Mucky

Being in my fifties, I now have a hard time dating anything from my childhood, particularly anything from the junior school years. My memory seems to have reduced to mostly toys and comics because that was what was important at the time, or seemed important. I'm told we see colours brighter and sharper during the first ten years, before our optic rods and cones begin to deteriorate. I can therefore now remember colours I'm no longer able to see, not in the same way.

Looking online, I recognise the cover of the Dinky catalogues from 1973 onwards but not the 1972 edition. I seem to recall that the catalogues were dated for the coming year, so I'm presumably able to remember something I saw in 1972 when I was either six or seven. I seem to recall that Mucky was always the first to get hold of the new Dinky catalogue and bring it to school, which was Ilmington C of E Junior and Infants. He was the first kid to get hold of the Eagle Transporter from Space 1999, then the first to have a Dinky Starship Enterprise the following year - which would have been 1975 from what I can work out. We shortened his surname from McFarlane to Mucky so as to save time, which may seem a little cruel with hindsight, although I don't remember the abbreviation carrying the sort of fecal connotations it seemingly implies now that we're all in our fifties. He seemed reasonably clean most of the time.

I was eight or perhaps nine and my entire personality was spaceships, space monsters, robots, aliens, flying saucers, anything a bit weird or futuristic, and particularly if there was a die cast toy to be had. My friends were Sean, Matthew, and Mucky. They were all from the year above mine. We weren't really a gang, more like different parts of a Venn diagram. I have a vague memory of Matthew discovering girls before the rest of us, or at least the general idea of girls, but don't recall him sharing our obsession with Gerry Anderson's spaceships; which just goes to show how wrong you can be. Here he describes our having correlated the school climbing frame with Skydiver from Gerry Anderson's UFO:

 

I can vividly remember mucking about on the climbing frame and all of us being totally in the zone and each playing a certain role on Skydiver, especially exiting via the shoot.  It was a case of whoever reaches the climbing frame first claims control of it, and if the little kids (from Mrs Price's class or lower) got there first then one of us sounded a red alert thereby triggering action stations and they were swiftly removed from the spaceship. Mission accomplished.

 

Matthew seems to have a much better memory of the time than I do, which is depressing considering that I'm slightly younger and don't have any significant periods of living anything which could be described as a rock 'n' roll lifestyle. Apparently I've even managed to forget Mucky's characteristic noise:

 

I can hear the ol' Muckster now as he used to play on the wooden climbing frame while buzzing-humming. Just try this at home now: create a really goofy expression with your teeth protruding as far as possible yet resting on your bottom lip. Now try to hum while blowing saliva bubbles to the tune of Spiderman. It used to piss me off big time when he did that.

 

I dimly recall one occasion of Mucky making this noise as we played on a see-saw and he instructed me on the individual powers of each of the original line-up of the X-Men, but this memory may be partially formed by Matthew telling me about the buzzing-humming thing long after I'd forgotten.

Mucky introduced me to Marvel comics, or at least to the black and white English reprints. I'd seen them in newsagents but somehow had the impression they were kind of trashy. I had the usual Beano annuals at Christmas, and The Topper was still delivered to our house on Sweet Knowle Farm every week, but I hadn't really considered that there might be other options. Every Wednesday a coach took the kids from Ilmington to the swimming baths at the high school in Shipston, and Mark chose one such journey to catechise me with five A4 pin-up pages torn from various Marvel reprints. I don't know why I should specifically remember there being five of them, but I realised that these characters almost certainly qualified as either weird or futuristic and were therefore of obvious appeal. There was Dr. Strange looking dark and mysterious within his abode, stood directly beneath his famous funny shaped window; then an image of the Avengers all running out of a tunnel, for some reason - Captain America, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor and some others; then probably Spiderman, maybe the Beast from the X-Men and I'm not sure about the rest. I was fascinated, particularly by Iron Man rendered in reds and yellows which I'm no longer able to see. Mucky took great pleasure in telling me all about these characters, whom I had assumed were real people by some definition. He told me their names, their affiliations, their powers, even a few personal details.

'Who's that?' I asked as he showed me a pin-up of the Fantastic Four, of which there were clearly five.

'That's Crys,' he said, pronouncing the short form of Crystal as cries. 'She's the girlfriend of the Human Torch.'

'What can she do?'

'She cries.'

This was Mucky's sense of humour, I guess.

On the 8th of March, 1975 - according to the Albion British Comics Database - Marvel UK launched a comic called The Super-Heroes featuring black and white reprints of Silver Surfer and X-Men comics. Naturally Mucky was right at the front of the queue, and kindly lent me a stack of back issues once he'd built up a collection. At least the covers of the first ten look mostly familiar.

It was probably Sean who lent me his copy of Spiderman Comics Weekly, issue 111 dated to the end of March, 1975. I would have attributed it to Mucky but for a distant memory of Sean always wanting to be Spiderman when we played around on the farm on which I grew up. I was usually Thor, having read about the Thunder God in one of those Marvel Treasury Editions printed at broadsheet scale, twice the size of an ordinary comic book. I recall Sean wishing I'd impersonate some other superhero on the grounds that Thor just flew here and there and didn't jump around much. Anyway, whoever lent me that issue of Spiderman Comics Weekly probably felt sorry for me in my ignorance of super-powered costumed adventurers, or maybe just needed an accomplice. It felt a little like forbidden fruit. This was the issue which ends with Peter Parker exclaiming holy fucking shit as he sprouts four additional limbs, rendering him somewhat more spidery than before - which was particularly ironic given that he'd spent most of the issue telling everyone he was about to pack in the whole Spiderman business so as to concentrate on his photojournalism. It was drawn by Gil Kane - although the name meant nothing to me at the time - and made a big impression.

It impressed me so much that I decided I was going to join FOOM, the Marvel comics fan club as advertised in that very issue. FOOM stood - rather chummily - for Friends of Ol' Marvel. I filled in the little form, folded back the cover in hope of concealing the identity of the publication, and took it to my mother for the obligatory parental signature. She took the magazine, then unfolded it to see what the hell I'd been reading.

'Oh my God,' she groaned, rolling her eyes because it was American or something. She probably didn't realise that this issue had been drawn by Gil Kane, but signed anyway. Six to eight weeks later I received membership materials and issue nine of the FOOM magazine. I didn't really understand it because it was mostly writing so I just cut out the pictures and lost them. FOOM issue nine is now worth two-hundred dollars in good nick.

I went to visit Mucky just once. He lived in a house on the Mickleton Road. It was on its own next to the woods, and could be seen from the playing field at the back of the school. It looked like a fairy tale place, a lonely dwelling which might conceal a troll or an ogre, which actually turned out to be true.

Mucky's mother was a bit abrupt and the front room belonged to a terrifying and slightly smelly old man resembling Albert Steptoe who was cemented into an armchair facing the television. I was told that his name was Maverick and I couldn't understand a fucking word he said to me with his possibly toothless mouth, at least not until the end of whatever his address had been when I distinctly heard something hostile about how I thought I was too good for them, them being the McFarlanes. This made me cry and want to go home which, with hindsight, leads me to conclude that I probably was too good at least for this disagreeable old cunt who had no problem bullying eight-year old children.

I was never invited back and I don't remember much about Mucky from that point on. He did well at his eleven plus and went to the grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon. Sean, Matthew and myself ended up at the comprehensive in Shipston. I encountered Mucky just once, possibly 1977 or maybe 1978, coming out of Martins newsagent in Shipston just as I was going in. It took me a moment to recognise him in his fancy school uniform.

'Hello!' I exclaimed, delighted to see my old friend.

'Oh,' he said, 'it's you,' and marched off towards the bus-stop by means of a stride which made it quite clear that there was no point in my following any further line of enquiry which involved him.

Matthew's final sighting came a couple of years later.

 

The last time I saw Mucky was in 1983 while on my moped on the way from Ilmington to Stratford to work one cold and frosty morning. I actually remember the occasion very well as I was riding my Yamaha RD 50cc while our Mucky was riding his Honda 100cc. As I was in a mischievous mood at the time, I remember seeing him coming up behind me on the straight bit near your old farm. Well, as he got closer, I started to move out and kinda block him from overtaking. Silly, I know. To be honest, I think I was just jealous that he was off to a good job with prospects at IDC while I had a bum admin job at Saville Tractors; but surely that is not the reason why the ol' Muckster didn't reply last month to my message to become reunited after twenty-four years?

 

Mucky had briefly showed up on Friends Reunited around 2008 or thereabouts, but failed to respond to my request. Matthew didn't have any luck either.

 

I sent him a cheery note but heard nothing. I could see his picture online but he didn't wanna reunite with me. Putting the ginger hair to one side, it would be good if we could include Mucky in our den (if only to see if he still has a runny nose). He still has that Total petrol tanker Dinky toy I lent him, so it would nice to get that back.

 

Sean, Matthew and myself met up at Sean's house in Rugby in March, 2008. We hadn't seen each other in nearly three decades, but it was wonderful and we've stayed in touch, albeit intermittently, ever since. In some email or other, I wrote:

 

As a brief testimonial to the benefits of Friends Reunited, I've just come back from Rugby where I met with Sean Downham and Matthew Beecham, my best pals when I was about ten. It was fucking great. Both now have wonderful children and jobs I don't quite understand. Matt writes articles about shock absorbers. Although the reunion was strange, it was strange in a good way. There was much talk of things that are not like they were in our day and so on. We drank beer, ate pizza, admired Sean's funky bass playing and unusual pets - a corn snake and a tarantula called Bubbles. Soon we were all swapping toy cars and rubber monster pencil toppers like it was only yesterday; not really, although we did get a pretty major haul of penny chews from the corner shop whilst Matthew distracted the shopkeeper by pretending to have a grazed knee.

 

Mucky could have shared in some of that magic, but I guess it wasn't to be. His loss, I suppose.