He had these pointless, hateful drills, like rotating the sofa cushions at night—lest the sofa should show some sign of the
* George Best was the best British footballer of all time. A self- destructive, alcoholic genius, he came to prominence during the pop cultural revolution of the ’60s, and was frequently referred to as the “fifth Beatle” like umpteen other people at that time—there were so many fifth Beatles that, had they all been allowed on stage, they’d’ve made Earth, Wind
& Fire look like an underfunded one-man band. Four years after his death, Manchester United fans still sing anthems in his honor; think Mickey Mantle meets Jim Morrison.
† Alan Bennett is an English playwright and comic legend. He is an integral part of the British comedy landscape, as he became famous as part of the Beyond the Fringe team that included Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. He is northern, bespectacled, working class, gay, timid and demure, and his most famous character was a Church of England minister, but passages of his prose have the intensity of Byron.
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passing of time, or experience, or joy. And him sat forever in reluctant pants in the corner of the room, clutching a can of Ten-nent’s Super, or some other homeless lager, the faithful TV
remote forever resting on his naked thighs like Blofeld’s cat.
I was unable to categorize or understand the flow of Colin’s moods. All I knew was that he were perpetually displeased with something, and fundamentally disapproved of me. I was the an-tithesis of all that he stood for—this simple, working-class man, a humble individual with low expectations of life, whose only dream of becoming a successful footballer had long ago been packed away. And while in retrospect I can understand his resentment of my Quentin Crisp quirkiness—flitting around, all self-absorbed and vain and unusual—for me, he was a toxic in-terloper in my home. Colin: this essentially misanthropic man, 43
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not having enough vitality to be actively hateful, but constantly down on all life.
I had a growing sense that I was a disappointment to people: not only that I wasn’t the kind of person my dad would have wanted me to be, but also that I wasn’t able to look after my mum; either to prevent her from getting ill, or to stop Colin from moving in. All that seemed to be left to me were my own limited resources, and an intensifying thirst for animal friendships.
I really craved the company of animals—the wordless simplicity of it. Even now, with my cat Morrissey, I cherish the moments that I’m absolutely alone with him, and the unrecorded tenderness that no one will ever know of—the simplicity of
“Oh, I’m just here, with this cat.” I don’t even feed him that much any more, ’cos Lynne, the house keeper, does that now.
But he seems to want something from me that isn’t food, and perhaps that thing is love.
My relationship with Topsy quickly grew very intense. Perhaps because she was a problem dog, we had more in common than I’d initially realized. I sometimes cuddled her too hard so that she would yelp. “Here, have some of my painful love,” my febrile embrace would tell her. “It is constrictive and controlling and painful, like all love should be.” In later life, I have come to realize that any expression of love which ends in a yelp probably requires modifi cation.
When we first got Topsy, she would be allowed to sleep in the bed with me: I hope it is not necessary for me to stress the platonic nature of that relationship—not platonic in the purist sense, there was no philosophical discourse, but we certainly didn’t fuck, which is usually what people mean by platonic; which I bet would really piss Plato off, that for all his thinking and chatting his name has become an adjective for describing sexless trysts. But, 44
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when Colin came, an absurd edict was introduced whereby she was no longer allowed upstairs.
I evidently had a lot of anger and hate in me about this, because I would perch at the top of the stairs and lure her to come up—“Topsy! Topsy! Topsy!” Then, when she would slink nervously upward to the forbidden terrain of the upper fl oor, I would suddenly become Mr. Hyde. “Oh dear, Topsy,” I would declaim, in a rather arch manner, “you know perfectly well you’re not allowed upstairs” before cruelly kicking her back down to the bottom again, where I would rejoin her and give her a sympathetic cuddle, regretfully muttering, “Oh Christ! Were you kicked down the stairs? This is terrible.”
That’s quite fucked-up, isn’t it? My friend Matt Morgan says Topsy must’ve thought she lived in a house with twins—an evil one who lived on the landing, and a good one who dwelt downstairs. I feel very guilty about this conduct and try to off er amends by treating animals with respect at all times. (In fact, while writing this, a gnat, which has been biting me all evening, rested momentarily on my keyboard and, though I’m quite cross about its bloodsucking, I gently requested that it dine on me no further rather than dashing out its wicked brain onto the space bar. It ignored my attempts at a civil solution, suggesting that perhaps our leaders are right and you can’t negotiate with terrorists. Or gnats.)
With Topsy at my side, I’d head over the road to rescue the innocent creatures of the chalky wilderness from the tyranny of free will. How I rejoiced in rescuing those nestlings. “My God!
I’ve got this thing. Now I can take it to my house, I can have this innocent, terrified bird, staring up at me and exuding this strange, sweaty smell.”
I would make a new home for them in my AT-AT Walker—a Star Wars toy with legs from The Empire Strikes Back: it struck 45
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back very hard at Essex’s wildlife, with me as the Emperor’s well-intentioned idiot apprentice. All my other Star Wars fi gures lived in there too, so if you opened it up you’d see Lando Calrissian, a storm trooper and a baby sparrow—an unlikely trio, yes, the three’v’em’ve all got their foibles, sure, but they’ve got each other, and they’ll all learn something on this journey they’re taking together.
The problem with rescuing baby birds is that it’s very hard to get them to eat properly. You have to chop ’em up worms, which they don’t want to eat. Which I quite understand because they look and smell awful, writhing on a spoon like spastic spaghetti (spazghetti?); I wasn’t prepared to pop it in my gob like their real mum would’ve done. “My real mum chews my food up and regur-gitates it,” one might’ve said. “I don’t care what your real mum does, while you’re under my roof, in my AT-AT Walker, you’ll live by my rules.” Sadly, my avian nursery had a one hundred percent failure rate. If I was a rehabilitation center for fl edglings, the AT-AT Walker would have been sold off to pay for counseling for the grief- stricken parents.
For me it seemed like an opportunity to have something of my own. I really loved those little pricks. I kept having to get rid of their bodies, like Bill Oddie as a hit man, and they looked all dead. In Enid Blyton, the animals would always survive. But even now, I don’t think I’d be able to get a little baby bird to live—how does anyone do it? I suppose it takes a lot of devotion.
You’ve got to be doing it all the time, like when Terry Nutkins has those otters in his bath.* I think one of them otters scoff ed down his fi nger by way of thanks. So in a way I was just unknowingly
* Bill Oddie was a famous comedian who became latterly more known for ornithological programs. Terry Nutkins is a wildlife TV presenter, forever lodged in my mind because an otter that he rescued ate his finger. His career has been reduced to one of amphibious mammal victimhood.
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avenging Nutkin’s lost digit; you send one of ours to the hospital, we’ll send one of yours to a Star Wars merchandise morgue. In fact loads of yours.
This bit of my childhood might be a bit of a downer to read; it was a bit of a downer to live an’ all. The period around my seventh birthday has been studied by so many analysts and counselors that it’s little wonder that I was such a show-off , as if I could feel the eyes of future do- gooders peering a
t me through the decades. I had an insular yet somehow idyllic early childhood—which was okay, so long as I wasn’t forced to leave the house or do anything with other people—that was suddenly brought to an end by a sequence of dramatic shocks. My mum getting ill, Colin turning up, then my dad, with the best of intentions and a pocket full of transitory cash, deciding to send me to a posh, private school called Gidea Park. Academically, I would inevitably lag behind the privileged elite of Gidea Park College, so my dad arranged for me to have private tuition with the bloke next door to him, who looked a bit like the former Labor Party leader Michael Foot (it wasn’t actually him, he was a beautiful and idealistic man, they just looked similar).
Once, when I got a question right, this chap—by way of congratulation—stuck his finger up my arse and felt my balls.
“This is unusual,” I thought. I wondered if perhaps I might’ve encouraged him, because I’d said something I’d heard on Only Fools and Horses.* To describe my bafflement at a mathematical
* Only Fools and Horses was a hugely successful sitcom chronicling the adventures of an affable, criminal family. The alpha male, Del Boy Trotter, perpetually dreams of becoming a millionaire. His brother, Rodney, is an artistic dreamer and Granddad is a burden. Th e
show epitomizes the phenomena of working-class aspiration under Thatcher. It was a mainstream show, beloved by young and old, and I used to literally dream they were my family.
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problem, I’d employed a phrase which Del Boy used—“Rodney, I’ve been looking for you like a tit in a trance”—only changing
“tit,” which I knew was rude, to “clown.”
“But it’s not ‘clown’ in a trance, is it?” he responded, lascivi-ously. By referring to this lewd colloquialism, it seemed I’d sig-naled my complicity in the world of adult sexuality. Just a few moments later, he was copping a feel, and besmirching the purity of what would later become popularly known as my ball-bags.
As a currency for rewarding academic achievement, I think it’s unlikely to supersede the gold star. Although I thought it odd, I wasn’t particularly cheesed off. What most aggrieved me about the whole sorry business was that soon after it happened, I told my mum, she in turn told my dad who didn’t go to the police, because he said he’d deal with it. But he never did anything.
Later in life, when he would sometimes drunkenly allude to parenting errors in a “Sorry I wasn’t a good dad” kind of way, I often felt this was what he was referring to. And if he’d beaten the poor old sod up or something, I would have seen that as an act of heroism. I didn’t see that tutor again, one hopes on account of his bizarre antics.
My brief foray into the world of private tuition was not, however, entirely disastrous. I should say at this point that, when I think about what tribe I belong to, where my loyalties lie and what my affiliations are, stories about going to see a tutor on a Saturday seem very much out of sync, both with how I regard myself, and how I want to be regarded by others. Th at aside,
there was something about this new tutor woman I went to see which was far from compromising to my identity. In fact, it’s something I still crave in women now.
The first time I went round to her house, she said, “Okay Russell, what are we gonna do today?” I replied that I didn’t 48
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want to do anything and had a big tantrum, insisting, “I can’t be bothered: all I’m going to do is scribble on this bit of paper.”
Instead of being upset by this, she just said, “Oh, alright.” So I got on with that for a while, until it got boring. And then she asked if I wanted to do any more of that or would I prefer to do something else. And I said, “I’ll do something else.” Retrospectively, I realize that this must’ve been a rare encounter with someone who knew how to deal with me. The form of parenting I was used to was very much damage limitation. I’d have got myself into some awful situation and my mum would arrive all flustered—“Russell’s done this thing!”—then I would be molly-coddled and assuaged.
In this woman’s house, there was a conservatory area with a lot of light in it. It seemed a very comfortable place, and she made me feel really at ease. She had one of those little organ things where, when you press the key, a little toy will open its mouth. I still feel a sense of technicolor comfort when thinking about that. Sitting in her house was a kind of sanctuary. I never went back there again. V
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“Diddle- Di- Diddle- Di”
I went to that Gidea Park College in the end. I had to get a new uniform for it—a cap and stuff like that. I tolerated it, even though I’d naturally been opposed to all institutions, from playschool onward.
I used to travel to school with these kids whose parents ran a pub called The Old Shant, which my mum always said looked like a public toilet, because its exterior was decorated with ce-ramics. Some days their parents used to take us and other days my mum would. One of the kids was a girl called Maxine. Her name stuck in my mind because my mum’s car—a capacious vehicle—was an Austin Maxi. Maxine told me the first joke that I can still remember.
“There’s two men who were going to go to a pub, so they met outside The King’s Head, but it was shut, so they went to Th e
King’s Arms, and that was shut as well. They went to Th e Queen’s
Legs and that was shut, but they decided to wait outside. Th en
their mate walks past and says, ‘What are you doing here?’ And one of them replies, ‘Oh, we’re waiting for The Queen’s Legs to open, so we can have a drink.’ ”
“Well that’s just brilliant,” I thought. “It sounds like they’re going to drink the queen’s wee, these men. That’s what’s implicit 50
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in their response. God bless’em, these two—I’m right behind them.”
It did seem a posh sort of school to me, though my dad insisted that all the other pupils were children of stallholders from Romford market, but it still felt really alien. I disliked the teachers. One really stern, vicious spinster—I can’t recall her real name, but if she turned up in Dickens, she would be called Miss Snickersnatch—was what I can only describe as a lady-bastard.
Maybe I adapted this story in childhood to get sympathy from my mother, but as I remember it, she took this pencil sharpener thing that I had, with an eraser attached, and threw it in the bin, then tore up my work. Why would a teacher do such a thing? That, surely, must be a lie. But it feels like t’were true.
Chief among my accomplishments at Gidea Park was the ant-eating. It seemed a very small investment of discomfort for the amount of attention you received. Ants don’t really taste of anything. I mean, there’s the indignity of picking them up off the fl oor, of course, but once an ant’s in your mouth, it’s very much like any other bit of detritus you might pick from between your teeth. It has no specifically ant-like qualities. You can’t feel it serve its queen or lay eggs.
Another dubious attention-seeking device that I invented at this school was the game “genital- grabbing,” which is very simple and easy to play but fraught with dreadful connotations for its participants and severe vilification for its unwitting inven-tor. Still, it really caught on among my fellow students, rapidly becoming a deviant craze. This act of violation would be accompanied by a comedic noise, a tinkling bell sound—“diddle-di-diddle-di”—which one would now liken to a mobile-phone ringtone. At that time, I didn’t think of this activity as sexual, 51
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but it does seem a little odd that this would be the kind of social tool that I would manufacture—going up to people and grabbing their winkies or vaginas (it is disgrace that in these enlightened times we still haven’t reached consensus on an in-offensive word to describe prepubescent female sex organs.
Male is a synonym Mardi Gras—“willy,” “winky,” “dinkle,”
“tassel?” Female—“moo moo” and “noony” and all sorts of crap I�
��ve heard; damn it, what are we afraid of?) It was only through their clothes, though—I wasn’t a pervert.
There was a girl called Lucy who I quite liked and had expressed my affection toward through the left-field ritual of the ol’ “diddle-di-diddle-di” game. My mum had to go up the school about that. I’ve always been a “your parents have got to come up the school” type of person. Even now, when I do something wrong—if I say something inappropriate on a live TV show, for example—I half expect to have to deliver a note to Barbara Brand: “Please come up to Channel 4 head offi ce,
Russell’s done something despicable.” The teachers had to tell my mum all about my embarrassing exploits: “He’s been grabbing children’s genitals. Of course, he is a child himself, and that makes it just about bearable. If he were doing this in a decade’s time, crikey! That really would be a problem.” Th e problem may have been worse but for the fact that it only took my dad a term to squander his nouveaux riches, so he didn’t pay the school fees, and so I had to leave and go back to the normal state primary school I’d been at twelve weeks previously. But by then, of course, everything had moved on and it was all different—like how your house looks when you come back off your holiday.
What mattered at Little Thurrock primary school was being good at football (and I weren’t good at football). If you weren’t 52
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good at either football or, failing that, fighting (or ideally, both), you might just as well have come to school wearing a pair of your mum’s tights, with your balls and cock looking like disgruntled, tiny burglars on a dreadful bank raid. “You’re on a hiding to nothing—you’ll end up serving ten to twenty down the front of your mum’s tights with no chance of a reprieve, I tells ya!”
I think it berserk that I still feel embarrassed about things I did when I was a child. De cades have now passed; I should be able to remember a faux pas from when I was eight without feeling ashamed. There was this teacher at that school, Miss Savage, not in a Dickens way, younger than I am now, probably, fizzing with the enthusiasm of a recently graduated teacher. She started a school cricket team in addition to her dinosaur and painting lessons; she said that I was good at bowling. I thought,
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Page 5