Boot Boys is –for better or ill- full blooded James Moffat, almost every page of this book spits at you in the face. By 1973, Moffat aka Richard Allen was encountering the problem that the first generation of skinheads he’d been writing about were fading from view, but the public’s appetite for sensationalistic tales of youth at its worst was still strong. His solution was to turn his attention to the Boot Boys- an emerging youth cult that in terms of style and fashion harkened back to the mods of the 1960s, while also being the heir apparent to the skins’ penchant towards football hooliganism and racially motivated violence.
Moffat
centres Boot Boys around Tom, poster boy for Boot Boys culture and head of the
gang ‘The Crackers’. Moffat provides
Tom, the mother of all introductions with “even his father had to admit that
Tom Walsh was a rotten bastard”. A claim
that Tom spends the rest of the book living up to. After indulging in some football grounds
thuggery, Tom quickly graduates to attacking a couple while they are having sex
in a park. Bashing the man over the head
with a pole, raping his girlfriend, and taking misogynistic satisfaction in the
knowledge that once the guy wakes up he’ll not want anything more to do with
her “the rotten little bitch would get her ass kicked and be sent
packing”. Tom then turns his gang loose
on the house of a crooked black businessman, smashing his windows with rocks under
the justification that “the law being a bloody ass would not prosecute to the
extent of getting the suckers’ money back.
Well, The Crackers would show them how to hurt guys like him”.
The
actions of Tom’s gang might have been pulled from the headlines of the day, but
Moffat also appears to have turned to vintage Hollywood gangster movies for
inspiration here. Paying tribute to them
by making Tom a junkie for late night TV repeats of movies starring “Cagney, or
Raft, or Bogart, or Ladd, or Bendix, or Edward G.” The focus on ‘the rise and fall of a small
time hood’ and the power struggles within Tom’s gang, also allows Moffat’s
anti-Semitism to run riot in Boot Boys, making this an especially noxious piece
of writing, even by Moffat’s standards.
Tom faces dissension in the ranks, when Benjy, a Jewish member of his
gang, apposes Tom’s plan to daub swastikas on the doors of Jewish
families. An action that triggers a war
between Tom and Benjy, Gentile against Jew, over leadership of the gang. The other significant Jewish character in the
book, Lenny, is in contrast, meek and pathetically subservient to Tom, despite
Tom’s hostility towards him and overt anti-Semitism. Lenny acts as Moffat’s whipping boy throughout
the book, with Moffat stressing Lenny’s physical shortcoming to the point of
numbing repetition. Take a drink every
time Moffat refers to Lenny as being ‘pint sized’ in this book, and you’ll end
up as shit-faced as Moffat was when he wrote this thing.
Moffat’s
blustering, tabloidish approach to the material allows the author to have his
cake and eat it. Rubbing the gang’s
vilest deeds in the reader’s face, whilst lashing out at do-gooders for
creating a system that offers little by way of a deterrent or punishment. All of which results in Moffat getting misty
eyed for the days of Dick Turpin, when “the punishment for rape had been
drastic. Do-gooders had not been popular
with the rough and tumble serfs and their effeminate masters. Not like today”. While in 1977’s Knuckle Girls, Moffat pointed
to poverty and parental neglect as the reasons for its heroine’s anti-social
behavior, he appears to have been of an entirely different mindset when he
wrote this in 1973. Boot Boys angrily
rejecting such excuses, by deliberately making Tom the product of a loving
father and an affluent household “he had a wardrobe many a Mayfair socialite
would have been proud to show off to some skinny dolly bird”….and in spite of
all that he still turned out to be a rotten bastard!!
Acting
as a breather from Tom’s antics is the parallel story of Wilf Tomlinson, a
local newspaper hack who is determined to see the gang face justice, especially
after he meets Debra Wilkinson, a young widow who has been gang raped by The
Crackers. Wilf follows a familiar
pattern of Moffat’s heroes, by becoming hopelessly infatuated with the lead
female character, even though his old fashioned values means he struggles to
consummate the relationship. Wilf also
gives Moffat himself a run for his money when it comes to insensitivity. Asking Debra questions like “Did you ever
dream about your father once you reached adolescence” and secretly admitting
that he “fought to control an urge that would have placed him in the same
category as those who had, two nights previously, seen fit to make her the
target for their disgusting lusts”.
Midway
into Boot Boys the mood turns highly sexual.
What with passions between Wilf and Debra boiling over, and the
confrontation between Tom and Benjy taking the form of a battle of the studs,
as they compete over which of them can satisfy the most women in
succession. Along the way there is the
kind of written word laughability that only 1970s trash fiction can reach, with
Wilf pining “she was the reincarnation of Eve- a being with all the mysteries
wrapped between her fleshy, yet so firm, thighs” whilst Debra daydreams “she
knew that Wilf respected her even though he wanted to make her perform like a
common slut”. While fellow trash fiction
author Guy N. Smith preferred his female characters to be slender, and had
little time for big boobs, Moffat was of a different school. Boot Boys having a downer on the ‘skinny
dolly bird’ look, and instead lusting after the more mature, curvier woman. Debra Wilkinson being the type defined by The
Kinks song ‘Don’t Forget to Dance’ as “a nice bit of old”.
However
its rape and anti-Semitism that are the twin obsessions of Boot Boys, and
Moffat can’t keep away from either for long.
Tom’s gang might be depicted as irredeemably beyond-the-pale but you get
the creeping suspicion that Moffat secretly approved of, and may even have gotten
a charge out of their racism and sexual assaults. Moffat does have a contradictory attitude
towards the gang throughout Boot Boys, who occasionally switch from being the scourge
of decent society to the defenders of it.
Like when they are vandalizing the house of the crooked black businessman. Where Moffat clearly sees them as modern day
Robin Hood characters, stepping in where the law won’t, and getting justice on
behalf of hard working, law abiding citizens….y’know the sort of people the
gang are otherwise committed to raping and terrorizing. A product of its time, Boot Boys take on rape
is predictably pornographically minded, and where the victims -natch- end up
enjoying the experience “at first I was so frightened I could have died. Then,
the pleasure became intolerable”. Even
in that climate however, Moffat does push this a little further than most. It all builds up to Debra’s outrageous
admission that she’s actually grateful to her rapists. “They opened my
eyes. They made me see myself for what I
am- a sensualist”. All of which makes a
mockery of Wilf’s desire for revenge. It
would be like Death Wish ending with the daughter emerging from a catatonic
state and telling Paul Kersey that he’d wasted his time shooting all those
muggers and rapists, because, thanks to men like that, she’s gonna go off and
become a sensualist.
Speaking
of fathers and daughters, there is also an underlining fixation for incest in
Moffat’s work, even if he can’t quite bring himself to break that taboo. There’s the daughter and stepfather/lodger
subplot in Knuckle Girls, while here we have Wilf touching a nerve by asking
Debra questions about her father. As
well as Vanessa, Tom’s girlfriend, bringing up the fact that her father visits
her bedroom. “He isn’t interested in
sex, thank God” she cryptically adds “I’ve heard mum pleading with him”.
Fueled by boundless energy, all of it unhealthy, Boot Boys flits from maniacal set
piece to maniacal set piece like a headless chicken. The book all but exhausting its juvenile
delinquent theme before the end, forcing it to search out other genres for the
grand finale. Moffat initially flirting
with the crime genre, as Tom’s gang get mixed up with professional criminality,
before wigging out and going all satanic panic on us. “There had been certain things he wished he
could have experienced as a child, not least of them being an association with
Aleister Crowley”, Moffat writes of Tom, who has the gang desecrate a church
and perform an orgy in the graveyard in an attempt to do Wicked Al proud. Boot Boys is one mad, rollercoaster ride to
the dark heart of the 1970s, but with Moffat’s omnipresent anti-Semitism in the
back seat, the ‘guilt’ part does often outweigh the ‘pleasure’ here. If we were to do movie compassions, I’d say
that Guy N. Smith’s books were the equivalent of The Evil Dead or The Deadly
Spawn, they’re ultra-gory but also lots of fun and unlikely to leave any troubling
aftertaste. Whereas Moffat’s work is
like Cannibal Holocaust or Goodbye Uncle Tom, they’re grueling and emotionally
draining experiences to get through.
Toxic
as this book is now, I would say there is a valuable history lesson to be
learnt from it. Inadvertently Boot Boys
does bring it home how tone deaf society once was towards sexual assault, as
well as the amount of prejudice Jewish people faced back then. These days you’d have to search dark, obscure
areas of the internet to find vitriol like Moffat’s, but back in 1973 it was
all out in the open, selling like hot cakes in bookshops and being passed
around every schoolyard in the land.
Still, if you take on Boot Boys, you can come out the other side
boasting at having conquered 1970s fiction at its most crass, hateful, and
savage. Be warned though, in the case of
Boot Boys the past punches hard.
No comments:
Post a Comment