Mama - Peter Cave

 MAMA - PETER CAVE

Yet more pulp fiction dredged up from second-hand bookshops on the East Devon coast, this time from the mean and dark backstreets of a place called Dawlish. I keep getting writers Peter Cave and Richard Allen mixed-up as they both during the 1970s knocked out very similar, gratuitously violent types of books about Hells Angels and Skinheads that sold in surprisingly large numbers. It's an easy mistake to make as anyone aware of this genre might acknowledge. Mama, by Peter Cave, is the sequel to Chopper, the story of England's King of the Angels, and as the blurb on the back cover explains: 'Chopper may be dead but his girl lives on. Mama. A motorcycle groupie becomes Queen of the Hell's Angels'.

So what might be here for us to learn on perusal of this now classic cult book? Well, firstly, Peter Cave had a knack for giving his characters interesting names. For example: Danny the Deathlover. Can you imagine having that as a moniker?

We're also informed about how Hell's Angels can apparently at times be 'a force to reckon with, an army without fear or favour, a crusading band of renegades dedicated to the violence of revolution and social disruption'. And who am I to argue with that? Especially when at the wrong end of a bike chain wielded by some geezer in black leathers and steel-capped boots, sporting a swastika tattooed on his forehead. Self-preservation is my wont.

We also learn something of the alleged initiation process into the the Angels, involving vomit, urine, and phlegm, that could quite easily double-up as a video from under the counter of a 'specialist' shop in Amsterdam's Red Light district. And on that same subject, we also discover what 'pulling a train' means in regard to one girl and up to seventeen Angels in a row. Moreover, we learn of the Angel's code in regard to never running away from a fight, be it a physical one or a more metaphorical one as in achieving the dream of escaping to America where an Angel can ride easy upon its endless highways.

Mama is (as are all of Peter Cave's and Richard Allen's New English Library books from the Seventies) pulp fiction for the social anthropologist. It's the kind of book that Stewart Home has always wanted to write but has never quite managed to do so. At the time of its publication it was a gateway drug for disenfranchised children everywhere to start taking an interest in reading something other than Marvel comics. It's an insight into what scared anyone involved in the education system of the 1970s, fearing the influence it might have upon their young charges. Mama is an example of what is deemed 'low culture' by the self-appointed regulators and arbiters of what is passed as 'mainstream' culture.

Mama is also of course, rubbish, but it's cool rubbish given the seal of approval by your typical, home-grown kid on the street of any council estate or tower block of any dirty old town or city in England. Mama not only rocks but it rolls.

John Serpico