“Intriguing,” I thought.
* “Pee” means “pence”—cute, huh? “That’ll be twenty pee mate,” someone might say. Other currency-related slang includes “fiver” (five pounds), “tenner” (ten pounds), “a score”—which is twenty quid, and “quid” is a pound, “bullseye” is fifty quid, “a grand” is a thousand pounds. It’s all very confusing.
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My dad gave me the money through the window. He didn’t seem bothered or embarrassed by the whole thing at all. He was just muddling through life, was dear Ron Brand. He did his best, as we all do, groping his way through fatherhood without a template. The little girl’s dad never found out. He was just playing crazy golf while the real craziness took place in his wife’s knickers.
Less bizarre but equally impacting were the early trips to Upton Park to enjoy our other shared passion, Th e Hammers. I didn’t do badly on the West Ham front: he took me a fair bit, probably three or four times a season, starting when I was really young. I loved everything about it—the intensity, the proximity, the noise, the journey there. There’s a very good description, I think it’s in the play When Saturday Comes, of how when you leave your house to go to the match you’re on your own. Then you see another person in a football scarf.
Then one or two of you become the trickle. Then the trickle becomes the river. Then the river becomes the flood. Th en
you get the sense of, “Oh my god, we’re all heading toward Shangri-la.” Every time I stroll down Green Street I involun-tarily recall feeling all anxious, nervous and small, the stench of shit food and belched booze, but most of all the numinous thrill on ascending the stairs within the ground and seeing anew the improbably bright, livid, lurid green pitch. Sometimes by happy chance you’ll see the pitch as the Irons run out and the crowd’s roar will greet you as it does them and you know that you’re everything and nothing. I felt this too when I entered Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Regarding the ceiling, I understood why people believe in God. Because God appears to be present. “This could be it, it could literally, physically be God: not just some abstract idea.”
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Shame Innit ?
Leaving the ground and seeing everyone depart onto Green Street, I once asked, “Is that all the people in the world, Dad?”
It was so exhilarating—the singing, and the violence, because even when it’s not enacted, the violence is still there, there’s a kind of hum, constantly present in the language used toward the players, the referee and the opposing fans. Malevolence lurks unseen within us all; even when all tiny and webbed in snot and sweeties I felt it in me. A need to be naughty or bad—and even this innocuous, forthcoming tale seems to me to indicate an innate malady . . .
In the film Citizen Kane, there’s that scene where Kane is dying, clutching a snowstorm globe. As he dies, he drops it on the floor and utters the word “Rosebud.” Because when he was a kid he had that sled, “Rosebud,” that he used to bomb down hills on, and he really loved it. In spite of the fact that in later life he became a millionaire and built a business empire and had all that power and all that success, when it came to the moment of his death, it was being a child on that sled that he remembered. Perhaps for all of us there is a moment that epitomizes our lives—a moment when you’re more yourself than at any other time, an instant of absolute self-realization. Well, that was Kane’s, and this is mine . . .
It all began with a nice old man who lived on our street, talking to me about some flowers that he’d grown in his garden. I think over time I have perhaps, if not sanitized this old man, at least Disney- fied him. For now, in my mind’s eye, when I cast my thoughts back, I see a twinkle-eyed Geppetto character, smoking a pipe and wearing lederhosen as he tends to his nastur-tiums. They beam back at him and grin—perhaps even jigging about like the battery-operated dancing flowers that were to become popular a decade or so later. The passage of time has 33
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also allowed me to lacquer the memory with the old man’s unexpressed suspicion that I were in need of a patriarch, a father figure, and him being all kind and guiding me toward an understanding of nature.
As I recall it now, he put a fatherly arm around me, and what he said next could almost be a song from The Lion King about the cycle of life. “And these flowers grow, and one day they die, but they’ll grow again. These flowers are perennial.
Their seed is eternal. Flower begets flower and on we must go—from now until the end of time. Always it were thus, like a line of human bellybuttons stretching back to Adam and Eve.”
Then, the old man paused. “Oh well,” he said, “I’ll just pop into the toilet for a wee . . . Don’t stamp on those flowers, will you?”
“Don’t stamp on those flowers . . .” Why say that? Had he not parted with the words, “Don’t stamp on those flowers,” I wouldn’t have. It just wouldn’t’ve occurred to me. I might have stamped on one to make an example of it. But in the sentence,
“Don’t stamp on those flowers,” the word “don’t” is feeble, impotent and easy to ignore. Whereas “STAMP ON THOSE
FLOWERS” has a real linguistic verve; “stamp on those fl owers” could be a slogan, a catchphrase, a banner under which nations could unite. So the moment he shuffled out of view, all old and friendly, I stamped on them flowers. I stamped ’em till there was naught but mush, till they were but a memory of flowers; I stamped with a ferocity that meant that fl owers everywhere would never again feel safe. It was a floral 9/11. I knew it was bad but I couldn’t deny the urge; I know why them medieval loons were so keen to believe in demonic possession because I gave vent in that moment to a timeless darkness, the param e-34
Shame Innit ?
ters of which extend beyond my being and transgress the very borders of evil itself.
I was angry toward them flowers—just growing there, thinking they were better than us. It was a bit like in Stanley Hollo-way’s rendition of “Albert and the Lion.” My dad was obsessed with that poem—he made me recite it with him, verse for verse, at one of his ill-advised weddings. There’s a line where the little boy, Albert, takes umbrage at the lion’s lack of gusto: “Now Albert had heard about lions,/How they was ferocious and wild—/
To see Wallace lying so peaceful,/Well, it didn’t seem right to the child.” Well, it didn’t seem right to me that the fl owers should be there, all peaceful and beautiful. The poem continues: “So straight’way the brave little fella,/Not showing a morsel of fear,/
Took his stick with its ’orse’s ’ead ’andle/And pushed it in Wallace’s ear.” My memory of the poem has spanned decades in which the marriage it was learned to serve could’ve played out a dozen times.
I took my cue from the brave young protagonist of this famous tale and stamped down on that beauty: stamped it into the soil. Them smug, up-reaching flowers, greedily sucking up sun. “I don’t know what photosynthesis is, and I don’t know what’s in it for me, because I’ve never felt any of its advantages. I think it’s a cruel trick . . .” So I were satisfied to stamp them down, and then waited with a churning gut for the old man’s return.
He came back, beaming and benevolent, still with his leathery face and furrowed brow and them sort of thick, dirty fingers and leathery palms that old men often go in for; it seems somehow satisfying to smell their jumpers and fall asleep on their laps. He trundled back down the path, all warm, avuncular and glowing.
He glanced first at me, and then at his devastated fl owerbed; 35
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all plowed up and butchered, like a Ripper victim—like Pearly Poll, lying gutted in Hanway Street, Spitalfields. And his anger grew the same way he’d explained to me that flowers grew. First there was a tiny seed of rage—“Oh Russell, what did you do that for? I thought you were a good boy—a nice little boy.”
Swiftly came the spring and his anger bloomed into raging trif-fids. And suddenly this warm man, this gentle man, was shouting and screaming at me, incan
descent with fury. I can still remember his roar—this visceral sound booming up from his guts—“GET HOME!”
I raced home, a refugee from the botanical carnage, to sanctuary; only the pathologically mischievous know the relief of closing the door behind them, locking out the world and its tight angry fist clutching dockets and penalties for parental perusal. I was excited by what had happened, but also sort of sad.
I never spoke to that old man again. I closed down that account which could have been quite rewarding. Time has bleached away my memories of the period immediately prior to the beginning of this narrative, but it feels as if the old man’s kindly overture was not an isolated incident. He seems, retrospectively, to have had a tendency to take me under his wing and witter away encouragingly. Having the knowledge that I’m being destructive and then doing it anyway: I’m still trapped in that pattern. In fact, I made myself a victim of it again as recently as the night before I wrote this very para-graph.
I was at a do and thought, “Russell, why don’t you just go home? Tomorrow morning will still be tomorrow morning, what ever you do now. Why not forgo the opportunity for a sexy adventure and wake up on clean sheets with a clean mind?” Alas 36
Shame Innit ?
the demons were unwilling to negotiate and more flowers were damned. This is why I currently find myself turning to celebrity hypnotist Paul McKenna to brain-ma-tise me into change.* But if celebrity hypnotist Paul McKenna can’t help me, who else is there to turn to? V
* Paul McKenna is a hypnotist and self-help guru rumored to be the highest paid entertainer in the UK. He is also, now, my friend—and peculiarly, rhyming slang for a “tenner”; see above.
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4
Fledgling Hospice
I like animals very much—lovable, dumb chums, loyal, decent and lovely—and if I’d had my way I’d’ve been reared in a menagerie. In my childhood there always seemed to be massive obstacles between me and any simple pleasure; as if I were unwittingly a character in a peculiarly trivial Greek tragedy. For instance, I really wanted to get another dog, but my mum was always opposed to this idea. Until one day, my dad, in typically irresponsible fashion, purchased this huge, dopey German shepherd, unwittingly starting an inter-parent canine arms race where my approval and love were sought through dog acquisition.
Toby was the name of my dad’s preemptive strike—a really lovely, big-footed, lumbering, daft dog. When my dad cleared off to live in Düsseldorf with the woman who later became his third wife, he left Toby with my tiny nan, this huge great beast filling her mid-terrace house, as if it were a pebble-dashed waist-coat he were wearing to the dog Oscars.
He used to sit on her lap, while she peeped round to join the chatter or watch the telly. My nan’d never mutter a word against him, as if to do so would be sacrilege. She knew that it was the manifestation of my dad’s id, Toby being more dogma than dog.
Off they’d go for bone-crunching walks round the estate, await-38
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ing the appearance of an inevitable cat who’d send them both off on a ridiculous, sledless husky ride down the concrete slopes of Dagenham. Her busted hands belatedly evolved into a twisted glove fit only for clasping a constantly taut leather lead; if this painful development troubled her, it was a burden she endured silently. As with many women of her generation and class, this unspectacular martyrdom was never remarked upon, as it was simply her duty to give and be a mother.
My mum struck back at the Toby purchase by acquiring us a four-legged financial drain of our own. Alas, she got it from a refuge for delinquent hounds. I was not involved in the selection process. I was disappointed that it weren’t little enough: I wanted it to be more of a puppy, so I could share in the joy of its infancy and mold it into a bespoke companion adhering to some rather unique requirements; the mutt was due to be my only friend and salvation, you can’t just get them off the rack. I’m sure when God was selecting Jesus for his mission to redeem the people of Earth he didn’t just hurl a potato out of his offi ce window shouting, “Whomever this spud may strike, boy, have I got a job for you!” I imagine there was a rigorous selection pro cess, a kind of celestial X Factor, although, given the story’s dénouement, perhaps ✝ Factor would be more fi tting.
Life’s never a postcard of life, is it? It never feels like how you’d want it to look. I suppose my very specific canine pref-erences would probably have been formed by reading Enid Blyton.* I really enjoyed her as a child—even books like Th e
Naughtiest Girl in the School, which were only meant for girls.
I was a cross-reader, feasting on the forbidden fruit of girl
* Enid Blyton is a children’s author who was recently voted the most pop ular of all writers of that genre, beating Roald Dahl and Lewis Carroll. Her books captured a prewar, innocent Britain where protagonists could have names like Dick and Fanny without raising a titter. These days even the word “titter” makes me think of tits.
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fiction: what a turn-on. So I wanted a well-balanced, cheerful, mongrel, Enid Blyton–type dog along the lines of her immortal
“Timmy,” that I could have grown up with—not the Looney-bitch that turned up. Topsy was a mixed blessing. As a result of coming from dog borstal, she was a bit troubled and would take any opportunity to tear things up. She tore up a koala bear that was stuffed with polystyrene balls, once. I remember looking through the letter box and seeing the stairs and the hallway all covered in white plastic, like a suburban Narnia.
Also, Topsy ate money. Not in the metaphorical sense of having to go to the vet’s and have a lot of operations or anything.
She just liked eating money.
My mum would leave cash on the kitchen work surface after those “Clothes Parties,” and once Topsy ate it. I like to think that Topsy was a vehement anticapitalist and that this money-guzzling was a statement of some kind, but I only like to think that ’cos I’m a twit.
I was seven years old when my mother got cancer for the first time; she had to have a hysterectomy, which was diffi cult
for her and cemented me forever as an only child. If you have no brothers and sisters it defines you for life; even when you’re thirty you refer to yourself as an only child.
While she was in hospital, I found myself uprooted from the security of Grays and forced to go and live with her family.
They’re good people, but I’d never felt part of the family; I watched Christmases and birthdays through patio doors in my mind. The first night at my maternal grandmother’s house in Brentwood I wet the bed. She humiliated me while we changed the sheets, saying I was “too old for that sort of business,” and that I was bad and responsible for my mother’s illness. I’ve found that difficult to forget. She was a much-loved woman, my grand-40
Fledgling Hospice
mother, Dusty Miller, and meant the world to her children and my cousins. I took that exchange as further evidence that there was something wrong with me.
The hospital my mum was in (the same one where I was born, in Orsett in Essex) was all decaying and falling apart: it’s been made into flats now. Everything’s been made into flats now: schools, churches, hospitals. What are we to do when the occupants of these flats have children, get married, get ill and die? Bury them in the scarce earth only to learn their coffi ns
have been made into flats now?
The hospital became the bleak venue of a courtship between my mum and her new boyfriend Colin. I fucking hated Colin.
Before she was ill, she used to have these parties—of which I would be quite disapproving—at which loads of people would gather downstairs, making adult noises, not sexy noises, just the adult rumble, punctured with Sid James laughs and the clinking of glass. I think Colin had first crossed our threshold to attend one of these gatherings, and then visited her when she was in hospital.
My mum eventually recovered, and I went back home to live with her again. She told me that she had only
survived because she loved me so much. For the first seven years of my life, the house in Grays had been a kind of extension of my mother’s womb—a comfortable environment in which I felt safe. In later life I wrote a poem about mum’s illness called “Hysterectomy Angel,” which ended with the somewhat troubling (at least in terms of conventional Freudian psychoanalysis) line: “When I fall in love, it will be with Mother.”
But now my incestuous bubble was about to be punctured by the arrival of this swarthy yet utterly humdrum man. Colin was a
good-looking
individual—somewhere between David
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Hasselhoff and George Best.* He, like my dad, had been a brilliant footballer in his youth. He was handsome but utterly lacked glamour. Not that lacking glamour is necessarily a terrible thing; Alan Bennett lacks glamour and is perhaps the greatest living Englishman.† Colin was, I suppose, part of the paradigm where dead beautiful women sometimes neglect to develop a personality, because they’ll be invited to functions regardless:
“Just pop a frock on, and I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”
A personality for the incredibly beautiful can be a pointless cargo, regardless of gender. Colin moved into the house that we already inhabited, and never really recovered from the sense that he lived in a home that my mum and dad had occupied together.
Because Colin had a job (he initially worked nights in a factory, checking breeze blocks, and then later became a van driver), there was a flush of new income into the house hold. Whenever a new consumer item was bought—a sofa, or a washing machine—it would be worshipped like a Dyson Deity entering the home: as dear Morrissey said, “Each house hold appliance is like a new science in my town.” Colin would extract a tiresome price for these exciting new material idols.
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Page 4