May I Have Your Attention Please?

by James Corden

  So there I was, back in the middle of the playground, my heart beating, my brow covered in a sheen of sweat. (OK, I’m making this far more dramatic, but it’s sort of true.) How was I going to do this? All of the school reports had to be signed by Mr Cox, the headmaster. He would read what the teachers had written and then write his final comments. Thinking fast, I walked off the playground and headed in the direction of his office.

  Now, as a pupil, you couldn’t get close to Mr Cox’s office without a teacher or dinner lady asking what you were doing. What could I say? I needed an excuse, but nothing came to mind. I walked past the school hall, past the canteen and, before I knew it, there I was, outside his office. Mrs Quarterman the school secretary/nurse came over and said, ‘Are you OK, James?’

  What should I say? Think of an excuse, quick.

  ‘Yes, thanks, miss.’ Nice.

  As she stood up to come over to me, I caught a glimpse of what could only be, could it, please God … yes! Behind her, on her desk, piles and piles of school reports. The motherload.

  ‘Who are you looking for?’ she asked.

  ‘You, miss.’ I blurted out. What did I say that for? Why the hell would I need to see Mrs Quarterman?

  ‘Why? What’s wrong?’ she said innocently.

  Think, man, think. Say something, anything!

  ‘I’ve hurt my knee, miss.’ There, that was that. It was the first thing that came to mind. I’d gone with the knee: a brave choice, though not completely stupid. Knees are funny things, especially on a growing kid, and I was almost certain Mrs Quarterman wasn’t qualified enough to dismiss any of my symptoms.

  ‘Well, come in and sit down.’ I immediately fashioned a limp, and took a slight intake of breath whenever I put my weight on my right leg. ‘Where does it hurt?’ she asked as she began bending my knee slowly up and down. Now, the trick to faking any kind of injury is, whatever the nurse tries the first two times, whether that be prodding or pressing or bending, you have to say it’s fine.

  ‘Does that hurt?’ he or she will ask, to which you say, ‘No, not particularly.’

  ‘What about if I do this? Any pain?’ they’ll ask, trying their second technique.

  ‘No, not really,’ you reply, seemingly as mystified by it as they are, and then – and this is the crucial part – whatever they try next, you yell in pain. It works every single time. Without question. Most people faking illness or injury have the whole thing worked out and think you have to be in extreme pain everywhere. That’s the sign of a faker. A pro like me waits and makes his move at the right time.

  ‘Aaarrgghhh!’ I yelled, as Mrs Quarterman pressed her thumb against the back of my knee.

  ‘Ooh, James, what have you done?’

  ‘I don’t know, miss. It just suddenly started really hurting.’ She looked and tweaked and bent and prodded some more, and whenever she ventured near the back of my knee, I closed my eyes and winced a little. I didn’t yell again. (Never yell twice, you don’t want it to seem too severe. It’s just got to be severe enough to make her think of possible remedies.)

  ‘Have you got PE today?’ she asked me.

  ‘No, not today, miss,’ I said in a standard unwell-type voice, though quite why my knee hurting would affect my voice is beyond me.

  ‘OK, well, I think you’re going to be OK. You’ve probably just pulled a muscle. Would it help if we put a Tubigrip on it?’ I sat staring deep into Mrs Quarterman’s eyes. I must have looked like a puppy that’s about to be put down.

  ‘If you think it’ll help, miss.’

  She stood up and headed towards the kitchen area, round the corner from where we were sitting. ‘Janice, where are the Tubigrips?’ she called out.

  Out of my line of sight, Janice replied, ‘Ooh, they’re either under the sink or in the green locker next to the coat hooks.’ And so, turning her back to me, Mrs Quarterman wandered round the corner towards the sink, leaving the reports unguarded.

  This was it. My only chance. Now or never. I leapt up and started leafing through the reports. I presumed they’d be in alphabetical order, so mine would be near the top in the Cs, but no, dammit, they were in class blocks. My eyes were darting over other pupils’ names; my brain registering information quicker than it ever had before; my fingers flicking faster and faster. But where was my report?

  ‘They’re not above the sink, Jan,’ Mrs Quarterman shouted.

  ‘Must be in the locker then,’ Janice replied.

  Time was running out. The names and reports kept coming thick and fast. Alan Wayman, Matthew Stopp – I was getting closer, surely: both of these guys were in my class …

  ‘Found it!’ shouted Mrs Quarterman. ‘You’re right, Jan, all the bandages are in the locker.’

  Shit! She was on her way back. Mrs Quarterman shut the locker door and I could hear her footsteps getting nearer. I scrambled through a couple more reports, knowing that if I didn’t see it, then that was it. I’d have failed my mission. Then suddenly, like a shaft of light in a dark tunnel, there it was. My name: James Corden.

  I grabbed it and in one swift move shoved it down the back of my trousers. And there it stayed, nestled between my underpants and grey polyester slacks as Mrs Quarterman rolled the Tubigrip over my knee, until the bell rang for afternoon break.

  I ran out past the playground and into the spinney, the small copse of trees between the school and the street I grew up on. Once I got myself a safe distance away from the school, I grabbed the report from my trousers and began digging a hole with my bare hands, so quickly that to anyone passing by I would have looked like a deranged psychopath burying the evidence. Remember, this was break time, so I only had ten minutes to hide the report.

  Once I’d finished digging, my nails crusted brown and my knees all dirtied up, I threw it into the hole and covered it with mud and dry leaves and anything else to make it disappear. I pegged it back into the playground, put my muddy hands in my pockets and slowly started limping (just in case Mrs Q was watching me, y’no?) into the toilets next to the canteen. There, I got busy scrubbing my hands, rubbing them hard, as if I was trying to wash away the lie.

  As the muddy water swirled down the sink, I was overcome by a huge pang of guilt. What had I done? Who was I? I looked in the mirror, my guilt-ridden face staring back at me, feeling like Bruce Willis in Die Hard – I’m not joking, I was honestly this dramatic as a ten-year-old – and I knew what I had to do.

  I got back to class and stayed there, much quieter than usual, until about ten minutes from the end of the last lesson, when Janice came into the classroom with the pile of school reports from Mr Cox’s office. There were twenty-five kids in our class, but I – and only I – knew that Janice was holding twenty-four reports.

  Mrs Aitkinson took the reports and started walking in amongst us, handing them out. ‘These envelopes are sealed and they shall remain sealed until one of your parents opens them, understood?’ The class replied with a murmured ‘Yes, miss.’

  She walked past me three times. Back and forth, looking down each time she passed. I was so nervous that I started to sweat. I knew that the only way I’d get away with it was by saying and doing absolutely nothing. I had to just ride this one out.

  ‘James,’ Mrs Aitkinson started, looking straight at me, ‘I don’t seem to have a report for you. Wait here.’ She left the classroom, and I did nothing. Just sat stock-still, trying to keep myself together. One slipped word here could land me in more trouble than I’d ever known. A couple of minutes later, she came back into the classroom and checked over her desk, then left again. What was going on? Did they suspect anything? Did they know?

  I could see the top of her head out of the window talking to Janice. A couple more minutes, then they both came into the classroom and looked on the floor, once more checking the desk, lifting things up and putting them back down, only to lift them up and put them down again. Then Mrs Quarterman came back into the class and the three of them had a private conversation by the blackboard.
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br />   By now, my palms were sweaty and my breath was getting shorter. All I was trying to do was look calm. I can’t imagine I was succeeding. The clock was ticking nearer to 3.20 p.m.: home time.

  Mrs Quarterman and Janice left the classroom, leaving Mrs Aitkinson to continue picking things up and hunting around on the floor. She asked the whole class to check the floor for a brown envelope, like the ones our reports were in. Then, just as the clock ticked past 3.18 p.m., in walks Mr Cox. The big dog.

  He had a quiet word with Mrs Aitkinson, accompanied by a lot of head shaking and sighing. Then he turned to me and said, ‘James.’ I felt my whole face go red, felt my school tie strangle my neck. ‘Are your mum or dad collecting you from school today?’

  I tried to speak but no words would come. I coughed, cleared my throat and tried again. ‘Er, no sir, I walk home. I only live over the road,’ I said in as breezy a manner as I could muster.

  ‘Right, well, we have a slight problem with your report. You’ll have to get yours when we come back after Easter. I’ll notify your parents and apologise to them.’

  Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait. Was that it? No great inquest? No putting me on the stand? No examination and cross-examination of my whereabouts? No looking through my bag? Nothing? That was all he had? Nothing? Weird.

  Three twenty p.m. came, the school bell rang and that was that; I walked out of the school gates like Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption. Well, sort of – I was wearing my own shoes. (I was also guilty as hell, but you know what I mean.)

  As I walked in through the back door of our house, Mr Cox was leaving a message on our answerphone, saying there had been a mishap with my report and he’d get to the bottom of it over the break. I was completely in the clear. By the time the Easter holidays were over, Mum and Dad had forgotten all about my school report. When we returned in the new term, Mr Cox issued me with a brand-new report, which, as I’m sure you can guess, never saw the light of day. I put it in my bag, and when I got home I stuffed it behind the boiler in our airing cupboard. My parents have never seen it. Well … until now. Because here, in all its glory, is the very school report that was hidden in our house for eighteen years until I moved out.

  Everything I was like as a ten-year-old is here in this very book. Mum and Dad, I’m so sorry I kept it from you, and I’m truly sorry I was the reason for so many of your rows. You were and are the most wonderful parents I could ever ask for. So loving and caring and you only ever put the three of us (me and my two sisters) first. I am so proud to be your son and love you both very, very much. I’m sorry I hid this from you.

  OK, Jack the publisher just called back and said I don’t have to have chapter titles, but that it is advised. So I’ve decided not to have titles as such. More kind of chapter profiles, with some lifestyle suggestions to make the book more enjoyable. Or perhaps just bearable! I shall recommend a soundtrack for each chapter, a snack and a movie choice. Though I accept that reading a book and watching a film are probably mutually exclusive. But it’s your call. Try them together or separately; it’s totally up to you.

  CHAPTER 1

  BEST MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT:

  ‘Silent Night’

  BEST FILM TO WATCH ALONGSIDE:

  Nativity

  BEST ENJOYED WITH:

  a warm mince pie

  I WAS BORN on 22 August 1978. My full name is James Kimberley Corden. It’s OK, you can go ahead and laugh. Kimberley. I mean, seriously. It’s basically a family tradition. I know nothing more than that. My dad is called Malcolm Kimberley Corden, his dad has the middle name of Kimberley and his dad had it. And on it goes. It was a horrible name to have at school. Awful. When you’re at school, anything that sets you apart, whether it be a name, an accent or even your hair colour, is an invitation for ridicule. It’s always been the case that the first son in our family will carry the middle name Kimberley. At the moment, as it stands, I don’t know whether my one-day-old son will have it too. My dad would love it and it would, I’m sure, mean the world to my grandad. But can I really subject my son to the same name-calling that I suffered? Who knows? We’ve not got a first name for him yet.

  We lived for the majority of our family life in a small village called Hazlemere, just outside the town of High Wycombe. My parents still live there and, whenever I go back, every street corner is full of different memories. I say ‘street’ corner – it was hardly the ghetto, more like one big housing estate with a small parade of shops, a doctor’s surgery, a vet’s and a chip shop. It was a wonderful place to grow up.

  It’s only now I realise how painfully ordinary High Wycombe is as a town. It’s grey, plain and its big selling point is that it has a chair museum. Before we moved to Hazlemere we lived on Walton Drive, which is a bit nearer Wycombe town centre, and before that we briefly lived on a military base in Uxbridge. If Walton Drive sounds familiar to you in any way at all, it may be because some terrorists were arrested during a raid there a couple of years ago; they’d been planning on bringing down various aeroplanes around the world. Literally two doors down from our old house.

  My mum has a habit of adding personal drama to situations simply because we may have been somewhere once. ‘Can you believe it?’ she said at the time. ‘Terrorists, two doors down from our house.’

  ‘But it’s not our house, is it, Marg?’ Dad corrected. ‘It was, twenty-seven years ago. That’s quite a lot of time that’s passed since we lived there.’

  ‘Still,’ Mum said. ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’

  I never realised the sacrifices Mum and Dad made for us growing up. Dad played saxophone in the RAF band and so he and his young family were allowed to live for free on the military base. Pretty much all of the other musicians in the Force lived there, but Dad’s never been one to follow the crowd. He decided quite early on that he didn’t want us growing up on the base and then stuck to it adamantly. He wanted us to experience different people from different backgrounds, instead of living in what I think he saw as the very insular, blinkered and barricaded life on a Royal Air Force base.

  Living off base meant finding the money to buy their own house, so Mum and Dad scrimped and saved to try and make it work. Dad worked all over the shop, teaching clarinet and saxophone to local kids in the back rooms of our house or at local schools. But when it came to the crunch and they needed to find money for a deposit, there still wasn’t enough there. So Dad sold the one thing he owned of value – his beloved saxophone. It meant he would have to use one of the ones in the band room, which he hated doing. But he did it, for us.

  Mum told me a few years ago that when we moved a second time, from Walton Drive to Hazlemere, when my little sister Ruth was born, they looked at their finances and realised they had £25 a week more going out of their account than they had coming in. When you’re young, you don’t really take these things on board – it’s just life as you know it.

  We would holiday in a borrowed caravan at a farm in Devon. Sounds quite romantic, doesn’t it? A Devon farm. Conjures up images of something out of Lark Rise to Candleford. The farmer, with his big bushy beard, wandering around aimlessly, chewing on a piece of corn. The farmer’s wife, filling the air with the scent of her freshly baked bread as she waves the free-range geese out of the back door of the thatched cottage. Well, I can officially tell you that the farm we holidayed at was nothing like this. The nicest and most polite way I can describe it to you is that it was, frankly, a shit hole. A half-brick, half-corrugated-iron building set in the middle of a muddy wasteland, with a nine-by-five-foot concrete swimming pool that was filled with cold hose water. How’s about that for romantic?

  One year we went, there was another family camping on the site. Dad got talking with the dad of the other family and it turned out that they weren’t on holiday as such; they were living on the site. For ever. I keep expecting them to turn up on a Channel 4 documentary when the daughter gets married.

  But however much I’m doing it down, I have to say that I remember those family
holidays so fondly. Sitting in the caravan playing cards while the rain poured down outside, swimming in the ice-cold pool, cycling around the muddy countryside – believe it or not, they were happy times. I guess we were a fairly ordinary family, though I’m not sure ‘ordinary’ actually exists when it comes to families. No family is ordinary. But when it’s your own and it’s the only one you know, everything feels very natural, like life couldn’t be lived any other way. I grew up thinking that nothing we did as a family was particularly different; it’s only now that I realise quite how different it was.

  You see, every single Sunday we would wake up, put on uniforms, go to church in Wycombe town centre and march through the streets playing brass instruments. I know. And I thought this was completely normal. We didn’t do it for our own amusement; we were all fully signed-up members of the Salvation Army. Mum grew up in a Salvation Army family, and when she met Dad and they fell in love, Dad found God and joined the Army too.

  The Salvation Army is a wonderful yet complicated organisation. First and foremost it’s a church, but it’s also a charity that helps many people in need around the world. The whole uniform-wearing thing came about because its founder, a man called William Booth, wanted it to stand out from other churches and look and feel like a new movement.

  So that’s what we’d do, as a family, every Sunday. Mum and Dad made it clear that we had to go until we were sixteen and then we could make our own choices. I have both great affection and also contempt for our time as Salvationists. I made some of my best friends there at various music and drama weeks in the school holidays; three guys in particular: Jason, Anthony and Gavin. So close were the friendships I formed then that they still remain a big part of my life today, and one of the aforementioned three would go on to have a title role in a television programme I’d write many years later. I wonder if you can guess which one?