Billy Liar on the Moon

BILLY LIAR ON THE MOON

by

KEITH WATERHOUSE

With a new introduction by

ALICE FERREBE

VALANCOURT BOOKS

Billy Liar on the Moon by Keith Waterhouse

First published London: Michael Joseph, 1975

First Valancourt Books edition 2015

Copyright © 1975 by Keith Waterhouse

Introduction © 2015 by Alice Ferrebe

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

Cover by Henry Petrides

INTRODUCTION

What’s the ideal profession for a compulsive liar? Public relations, of course, and in Keith Waterhouse’s 1975 sequel Billy Liar on the Moon, William Fisher, now 33 years old, is working as Publicity and Information Officer for Shepford District Council, in the Mid­lands of England. Billy Liar was published in 1959 in a nation striving for affluence and progress in the wake of war. Success, how­ever, could be as much a source of anxiety as failure, as social mobility clashed with the archaic but obdurate British class system. It was linguist Alan S. C. Ross who coined the idea of ‘Upper’ and ‘Non-Upper’ language use. Writing on the subject of ‘Changing one’s voice’ in 1954, he asserted confidently that: ‘In England today – just as much as in the England of many years ago – the question Can a non-U speaker become a U-speaker? is one noticeably of paramount importance for many English­men (and for some of their wives). The answer is that an adult can never attain complete success’.1 As a teenager, most of Billy’s worries – in fact, most of his lies – came about through feckless attempts to change his voice to better suit the bewildering nuances of an array of unfamiliarly adult situations – with lovers, parents, friends, and employers, in the Yorkshire town of Stradhoughton.

Now nominally an adult himself, and living in a flat on the twelfth floor of a Shepford high-rise block with his elderly mother and his wife Jeanette, Billy has not yet cast off this childish habit. ‘I’ll have to stop picking up other people’s expressions like a ver­bal chameleon’, he tells himself. ‘What’s it a sign of? Immaturity? Lack of confidence? Desire to ingratiate? Never mind.’ But Billy does mind, and very much: he is exhausted by his relentless play-acting in the role of ‘juvenile lead’. In Billy Liar, Councillor Dux­bury, an object of Billy’s derision and star of one of his daftest skits, the clichéd Yorkshireman, punctured the boy’s humour with the sharp but kindly invective to speak in his own voice: ‘Ah’ve had no education, ah had to educate myself, but that’s no reason for thee to copy t’way I talk.’ In a scene of delicate pathos, the old man added, ‘Tha’rt a young man. Tha’s got a long way to go. But tha can’t do it by thisen. Now think on.’2 Over a decade later, Billy remains just as lonely, except in his infrequent liaisons with Helen Lightfoot, the woman he identifies as his juvenile leading lady. Billy’s wife doesn’t understand him, he thinks, but his mistress knows him far too well: she is the female version of himself, restless and dissatisfied.

If the spoken word regularly betrays Billy, the written word can be more condemnatory still. In Billy Liar, he was tortured by guilt at his failure to post his mother’s letter to the radio request programme Housewife’s Choice. Humiliated by her poor grammar and spelling, and the wheedling admission that ‘We are just ordinary folk’, he stashed the letter in his ‘Guilt Chest’, with a stack of client calendars printed by his undertaker employer (the idea of a complimentary memento mori is a consummate Water­house touch). In Billy Liar on the Moon, the offending letter has been written by Helen, informing her lover, amongst other things, that ‘you do not yet know all the things I can do with my tongue’. Other documents are conspiring to ruin Billy too – the ‘swindle sheets’ on which he claims expenses for vodka martini-fuelled trysts at the Heritage Motor Lodge just off the M1 slip-road, and Pageantry with Progress, a promotional tome for Shepford that is printed with some of the vitriolic pastiches Billy writes on the side to exorcise his contempt.

Billy does have some scruples, but they are almost all syn­tactical. ‘When the judge sentences me to fifteen years’ for em­bez­zlement, he claims, ‘I shall be standing in the dock correcting his grammar’. Keith Waterhouse himself was a zealot for proper Eng­lish. He was born in 1929 in Hunslet, Leeds, in Yorkshire, his mother a cleaner, and his father a costermonger (a door-to-door vegetable salesman) who died when Keith was three. Brought up in extreme poverty on a housing estate, Waterhouse left school at 14 and worked in an undertaker’s before two years’ National Service in the RAF. He then got a job at the Yorkshire Evening Post, and became a formidable journalist, going on to work for national paper the Daily Mirror and then the Daily Mail, and writing investigative pieces, features and columns along­side over 60 books. His self-assigned brief was a battle against the per­ceived denigration of the English language as a tool of clear and ex­pressive communication. His founding of the AAAA (The Asso­ciation for the Annihilation of the Aberrant Apostrophe) through a column in the Daily Mail, was, like most of his writing, as serious as it was funny.3 Your vocabulary, he urged his readers to remember, ‘includes everything you want, cherish, own or aspire to. Language is a great liberator.’4

Billy Liar made Waterhouse rich. A British comic classic of the twentieth century, it achieved both high sales and high praise from literary critics. Its title passed into the language Waterhouse worked so hard to defend until his death in 2009. It formed the headline of two newspaper front pages framed on the wall of his London flat, one revealing U.S. President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, and another pillorying U.K. Conservative leader William Hague’s claim of drinking fourteen pints of beer a day. After its publication in 1959, Waterhouse’s second novel was swiftly made into a 1960 play, which ran for 582 per­formances with gritty leading male Albert Finney, and then Tom Courtenay. Courtenay starred in the 1963 film version with a luminous Julie Christie, a young actress with, in the words of one reviewer, ‘the rare quality of obliterating everything else from the screen whenever she walks across’.5 In 1974 came Billy, a musical adaptation. One journalist was prompted to wonder if these new versions might end with ‘say, an equestrian ice show’.6 Instead, they ended on the moon. Waterhouse had ‘dabbled at being seriously rich’ – his Who’s Who entry magnificently listed ‘lunch’ as his sole recreation. Yet, like his most famous fictional creation, he was ill at ease with movement up the class scale: ‘Except for a daily bottle of champagne, for which I have retained the taste, such excesses soon palled’.7

Jeanette longs to move up to a bungalow in newly-built May­field with its ‘half-moon crescents’ and baby boutiques (Billy calls it ‘Mortgagedene’), but her husband feels he already ‘in­habits a suburb of the moon’, soundless and airless. The 1960s had little impact upon the moral mores of Shepford, but they made every difference to the fabric of the town. ‘Shepford’ and ‘Mayfield’ – these faux-rural English names have been assembled by committee, and the town’s revamp was designed, Billy tells us, by Creative City Consortium, ‘a gang of architects and other roving vagabonds dedicated to making Shepford the showplace of their balance-sheet’. Billy’s job demands that he wreathes the fake place he loathes in a rhetoric of Space Race optimism and technological progress that is already long out of date in 1975, promising its citizens a wealth, Billy riffs sarcastically, of ‘chamber music on the Uniplex sports ground and five-a-side football in the Little Theatre’. Reggie Rainbell, the elderly boss for whom Billy feels a rare respect and affection, seems to him to be ‘quite touchingly vulnerable – especially against the lam­inated panels, glass doors and silicone-finished vestibules of the Civic Centre’. Billy is trapped in this weightless, artificial environment.

Reviewing Billy Liar on the Moon at its publication, one critic called Waterhouse ‘one of the saddest of our popular humorists’.8 The novel is full of sadnesses, among them the revelation that Jeanette knows Billy better than he thinks, and wants him more than he knows: ‘you think because one day’s like another, and we lead an ordinary life like the people next door and the people next door to them, you think it’s dull. It isn’t dull, Bill. I don’t find it dull. I find it exciting.’ Yet Waterhouse does leave us with the prospect of a ‘new experience’ that promises Billy a chance to turn his talent for lying – for making up stories – to better use. Sadly, though, this chance may come at the cost of a bungalow ‘at the end of a frying-pan-shaped dead end called Shepherds Croft, without the apostrophe’.

Alice Ferrebe

Liverpool John Moores University

December 2014

Alice Ferrebe is Senior Lecturer in English at Liverpool John Moores University. She is the author of Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction 1950-2000 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Literature of the 1950s: Good, Brave Causes (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

1 Alan Ross, ‘U and Non-U: An Essay in Sociological Linguistics’ (1954), in Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy, ed. Nancy Mitford, (Harmondsworth: Pen­guin, 1960), pp. 28-29.

2 Keith Waterhouse, Billy Liar (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 92.

3 Keith Waterhouse, ‘Apostrophe Apocalypse’, Daily Mail, Monday, 30 June 1986, 8.

4 Quoted in Richard Littlejohn, ‘The Man with the Champagne Touch’, Daily Mail, 7 August 2009.

5 ‘Billy Becomes a Film Star’, by our Film Reviewer, Times, 14 August 1963, 11.

6 Simon Hoggart, ‘Waterhouse Watershed’, Observer, 17 March 1991, 58.

7 Littlejohn, ibid.

8 D. A. N. Jones, ‘The Middle Age of Billy Liar’, Times Literary Supple­ment, 24 October 1975, 1255.

BILLY LIAR ON THE MOON

1

The only place where you can get a vodka martini in Shepford is just by the M.1 slip road, ambitiously described in the official guide-book as the Highway to Europe. Road maps are not much use to the thirsty traveller, it being the Council’s policy to keep one jump ahead of Geographia Ltd. Anyone needing a vodka mar­tini that badly would have to take verbal instructions.

Driving west out of town through the shopping centre – or, for that matter, driving west out of town while still looking for the one-way side street that is the only access to the shopping centre – you come across three or four small brick factories, one of them also mentioned in the guide-book. (It makes plastic weather-shields for offshore generators; thus Shepford, though eighty miles inland, plays its part in the quest for North Sea Oil.) Then there is a patch of rubble where another small brick factory is about to go up or has just fallen down. Then there is the borough’s surplus cache of sewage pipes, stacked on what used to be a grass verge. Then there is the road junction with its cluster of signs: this way to the Town Centre, that way to the Abbey, this way to the Castle, this way, that way and the other way to the car parks, and round the back-doubles for the Highway to Europe. This route takes you to the site that was rejected, so they say, by Holiday Inns, but accepted by Heritage Motor Lodges of America.

The Heritage Motor Lodge complex, resembling a Nevada Desert gambling resort that has run foul of the Las Vegas District Council Planning Committee, was but four minutes from the town centre when it was built and is but twelve minutes away since the one-way system was perfected. But it is sufficiently near the motorway to give the discerning visitor a last chance of re­viewing the life-style to which he has been reduced by the profit motive, re-packing his case of samples and heading back to London or any point north – in my case, Stradhoughton.

If only I’d left before the second martini, not only would the Helen problem have solved itself, but I could have been driving into the Bull Ring car-stack by half-past nine, throwing-up a Chinese dinner by half-past ten, and still have had ninety minutes to play with before exploring the question I’d often turned over in my mind since leaving Stradhoughton all those light-years ago – did the drunks still race all the way around the Town Hall while the carillon sounded twelve?

I couldn’t afford vodka martinis, and neither, I imagined, could Shepford District Council, which paid for them in a round­about way. I drank them as a gesture to my designer-decorated surroundings – to fit in, as much as possible, with the padded leather bar, the bowls of pretzels, and the old English cross-bows on the bare stone walls. The illusion, for which I was grateful, was of being, if not in New York, then at the very least in down­town Albuquerque, wherever that turned out to be. And anyway, it was not much dearer than the doubles bar which had lately taken possession of the soul of the King’s Head in the Corn­market; and anyway, vodka martinis were what Oscar drank too.

‘Nearest place south of Birmingham where they know how to fix the darn things, Bill. Lemme say this. You British can build the best boats in the world, the best suits in the world and I’d walk a billion miles for an English teacake. But you bet your ass you’ve never yet built a good barman. No – way.’

‘Right.’

Why Oscar spoke like an Australian actor playing an Amer­ican bit-part in an English television play was because he didn’t exist. Sometimes he absolutely didn’t exist, for weeks at a time, but he’d been useful with the Helen problem lately and he was often a comfort in other ways, so the least I could do was stand him a drink occasionally. He was an oilman at present, and I was doing him a big favour by introducing him to the only firm in Britain that could turn him out a plastic weather-shield for his offshore generator by the end of the week; but usually he was in public relations and if I played my cards right I would be on Madison Avenue before I was forty. Or should I, I sometimes used to wonder in whimsical moments, and especially when the Helen problem wasn’t too pressing, turn Oscar into a six-foot rabbit, like Harvey? That would depend on future access to the vodka martinis.

Who did exist, to the point of occupying Oscar’s bar stool and embarrassingly asking for draught Bass, was Purchase, who called himself a colleague of mine and was said to shave his nose.

‘You mean the hairs in his nostrils,’ I’d said to Hattersley, who had brought me this tit-bit.

‘His nose. From tip to bridge.’

‘Upward strokes? Sounds improbable.’

‘Bridge to tip, then. It’s true! I caught him at it in the washroom – the night we were all going to Pisspot’s birthday do. He puts lather all over his nose and then he shaves it.’

‘The only man in Shepford with a conk like a baby’s bottom.’

Also the only man in Shepford I didn’t want to see in the bar of the Heritage Motor Lodge – or, to be fair, going rapidly through a roll-call of about two hundred names and putting asterisks against the dozen or so who might remotely land up there – the last man I wanted to see. Although Purchase could describe himself as a colleague only in the sense that, say, a BBC admin clerk can claim credit for the nine o’clock news – for he was in the Finance Department while I was in Information and Publicity – we were, at least on paper, in line for the same promotion. No way, as Oscar would have said.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. Mr William Fisher, 33, is to be ap­pointed Information Officer and Director of Publicity for the District of Shepford at a commencing salary of about double what he is getting at present, plus entertainment allowance, office car, honorary membership of the municipal golf club, key to the Civic Centre drinks cupboard, and freeloading facilities at most official functions. He succeeds Mr R. V. O. (‘Pisspot’) Rainbell, who is taking up residence in a home for alcoholics.

‘Be a bit late tonight,’ I could hear myself saying. ‘Bloody Mayor’s reception. Bloody Japanese trade delegation.’

I could even say the same thing to Helen, if the Helen problem wasn’t solved by then.

Mr Fisher entered local government in the West Riding Borough of Stradhoughton, where he had been employed as an undertaker’s clerk until dismissed for petty embezzlement. After joining the Rates office on forged references, he gained experience in several municipal departments before transferring to the then County Borough of Shep­ford for a motive he finds himself unable to discuss. Mr Fisher has lived in Shepford for eight years, although it seems like eighty, and has been in the Information Office for the past five years. He is part-author of Pageantry with Progress (new edition), the official guide-book. Mr Fisher resides either with his wife and widowed mother on the Fairways estate, or alone in a mahogany-panelled turret overlooking the ancient Cornmarket with its many pavement cafés, brasseries and bustling restaurants.

But this was no time for counting golden eggs. If Purchase was still sitting here humming and hawing over what to drink as a substitute for draught Bass when Helen walked in ten minutes hence, there was nothing short of a good shove into the Civic Centre paper-shredding machine that could prevent his account of the rendezvous reaching the Senior Appointments Selection Board. Plus, as a bonus, a breakdown of my vodka martini budget, with informed speculation on how it was balanced. I could already see his smudgy coloured photograph in the Evening Mail, a news-sheet that seemed to be put together by a hundred monkeys at a hundred keyboards, and the accompanying text:

Mr James Pugchase, a meber of te District Treasurer’s De­partment ang chairman of the Shepford Festival Com­mittee ival Committe shrdlushrdlu has been appointed Mr Purchase, who is an old boy of Shepford Grammar Information Officer and Publicity Director School, Te case was adjourned until Thrusday.

‘No draught beer of any kind?’ repeated Purchase. The barman, Harry (a name he had drawn from stores along with his white bum-freezer when joining the Heritage Happy Family) had just said that to him, in so many words. Purchase did with other people’s sentences what he did with figures all day long at his trestle table in the office next to mine – he checked them for possible discrepancies. I had once made a tape of him cocking-up an interview on the local radio, and he had repeated, word-perfect, a question about the Shepford Festival consisting of fifty-eight syllables. No wonder they called him the human radish, or would do if I had anything to do with it.

‘Lager, then,’ he said, taking a far bigger handful of pretzels than he was entitled to on such a cheapskate order. The room was too dark to stare at his nose, a spot-check I carried out from time to time. One little nick, or even better, a strip of Elastoplast, would confirm Hattersley’s story: I didn’t believe all he told me.

‘Don’t often see you in this neck of the woods,’ I said, slipping easily into the council-clerk patois. (If I’d wanted an ‘A’ for Effort I would have said ‘this particular hostelry’.) I cupped my hand around the empty martini glass, wishing I’d ordered it on the rocks so that it would have come in a tumbler and made him be­lieve I was on gin and tonic. As it was, he would have to think it was sherry. With an olive.

‘One of your haunts, is it?’ A ninety-degree glance around the bar, as casual as a turtle with inflamed neck glands, to indicate that he’s only making conversation. You don’t catch me like that,