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across the page. The best story was Spiderman’s three-issue fight with Dr Octopus, involving the first of his Aunt May’s many brushes with potentially fatal illnesses. Spidey needn’t have worried; the old broad had the constitution of an ox.
    On his rack, Mr Purbrick also stocked shoddily reprinted collections of weird tales with surprise endings. The lead stories were always about giant creatures called Koomba or Zatuu, who were defeated by an insignificant bloke in a hat, the sole purpose of their existence being for the artist to have fun drawing them smashing up city streets.
    But oh, the pleasure didn’t end there. In the backs of these comics was always a page entitled BUMPER TREASURE CHEST OF FUN! It sold:
    Trick black face soap
    Worms (‘They magically appear when dropped in a glass of water. Imagine the look of horror on your victim’s face. Harmless.’)
    Onion gum
    See-behind glasses
    Throw your voice!
    Joy buzzer
    Plastic sick (‘Whoops! Who’s been ill? Imagine their faces! Hours of fun!)
    X-ray spex (actually cardboard lenses with pieces of ribbed feather across the centre pinholes that created a black ghost-shape within any object looked at, the sort of thing people see as they’re going blind).
    Purbrick’s sold Ellison’s Jokes, which included tin ventriloquists’ swozzles that you were always in danger of swallowing and choking to death on, and ‘Fake Soot’, which comprised tiny specks of ground rubber. His shop was in the middle of the parade on Westcombe Hill, a down-at-heel middle-class suburb. There were no turds or rubber breasts in his joke shop; the children were expected to throw fake soot at each other.
    Although I much preferred American comics, I also took all the British comics because everyone else did.
Dandy
,
Buster
,
Topper
,
Lion
,
Beezer
and the rest were delivered every Wednesday, along with Kath and Bill’s
Daily Mail
. My favourite stories concerned the Steel Claw, a man with a metal hand who turned invisible (except for the hand) whenever he was electrocuted. The strip required its hero to walk into power cables at the same rate that normal people crossed the road. Girls weren’t allowed to read these comics. They had to make do with
Bunty
, a periodical seemingly financed by the hockey industry.
    I loved the private world of comics – no adult could make sense of stories that accurately reflected the preposterous illogicalities of imaginative children. Comics were a narcotic that led to harder drugs like
Mad
magazine, with its unfunny American jokes about cars and movies and Madison Avenue, and
Famous Monsters of Filmland
, which was filled with appalling puns and blurrily reproduced stills of long-forgotten B-movie monsters. My favourite monster was the crimson creature shaped like the top of a cucumber that fired mind-controlling bats to attack the people of Earth in Roger Corman’s
It Conquered the
World
. It wasn’t much of a stretch defeating this fearsome beast; the hero just hit it with a flamethrower and tipped it on its side. When he did, you could see the castors it moved around on sticking out from underneath.
    Famous Monsters
had great stuff you could send away for in its back pages, including rubber horror masks that made your face sweat, ten-foot inflatable pythons, giant weather balloons, ‘sea monkeys’ that were actually dried brine shrimps, despite the fact that the artwork showed them sitting in armchairs reading newspapers, 8mm reels of
The Giant Claw
, 4
The Deadly Mantis
and other lousy monster movies, Aurora horror model kits, 5 the baby chick incubator, the Mad Doctor hypodermic needle (‘everyone will faint when you plunge this needle into your victim’s arm!’), spooky sound effects LPs and live monkeys. None of which my mother allowed me to send off for.
    ‘They would have to come all the way from America,’ Kath told me. ‘It would cost a fortune, and nothing would survive the trip. I’m not spending all that money to have a