Free Alma Cogan by Gordon Burn

stories?’
    I always picked them up from where they were lying in a studiedly casual way and read them with a growing feeling of guilt and a packed hotness behind the eyes.
    They will always be connected in my mind with stalled Sunday-afternoon rail journeys between, typically, Middlesbrough and Nottingham; with northern industrial light working its way across worn carriage-cloth; and with the unfamiliar, not unpleasant, sensations they started up in me.
    Sin Circus. Shame Slave – She knew the little tricks that fan lust in men and women. One Hell of a Dame – The naked story of lusty-bodied Sheila whose uncontrollable desire put her name in lights. Resort Girl . Diamond Doll. She Had to Be Loved. Gay Scene – Every time a man had her it was rape. But with other women it was love. Gutters of lust ran wild in this Sex Town .
    Along with the American magazines you found on sale at some station bookstalls – Zipp, Abandon, Caress, Hollywood Frolics – these were titles which struck me then as a kind of concentrate of eroticism. (And recalling them now, I have to say, still gives me a certain frisson.)
    As the fifties drew on and the profession started attracting a higher percentage of what Fay called ‘strollops’ and professional good-time girls, I was dimly aware of scenes from the covers of Shame Slave and Sex Town – spectacular cleavages (the breasts very boldly shaped and divided) and Bri-Nylon Baby-Dolls; rippling torsos and luxuriant chest wigs – playing themselves out in the digs around the country where we stayed.
    Despite the standard rule about no ‘take-in’, these places were alive with sexual activity: Atomic Armfuls … Bikini Bombshells … sexsational sex romps and hi-jinks … dolls on dope … daisy-chain dollies … The News of the Screws got it more right more often than probably it even realised.
    When I returned to London at the end of my first hike around the provinces, I recall my mother taking me firmly by the shoulders (she had to propel herself on to her toes) to give me the third-degree. ‘That’s it,’ she wailed after an interval. ‘I knew it. It’s happened. You’ve changed. You look hard already.’
    I was always promising myself that I was going to read something more nourishing. I appeared to have plenty of time at my disposal. The problem was that it was effectively dead time – toolong to do nothing in, but too short to do anything in particular.
    Every day was geared towards the evening’s performance. I was obsessive about protecting my voice. I was always detecting coughs and infections. For years I endured breakfast-time (that is, lunch-time) witticisms about what I was hiding behind the foulard scarves with which my throat was lagged. Most nights, as I think I’ve mentioned, I was sick until my ribs ached before I had to go out and be the vivacious little miss with the bubbling personality. Books never had any place in this programme.
    The countryside represented one of the holes in my knowledge of which I was most conscious.
    ‘Country’ to me was the sleepy boring bit between the incident-filled narrative of the cities; the nothingness spreading out beyond town boundaries, where the trolley-wires terminated and real life dwindled to an incandescent dot, and then quickly faded to nada, like television at the close of transmission.
    I only knew the flowers everybody knew. I didn’t associate flowers with the seasons. Roses were something that arrived wrapped in cellophane, with a small white pill in an envelope to prolong their life. It remained the case even when I became a variety advertised in the bulb and seed catalogues myself.
    In the days when it was as much a part of the celebrity ritual as being hi-jacked for This Is Your Life and being greased up by that old phoney Roy Plomley on Desert Island Discs , I had a rose named after me: a pale tangerine-coloured tea-or damask-or old-rose that turned slightly less anaemic-looking when (perhaps it was