.

Not that phoniness is dispersed only through television. It’s all around us, with party political conferences excusing it as “presentation”.

Closer to home, there’s the false intimacy by which call centre employees so quickly wish to address us when they want to sell us something – overlooking the fact that we are total strangers to them. “Do you mind if I call you John?” they ask cosily. It seems priggish not to let them, even though only they and the tax man know me by that name.

Then there’s the internet where the average Facebook member has, apparently, 130 online “friends”, although he or she will never have met most of them, and couldn’t care less if someone called Dilly in San Diego has lost her cat and wonders if any of her “friends” has seen it!

Often the spurious friendship comes by email. While I’ve been writing this article I’ve had a message saying “We miss you…” from a company selling men’s toiletries, an organisation from which I’ve never bought anything. How can they miss someone they’ve never known?

It’s good to have pals and to know they “sort of” mean it when they say they’ve missed you. But everything else is bogus – not unlike the explosions of laughter which follow the weakest of jokes in those doleful Radio 4 comedy shows.

Not much on Radio 4 is very funny since Linda Smith died. But if you didn’t understand English and could only measure how amusing a line was by the decibels of appreciation that follow its delivery, you might reasonably assume that Radio 4 transmits the utterings of the funniest people in the world.

It doesn’t. Studio audiences are generous with their hearty guffaws because they understand that the very reason they are there is to laugh. But the level of their good humour, as picked up by those strategically placed microphones, invariably sounds exaggerated when heard on our radios. It’s a cheat.

You could argue that since the evolution of our species we’ve always been guilty of duplicity in our dealings with each other, and that the much admired British stiff upper lip was just as phoney in its way as any of the emotional conflagrations on The Only Way Is Essex.

But I don’t think so. British understatement and stoicism were cultural characteristics which took generations and hundreds of years to develop and be passed on. Tat television and the internet is changing us within a few decades.

There was a fashionable phrase some years ago that went “you are what you eat”. Now we’re in danger of becoming what we watch – a nation full of insincere phonies acting like the wallies on the wretched X-Factor.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ray-Connolly-Beatles-Archive-ebook/dp/B0052AFE6S/ref=pd_rhf_ee_p_t_1

“John…” says Sir George Martin measuring his words, “hated his voice. When we were recording he was always asking me to distort and disguise it by putting different sorts of echo on it. In that way when he heard it through his headphones in the studio he could forget that he was listening to John Lennon. I loved his voice.”

So, of course, did hundreds of millions of others who never suspected Lennon’s insecurities. But, for seven years in the Sixties, Martin, the serene, elegantly spoken man who produced every Beatles record, observed in close-up all the little worries and ego clashes of the most famous four people in the world.

It’s sometimes been said that Martin, now 85, was the “fifth Beatle”, in that, as well as helping arrange the group’s recordings, he played on at least thirty five of them. I believe he was more important than that. It seems to me that had the Beatles never met George Martin, they would still have become a great rock and roll band with some terrific songs. But with him, a classically trained musician with an ear for adventure, they became a cultural phenomenon that changed the course of popular music.

To think of Martin solely as the Beatles’ producer as many do, is, however, to overlook four fifths of a remarkable career. Did you know, for instance, that as a young man in 1951 he produced what is probably the most familiar piece of music in the UK, when he recorded the theme music for The Archers? By my reckoning that jaunty little jig (officially titled Barwick Green) has been played getting on for 60,000 times since then.

And it’s pretty certain that if he hadn’t recorded Gerry Marsden singing You’ll Never Walk Alone, that song would not have become the great football anthem which is now sung on the terraces not only at Liverpool Football Club but also at Celtic, as well as clubs in Holland, Germany and Japan.

Before that he’d recorded the evergreen children’s favourite Nelly The Elephant, comedy by way of Goodness Gracious Me from Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren, and Right, Said Fred by Bernard Cribbins. And then there was the London Philharmonic, jazz virtuosi, tunes for Scottish country dancing, piano recitals, choral pieces, the London Baroque Ensemble and much else that was to prove invaluable when he came across the kaleidoscopic song writing talents of Lennon and McCartney. Tens of thousands of records, all of which explains why on Easter Monday BBC 2’s Arena is devoting a ninety minute film to his life and work.

But how did this extraordinarily varied career begin? Well, not in an educated, musical, upper-middle class home as Martin’s carefully enunciated speaking voice might suggest, and as the Beatles first imagined.

“We were very, very poor when I was a child, living in a flat in Holloway, north London, a run-down four storey house with a family on each floor,” he remembers as we talk at his elegant Georgian country house in Oxfordshire. “My father was a machine carpenter, and was out of work for nearly two years in the Thirties. My mother had to scrub floors to keep the money going. The Depression blighted their lives.”

By sheer chance, however, since neither of his parents could play, they always had a piano. “My uncle was a piano tuner, and he started a company with a friend making pianos. Unfortunately they went broke, but as they had a number of pianos lying around we managed to get one.

“I can remember reaching up to the keys trying to play when I was very small. I only ever had eight piano lessons when I was about ten. Then my mother had a row with the teacher. I’m completely self-taught, because I was playing before I got those lessons. I can’t remember not playing. I can’t really explain it, but I was born with an understanding of music and perfect pitch.

“Paul McCartney can’t read or write music but he’s probably the best musician I know, because he has this innate sense of what music is about and the way that it’s structured. I had that, too. I suppose that was why Paul and I related so well.”

When World War II began the family moved out of London to Bromley in Kent. It was there that he heard his first full orchestra when Sir Adrian Boult brought the BBC Symphony Orchestra to his school for a public performance. Captivated, he began dreaming of becoming the second Rachmaninov, and at 16 went to a private recording studio to record a piece he’d composed.

“Looking back it was nothing amazing, a bit florid and Debussy-like by a very pompous little 16 year old git. At the end of the recording I said ‘You have just heard Fantasy by George Martin’, but when they played the recording back to me what I heard was ‘Fain’asy by George Mar’in’,” and he exaggerates a working class, glottal stop London accent. “I thought, ‘Christ, do I really sound like that!’.” From then on, he consciously began to change his accent. To be a composer he would “have to speak like a BBC person”.

University was financially “out of range completely”, and leaving school at 16, with his parents’ anxious advice to “get a safe job…in the Civil Service”, he did that for a year before volunteering for the Fleet Air Army, much to the distress of his mother who was sure he would get himself killed.

As it happened he never saw any action (“we dropped a few depth charges on what we thought was a submarine, but it might well have been a whale”), but got a lucky break when he went to hear a concert by a fairly well known pianist of the time provided by the Royal Navy.

“I missed my piano when I was in the Navy, so after the pianist had finished and the hall emptied I went up to the piano to play to myself. What I didn’t know was that he was still there, heard me, and asked what I was playing, which was one of my own pieces. He then told me I should send it to a chap called Sidney Harrison at the Committee for the Promotion of New Music.”

The result was a sort of pen-pal relationship with Harrison, sending him everything he composed and getting back pages of stern criticism. And when in 1947, now an officer and speaking like one, he was offered a twelve year commission in the Royal Navy it was Harrison who insisted that he should become a musician. He was good at it.

“I didn’t see how I could. I was 21 and had no musical education to speak of. But he arranged for me to meet the principal at the Guildhall School of Music, where, as an ex-serviceman, I was paid for three years to learn composition, orchestrating and conducting and a second instrument, the oboe.”

He could play enough to earn “a kind of a living”, but knew he would never be good enough to be a performer, when, aged 24 he was invited to a meeting at EMI Records. His influential pen-pal Sidney Harrison had recommended him once again.

“I didn’t know what EMI was, but I put on my naval great coat and got on my bike and cycled over to Abbey Road studios…”, where he was promptly made assistant to the head of Parlophone Records on a salary of  seven pounds, four shillings and threepence a week.

Thrown in at the deep end it was a steep learning curve doing every kind of music with the smallest of EMI’s labels. “Jimmy Shand’s Scottish country dance records were our biggest sellers then, but I thought there might be a market in comedy. I loved the Goon Show and recorded Spike Milligan and Michael Bentine. Then there was Rolf Harris, Peter Ustinov (“an expert on baroque music, by the way”) and Flanders and Swann. He produced pop hits, too, most memorably Matt Monro’s Softly As I Leave You and trad jazz with Humphrey Lyttelton’s Bad Penny Blues, which would later become a starting point for the Beatles’ Lady Madonna.

But then he seemed to get it wrong, when, in the late Fifties and now head of Parlophone, rock and roll arrived. Columbia Records, one of EMI’s much bigger labels had Cliff Richard, and the pressure was on for Parlophone to have a rock star of its own. “I knew something about pop music, but rock and roll….I mean it was there, but it was alien to me. I was never a great Elvis Presley fan, so maybe that was a black mark against me because everybody else was…” including Judy, his second wife of 45 years. “I was always looking for a rock and roll act, but…”

Then in 1962 Brian Epstein turned to him in desperation, having seen his group, the Beatles, rejected by every other recording company in Britain.

“When Brian played me their demo tape I told him that if he wanted me to sign a group based on what I was hearing the answer was ‘no’. But he looked so crestfallen I told him to bring the group down from Liverpool and I’d give them an hour in the studio to see what I could find. That was it. I didn’t fall head over heels.”

But then he met them. “We liked each other. They were charismatic. I thought if they could charm the pants off me they could charm the pants off an audience. And if I could find them a hit song I’d have a hit group. They didn’t have a song themselves.” Love Me Do, he still thinks, wasn’t much more than a riff.

Desperate not to let this opportunity pass the Beatles agreed to record a song Martin had been sent called How Do You Do It? (Later a number one for Gerry and the Pacemakers.) They did a workmanlike job, “but John begged me not to release it. They wanted to write their own songs. When they’d first played me Please Please Me it was really dreary, but they went away and speeded it up, and we worked on it and put a harmonica on the beginning and it was great. I think I said at the time ‘You’ve got your first number one’.”

Did he know that later some American disc jockeys wouldn’t play it because they thought it was about mutual heavy petting? He laughs. “No. We were so innocent then.” He pauses, then smiles. “But it’s quite probable it crossed the boys’ minds.”

“The boys…” That’s how he still fondly refers to them, as a schoolmaster might about special pupils. Just how special they were he was soon to discover. “They were eternally curious. They so much wanted to learn, and Abbey Road studios (with its band room full of old, forgotten instruments) was like a fantastic toy shop for them.”

But there was something else. Although he won’t admit it, I believe that more influential than the Abbey Road “toy shop” was Martin’s vast musical knowledge which the Beatles also raided. They knew everything about rock and roll and not much else. He didn’t know much about rock, but he did know a vast amount about other kind of music.

When Paul McCartney (“he always had very good ideas”) brought in Yesterday, it was Martin who scored it for a string quartet, and later when the same writer came up with Eleanor Rigby Martin dug into his knowledge of film music, and, as “it was a very spiky piece”, borrowed from Bernard Hermann’s orchestration for Hitchcock’s Psycho. While for Lennon he wrote and played the electric piano break which sounds like a harpsichord on In My Life, made a Hammond organ sound like a fairground on For The Benefit of Mr Kite.

Was he aware of Lennon’s envy of McCartney’s gift for melody?

He sidesteps the question. “There was a competitive element between them, and if John was envious of Paul’s musicianship, Paul was envious of John’s facility with words. John’s musicianship wasn’t as deep as Paul’s but he had an uncanny knack of finding the right musical vehicle for his lyrics. For instance, Imagine (which Martin didn’t produce) is a simple song based on just a couple of chords. Only John could have written that. Paul couldn’t. Both were incredibly talented people, and scoring points off each other and envying each other, proved to be a ladder that they climbed together.”

Shortly after the Beatles broke up John Lennon said to me, “Paul and me were the Beatles. We wrote the songs.” Was that fair?

“It’s not far off really. They got rid of one drummer in Pete Best and Ringo became the luckiest drummer in the world. How many people would get the opportunity to become an integral part of the Beatles? If they’d changed their lead guitarist, too, and engaged another they would still have been the Beatles because John and Paul would have gone on writing those songs which made them so successful.

“Ringo became a rock solid part of the band and George developed. His early songs were derivative and rubbish. He wasn’t part of the Lennon and McCartney song writing team and he found that frustrating. He would have loved to have had a collaborator but he didn’t and had to work by himself.

“I didn’t encourage him enough, which I regret because I should have done, but I was rather occupied with two other people. Eventually he came up with Here Comes the Sun, which was a great song, and one of the best love songs ever in Something. It makes Paul wince when I say that, because that was Paul’s domain.

“But they were a band and they would work out ideas between them. George was always good for a guitar lick, and Paul, too, sometimes. John would sing his songs to me on his acoustic guitar and then I’d go over to the piano and play what I thought it was, and then we’d decide how we were going to do it.  They’d all put their oar in with ideas. John had immense faith in Ringo’s taste. If he was singing and playing something he’d ask Ringo what he thought. If Ringo said ‘It’s crap, John,’ he’d just drop it and go on to something else.” He pauses. “I don’t think Ringo was quite so honest or vocal with Paul.”

It’s been said that Paul never knew what his best songs were when he’d written them, I suggest.

“He still doesn’t,” comes the reply. “You can’t expect a genius to have the same critical faculties as someone who isn’t a genius, can you? Yes, I think he’s a genius. I’m happy to go into print on that. John, too. When you look back at their work…it’s incredible.”

His loyalty is touching, because his “boys” weren’t always loyal to him. With the Beatles’ success the balance of power in the studio shifted. “When in 1969 they recorded the Let It Be album John said bluntly ‘We want this to be an honest album, George, so I don’t want any of your crap on it’” (referring to the overdubbing of additional instruments and arrangements that had made Sergeant Pepper such a tour de force two years earlier).We’ll play and you just sit there and tell us if it’s all right.’

“So they started recording and it never was right. It was a very unhappy time. They’d be up to take 53. In the end he and George (Harrison) took the tapes away and gave them to Phil Spector to edit, who then did all the things John wouldn’t let me do, overdubbing like mad. I was very cross about that.”

Actually he felt betrayed. He never recorded Lennon again after the Beatles broke up. “After John died Yoko said to me that she wished I’d worked with John once more. If he’d asked me I would have jumped at it, but he never asked.”

McCartney did, and there would be several more chart topping collaborations between the two in the Seventies and Eighties, but, due to the caché Martin had acquired through his Beatles work, he was by then in great demand everywhere. “It gave me a freedom to do what I wanted to do.”

That included composing the scores to fifteen movies, including the James Bond film Live And Let Die (McCartney wrote and sang the title song), building two recording studios, one on the island of Montserrat (sadly later destroyed by a hurricane and volcano), and working with the King’s Singers, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Webb, Celine Dion, Kenny Rogers, the John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, the hit group America and dozens of others. Then there was the night he produced the biggest selling single of all time in Elton John’s the reworking of Candle In the Wind after the death of Princess Diana.

He once assumed that after Sergeant Pepper popular music would go on “building into, without sounding too pompous, a new art form. But then along came punk in the Seventies. The Sex Pistols singing God Save The Queen was like people coming in and dropping their trousers and showing their bums. I found that very disappointing. But what we’d done has fed into the bloodstream so it’s still a part of music as it’s metamorphosed into something else. It’s still healthy.”

Less healthy is his hearing, his “nerve endings withered by sitting in front of the studio speakers all those years”. Now one of the patrons of Deafness Research UK, sounds come across as “tinny and Dalek-like” and when five years ago he was asked to mix the music for the Beatles’ Las Vegas show Love he was grateful for the younger ears of his son, Giles, who is also a record producer. “The thing about deafness is that in a social environment it’s very difficult to tell what’s going on and you feel emasculated.”

Not that that stops him composing, having recently finished a 15 minute choral piece based upon his unused score for the film The Mission. “I write from memory because I know what the notes sound like. But, of course, I will never hear the piece properly.”

It seems a terrible irony but he appears to accept it with a smile: George Martin, still the quietly dignified man who helped make the Beatles something more than extraordinary.

Produced By George Martin will be shown on BBC-2 on Easter Monday,  April 25.

Ray Connolly’s new novel about music, The Sandman, is available as an eBook from Amazon.

When, some years ago, the Queen Mother was asked by screenwriter David Seidler whether she would like a film to be made about her late husband’s struggle with his stammer, she replied: “Not in my lifetime”. Even as an old lady, and many years after his death, the memory of the distress that a speech impediment had brought King George V1 was still too raw.

Because he, by accident of birth, had been fated to become King and the head of a worldwide Empire, at the very dawn of radio. The world wanted to hear the King speak, especially at the outbreak of World War II,  and that he did only with the greatest difficulty.

This weekend, nearly nine years after the death of the Queen Mother, the film, The King’s Speech, about George VI’s relationship with the Australian speech therapist who did much to prepare him for radio broadcasts, opened across the country. Colin Firth plays the monarch in a BAFTA winning performance. I’ve certainly voted for him.

A bad stammer would have been upsetting but mainly a private matter when George VI was just Bertie, the young Duke of York and second son. Public speaking could be largely avoided.

But when, after the abdication of his elder brother, Edward VIII, he became King, the misery and fear at having to speak publicly must have been crippling.

But what is it like to be anyone who can’t get his or her words out, whose explosive consonants repeat themselves unstoppably, whose face goes into rictus contortions at the struggle to speak, whose eyes sometimes close involuntarily, who blushes and gulps for air and whose entire body strains?

What is it like to be terrified of having to pick up a telephone, or buy something in a shop, or ask for a fare on the bus? What is it like to have a really bad stammer?

As someone who grew up with a crippling stammer, and who had one until well into his adult life and career, I can tell you one thing: it isn’t funny. Did King George VI hate the First World War song “K-K-K-Katy, Beautiful Katy” as much as every other stammerer ever since? I’m sure he did.

Not that we don’t find such insensitivity today. “Of c-c-course the king can curse,” ran a headline in a Sunday newspaper about the Colin Firth film. To most people it would seem an innocuous headline. But, believe me, stammerers winced internally when they read it, as recollections of mocking chants in the playground flooded back.

Nor is it only children who can be cruel. “C-C-Co-nn-olly!” one Latin teacher would call me, before later deciding I couldn’t be in the school choir because I was “too jerky”.  He mustn’t have known that stammerers don’t stammer, or “jerk”, as he put it, when they sing? Though I could certainly sing, I was excluded from the choir.

But then, as most young stammerers quickly recognise, being excluded is part of everyday life. I was rarely asked questions in class because I could never speak to answer them. One French teacher suggested that I should run out to the front of the class and write the answer on the board because she didn’t have time to wait while I got the words out. Thirty seconds, maybe?

I didn’t take up her suggestion. That would have meant making an even bigger exhibition of myself. So she didn’t ask me any questions. I became silent and invisible.

That’s common, too. Unable to display much personality other than that of someone who seems to be tearing his face apart in order to make conversation, who is bursting with frustration, and who, yes, is often fearful of being mocked, young stammerers tend to keep quiet. It’s easier that way.

There’s clearly far more understanding of stammering today than when I was a boy, but I strongly suspect that those who stammer are still often regarded as basically timid, nervous types. That, it’s assumed, is why they stammer.

Actually that’s back to front thinking. In my experience if stammerers appear any more nervous than anyone else it’s because they know they’re going to stammer, not the reason they stammer.

It was probably with this misapprehension in mind that my headmaster wrote to my mother when I was in the sixth form suggesting that he might be able to put a word in for me in some form of local government where I would never have to speak. It was a kind thought, but I had other plans.

Not that university was easy at first. After giving a class paper in my first few weeks, and thinking I’d done rather well, I was brought down to earth when my blunt tutor privately said to me: “I suppose you realise we couldn’t tell what you were saying most of the time”, and advised me to see the college psychiatrist.

As it happened I had, by then, been seeking help for years, at first from an elocutionist, later from a child psychologist and a speech-therapist. All kinds of techniques were tried, from breathing exercises, to copying the sounds on spoken records. There’d even been questions about my sex life. At fifteen I’d been asked by a buxom young speech therapist whether I ever did anything when I was alone of which I was embarrassed or ashamed. It was only years later that I realised what she was talking about.

At university they were Freudian times. When explaining to the college psychiatrist how I had trouble speaking when asking for my fare in the Tube station, that is projecting my voice into the hole in the ticket seller’s window, I was asked whether I thought I might have a sexual problem.

No, I’d never thought that, I replied. Not that I’d ever had any sex either.

You could say, to use modern parlance, that my stammer defined me. Plum, my wife recently admitted that before she introduced me to her flat-mates she warned them about my speech. And when we became engaged her aunt advised her that she was taking on someone with a serious handicap.

It was a problem, but somehow more for others than for me, because, in my head, I didn’t stammer, I was quick witted, even good with words. And it’s just possible that having a stammer inadvertently made my career.

I couldn’t talk, so I wrote, eventually forcing myself in my mid-twenties to the attention of the brilliant editor Charles Wintour at the London Evening Standard Fleet Street, where I was given the job as an interviewer that changed my life.

Not that my speech changed much at first. Recently playing back some interview tapes made forty years ago I was shocked to realise how difficult it had been for me to speak then. But I was warmed, too, to hear how patient so many very famous people had been to me.

I still stammer, although not when you might expect. I frequently go on radio and television and address classrooms and halls full of people and speak just about fluently. Publicly my speech is no longer a problem. But, in truth, in those situations I’m faking it. Like an actor I’m playing the part of a person who doesn’t stammer.

But around the house with my family, or with friends who know me well, the stammer is usually there. I don’t act with them. I’m me. I suspect that when George VI relaxed at Buckingham Palace, having triumphed over his handicap and made an entire speech word perfect, he slipped back into his normal halting delivery with those closest to him.

Great progress has been made with the treatment of stammers in recent years, with the emphasis gradually moving away from psychological causes. But, although brain imaging studies show significant differences between the brain activity of people stammering and fluent speakers, there’s still no single explanation.

Generally about one per cent of the adult population stammer, with a slightly higher figure in children, nearly four times as many boys as girls having a problem. Nothing in the statistics suggest that the number of people who stammer is changing over the generations, but, as I seem to be less aware of it these days, perhaps speech therapists are helping children at a younger age.

As the Queen Mother didn’t want The King’s Speech made in her lifetime, I wouldn’t have written this article when my mother was alive, my articles on the subject then always making light of it. I hid the hurt with jokes, because there was absolutely nothing more she could have done to help me. But if you have a child with a bad stammer don’t assume that because your child doesn’t complain he or she isn’t suffering torment inside.

I don’t suppose George VI complained very much. But his widow felt his pain for the rest of her life.

Love, like youth and sex, can be wasted on the young.  Naturally I didn’t think like that when I was young. No young person ever does. For the young, who reinvent the romantic wheel with every first flush of adolescent hormones, love is theirs alone, their beatifying joy and their anguished misery. Surely, they believe, no-one who isn’t shining with youth can ever fall in love.

But they can, and they do. Because, though limbs may begin to creak and complexions crease, no-one is old in their heads. Hearts still leap at a smile from a beloved: just to be close to the object of devotion makes the world a warmer place.

When it comes to romance most of us are psychologically frozen at somewhere between the ages of sixteen and twenty. I know I am. That’s the time in our lives when everything is new and at its most intense. But if we think that’s the only time when our hearts metaphorically flutter, we’re wrong. The bathroom mirror may tell us one thing, but the one inside our heads shows a quite different picture – that of our own eternal youth.

Sometimes some of us, like seventy five year old Michael Andrews who briefly met and then fell head over heels in love with the 90 year old Duchess of Devonshire, can behave inappropriately when in the grip of a new romantic obsession. That can be sad.

“Silly old fool,” the cruel probably commented yesterday as the Duchess finally had to resort to magistrates to prevent her suitor from further pestering her with his letters and texts of adoration. But those who did forget what for millennia poets have called the divine madness that love can bring. And they overlook, too, that age is no impediment to infatuation.

Most songs and films, tell it differently. For them love needs the bloom of youth if it is to sell, so it’s tender and true, sweet sixteen and salad days innocent. That’s understandable. Young love is so much more tuneful and prettier on the eye, and we’ve all known that teenage tug of the heart, that glance or smile that can change a day and then a lifetime. One changed mine. We like to remember and relive those moments and feelings through others in melodies and movies.

But old love is no less intense. Traditionally we smiled at the charming image of a Darby and Joan later life. Robert Browning wrote “Grow old with me, the best is yet to be…” and that was the ideal. It was a pleasant dream, but ideals don’t last for ever. Age can wither hearts as well as bodies, and death will inevitably take one partner sooner than the other. In any couple there is always a survivor.

Until relatively recently that often meant years, even decades, of loneliness. For many it still does. And who is to say that for some memories of love are not enjoyed more than new ones?

But for others there are new possibilities now as attitudes change and lives get longer, fresh chances of romance and companionship, extra avenues for making relationships. Recently I met up with a former tutor from my Sixties’ university days. Now 81 and divorced he’s found a new love on an online dating site. She’s a widow. They’re very happy.

Not that any of this will be much consolation to the heartbroken Mr Andrews, who, it has to be said, might have been pitching his affections at someone somewhat out of his league.  Not, I hasten to add, that the Duchess might have considered herself too grand for him. Absolutely not.

But didn’t he know that the lady is a keen Elvis Presley fan? Did he really think he could compete for her affections with Elvis? Divine madness indeed.

First published in the Daily Telegraph on  January 6, 2011.

Ray Connolly’s latest novel, The Sandman, is available on Kindle from Amazon.

The sad, early death of Gerry Rafferty yesterday got me thinking about that alto sax intro on Baker Street and how in 1978, not knowing who was singing, I went into W.H. Smith in Kensington High Street and told the girl on the record counter that I wanted the one with the saxophone introduction.

She looked at me as though I was speaking Chinese and it wasn’t until I sang the saxophone part (played, I now know by a guy called Raphael Ravenscroft) that she said: “I think you mean Baker Street.”

Since then Baker Street has rightly become a classic track, which, it seems to me, was badly missing, along with much else, on New Year’s Eve at the firework display at the London Eye on the Thames. God knows who arranged the music to accompany what was an astonishing display of pyrotechnics, but if he or she or they were a day over 35 I’d be amazed.

Now, I don’t doubt that the vast majority of people waiting to watch Big Ben do its bit were predominantly young, but the other 60 million around the country who had stayed up to see in the New Year on television were of all ages and all tastes, and the music played should have reflected that. It didn’t. It was all pop and, apart from Beatle and Queen sops to the elderly, overwhelmingly too recent.

For an occasion like this there should have been themes and songs that people in this country of all ages know and love. By all means include some newer stuff for the young, but where was Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March (the bit before Land of Hope and Glory comes in), or the Bee Gee’s Night Fever? What about the Fine Young Cannibals’ Good Thing, the Rolling Stones’ Brown Sugar, Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again, Eric Clapton’s Layla riff or Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus?

Everyone would have their own list but why not Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax, Love Is All Around from Wet, Wet, Wet and Greensleeves? I would have found space for the Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams maybe even Cliff ’s The Young Ones and certainly Gerry Rafferty’s  Baker St saxophone riff. As for the Beatles’ All You Need Is Love would have been a better choice to start the year than Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. We didn’t need telling there were diamonds up there: the sky was full of them, magnificently popping and exploding wherever we looked.

Queen’s We Will Rock You was a good choice, but Status Quo’s Rockin’ All Over the World would have fitted, too. What’s happened to us Brits? We used to be good at music ‒  for all ages.

Ray Connolly’s latest novel about music, The Sandman, is available for Kindle from Amazon.

Harry watched as the little girl, the tip of her tongue poking from the corner of her mouth, compiled her list. Finally at the bottom of the page she wrote in fluorescent pink: “Happy Christmas. With love from Amy xxx”. Then, sticking a couple of shiny stars next to her name, she folded the paper and put it into a small envelope from her stationery set.

“Aren’t you going to show us what you’ve asked for?” Helena, her mother, asked.

She shook her head. “It’s a secret. Only Father Christmas is allowed to know.” And climbing down from the table she crossed to the fireplace. Suddenly she frowned. “How do you make the envelope go up the chimney?” she asked, confronted by a display of dried hydrangeas in a grate that hadn’t seen a fire in forty years.

“Don’t worry about that, we’ll find a way,” Helena said. “Now, come on, it’s time you were in bed.”

“You won’t forget, will you? If he doesn’t get it, he won’t know what to bring me.”

“We won’t forget. Now go and kiss Daddy and I’ll come up in a minute and read you a story.”

Harry held out an arm as Amy reached up to him, the warmth of her little body radiating through her pyjamas. Then, pushing the envelope into his hand, she scampered off up the stairs. From the next room he could hear the sound of laughter where his two older children were watching television.

“So, does she still want to be a princess?” Helena smiled as Harry opened the envelope and considered the list.

He passed it to her.

“My! She’s hopeful. ‘A pink princess dress with real fairy wings, Toy Story 3, How To Train Your Dragon…Yummy Dough…Tabby McTat… ’”

“Then there’s Rock Band for Ben, new trainers and a skateboard…” Harry said.

“Catherine wants some boots and needs a new coat and…well, everything really. She’s growing so quickly.”

Harry considered the fairy lights blinking on the small Christmas tree he’d bought and decorated that evening. It had been something to pass the time. “I think I’ll go and do some work,” he said at last, and, avoiding Helena’s eyes, made his way upstairs to the little box room he called his study.

Work? There was no work. But now it was his turn to make a list. Four hundred pounds, he quickly estimated ‒ that would be the cost of Christmas, even if he cut the requested presents by half. No, five hundred, maybe more, if he included the turkey and something to drink at lunch on Christmas Day when Helena’s parents and her sister’s family came over. It had been agreed it would be his and Helena’s turn this year. But that had been last Christmas, before the round of staff cuts in January.

Switching on his computer he logged on to his current account for the third time that day. It was no use. No matter how often he recalculated there would be hardly enough to cover the mortgage, and he was already a month behind.

He closed his eyes. It had been a shock when he’d been made redundant. “You’ll find something else soon,” Helena had consoled. But he hadn’t. Now, after a hundred and seventeen applications he was a middle-manager of forty four with a family to support and nothing to manage.

One by one he listened as the rest of his family came to bed, Ben at 12, bounding noisily up the stairs at nine thirty to have one last session with his PlayStation before sleep, and an hour later Catherine, quieter, 14 now and self-conscious about everything there was to be self-conscious about. Helena came up when Newsnight finished. “It’s nearly half past eleven,” she said quietly, putting her head around his door.

“I won’t be long,” he replied, and then sat motionless until well after two as the house grew cold around him. Christmas was the time for giving and this year he couldn’t afford to give anyone anything. He’d let everybody down.

*

“I’m sorry, Mr Allerton. There’s absolutely nothing. It’s always difficult around Christmas. Perhaps in the New Year…” The recruitment officer, a narrow faced young woman in a stern, black suit, let the suggestion hang. “Have you registered with…?”

“I’ve registered with everyone,” Harry interrupted. “Everywhere. Look, I’m not necessarily looking for what I had before. I know that’s not possible. But, well, just a bit of something temporary…  I mean, I’ve got children and…” He heard his voice begin to quaver and looked quickly down at his hands.

That wasn’t what responsible people like him were supposed to do. From the beginning it had been about keeping up appearances, and letting slip the fiction of doing consultancy work from home ‒ “so much easier now that everyone’s online”. No one believed him, apart from Amy. He knew that. At six years old she believed everything her Daddy told her ‒ even that he’d posted her letter up the chimney the night before. Ben had been gently teasing her for still believing in Father Christmas as they’d been getting ready for school that morning, but she’d been adamant. “He is real, isn’t he, Daddy?”

“How else would you get your presents?” he’d reassured with a wink to Ben. She’d learn the realities of life soon enough.

Now, across the desk in the Professional Professionals’ Recruitment Agency, the young woman in black closed her file and lowered her voice. “Perhaps, Mr Allerton… have you tried the JobCentre?”

*

“Ah, I was wondering where you were!” Helena’s smile greeted him as she took the pizzas out of the oven. “Do you think you could pick up Amy from school tomorrow? I said I’d help decorate the surgery.” Since the autumn she’d been helping out at the local health centre.

“Er…actually, I can’t,” Harry said, giving Amy a jokey Gruffalo growl. “I’ll be…working.”

Helena’s face widened in surprise. “Really! That’s terrific. Doing what?”

“Oh, nothing special, some seasonal promotion over in that new shopping mall at Forreston. Just for a couple of weeks until Christmas.”

“Well, that’s good news. Don’t worry about Amy. I’ll arrange something else.”

It wasn’t a complete fib, Harry told himself, as the children gathered and chattered about their day. And Forreston New Town was a good fifteen miles away, so no-one would ever know.

*

He took the bus to Forreston the following morning, his company car having long since disappeared with his job. Mr Peploe, the mall’s manager, a man of about his own age, was waiting for him.

“Actually, we’d been expecting someone quite a bit older,” Peploe said peering at Harry with a slight frown as he welcomed him into his office. “But…maybe it’s for the better. We had a slight disaster yesterday when the chap we’d hired suddenly had a problem with his pacemaker. Hence the emergency call to the JobCentre. Anyway, if you’d like to get changed…” And he passed Harry a large box.

Fifteen minutes later, at seven pounds an hour, Forreston Mall’s substitute Father Christmas took his place in Santa’s Grotto alongside the giant Christmas tree. “I’m not embarrassed, demeaned or ashamed,” Harry tried to tell himself from inside a voluminous red coat and hood, much of his face hidden behind a cotton wool beard and moustache, his eyebrows dusted white with talcum powder, and baggy red trousers tucked into large snow boots. “It’s honest pay for honest work and it’ll help get us through Christmas.” But he was all of those things.

The morning was slow and the first visitors to Santa’s Grotto were of pre-school age. Some cried as they were pushed towards him by over-enthusiastic young women, and, nervous in this new role, he didn’t quite know what to do. Should he say “Yo-ho-ho” and pull a funny face? Or put a comforting arm around them? Best, he decided, to simply smile kindly, offer a cheap toy and wait for their mothers to retrieve them.

Mostly, though, the toddlers just gazed at this strange man who asked them what they wanted for Christmas, and then gave them something else. And, as he gradually relaxed, he was cheered as he saw how the mothers were enjoying it all, their camera phones flashing to record the moment.

The afternoon was busier as the mall filled, and the seasonal music got louder. With Slade now wishing the shoppers “Merry Christmas, Everybody”, the children became ever more demanding, reeling off lists of magic sets, Twilight dolls, Thomases and Ben 10s. What on earth could a five year old want with an iPhone, he wondered, amused. Compared with some of the requests he was hearing, Amy’s expectations seemed reasonable.

*

He was exhausted when he got home. “So how did it go?” Helena asked as he hung up his coat.

“Oh, not bad.”

“And the people you’re working with?”

“Oh, you know, young…demanding…excitable.”

“What exactly are you doing?”

“Well, just talking to clients really. Helping Forreston Mall connect with the local community. That sort of stuff.”

“But you’re enjoying it?”

“Yes, actually, I am,” he said truthfully. He’d surprised himself. Apart from those few early uncertain moments it had been very enjoyable.

After that every day got better, as in the mornings he looked forward to the day ahead. For months he’d slunk silently around his home, going running, a lifetime pursuit, when he thought it least likely any neighbours might see him.

But in the Forreston Mall, in his red coat and white beard, he was a star. Everybody loves Father Christmas and soon the staff from Between-the-Slices were bringing him sandwiches, and the Polish boy at Monika’s was supplying free lattes and a joke a day. While, after deciding that his cheeks weren’t rosy enough, a couple of beauticians from All Maid Up were taking it in turns to rub rouge into his cheeks every morning ‒ reminding him among giggles to make sure he washed if off before he went home at night.

Redundancy had been a shattering financial blow, but only now did he fully realise how crushing had been the sense of being locked out of the working world and its daily camaraderie. And, as the queues of children outside his grotto grew ever longer as the big day approached, Forreston Mall, with its shop assistants and security men, sales managers, cashiers and shelf packers became his mall…his people.

“You’re very good at this, you know,” Peploe, the Mall’s manager, said thoughtfully as Harry changed out of his Santa Claus outfit one night. “Much better than any other Father Christmas I’ve ever known…excellent at getting on with people. Do you mind if I ask what you normally do?”

“Oh, you know, a bit of everything really,” Harry murmured, ripping off his woolly white beard. Telling Peploe how far he’d fallen would have been to confuse their relationship.

*

“Do you think he wears a seat belt?” Amy asked a couple of nights before Christmas.

“Do I think who wears a seat belt?” Harry replied, balancing on a chair as he Sellotaped a Survival card of an igloo above the sitting room door.

“Father Christmas. It must be very dangerous going across the sky in his sleigh in the dark.”

Harry hid a fond smile as he got down from the chair. “What do you think, Catherine?” he asked his elder daughter who’d overheard the conversation.

“Bound to,” the girl laughed. “He probably has one around his sack, too, to make sure the presents don’t fall out.”

“I thought so,” Amy came back sensibly, and went to get some more Christmas cards.

Harry watched her go. Any day now some child at school would tell her the truth and the first myth of her little life would be exploded. It would be nice if she could believe for just one more Christmas.

*

“I’ll be doing the last of the Christmas shopping tomorrow,” Helena said as they went to bed that night. “It’s okay if I use our joint account to buy the rest of the presents and stuff, isn’t it? I mean, we can afford…?”

“Oh, yes, we’re fine,” Harry reassured, putting out the light. “Whatever happens in the New Year we’ll be able to get through Christmas.” He had no idea what January would bring, but Father Christmas wouldn’t be letting Amy or anyone else down this year.

*

From the moment the doors of Forreston Mall opened on Christmas Eve a queue of toddlers and their already exhausted mothers began forming outside Santa’s Grotto. “I suppose this is my big day,” Harry thought, as he told the little ones to make sure they were good and went to bed early so that he could bring them their presents.” And he smiled to himself as one after another they nodded in excitement.

To keep the spirit of the season going right until the last minute, a surprise shower of fake snow had been arranged for the afternoon. And as the flakes began to fall on the Christmas tree and Santa’s Grotto, a large choir of carol singers arrived, collecting funds for a new dialysis unit at Forreston Hospital.

How generous people are, Harry thought, as the choristers’ children, armed with gaily painted plastic buckets, waylaid shoppers, who, in the midst of the rush, still smiled  and searched in pockets and handbags for some change.

“God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, let nothing you dismay,” sang the choir as money rattled into the children’s buckets and a TV film crew came and went, collecting images for that night’s local news.

“Let nothing you dismay,” Harry reflected, as he jiggled a little boy’s reindeer antlers. It was a good message. He would remember it.

It was nearly closing time before the choir decided they’d sung enough and the collectors presented their, by now, heavy buckets in front of the Christmas tree. The queue for Santa’s Grotto was finally thinning, too.

Nearly time to go home, Harry thought sadly. It was the end of his job. And, looking to make sure he had enough presents in his sack for the latecomers, he didn’t notice a little girl in pink step up to him.

“And what’s your name…” he began to say as he turned back. Then he stopped.

“Amy,” a familiar voice said.

He couldn’t speak.

“And I want a pink princess dress with real fairy wings. Don’t you remember, I wrote to you?”

Harry tried to disguise his voice. “Oh, yes, I remember.”

Amy was now peering closely at him. Somewhere at the back of the queue Helena would be standing with the other parents, not recognising him.

He looked away, so that all Amy would be able to see would be his red Father Christmas hood.

But Amy followed his movement, her face closer than ever now.

“Well, I think you should go to bed early tonight or else…”

But she’d seen enough. “Daddy!” she said, her eyes bright in astonishment.

Harry gazed at the little girl. The moment she stopped believing had arrived.

But at that moment there was a shout from the carol singers, then another and the sounds of a scuffle. “Stop! Thief!”

Harry looked towards at the choir. One of the singers was struggling with a couple of youths, wrestling to grab back two buckets of charity money. But the thieves, with the advantage of surprise, were stronger. In an instant they were racing away down the mall, buckets in their hands.

Harry stood up. “Go back to Mummy,” he said. “Quickly, Amy!”

But even before the child, wide-eyed at her discovery, could back away he was off, running after the thieves, a surprisingly agile Father Christmas, angry that the goodwill of ordinary people was being thwarted here in this mall, the place that had given him new hope.

Down the main hall he went, out of the fake snow shower, dodging around shoppers, in between stalls of crackers and oranges, past a warm brazier where chestnuts were roasting, all the time his eyes on the two young thieves. His snow boots were heavy, but he had an advantage. He’d always run. He was still fast, and as the youths were dashing into an oncoming crowd, his path in their wake was clearer.

The chase ended quickly. Turning a corner that would have taken them out through the service doors the young thieves found themselves heading straight for racks of new suits already being rolled out for the Boxing Day sales. As they hesitated, Harry was on them, rugby tackling the nearest, his Father Christmas hood falling from his head, his cotton wool beard torn away, a bucket of money flying across the mall…

*

It was the first time he’d been on television, and he squirmed in embarrassment as he watched himself, an angry Father Christmas rolling on the floor, as two young men took angry kicks at him before making their escape ‒ without the carol singers’ money. The TV crew, sent out to cover last minute shopping, had accidentally caught the end of the incident.

“Well, there goes my anonymity as Father Christmas,” Harry said bleakly as the reporter announced the name of the “hero” to the world. “Everyone knows now.”

Helena passed him a cup of tea. “I’m proud of you.”

“Proud? For chasing a couple of yobs. It was hardly heroic. They were half my size. I was just angry.”

“Proud of you for…well, wanting to make Christmas nice for us all”

He didn’t reply. On the way home Helena had explained how, with the two older children out doing their own shopping, she’d taken Amy to Forreston Mall when she’d been unable to get Catherine the boots she’d asked for nearer home.

“Where is Amy, by the way?” he said at last. She’d been very quiet since the incident in the mall.

“In her room.”

“I think perhaps I’d better pop up and see her,” he said. “Part of her world came tumbling down today.”

Amy was at her desk as he reached the top of the stairs, a red felt tip in her hand. She didn’t look up. He peered over her shoulder. She was drawing a Father Christmas surrounded by sacks of presents. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“You should have told me,” she said quietly.

“Told you?”

“Yes.” Then, looking up at him, she smiled brilliantly. “All this time I’ve been wondering who Father Christmas was and where he lived. I never knew he was my Daddy and lived here with me all the time. That’s so exciting!”

Leaning over, he kissed the top of her head.

“There’s just one thing I don’t know,” she went on.

“What’s that?”

“Well, it might be a secret, but…where do you keep the reindeers?”

*

Harry will begin a new job in the New Year ‒ as assistant manager at the Forreston Mall.

© Ray Connolly 2010

Let Nothing You Dismay was first published in The Lady magazine, December 21, 2010

“So, how did you get on putting your new book online?” That’s what I get asked quite a lot these days, a reference to how in August I began serialising my latest novel, The Sandman, free on my website. A thriller about music, social networking sites and cults, I reckoned it fitted the moment.

Well, so far I think I’ve been proved right, largely, I must confess, since the Guardian published a piece I wrote outlining what I was doing and how publishing was changing. Until then my website had been attracting no more than 150 readers a day, but on the day the article appeared it got an astonishing 50,056 hits. Eureka!

Naturally the level of online traffic levelled off after a hectic week, but it never dropped to fewer than two and a half to three thousand visitors a day until the serialisation ended in mid-October. Since then the figures have returned to a regular couple of dozen more than where they were before it began.

Now, in terms of book sales a following of maybe a couple of thousand isn’t huge – although many a hardback novel struggles to sell a thousand copies these days. And it was interesting that when offered the choice between downloading the entire book immediately for £4.99 or reading the free serialisation, the serial won hands down. Readers clearly didn’t want to pay for instant access if they could get it for nothing as a drip-feed.

But most interesting was the geographical breadth of The Sandman’s readership. Obviously the greatest following came from the UK and the US, but there were also many readers in Russia, Japan, Australia, the Scandinavian countries and Germany, France and Switzerland ‒  twenty five countries in all. What was really surprising was to find people downloading the entire book chapter by chapter in Moldova and Ukraine. I hadn’t expected that.

I’m not a tecchie but over the last few months I’ve learned how to trace IP addresses, and the idea that someone is following my novel on his or her computer in the Carpathians does give a certain buzz.

My great worry when I began was that people would read the first few chapters and then miss and episode or two and lose interest. I’m sure that happened in some cases, but many readers stayed with the book, quite a few of whom, I worked out, were reading the chapters every morning at work.

I could almost set my watch by the time readers came to the website in the Lancashire County Council offices in Preston and the UCL department of medical physics and bioengineering, before, as the day wore on, regulars logged on to the latest episode in New York and Washington, later in Texas and Chicago, and, towards the end of my working London day, in California.

Having given the stragglers several weeks to catch up with the final chapters, the free The Sandman is no longer available on my website. I’ve now put it on Amazon’s Kindle, which means it can be bought and read anywhere in the world on Kindles, iPads, iPhones, BlackBerries and almost any Android device, as well as on computers. There’s been some interest from TV, too. We’ll see.

Like other authors whom, I now hear, are putting their books online, I would obviously have preferred it if a big publisher had snapped it up, given me an advance, sold foreign rights, put The Sandman into the shops, advertised it and got it reviewed in newspapers.  Because, although it’s now relatively simple to put a novel online, without a publisher’s marketing force it isn’t easy to let the world know about it.

But it didn’t happen. And now, as agents continue to struggle to sell fiction to publishers, things are changing on an accelerating basis. This Christmas millions are being spent on persuading us to buy easy-to-read electronic devices like Kindle and iTab, and with more digital books said to have been sold in the US this year than hardbacks we can all see that a publishing revolution is on us. Just this week Google launched its Google eBooks website in opposition to Amazon and Apple.

I don’t for a minute think the reader will be forced any time soon to choose between digital and print. Surely the future points to the two co-existing alongside each other. But for the writer it means a new avenue of communication has been opened.

Where any of this leaves The Sandman, I really don’t know. But it’s fun to be in at the start of something new.

Ray Connolly is the author of fourteen books, several screenplays, TV series, short stories and radio plays. The Sandman is now available as an eBook from Kindle on Amazon.

JOHN LENNON – THIRTY YEARS LATER

An old friend of mine, David Johnson, reminded me today of something I wrote in a short biography of John Lennon just after John was murdered. I said then, and I’m, pleased to say, I agree with myself, now:

“The American composer Aaron Copland once said that when future generations wanted to capture the spirit of the 60s all they would have to do was to play Beatle records. That’s true, but I would go further. Future historians will find that understanding of the 60s and the 70s widens immeasurably by focusing on the life of John Lennon. From Liverpool war baby to killer’s victim just across the road from Central Park, Lennon’s every interest tells a story of the times. The widespread grief at his death was compared with the mourning which followed the assassination of President Kennedy [in 1963]. No one should have been surprised, though many were.

One of the reasons was that “Lennon chose the role of anti-hero for much of his life, casting off the trappings of glamour, throwing aside the shell of lovable immortality. John Lennon would never have made a politician. Political heroes are pragmatists. That is their job. John Lennon had no time for pragmatism. He was outspoken about everything and everybody, and then bore the consequences for his outrageousness.”

I would add now that although he may have allowed a naïve, well-meaning heart to be ruled by a hasty, agitprop head at times, and that he undoubtedly said some daft things as well as wise ones, he wasn’t afraid to say what he thought. Put another way he wasn’t afraid to call a spade a spade, even if it turned out to be a wheelbarrow. That was what I liked about him—his contrary spirit, his Beatle impudence, his contradictions, and, most of all, his wit.