by Bishop, John
Along with this, when I arrived at the sixth form wearing brand-new jeans, I was promptly informed that jeans were not acceptable so I would have to get some trousers.
At the time, Eddie had left home to take up residence in a flat in Southgate, an estate built to look like washing machines and with about as much practical application as a washing machine when it came to somewhere to live; Kathy was training to be a nursery nurse; and Carol was on a Youth Opportunity Scheme. My dad was trying to make a living making and selling wrought-iron furniture, such as telephone tables, which were such a staple of every home at the time. The idea was that when you used the phone you sat sort of side-saddle at the table. No wonder people of a certain age seem to droop as they get older – for a large part of their life they are having conversations on the phone at a ridiculous angle. My mum had a part-time job washing dishes in the kitchen of a factory canteen on the industrial estate. In essence, I didn’t feel I could return home and say to my mum I required new trousers. Instead, I felt I should be bringing money into the household and paying my way.
I had already applied for a job at the main factory in Runcorn: ICI. Along with my mate, Vic, I received a letter saying I had the got the job, to start in the second week of September. ICI was a huge chemical plant and the job in question was as a mail lad. That was the actual job description; it was a job for a ‘lad’ – girlies need not apply. And to my knowledge, none of them did. Most followed other paths, like my then girlfriend Denise, who trained to be a hairdresser. At least the old system made things very simple, as I’m sure if the ‘mail lad’ job were to exist at all in the world of emails it would be called something like ‘communications distribution individual’.
So I left school and went to work delivering mail at ICI. This involved getting a bus at 6.30 a.m. to arrive at work for 7. We would then collect the bicycles that were left at the security gate each evening and ride down the hill to the mail office. Getting up early was worth that ride downhill. Everyone should start the day going downhill on a bicycle. It was great fun – apart from the rain and snow and cold. OK, so it was great about eleven days of the year, but they were still great days.
We’d finish by 3 o’clock and, two nights a week, I would then go to night school in Widnes to study A-levels in English and Law. I may not have been in the sixth form, but I didn’t want my education to stop.
One day, on the way home from ICI, and while still wearing my steel-cap ICI safety boots, my ICI safety jacket and my ICI safety trousers, I called in to the school sixth form. It was there that I bumped into Mr Logan. Mr Logan had been my English teacher during my O-level period and would have been my A-level teacher had I stayed in the sixth form. He asked me how I was getting on, and I explained that I was working and doing A-levels at night school. He asked if I’d consider returning to the sixth form in January, but as I was then earning £42 a week, to leave that to return to a family allowance of just £6.50 a week didn’t seem viable.
In reality, I was beginning to have doubts about ICI and the future. I remember one day I fell into conversation at the plant with one of the men who always seemed to be walking around wearing boiler suits and hard hats, but never actually doing much. He was a friendly man in his late fifties with a warm face and a frame that suggested he enjoyed a roast dinner, and a disposition that suggested he had never seen how that roast dinner was made. He had worked at ICI all of his life.
‘You’ve got a job for life here, son,’ he informed me proudly, as he lit a cigarette, completely ignoring the No Smoking signs and the miles of pipework around his head carrying flammable chemicals. ‘Yes, son, no reason you won’t be taking your pension here.’
I remember looking around at the myriad pipes transporting chemicals all over the plant, and thinking, ‘Is this the view I have to spend the rest of my working life looking at?’
I think one of those great things about advice is that it is often given to make one point but ends up making entirely the opposite one. I could think of nothing worse than giving my life away so cheaply. Some people are lucky enough to find contentment in such security, but for me it felt as if someone was pouring water over my bonfire so the flames would not get too high. To stay in the same place of work all my life, get married, live in the same area, go to the same pubs, see the same faces until one by one we popped our clogs was like being handed a life of limitation that I just couldn’t accept. It’s a life that suits many people down to the ground, and in many ways I have always been envious of them. I never thought I was better than anyone else; I just knew I wanted something different. The problem was, I wasn’t sure what that was.
In the discussion with Mr Logan I had told him that the only option for me to return to full-time education of any nature was to take a part-time course at the local further-education college. If you were able to study part-time there, then you were able to claim unemployment benefits, which would mean £18 a week rather than £6.50. Still a long way behind the £42 a week I was currently earning, but at least a step to bridge the gap. The difficulty was that you were not allowed to study in school sixth forms part-time, only in FE colleges. If you were studying in a school, then you had to be classed as a full-time student for the school to receive the payment from the local education authority to cover your attendance. Mr Logan had said he would talk to the headmistress, Ms Philips, and see if there was any way around this.
I came into school a few days later to have a conversation with them both. The reality was stark and clear: I could not continue to do night-school A-levels one night a week over one year and realistically expect to pass. But, on the other hand, I couldn’t afford to leave my job. After some deliberation, it was agreed that the school would give me a letter that I could take to the unemployment exchange to say that I was studying part-time. Once they accepted this and guaranteed I would receive my dole, then I would leave my job.
The school was basically gambling that the unemployment office would not get in touch with the education services who, had they found out I was only studying part-time, would not have given the school the full remittance for my place, while Ms Philips would have faced serious questions about why she had told lies.
Everything was agreed and the letter was accepted. I was to return to school to do English and History A-levels, whilst I was to continue at night school once a week to study Law. It was a decision that would change everything I would do from then on, and it opened the door to a new world of potential opportunity.
What I had not envisaged was how this plan would sound to anybody else when I tried to explain it. The night that everything was agreed with the teachers, I went home to tell my mum and dad. I knew that they had been proud that I had been taken on at ICI as it offered one of the few permanent jobs for anyone my age in the area, but I assumed they would be pleased with my decision to leave, particularly once I had explained the financial side of things.
However, my announcement was met with blank stares. The kind of stares I would have expected if I had said I was going to join the Foreign Legion. Clearly what had left my mouth was the least expected thing in the world, and we sat talking until nearly midnight over endless cups of tea.
Although my mum was more supportive, my dad was clear and honest in his view. He did his best to convince me that having a job with prospects was so much better than taking a chance on doing A-levels and only possibly going to university. At this point, only my cousin Karen had gone to university, and it was generally accepted as something not for the likes of us.
Also, Karen was clever and known to be so. I was a boy and so intellect was balanced by my ability to carry things, and within our family history we were more greatly predisposed to the latter as a way to make a living. I knew I was going against the grain, but I also knew I had to tell them that this was what I wanted to do.
As I write these words now, it almost feels like I am talking about ‘coming out’ to my family that I read books. It wasn’t so dramatic; it was more that I was g
ambling on something better and needed them to see it too, although at the time A-levels appeared as useful as magic beans. There were no jobs, so why give up a perfectly good one in the hope of another one in the future?
I set my argument out as best as I could: I wanted something more than it appeared I could achieve if I did not change direction.
After hours of talking, my dad summarised it all in just one sentence: ‘I think it could be a mistake, but you have got to try. If you don’t try, you will always wonder what might have happened.’
And that was that. From that moment, I had their full support and they never questioned my decision. It was a great relief that they supported me: once my mum and dad get behind you, they are there for the long haul, and you can’t ask more of anyone.
So for the first time, but not the last, I left a well-paid job to try to achieve something against the advice of many, but with the support of those who mattered.
Eighteen months later, I was sitting in the passenger seat of a second-hand BT van next to my mum, as my dad was driving us north to what was then Newcastle Polytechnic. My mum could have said goodbye at home and let me travel up with my dad, or they could have put me on a train. Instead, they wanted to make the eight-hour round trip in a car none of us was sure could make it in order to say goodbye properly, because that’s what loving parents do. The van had been acquired a few weeks before, and it was another in the long list of unique vehicles my dad has owned. With a top speed of 50 mph, the journey took a very long time.
In actuality, it had taken 18 years. I was leaving home and saying goodbye to start the next stage of my life.
CHAPTER 7
NEWCASTLE
Newcastle didn’t exactly work out for me as I had planned. I enjoyed my first term there, and I liked the people that I met. However, I had gone to study an English and History degree having achieved a ‘B’ in my History and an ‘Ungraded’ in my English A-levels.
The English grade had shocked the school to the extent that they had paid to have the paper remarked. They had predicted at least a ‘B’ grade, but when the paper was returned it was clear why the ungraded mark had been given. Somewhere in the exam my brain had turned to mush, and my mild dyslexia had gone berserk: I had written some words backwards, some upside down, whilst others were just illegible. Although I certainly am not the greatest speller in the world, and had been tested for dyslexia on a number of occasions, I had never before displayed such a meltdown.
I have always put my inability to spell down to the fact that in junior school we were taught to spell phonetically, which means speaking the word slowly as you spell it. The problem with such a process is that if you speak with an accent as thick as mine, and live in an environment where you are not surrounded by the written word to counterbalance your exposure to these sounds, then it is easy to make mistakes. I was 10 before I realised the word ‘there’ did not have a ‘d’ in it.
What happened that day has never happened since, and it is still inexplicable to me. But, using the grades I achieved in General Studies and the Law exam I did at night school as a trade-off, the school had somehow convinced Newcastle Poly they should allow me to do a degree in a subject that I failed at A-level. Which you have to say is no mean feat.
I began the course in Newcastle full of enthusiasm. It was my first time living away from home and I immediately fell in love with the city and its people. To this day, it is one of the first places I look for when I have a tour booked. I was living in the student hall of residence and threw myself into the social life that this presented. I gained a casual girlfriend called Anne and managed to get myself into the first XI football team, which provided a great social network. It also provided fantastic trips away, as Newcastle Poly sports teams were generally regarded as quite strong.
On one particular trip, we were to play against Edge Hill University, a teacher training college near Ormskirk. I can’t remember the score, but I know we won, and what I can remember is that after the game we went to the student union for a drink – only to find out the ratio of girls to men at Edge Hill was roughly 4 to 1. We had a whip-round to convince the bus driver to allow us to stay a few hours longer, and at the end of the evening we returned to the team bus triumphant. Every single player (apart from Lawrence, who played in goal and whose cousin attended that college and to whom he’d had to talk all night) had got at least a snog. It was a fantastic feeling to be amongst a body of men who had arrived in new lands and challenged the local men to do battle on the football pitch, emerging victorious and then finding pleasure among the local women. It was probably the closest I will ever come to being a Viking.
Despite the fun I was having in Newcastle, I was quickly becoming disillusioned with the course. In truth, my experience in literature has been limited to books that I was forced to read for school rather than books I wanted to read; it was only during my A-level course that I had begun to read books for pleasure. Prior to that, if it was not a comic book or a Roy of the Rovers annual, I never read anything.
I regret those wasted years, and I am pleased that my three sons are avid readers. I still don’t read as much as I would like, but I attempt to have at least one book always on the go. This does also lead to the accumulation of a mass of books that I have started on a train journey somewhere and never finished. I used to feel guilty about not finishing books but, as I’ve become older, I have come to the conclusion that this is not my fault – if the book was any good, I would have finished it.
This could be a very pragmatic way to explain my laziness, or it could simply be true. Books are the only thing that you embark upon feeling responsible for your own enjoyment of it; even if the first 50 pages are rubbish, there is a sense of defeat if you don’t finish it. That doesn’t happen in any other art form; it certainly doesn’t happen in comedy. You can’t be rubbish for 20 minutes to the extent that the audience get up and leave without seeing the conclusion of your act, and feel totally reassured that on their way home they will think it’s their fault.
No, as a comedian it’s your job to hold the audience’s attention. This is a responsibility I take on in my job, which I have now assumed for other aspects in my life: films, plays, TV programmes and books. Although, as a comedian, if you are losing the audience, you will soon find out because someone will tell you. That is the valid role of the heckler, to make you aware of any failings you had not realised yourself. But you can respond to a heckle, and at times it allows a comedy gig to step up a pace. You often find the act becomes sharper and quicker once the comedian has dealt with the heckle. It’s not the same for an author. I have often shouted at a book, ‘This is shit … is that all you’ve got?’ and I have never noticed it change the book at all.
So when I embarked upon a degree in English, it is probably fair to say my literary experience was more limited than most of the people in the room. The history elements of the course I really enjoyed, but the English element I found unbelievably frustrating.
During the first term, we concentrated exclusively up on the mammoth poem, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. For those unfamiliar with the work, all I can say from memory is that it is a story about a sailor who leads a ship to safety with the aid of an albatross. There is a wedding involved, and somewhere the sailor goes a bit mental and shoots the bird with a crossbow, hanging it around his neck, and gets lost again. I am sure there is much more to it than that, but even now I am not prepared to find out what because my relationship with the poem was tainted by the experience of sitting in a seminar room whilst a tutor asked us first-year students to explain the interaction between the sailor and the bird:
‘Why does Coleridge feel the albatross can communicate with the mariner in a way other people can’t? What is the connection that binds them, man and beast, together? Why should the bird return when the gift of flight means he could leave any time? He is the master of his own destiny, but binds himself to the ship – why would he do that? What is Coler
idge trying to tell us about ourselves and about him through the actions of the albatross?’
These and many more questions were put to us over a period of weeks. Although in their own right they would potentially be worth a discussion, everything is tarnished when you know Coleridge was an opium addict. When I suggested that being a smack-head and writing about ships meant that Coleridge was basically doing the eighteenth-century equivalent of shouting at buses whilst sitting on a park bench drinking Special Brew, it was clear that my days with the literary intelligentsia of Newcastle Polytechnic would soon be over.
Having made the decision to leave the course, I then faced the dilemma of what to do. I really wanted to enrol on the sports science course where I had a number of friends. The sports science faculty offered me a place, but suggested that as I had done a term already I would have to switch the following year.
So, after three months in Newcastle, I returned home with a place on the sports science degree to start in September.
Little did I know when I left Newcastle that day, I would never return to the poly.
CHAPTER 8
I DON’T EAT MEAT, OR FIGHT PARATROOPERS
The nine months that followed my departure saw me learn many valuable life lessons, including: 1) what to do with a dead man’s glass eye; 2) when a wage is not enough of a reason to be killed; and 3) why I love America.
Upon returning home, I faced the financial necessity of paying my own way, but I did not know what to do to fill in the next nine months before my planned return to Newcastle. For my first job, I started working on a building site for an extension to the cancer hospice where I had worked as a volunteer since the age of 16.