How I met Alf


Must have been about seven years old, living in Petts Wood in Kent. Bobby,
Nobby and the lads had just put West Germany in their place, and I was sick
in bed I think when my old man walked in with a big pile of Victors,
Hornets and some other more yellowed pre-war comics he'd found in a jumble
sale that morning.

Next few hours were a bit of a rite of passage as I'd been strictly a Dandy
and Beano child up until then.  As a small kid who could run faster than
most of his mates, with a mother born over the family chip shop and no
known relatives to have been anywhere near a university, it wasn't hard to
identify with Alf.  At that early age though the TotT stories made less
impact than the more dramatic spitfire chases on the pages around them.  By
lunchtime that Saturday I'd absorbed what I took to be important knowledge
for my future adult British male life including some useful expletives in
German and Japanese, the fundamentals of bayonet work, and the secret of
how to avoid being trampled to death when faced with a 1000 charging
buffalo - but with only one bullet left in your rifle.  By tea time I had a
very stiff neck from lying on my side turning pages all day.

Remarkably, the subsequent 40 years have provided little opportunity to
show off most of that learning.  Spending time in countries populated by
those shifty-looking other races generally drawn running away in the face
of the inately superior British has also - I must admit - raised doubts in
me about some of the wider social assumptions in those pages.  Is it
possible that Sir Cecil Rhodes had his head up his arse when he declared
that being born British meant that you had 'won first prize in the lottery
of life'?  All made sense in 1966.

Which all makes the Alf Tupper stories that much more special and timeless:
because at 47 I still ask myself at key moments in life "what would Alf do
in this situation"?

Dave Moore

New Zealand