How To Be A Wally

 When I was thirteen I moved from Brighton to Basingstoke, despite having committed no crime. 

I had a lot of good friends in Brighton and everyone in Basingstoke thought I was a weirdo and wanted to beat me up, so when my friend, John Russell - we were all called John in those days, it was the style of the time - invited me down for a week in the summer holidays, I was desperate to go. I got a coach from Basingstoke to The Old Steine in Brighton, where I would be picked up by John's mother and taken to their big house overlooking Goldstone Park. It was my first adventure. My first time going any distance on my own. I don't remember being worried, just excited to be back in Brighton with my old friends. 

I do remember what I read on the bus. It was this book: 

Paul Manning's How To Be A Wally. 

I haven't been able to track down much info on Paul Manning, despite him being a formative influence. He followed up this book with Superwally - which has a one star review on Goodreads - and 1984 And All That, which gets the five star treatment on the same website, and is called "a hilariously sarcastic account of the 20th Century up until 1984". I recently came across a copy of How To Be A Wally and snapped it up. You'll be surprised to hear  it was not particularly expensive. 

Paul Manning is a mystery. An enigma. He's the smile on the face of the Mona Lisa, the Sphinx's nose, the loamy bouquet of a Badedas bath. I can find nothing about him. In the introduction he insists he's not Gyles Brandreth, which instantly makes you think he must be. But on reading the book - and yes, I'm reading How to Be A Wally - I'm inclined to think the author is not the cuddly Tory Teddy Bear botherer. Gyles is posh totty. The author of this book knows of what he speaks, and he speaks of home bars and Ford Zephyrs and novelty underpants printed with the legend: "Greetings from Loch Ness". I don't like to think of Gyles Brandreth in novelty underpants. Or at all, really. Oscar Wilde solving crimes, Gyles? Bloody hell. You monied hack. 

Wish I'd thought of it. 

The question you're asking yourself - you're invested in this - is  this: is How To Be A Wally any good, John? After all, how could a book called How To Be A Wally, with a cover featuring the repeated motif of a vomiting parrot, and a promise to help you "get the most of your Colonel Bogey car horn" be any good?  

It's not great. 

But it's not terrible either. Paul Manning is a funny guy with a neat turn of phrase. The people mocked in this book - the wallies - "stand outside DER showrooms in the rain watching "Game For A Laugh" or "feed prawn cocktail crisps to the lions in Safari Parks". Wallies only wear suits "attending weddings, funerals or making court appearances following night club brawls". Wallies with cars take "a trip to Coventry to try (their) hand at ten-pin bowling or see the Barron Nights in Cabaret". Wallies adorn themselves with "heavy gold signet rings, plastic key rings in the form of biscuits, gold "ingot" pendants with the hallmark on the front, identity bracelets and imitation crocodile skin belts with large buckles in the form of the wearer's initials". They go on package holidays and stone-clad their houses. 

Yeah. 

As you read on, it becomes clear that the people he's talking about are people who haven't been to University. They are people who don't have that much money. Who don't have refined palates. Who decorate their houses to their own taste, rather than that of an interior designer they couldn't afford. Who celebrate the material things they possess because they had to work hard to get them. This book is a sustained, snide attack on poor people for their perceived lack of good taste. It's a deadbeat descendant of U and Non-U by Nancy Mitford (and a gentleman). 

The book is not without merits. It's very well written for a toilet book, which is what it is. Manning winkles out the wally's excesses accurately and well. And as a snapshot of a forgotten world it's incredible. I forget I'm old, so it's always interesting to read something I read forty years ago, something mapping the UK's cultural terrain. I wonder how many of these references I understood at the time, the references to Cyril Fletcher and Bernard Levin. What would I have made of, "Shirley Conran's offspring slumming it", or an "RAC Lombard Rally or Avon Tyres anorak"? The knowledge that wearing sta-prest trousers marked you out as a wally must have given me pause - especially as I wore the covered-market knock off version, Kikku. Was I a wally? Quite a few of the things listed in the book seemed like normal, harmless pastimes that everyone I knew did. Were there really underpants with "Prodwell Hydraulic Research Establishment" printed on the front of them? Or, more simply, "Flasher". What would the thirteen year old me make of the following instruction, from a chapter titled "Wally Etiquette": 

"On finishing a packet of crisps in the pub, do not forget to blow it up and burst it, showering people with the leftover bits at the bottom of the bag and causing them to spill their drinks."

Was this what happened in pubs? Was this what was meant to happen? I couldn't have known. I was observing observational humour I had never observed. But that was often the way back then. All sitcoms were written by Oxbridge alumni in their thirties, and that was the television I consumed. My early television heroes were all middle-aged businessmen hating their jobs and desperate to cheat on their long-suffering, saintly wives. These were strange lessons to teach children. 

I'd finished How To Be A Wally by the time the coach reached The Old Steine. As it was parking it smashed into some scaffolding and a metal strut burst through the rear window showering me with glinting pebbles of broken glass. As I shakily descended the bus, hare eyed and glittery with shattered window, clutching my copy of How To Be A Wally, I was met by Mrs Russell, who took one look at me and assumed the coach crash was in some way my fault. An instant dislike was formed. 

"How To Be A Wally, John? Surely you don't need lessons." was the first thing she said to me. I think I smiled, as I wasn't used to adults talking to me and didn't know what she was getting at. 

I wasn't invited back.