Michael Heath

I was born in London in 1935. By the summer of 1939, it was considered wise to get children out of the city before the war started. I wasn’t separated from my sobbing mother at Victoria station and put on a train holding a gas mask. Instead, my mother and I went down to Devon to stay with my grandmother, who had rented a house in the village of Torcross. In London, the war did not stop for Christmas. Toy shops before the war had sold small forts modelled on the Maginot and Siegfried lines. Now boys in the city wanted toy planes like the ones they saw flying overhead. But in Devon in 1940 things were still peaceful and we had a big Christmas lunch with all the trimmings. We were joined by an uncle whose job it was to pull bodies out of bombed buildings in London.

At home I work in a cupboard under the stairs just to keep me grounded, so you won’t hear me talking about my ‘studio’ — unlike some cartoonists I could name. My cupboard has in it, apart from old clothes, a cat litter tray and a collection of hundreds of jazz CDs. Do I put them back in their cases when I’ve finished playing them? I do not; anyway, I now have an iPod with all my music downloaded on to it. Fancy that! All those wonderful CDs on a machine the size of a packet of five Woodbines. Now I can have music wherever I go, so don’t even try and speak to me. I can’t hear you.

I see that the papers have finally given a name — ‘chavs’ — to the new working class. They are the type of people I have been drawing for years: trailer trash covered in bling bling, wearing Burberry baseball hats, white tracksuit bottoms and white trainers. They couldn’t be more different from the docile ‘pint-of-mild-please’ working class of the 1930s. I remember Mass Observation and the films by Humphrey Jennings, which collated their behaviour as if they were animals in a wildlife documentary. Try doing that now: ‘Wot you looking at?’ ‘Er ...nothing. I was just observing you drinking a large Jack Daniel’s and Coke so as to understand the sociological dynamic of the prole ...Ow! For God’s sake, don’t hit me!

Did you have a nice holiday? I know I did. Did you find yourself in a hotel bedroom in Naples looking after four children between the ages of two and six? Two girls and two boys, while everyone else went sightseeing. (‘Look! There’s a boy stealing that lady’s Prada handbag!’) The two girls have me as a father, the other two belonged to friends. They all wanted to watch something on television. After about three hours, they all agreed that they wanted to watch an animation they knew by heart called Ice Age. I fell asleep, only to be woken by four children screaming and pointing at the television set. Out of the screen came noises that sounded like someone being garrotted. In fact, it was two lesbians chewing away at each other and making orgasmic groans in Italian.

This is the first Christmas in recent years that I haven't spent in traction or immobilised by glandular fever. You may imagine that I spend my days drawing and whistling in a carefree manner, but there are tears behind the laughter. Two Christmases ago I was invited to the Erotic Review party in a club in London's Soho. I had worked for the magazine doing dodgy drawings at fifty quid a pop, so they owed me a drink. Besides, I was eager to meet the Erotic staff who, I felt sure, writhed around all day on their laptops sans knickers and headaches. I found the club, walked in and was unable to see anything except a bar, far off in the distance, full of decadent, half-naked women and helpless men being used as sex objects.