I usually find politics intensely boring. It seems to be mainly the pastime of men with bad hair who look as if they smell of tobacco, but on this night – for the first and maybe last time – politics seemed really dynamic and exciting. There was a feeling in the air that something special was happening. People will probably deny that it ever existed now, but there was a profound sense of optimism and hope that I, personally, hadn’t really felt about anything since I’d stopped drinking. As we flew from Manchester to London at sunrise, with the three-man film-crew asleep in the back, I looked down on the light, fluffy patches of mist covering the dark green landscape below and said to the pilot, ‘So, the dawn breaks on Blair’s Britain,’ and he nodded. Neither words nor gesture had the slightest hint of irony. A couple of weeks, and it was back to the same old bollocks.
Anyway, back to the Oldbury Tech story. In this episode, a moral dilemma, an artistic success, and an academic failure. And probably quite a lot of other stuff that won’t actually occur to me until I start writing it.
One day Shane, who by now had left school, and me were out walking when we spotted a wallet on the pavement. He quickly picked it up, and we scurried off to a quiet car park behind the nearby shops to see if we’d got lucky. And, if so, exactly how lucky we’d got. Eighty quid was the answer. We both got very agitated. To try and give you a sense of what we’re dealing with here, a pint of cider at the time cost thirteen pence. We discussed whether or not we should do the decent thing and hand the wallet in to the police. I may have had a shorter discussion in my life, but I can’t remember it.
As a Catholic, of course, it might have occurred to me that a man has to pay for his sins sooner or later, but I suppose I figured that, with forty quid, I could afford to pay for almost anything. It was a butterfly-crushing moment of massive proportions. I had forty quid to spend, and so did one of my closest friends, but we couldn’t spend it on material goods or our parents might have asked difficult questions about our sudden affluence. We only had one choice. We’d have to drink it. The school summer holiday had just begun, so if I was to take advantage of the lie-ins afforded by the summer break, lie-ins that I’d probably need given these new circumstances, I had five weeks to drink two hundred and eighty pints of cider. I didn’t bother with the maths, it was party-time.
It was during this period that I started to fall in love with drinking. That was exactly how it felt: ridiculous highs and lows, light-headedness, loss of appetite, and an inability to cope with any prolonged absence from my loved one. Some people drink and some people are drinkers. I discovered, that summer, that I was a drinker. If I’d handed in the wallet, my life might have taken a very different, and probably much healthier, turn for the better. So, if Cash had started the process, cash was about to take it on to another level. Oh, how we drank.
In the midst of this dream-like summer came my O-level results. Much better than expected. I’d got two: Art and English Language. Basically, the only two that you don’t need to revise for. I had done no work for my O-levels because I was going to be a rock star and academic qualifications didn’t seem very relevant. My parents, being of working-class stock, didn’t have much awareness of O-levels and the like and I worked hard to keep it that way. I made sure they didn’t get to hear about parents’ evenings and stuff, in case someone there let it slip that I was a work-shy, piss-taking little waster who was heading for a massive come-uppance. That could have caused tension at home. They were already starting to get suspicious about my social life. A couple of polo mints on the way home didn’t seem to hide my drinking-habit as well as it used to. I hadn’t noticed but things were starting to come to a head.
While I was waiting for rock-stardom to hit, I figured I might as well stay at school and relax. I knew if I timed it right, I could avoid having a proper job altogether. The school agreed to let me go on to the upper-sixth provided I re-took some of my O-levels and improved my general attitude. I think the Art teacher had spoken up for me, so I began A-level Art and A-level English, with O-level re-sits coming up in November. Soon I was in trouble for skipping classes and the headmaster, Mr Lardner, told me that this was my last warning and if I got in trouble again, he’d be forced to expel me. Yeah, yeah, there had been plenty of naughty boys go through the school while I’d been there and I’d never heard of him ever expelling anybody. Two weeks later, in the October of 1973, I was in his office again. A few pals and me had discovered where they chucked the used dinner-tickets when they were done with them, and decided to sell them, cut-price, to the other pupils. Having invented the speed-bump, we now moved on to re-cycling. The one thing we never allowed for was serial numbers. As I walked into Mr Lardner’s room, I could hear his secretary typing away in the adjoining office. It was my expulsion note. ‘Collins,’ he said, ‘you’re a drifter, and one day you’ll drift into something you can’t drift out of.’ I’ve looked back on this sentence on many occasions, and wondered if it was as prophetic as it sounded. What was it, in retrospect, that I later drifted into and had not been able to drift out of? Drinking, marriage, comedy, none of them seem to quite fit. Now, if I’d joined the American vocal group The Drifters in later life, this quote would have been a remarkable, almost supernatural, turning-point in the book. As it is, he was probably just talking bollocks, as headmasters are ever inclined to do.
When I returned to the common room to tell my schoolmates what had happened, they seemed kind of concerned but I also sensed a bit of ‘Oh, well, we can’t sit here talking. We’ve got classes to go to’, so I had a cup of coffee from the machine that sixth-formers were allowed to use, and then I walked home. And slowly it dawned on me. What the fuck was I going to tell my dad?
I waited till him and Mom had both got home from work and then said I had some bad news, and gave him the note. Rather grandly, it said that I had been ‘embezzling the school meals service’. It also said I was expelled. My mom started to do a ‘I’m not surprised’ speech but my dad cut it short by chucking his dirty boiler-suit at me and shouting, ‘Here, you’d better put these on and get down the Birmid, with the darkies.’
The Birmid was a local factory that always had the thick smell of heavy industry spilling out of its open windows. It was hard, hot, dirty work for forty hours a week. I think he had hoped that I would be the one who wouldn’t have to work in a place like that, the one who would do special, different things, but now that dream was gone. As for the rest of his remark, well, I’m not defending it, but these were less enlightened times and he was very, very upset. I never heard him be impolite to a black or Asian person in all the time I knew him, and he was not a man who worried about offending people he thought needed to be offended. Nuff said.
I considered trying to explain that he shouldn’t worry because I was going to be a rock star, but it didn’t feel like the right time. That night he came home drunk, obviously having dwelt on the day’s events. My mom had gone to bed so it was man-to-man time. After a short speech about his own missed opportunities, he slapped me hard across the face. Fair enough, I thought. It was the last time he ever hit me and we both went to bed with tears in our eyes.
According to today’s papers, I’m in a ‘shoot-out’ with the ex-Chelsea player-manager, Gianluca Vialli, over the house I’m supposed to be buying. According to the estate agent, ‘Both seem to like it and it has a 75ft garden, big enough for a kickabout.’ Well, that’s alright then. Both the Sun and the Mirror price the house at three and a quarter million. Obviously, two million isn’t impressive enough for them. And they’ve given it an extra bedroom as well. So, what’s it all about? Well, I heard through Jenny, my PA., that the estate agent got a bit panicky when he read that Caroline and me had split up and had asked if this might affect my future plans, so I’m guessing he’s using the papers to make me think ‘Oh shit, I’d better cast caution to the wind and sign everything quickly or Vialli will get my house.’ Of course, it may well be that Vialli really is interested, in which case I suspect Dave Baddiel’s enthus
iasm about me moving in might now start to wane a little. Either way, that’s how famous I am. I’m going to stop saying that because I feel you’re no longer taking it in the spirit that it’s intended.
In the early seventies, teenagers who needed a job went to the Youth Employment Office. Here they were dealt with by experts who were specially trained to cater for the needs and problems of young people. When I turned up on a Monday morning in October 1973, there was a fat girl making her way to the counter. The YEO woman asked her the sort of job she had in mind. ‘Well,’ said the fat girl, ‘all my life, I’ve wanted to work with animals.’
‘Yeah,’ said the woman, ‘well we don’t get many jobs like that, but they need a checkout girl at Woolworths. Here’s the details. Next.’ The fat girl waddled away, looking slightly shaken and clutching an official-looking white card in her chubby hand. Her butterfly had been well and truly crushed, but no wonder if she’d stood on it.
Then it was my turn. I explained that I was in a band and so I just needed a job that would tide me over till we got established. The expression on the woman’s face made me wonder if I’d accidentally said ‘Eat my nob-cheese’ instead. She said that someone, as she put it, ‘with your qualifications’ should be taking the ‘job-market’ a bit more seriously. With my qualifications? That was the thing with growing up in a place like Oldbury. You get two O-levels and people start eyeing you suspiciously, like you were some sort of Stephen Hawking figure. I felt that the photographer from the Smethwick Telephone could have turned up at any moment with an easel, palette and artist’s smock. Incidentally, one night on stage at Birmingham Town Hall, I asked if anyone in the audience knew why the paper was called the Smethwick Telephone, and one bloke said, without a trace of humour, ‘Cus it’s from Smethwick.’ Anyway, the YEO woman said that there was a vacancy at Hughes and Johnson’s Stampings. I was very familiar with Hughes and Johnson’s and it had one major plus-point. It was literally next door to the New Inn. I almost tore the card when snatching it from her hand.
When I turned up for my interview, the personnel manager said that, as I had O-level Art, he supposed I could draw a straight line, and gave me a job in the drawing office. I had never done anything approaching a technical drawing in my life, but no one seemed to care. I started on the following Monday and fucking hated it. We had to do an eight-hour day, for goodness’ sake, not including lunch. I got home that night and my dad asked me what I thought of my first day at work. ‘Horrible,’ I said.
‘Never mind,’ he said consolingly, ‘tomorrow will be better.’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘I’m not going.’ And I didn’t, but by day three I had got over the shock and it was literally back to the drawing-board, staring at sheets of tracing-paper, pretending I knew what I was doing.
The drawing office was separate from the other offices, even closer to the New Inn than the rest of the factory. On the other side was Harrold’s the newsagents. The owner, Edward Harrold, was known locally as Teddy the Paper-Chap to adults, and The Beano Man to kids. He always wore the same long grey coat and wellingtons, and his baggy black trousers were cut off where the wellingtons started. If you got up close when he was on his bike, you could see that his legs were so filthy that they were the same colour as his wellingtons. Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I never knew him to change those clothes, and he was too stingy to employ paper-boys so did all the deliveries himself. You would see him delivering daily papers at four in the afternoon and evening papers as late as ten at night. Every morning, his sister, Ivy, served newspapers and fags whilst breakfasting on lard sandwiches at the counter. Eventually, word went round that the Harrolds’ dirty old shop was full of money. Someone broke in and gave them a bashing. I turned up for work one day and the shop was closed down. The policeman on duty said they had found boxes of money in there, much of it long since gone out of circulation, and brands of cigarettes that no one had seen since the war.
It wasn’t a great area for brother and sister partnerships. I would occasionally stick a couple of quid in the local post office, run by Sidney Grayland and his sister, Peggy, in anticipation of a lads’ holiday we were planning in Burnham-on-Sea for the following summer. I turned up with my two quid one Thursday and found the post office closed. A criminal known as the Black Panther had broken in during the night, beat poor old Sid to death, and tied up Peggy so tightly that the ropes had to be surgically removed.
I was a less obvious target for attack. My first wage packet was £14.50. I gave a fiver to my mom and drank the rest. The combination of boring job and money in my pocket did wonders for my thirst. For the first fourteen months at Hughes and Johnson’s, I couldn’t remember past 9.30 on any night. I never remembered leaving the pub, or getting home, or anything in between. If the police had said it was me who raided the newsagent or tied up Peggy Grayland, I couldn’t have put my hand on my heart and sworn they were wrong. When I got too bloated to drink more, I’d put my fingers down my throat and make some room, and I woke up covered in cuts and bruises with no idea where I got them. I was seeing a very nice girl but she dumped me because I had arranged to meet her on New Year’s Day and didn’t show. The truth was, I decided to have a quick pint with my dad on the way to my one o’clock rendezvous, and woke up on my sofa at four. Apparently, Dad and me had both been chucked out of the pub for singing. I didn’t actually remember it myself.
Maybe all this drinking is normal teenage behaviour, I don’t know, but the thing is, it was fun. ‘Fun’ is not a word I often use because it’s been completely hijacked by local radio DJs who apply it to things that are definitely not fun. There are fun-runs and fun-pubs and fun-days, and they’re all shit, but getting drunk every night is fun. Well, sort of.
Anyway, what fun there was started to go a bit sour. I got chucked out of the band because I was turning up pissed to rehearsals, and they changed the name from Olde English to a name I can’t remember but which, inevitably, had something to do with Tolkien. This, of course, meant I could never go back. I have an aversion to all things children’s literature. Any adult who reads Tolkien, Pooh, Harry Potter and the rest, is a worry to me. I didn’t read children’s literature when I was a child so I’m damned well not going to read it now. It’s for kids. Look, they don’t read hard-core pornography, I don’t read their stuff. That’s the deal. Either way, I was out of the band.
Then I was in church one Sunday morning when my heart suddenly started pounding and I could barely breathe. I walked out, mid-Mass, and staggered home. It was raining, and I thought I was going to collapse and die right there on the wet pavement. I saw a doctor the next day and he told me that if I carried on like this I’d be an alcoholic by the time I was twenty-one. This would have been fine if I was a rock star, but for someone who works in a scabby drawing-office between a newsagent where people eat lard and a pub where people eat glass, it was just pathetic.
The doctor gave me some tablets and told me not to drink with them. I went to the New Inn and ordered a lemonade. An old black guy came in, a regular who, like Teddy the Paper-Chap, also wore wellingtons all the time, but combined them with surprisingly elegant suits. On one occasion he had brought a saxophone into the pub, so my mates and me presumed he was some sort of jazz player. From then on he was known as Duke Wellington. Anyway, he asked me about the lemonade and I explained about the tablets. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it sounds like whatever you needed that was in the booze must be in them tablets as well. So you might as well just drink the booze.’ It made perfect sense. I ditched the tablets and went back to the cider. However, I did cut down somewhat and started just getting drunk instead of very drunk. I had been treating life as if it was a limited-overs game, whereas, really, it is a five-day test match. Getting drunk instead of very drunk was a much more pleasant way of carrying on and I stuck with it for some time.
‘My battle with the bottle’ stories are always very tedious. I carried on drinking until I was thirty, so I won’t go on about being drunk unless it’s
really relevant. You can safely assume that, during the next thirteen years, any incidents I describe usually involve some degree of drunkenness. You don’t need to hear the details and, besides, it’s starting to make me thirsty. I mean, you know, thirsty.
Being that, at the present time, I’m incarcerated in a tenth-storey flat in Birmingham, writing all day, the ‘Today, I did this . . .’ elements of the book are starting to get a bit tricky to write. When I look back at the book, I don’t think I’ll see the Vialli section as a highlight. Anyway, my point is that the more observant readers will have noticed that I – fairly accidentally I must admit – have put together something of a structure for the book which alternates a sort of journal comprising a description of my current experiences with a chronological autobiography telling what happened in my past. I didn’t set out with this as a definite structure, but I thought it would help you because celebrities’ pre-celebrity lives aren’t necessarily all that interesting to read about and I hoped regular helpings of showbiz-glitter would help you through it.
As it turns out, I’ve let myself get a bit wrapped up in my past, and although I like doing the journal I don’t want to make a rod for my own back on the structure front. I have found myself thinking, ‘Well, I’d like to put three journal bits together here, or have two consecutive past-life bits there, but I’d better not because they won’t like it if I mess with the structure.’ Well, fuck off. From now on, they happen when they happen, and if I don’t like that I’ll change back.
I was in a pub one night with some mates who told me they’d seen some prostitutes standing on a street in the Balsall Heath area of Birmingham. They’d pretended to be punters and asked how much it was for sex. ‘Five quid,’ was the reply. None of us could believe it was so expensive. I’m not kidding. Remember, this was the early seventies. It was over a third of my weekly wage, and for what? Some old tart from Balsall Heath. If I spent a third of my weekly wage now, I could probably shag Fergie. Anyway, one mate, I suppose I better not name him, said he’d got a fiver and he was considering a late-night drive. A few of my mates were starting to get cars now. I was even having driving lessons myself. But tonight, though I didn’t know it, I was heading for a lesson of a very different kind. (I feel there should be some dramatic ‘da-da-daaaaaa’ music at this point. If only this was a CD-rom.) I put it to my mate that he might have the fiver but he didn’t have the guts. In a dramatic gesture that would not have been out of place in an episode of Maverick, he slid the fiver along the table towards me. ‘Woooooaaaah!’ went the crowd. I felt my stomach implode, but I cowboyed-up. ‘Gooo onnn!’ went the crowd. I picked up the fiver. Much cheering ensued.
Frank Skinner Autobiography Page 21