In the elaborate Action Man games I played with my brother Jude, games sometimes lasting for days, interrupted only for school, mealtimes, and homework, and involving complex missions, actual trenches, and tiny fireworks, there would be the occasional real casualty. A casualty might suffer a scary burn and get earth in its joints. At the end of a raid, he would be found in a heap with his foot some distance from his body, yes, dead with his boots on. This was always Talking Man. He was the brilliant Nazi officer, foiled again, the blithe stormtrooper just following orders or the double agent committing his final betrayal.
I was nine years old, and I had a sneaking admiration for the German uniform. I liked the tunic nipped in at the waist, the slim lapels, the rakish jodhpurs, the high boots, and the helmet which was a tidy compromise between the austerity of the Russian one and the sheer blowsiness of the American. And yet, we shuddered to dress our top men in this uniform; we only had it for the sake of verisimilitude. It gave us an over the shoulder feeling – is anybody watching? – to put a man in it. We only did so when we had pretty hard knocks in mind for the wearer. Talking Man wore it a lot.
In the days before soft boots with delicate laces that you could actually thread through eyelets, Talking Man had a pair of hard tight boots and changing them one day, I pulled his foot off too. With one of my favourite guys, this would have induced tears in me, and a desperate oh no feeling, but when it happened to Talking Man, I felt a shady satisfaction.
What did I have against him? Of all my men, I remember him most clearly, perhaps for the wilful neglect I inflicted on his person as well as for a certain poignancy he represents for me to this day and which I am only now beginning to grasp.
I had acquired him through the Action Man reward system. With each purchase of an item from the Action Man directory, you were awarded stars in proportion to its value. For instance, a complete uniform – British Army Officer, German Stormtrooper, Alpine Commando, etc. – earned you maybe five stars. Whereas something from the Quartermaster’s stores – a flare gun and radio unit; a detonator, coil of wire, and dynamite; a mess kit; a map case and binoculars – only afforded you one or two. When you had collected twenty-one stars you won a free Action Man. A free Action Man! I chose Talking Man, who was an innovation at the time. My heart sank when I saw him. On the box, things looked good. There was an actual-size painting of a soldier on it, dressed in an RAF officer’s uniform, his mouth ajar in mid-speech; he was clearly caught up in some grave moment and the words would be jaunty and ironic. I could tell he was a man used to self-sacrifice – ferociously brave, romantic at home, amusing and generous in the mess. In my memory, he resembled Sean Connery. It was not seemly to open the box in the shop, and I was too excited, having actually exchanged twenty-one cardboard stars for a whole man, to expect deception. But they really ought to have shown Talking Man naked on the packaging. A small picture of his torso would have been enough. I was simply not prepared for the facts. His chest was a mess of perforations, like grotesquely enlarged pores. I have ever since been disgusted by displays of regular perforations such as honeycombs or Band-Aids, the raised papillae of a burnt tongue, a pig’s snout, moon craters, the magnified hair follicles in a razor ad, subway grates, cheese graters, the graininess of a blown-up photograph, aeration holes in a new lawn, the skin of a plucked chicken, the little holes on the surface of perfectly cooked rice. A plastic ring dangled from the middle of his back, below the shoulder blades, and attached to the ring was a long flesh-coloured string that coiled within the hollow of his perforated chest, an intestinal rope, a terrible worm. Otherwise, Talking Man’s features were regular, identical to all other Action Men, ones without stigmata, ones with minds of their own and no ready-made speech. And Talking Man’s speech was simply insulting. How could his two or three uninspired phrases suit all occasions? I don’t actually remember the few sentences in his repertoire, but they were of this ilk: ‘ATTENTION! FIRE DOWN BELOW! COVER ME! ALL HANDS ON DECK! ENEMY AIRCRAFT!’ That sort of thing. And if any of these phrases came in handy, how would you know you’d hit on the right one? Even worse, this burst of speech was preceded by the noise of the cord uncoiling, followed by a shuffle and crackle of interference like announcements in a train station. Why couldn’t he sound just a bit like Richard Burton in The Desert Rats or Jack Hawkins in The Cruel Sea? Instead, Talking Man might have been on drugs, or merely a simpleton. He never paused for thought. He did not experience doubt or pain or emotional stumbles of any kind. He just blurted out commands like a madman, all out delirium was a shot away. Then the military hospital – Northfield perhaps, near Birmingham – where he is deemed LMF. Lacking Moral Fibre. There he hides under beds and calls out in sleep to dead men, friends and enemies.
I expressed my contempt for Talking Man in small ways, quite apart from having him careen headlong into ambushes and walk over landmines. When we went on our family summer holiday in Connemara, I left him behind. When Jude and I made undies and little vests out of old socks for our men, Talking Man had only bare skin next to his scratchy uniform. Action Man™ designed lovely long socks as part of their new sports line, and Jude and I saved them for our best men. Jude even made little garters out of black elastic. Not for Talking Man, however, the comfort of a warm knee sock. His feet were always bare, in hard boots. Or rather, his foot was always bare, in a hard boot.
I found the new sports line irksome. A booklet was available in the toy shops, and in it were coloured illustrations of Action Man dribbling the ball, mid scissors kick, tackling, making a save, and kitted out in the colours of the most famous English clubs of the day: Arsenal, Liverpool, West Ham, Spurs. I could not reconcile the figure of my fighting World War II man and this frivolous sporting type. If at least they had been big shorts, like those of the thirties and forties, then I could work with the idea: our men are taking time out, on an RAF base, say, dispelling tension between raids, playing football with real yearning and abandon, expressing their comradeship in war, and nostalgia for their curtailed youth. They are very deft at the game, in an unfussy, self-effacing way. They are unselfish, laying off passes for men recovering from disfigurement, or men whose wives had perished in air raids or who were unfaithful to them, unable to live in fear of the awful telegram.
‘What is it, Alice? Bad news?’
For my men, praise in the course of a match would be generously deflected by jovial cracks at their own expense. Talking Man, of course, never played in these matches, even before his crippling accident, when he was sidelined due to craziness. I had seen some old footage taken by psychiatrists in one of the military hospitals, the Royal Victoria or Craiglockhart, set up during the ’14–’18 scrap, a film showing the funny walks of shell-shocked men. Names were given to all
