The Art of Escapism

How James Bond Can Help You Survive a Parental Divorce

The Art of Escapism: How James Bond Can Help You Survive a Parental Divorce

Scrolling through Instagram on a bright Wednesday morning, I'm ambushed by a picture that pulls me up short. It's simultaneously endlessly reassuring and namelessly painful. It seems to contain a whole world of half-forgotten trauma; emotions I'm unsure I'm ready for so soon after breakfast.

            But there it is.

            I'm face to face with an image I once knew as intimately as any other while growing up in the late 1970s. It takes me a while to get my bearings, so visceral is the charge it still holds. I'd like to say I'm looking at Da Vinci's The Virgin of the Rocks, or Filippo Lippi's Annunciation, or even a treasured family portrait (though how this would come to be on social media without me posting it myself is anyone's guess). It's almost as familiar and moving as any childhood photograph, though it feels absurd to confess to such a thing. Because the image, I'm embarrassed to admit, is Dan Goozee's one-sheet poster for Moonraker, Roger Moore's fourth outing as James Bond, released in 1979.

            It depicts Moore's ingenuously grinning, nutbrown face emerging from a silver space suit (sans helmet), while floating above the Earth's troposphere; the sapphire oceans far beneath his moon boots. Across his chest he holds a laser gun (which my twin brother and I once owned as a toy plastic replica) in the familiar pose of 007 on film posters since From Russia with Love. Only this time, Moore appears to be firing the laser pointlessly over his shoulder as he engages us with his trademark raised eyebrow. This draws attention to his shoulder, which bears a Union Jack. To cap it all, underneath the futuristic suit he is wearing black tie; the dickie bow clearly visible beneath his famously prognathous chin. It's jarringly anomalous and not a little silly. It's as if Bond left the casino at 4am and fancied a quick trip to the moon. The top of the poster bears the legend: Outer Space Now Belongs to 007. At the bottom, below the movie's credits, is the promise: Blasting Off This Summer. Next to this is the pleasingly impressionistic United Artists logo, a kind of abstract flourishing tree; a trademark I once copied so many times I could reproduce it at will.

            The reason the image appears in my feed is the sad news of Goozee's death, aged 81, the day before. Not as well-known as the other Bond poster artists, he's nevertheless my favourite. More familiar, perhaps, to the general public is the work of Robert McGinnis, whose dramatic explosions of girls, guns, tarot cards and actual explosions enticed cinemagoers to everything from Connery's imperial-phase Bonds Thunderball and You Only Live Twice to Moore's first outing as 007, Live and Let Die. However, Goozee's artwork for Moonraker - which, as twin Bond fanatics, we once owned in the shape of the film's quad poster, Blu-tacked to our bedroom wall - is effortlessly effective. Detailed, glossy, daring, and, one has to admit, funny (the black tie). He must have quickly understood the ridiculousness of putting a British Secret Service agent into orbit on a space shuttle and capitalised on it, tongue rebelliously in cheek. Yet why do I find such a ludicrous image so painful? And, paradoxically, so comforting at the same time?

            The answer lies deep in my childhood. In the days when - as Larkin wrote in 'Home is So Sad' - we once made 'a joyous shot at how things ought to be, / Long fallen wide'.

***

In August 1979, the major news stories of the day were the Three Mile Island nuclear catastrophe, the overthrow of the Shah in Iran, and the murder, by the IRA, of Lord Mountbatten on his fishing skiff off the coast of Ireland. None of these dramas, however, mattered much to me or my brother. At the time, we were ten, about to turn eleven, and the biggest news in our world was that Moonraker had just been released. The distance between the premiere of The Spy Who Loved Me two years previously and the appearance of the new film had seemed, at that age, like an unbridgeable chasm. The red top papers had been flagging up Moonraker and its opportunistic theme of outer space (in the wake of Star Wars and Close Encounters) for over a year. Smudgy location shots of Moore in Rio atop a cable car, or at Pinewood studios in a space station, grappling with the villain Jaws (who had returned to harass Bond for a second time after Spy) were unbearably thrilling. There were pictures of the de rigueur 'bevy of beauties' in skimpy, Logan's Run-style outfits; compelling in a way, at almost eleven, I found hard to express. Also scenes of high-speed chases on gondolas in Venice and on speed boats in the lush Amazon basin. The news that the revered French actor Michael Lonsdale was playing the villain Hugo Drax made little impact. It was the sheer glam and bling of Bond returning that brightened up our deadly routine of school, followed by an evening meal of Findus Crispy Pancakes and strawberry Angel Delight in front of Butterflies or Rising Damp.

            Looking back, I can see the approach of the Moonraker circus, and the excitement it engendered, was performing another, more profound role in our lives. One might call it escapism, but that seems too flippant now. Too shallow. The word, an Americanism first coined in 1933, was often attached to both Fleming's Bond novels and the 007 film franchise. It's inadequate until you reach back to the etymology of the word 'escape', from the Old Fr. eschaper - literally to 'to get out of one's cape', to 'leave a pursuer with just one's cape'. Because my brother and I really did feel as if we were being relentlessly pursued. And the entity that was doing the pursuing was the sad and terrifying project of our parents' separation and divorce, begun four years before, its grisly machinations still ongoing.

***

When your parents split during early childhood, there's always a Before time and an After time. There are the prelapsarian days when all was right with the world, when you were happy and secure, followed by the chaos, uncertainty and unhappiness that arrive afterwards. Growing up in a Hertfordshire satellite town, we were gifted with six blissful years when our parents were together. This was our joyous shot at how things ought to be. Then, overnight (at least from our perspective), everything changed. Our mother, a hardworking NHS nurse, announced that she didn't love our father anymore and that they were getting a divorce. At the time, our mother had been openly seeing the man who would later become our stepfather, while our computer-programmer dad had been working in France for over a year, so the news was not the great surprise it might have been. But it was devastating, nevertheless. At six, you are just about aware of what a family and a home represent. You're old enough to remember what existing within the nuclear unit felt like, though you understand little about adult relationships, or what love or divorce even mean. What's certain is that you know how safe and content you felt with a family and a home around you, and how radically terrified and confused you feel when they are destroyed. It's hard for an adult to make this conceptual leap, unless they have experienced it themselves as children. Adults know how to anticipate change; they know that nothing's forever, that mutability is a fact of life. A child of six has no idea the new reality isn't permanent. The formerly reliable world has been made catastrophically unreliable.

            As an adult, life is what you make it. As a child, it's what others, namely your parents, make it for you. A parental divorce is a disaster that's inflicted upon you. Most kids blame themselves, which is only logical given how self-centred they are. Of course it's your fault. You begin to hate yourself for breaking up your parents' marriage. You begin to see yourself as worthless and unlovable, self-appraisals that are hard to shake, even in adulthood. All children of divorce secretly want their parents to get back together, but this is less of an altruistic aspiration than it seems. There's a simple equation at the root of it. When your parents were together you felt happy and secure. Now they're not, you feel unhappy and insecure. The desire for them to reunite is a selfish wish to return to your former state

            In this sense, your parents' divorce can only be experienced one way as a child, while divorce can be experienced, and handled, in myriad ways by parents. Ours chose to handle it sensationally badly. The man my mother initially introduced to us as our new 'uncle' might kindly be described as a bisexual psychopath. The unkind descriptions don't bear repeating. Physically (and, on one occasion, sexually) abusive towards me and my brother, he would poison the chalice of our lives for next thirteen years. By the time August 1979 rolled around, he'd been toxically 'on the scene', as the parlance had it, for over four years. And we'd been living in our mother's two-up two-down Wimpy home on a peripheral estate for exactly a year.

            The upheaval to a new house had been visited on us as we entered the last year of primary school. It was no accident that this was when our Bond fixation began, with the screening of Thunderball on ITV during the '78 World Cup. We'd begun a modest collection of cuttings and posters, as well as die-cast Corgi toys and other Bond merch, the most treasured being the White Lotus Esprit from Spy, with its retractable fins for underwater travel and four red rockets in the hatchback ready for downing enemy helicopters flown by impossibly glamorous sarong-wearing henchwomen. Our bedroom in the new house, with its storage heaters that never properly warmed up, became a shrine to this collection. The only continuity with the house we'd grown up in was our battered bunk beds, egregiously transposed to this alien new environment. Our father had kept the marital home, and it was back there we schlepped every weekend and half term, either on foot or in the back of our mother's district nurse-issue blue Mini Cooper; a torture that would go on for almost another decade.

            Anyone who's ever yo-yo'd between the two houses of divorced parents will need no explanation as to how disorientating, undermining and exhausting this is. If you haven't, it's another conceptual leap, one that's hard to make for adults from families who stayed together. Imagine couch-surfing forever. Or being a frequent business flyer who stays between two hotels, living out of a suitcase ad infinitum, but never goes home. After all while, you literally don't know whether you are coming or going, as the cliché has it. Whatever schedule is imposed is inevitably broken, whether because of illness or shifting commitments, or, in our case, arguments between two parents who quietly but determinedly hated each other. The people who really suffer in this scenario, of course, are the children. Because you have no home, while your separated parents do. By definition, home is singular - a physical, and just as importantly, a spiritual locus to which you return. It signifies comfort, continuity, safety. If you have 'two homes' (a pernicious lie propagated by the divorce industry) then you really have no home. You have two bedrooms, but no one special childhood sanctuary you make your own. Half your stuff is in one place while the rest is in another. You're always leaving something behind, your PE kit or toothbrush, or in our case, that Live and Let Die pressbook you want to pore over in your bunkbed by torchlight. No child has ever said, 'Mummy, I want to go homes.' Children thrive on stability, predictability and routine, and shuttling between two houses is the diametric opposite of this. You live in perpetual limbo, unbroken until you cut the cord and run away, like we eventually did.

            This was the disorientating situation we were dealing with as Moonraker approached. Add to this the nightly ructions and terrifying abuse inflicted by our stepfather, who would descend on the new house and then disappear unpredictably, the escapism provided by Bond was as necessary as breathing. On the one hand there was the heady world of 007, with its glamour, vodka martinis, the Bahamas, technicolour, urbanity, luxury, artifice, controlled threat, sophistication and energy. On the other was the Wimpy estate with its scarcity, blighted streets, fish finger teatimes, warring parents, sadness, depression, fear, self-loathing, trauma, anxiety and violence. There was Bond's imaginary post-war dreamworld populated by globe-threatening villains doing battle with a suave secret service agent. Or chilly postpunk austerity and the Winter of Discontent. Which one would you choose?

***

We finally got to see Moonraker in Scarborough. Our mother had driven us up there to visit her friend who lived a fair distance from the town; one of two close allies with whom she'd trained as a midwife in the early 1960s. Luckily for us, this friend had three children of around our age; two charging boys and an older girl called Lindsey on whom we both had an innocent crush. To our delight, it was the daughter who volunteered to take us to the new Bond film.

            And so, on an unforgettably hot August day, we set off from their village on foot, for some reason eschewing the bus, which would have taken us there much faster. We walked for what seemed like hours down lanes and across ploughed fields. At one point, Lindsey led us through a towering crop of wheat, across red earth and rough ground. I remember the corn being so high, our heads all but disappeared. It was an unforgettable experience. To be in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, on a time-stopped high summer afternoon, with this sophisticated girl, who took our hands in turn and giggled with a flirtatious insouciance. At one point, she commanded us to lie down on our stomachs in the dirt and look at an ants’ nest. We tried to count the ants. There were thousands of them, swarming like commuters in some great metropolitan station at rush hour.

            When we arrived in Scarborough we were dripping with sweat and slightly dazed. It was only as we queued outside the Odeon that Lindsey announced she was going shopping and would see us back there in two hours. Disappointed by this abandonment, I nevertheless secretly welcomed the prospect of two hours of high escapism experienced with just my brother; fellow Bond aficionado and, as Lindsey's brothers had perhaps unkindly reminded us, a 'child from a broken home'.

            And Moonraker didn't disappoint. Except, perhaps, in many respects it did. While performing its job of taking us away from our troubles for two frequently risible, action-packed hours, it wasn't The Spy who Loved Me. In retrospect, I can see the problem was one of tone. The tense pre-credit sequence, in which Bond's parachute is snatched from him by a freefalling Jaws at 30,000 feet, is ruined when the villain crashes into a circus tent and survives. Cue Wurlitzer music and the end of any suspension of disbelief (and the credibility of the entire series). There's also the problem of sustaining ever more grandiose set pieces, the apex of which is Bond leaving planet Earth in a space shuttle without any astronaut training. And then there's the cringeworthy gags, so sharp in the earlier films, but now devolved into Benny Hill smut ('He's just attempting re-entry sir'). And so on. The one aspect of the film that can't be faulted is John Barry's magisterial score. Indeed, the title song, sung with ethereal grace and power by Shirly Bassey, remains my favourite Bond theme of all time. Often disparaged by fans (and by Bassey herself, oddly), it seems to distil sadness and hope in equal measure. To hear it now is to conjure the sound of my childhood. For me, the tingling triangle motif during the intro behind the surging Barry strings is childhood distilled to its essence. Or perhaps the poignancy of childhood giving way to adolescence. To what came next.

            This sense of something ending was reinforced when we left the cinema with the bittersweet theme song in our ears. The weather had broken, and an August thunderstorm was pounding the streets. Waiting for Lindsey to come and collect us, chilly now in our T-shirts, we were startled by a commotion in the street. An elderly lady had been knocked down by a bus. Unable to resist moving closer to take a look, we pushed through the crowd to see the unfortunate woman, face down in the gutter, her blood flowing with the rainwater. We never did discover her fate.

            It was a shocking end to a very strange day, and a harbinger of what was to come. Which was secondary school, my mother's marriage to our hated pseudo-uncle, and the twin hells of puberty and adolescence. In short: the end of the innocence.

***

Back in the present, unable to take my eyes from Goozee's Moonraker poster on Instagram, I have a sudden urge to listen to the theme song. I put it on, and the quicksilver triangle at the start still sets off the same emotions. Sadness and hope. A sense of comfort, but also a sense of nameless dread. Of being pursued. Of not knowing whether I will escape the pursuer and live to tell the tale.

            Many years after those dark, yet unforgettably bright days of 1979, I told my therapist about the experience. With what I'm sure were the best intentions, she said: 'I just want to take that scared little boy and say: you will be fine. You will get through this.' Without thinking, I said: 'But I'm not fine! Don't you realise I'm still traumatised by it in my fifties? I survived, but only just. No, I'm pretty far from fine...' A parental divorce is the trauma that keeps on giving.

            Looking back, I can see the only mercy afforded us was an expedient one. Short of a parent dying, your parents divorcing is probably the worst thing that can befall a six-year-old. To a child, it feels like the end of the world. Being forced to live between two separate houses is a shitshow I wouldn’t wish on anyone (and it's strange that the only people who advocate such an arrangement are those who've never experienced it themselves as children). Of course, if a child has to escape a toxic domestic situation in which there is addiction or abuse, then two houses might be the only solution. But that wasn't the case with us. Ironically, the abuse we experienced at the hands of our stepfather was something facilitated by the two houses.

            But the fact was, we didn't move immediately into this situation. There was an interregnum: four whole years from being told by our mother that she didn’t love our father, and was leaving him with immediate effect, to living in the wretched Wimpey home. The reason was that they couldn't decide on selling the joint asset of the marital home. So we were afforded a stay of execution. For four whole years. Those magical years of childhood between seven and eleven; that time when the world is so vivid, when you remember everything with piercing clarity. Mercifully, we got to spend those years in the house we'd grown up in. Despite the dark shadow of our future stepfather flitting in and out, this was a gift. While our father worked abroad, we were parented by our mother, and then by him, or both of them together, when he returned. This was an example of what's now known as 'bird-nesting', a practice that's becoming increasingly popular with divorcing couples. It allows the children to remain in the family home with their familiar surroundings and routines while their parents return to visit the nest separately. It's child-centric, enlightened, and, having experienced it and its opposite, I can say it's the kindest way to treat your children if you're thinking about blowing up your marriage.

            Apart from the accidental bird-nesting, there was one other mercy, one other gift. Not Moonraker, but something I didn't fully appreciate at the time. The other mercy was my brother. The advantage of going through it all with someone else was inestimable. God only knows what the experience might have felt like for an only child. Once the dyad of our parents was broken, we became the dyad. The family, or what was left of it, became us. Just us against the world. A world we could occasionally leave with the help of a certain secret agent, dreaming ourselves somewhere better, while it stood baffled, holding our capes.