I don’t recall being laid low or even inconvenienced by illness. It was just a fact of life: miss a bit of school, get better, go back to school, pick up where you left off. On Monday 26 May 1975, my diary reads, matter-of-factly:
I had German measles. Me and Simon stayed up till 10.00 to watch this brilliant war film called The Longest Day.
I didn’t even go to bed early. The day before I’d been gambolling around Salcey Forest and by Wednesday I was playing croquet in Carl Merrick’s back garden. Encephalitis? Bring it on.
Simon worked a bit harder. He managed to generate extra-curricular medical concern on two fronts. One, by being allergic to dogs, which took a battery of tests involving multiple needles in far-off Birmingham to establish; and two, by getting nosebleeds all the time. I don’t just mean getting one when accidentally hit in the face with a football; he could virtually bleed from the nose at will, like a haemoglobin stopcock. If he so much as stubbed his toe or got excited, blood would start pouring from his nostrils. All my life I’ve known the correct way to get bloodstains out of white hankies – there was always one soaking in cold water in the sink in our house, turning the water red the way Coco Pops turn the milk brown. Such gore was commonplace. He was always being ‘nipped down to casualty’ to have his nose bunged up.
Eventually it got so bad Simon had to go into hospital overnight to have his nose sewn up. Cauterised, they called it, which I thought meant cutting it up into quarters, although there was no evidence of that when we went to fetch him home from Northampton General and give him whatever big Action Man present his incapacity had earned him. Simon was now officially a man; walking wounded.
I couldn’t match that, although I did end up with stitches twice. The first time, when I was about three, I tripped over my toys – you couldn’t see the floor of the living room for scattered plastic bricks, train track and bendy Topo Gigios. Thinking on my feet, or off them, I broke my own fall using my forehead on the corner of a wall. I don’t remember it hurting much, but I do remember the colour draining out of Mum’s face like a Tom & Jerry cartoon when I went into the kitchen and asked, ‘Is it bleeding?’ Put it this way, she didn’t bother checking to see if I had a chill.
A bath towel was quickly applied to my split head – which was bleeding – and, it being a weekday, Geoff Edwards from next door drove me to casualty.3 (What was Geoff doing at home in the middle of the day? Weren’t there pubs that needed refurbishing?) Two stitches; it was all over very quickly and I wasn’t old enough to be vain about – or proud of – the scar caused by the NHS needlework. You can still see it. Just there, above my right eyebrow. You have to look closely. I’m pretty certain I received a toy when I had the stitches out – as if a surfeit of toys hadn’t been my downfall. No irony in the Seventies.
A few years later I was messing about in the living room with Simon, wearing paper party hats, and mine slipped down over my eyes. Temporarily blinded I tripped, fell, bounced off the settee and pretty much popped my cheek on the sharp wooden corner of what was then called a music centre. It only needed one stitch (this time Chris Cater from over the road drove me to casualty) but once it had healed, the hole in my face formed a perfect dimple and, once again, it’s still with me. I may not be emotionally scarred but my face tells eight million stories. Alright, two, and now you’ve heard both of them.4
I feel deprived that I never, say, broke my arm. Eddy did, and Paul Gregor, and countless others at school. What a crowd-puller that is. David Boulter broke his leg; so did Sarah who lived over the road. Someone was always in plaster, getting it signed. Not me. The day after my second stitch, people thought I had chocolate on my cheek and kept helpfully pointing it out. I’m sure the same happened to Action Man when he acquired his trademark cheek scar after – one assumes – hand-to-hand combat with a German.
‘You’ve got chocolate on your face.’
‘It’s a scar actually. You should see the other guy.’
* * *
Other guys had battle scars; I got a dimple. I often fell off high things – some sacks of pig pellets stacked at Paul Cockle’s farm, for instance – and I regularly nicked myself with darts and model knives, but nothing major, no war stories. I am like the outdone Chief Brody in that famous scene below deck in Jaws, except his appendix scar beats my dimple hands down. Until I started hanging round with medical students in the late Eighties, I only visited hospitals during visiting hours.
I recently sprained my left knee, aged 36. Don’t scoff, it was majorly debilitating: I developed a proper, foot-dragging limp and I was buying Tubigrip and Ibuleve gel and everything – sympathy and admiration at last! However, instead of being able to say it was a footballing injury or something sexy I had sustained at the gym, I had in fact pulled my knee shopping. Specifically, while striding purposefully to Borders. That’s the story of my life: an insult to injury.
So, no rickets, no fractures, no outpatients. If, however, childhood visits to the dentist were a badge of honour, I was well decorated. Records show that I’d had five teeth extracted at the dentist’s by the tender age of eight. (Is that a lot? It sounds a lot.) I had my first filling on my tenth birthday – Dad joked that it was my present from Mr Wright, our family dentist. How I laughed. Mr Wright, incidentally, had crooked teeth. So, coincidentally, did Mr Eagland, my orthodontist. Physicians, heal thyselves.
Yes, orthodontist. Be impressed. Here’s where we get to my equivalent of going to Birmingham for allergy tests – I had additional dentist’s appointments. Twice as many as the other kids. Not only were there regular check-ups, fillings and extractions with Mr Wright, Dad also took me to a second dentist – a specialist – because my teeth were crooked. I never had to stay in overnight obviously, but I did have to put up with extra pain and discomfort and, well, I guess it made a man of me.
Visits to Mr Eagland – whose surgery was actually situated opposite Northampton General Hospital as if to tantalise me – usually involved having impressions taken of my offending teeth (never had those at the regular dentist’s) and undergoing a whole atrocity exhibition of mouth X-rays. Not quite open-heart surgery but impressive nonetheless (after all, everybody leaves the room while you get X-rayed). Impressions meant having a cold metal U-shaped mould filled with rubber-tasting dental Polyfilla rammed on to my teeth and left there while it hardened like cavity wall insulation foam. Then it was levered off, with Eagland’s foot hard against my chest. The biggest threat to my health was from gagging to death: don’t swallow, the grinning Eagland would tell me. I wouldn’t grin quite so readily if I had teeth as crooked as his. (Actually, I did have teeth as crooked as his.)
The upshot of all these extra-curricular dental visits was a brace. How very American of me. Fortunately it wasn’t a brace that was spot-welded to the teeth on the outside like some first-grader at junior high, but one designed to push my wonky incisors out from behind. In other words, you couldn’t actually see my brace – all the work went on backstage. Well, you could see it, if you caught me rinsing the Golden Wonder residue out of it in the sink at school, but I didn’t exactly wave it around. Unlike a plaster cast or a bandage or even an inhaler, a brace was never cool. I’m not sure how I managed it but I once rather humiliatingly got my brace snagged on someone else’s school jumper and out it came, attached to this other kid like a pair of hungry false teeth. He saw it.
I wore my brace from the age of 11 till just before I turned 16, at which point Mr Eagland felt I was old enough to decide for myself whether or not I wished to continue with my orthodontic treatment. My decision was predictable.
It was like being allowed to vote or see an ‘AA’ film for the first time: I had made an important, unilateral decision about my own health. No more mouthfill for me. The brace was consigned to some medical incinerator, and my souvenir plaster teeth were stowed in a box of junk in my bedroom, occasionally whipped out to impress girls with. (They were a big hit, as you can imagine.) Perhaps I should have persevered with the brace. My teeth set
to work as soon as it was obvious that the wire and plastic contraption would visit them no more – after four years of pressure they were free again to grow in whichever direction they felt like. And they did, like the little Union Jack arrows at the start of Dad’s Army.
I’ve always liked the Pam Ayres poem ‘Oh, I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth’ (I was a huge Pam Ayres fan in the mid-Seventies):
I wish I’d been that much more willin’
When I had more tooth there than fillin’
To pass up gobstoppers,
From respect to me choppers
And to buy something else with me shillin’5
Pity I didn’t appreciate Pam’s message at the time. As I write I still have a full head of teeth, but they’re not much to look at. (I hated David Bowie and Martin Amis for getting theirs expensively fixed in America – two crooked-toothed role models lost in the space of a couple of years. Traitors.) Perhaps if I’d eaten less Fruit Salads and more fruit salad, and stuck with Mr Eagland’s treatment I’d be a TV presenter by now.
* * *
I had an ingrown toenail in 1979. I know, we’re clutching at straws now in the search for some romantic medical trauma, but for a kid who never tasted hospital food this was the closest I came to the electronic board game Operation. Although the chiropodist only used a local anaesthetic and it was all over in a matter of half an hour, having the offending shard of nail cut out of my big toe did involve Dr Costain and his nurse wearing surgical masks and gloves. I was too old for a toy afterwards, but I was very brave and I did feel faint back home when the anaesthetic wore off.
Remember how exciting Operation looked in the TV ads? For a start it took batteries, which knocked Cluedo into a cocked hat. Sam the patient’s nose flashed red if you touched the sides while removing his ‘funny bone’ with the metal tweezers – and it buzzed, which I think was supposed to be Sam screaming! And the look of horror on the actress playing Mum’s face when she heard one of the child actors say, ‘Now it’s my turn to operate!’
‘Operate?!?’
We never had Operation. Not because we were deprived, it was just the way the numbers fell in the birthday and Christmas present lottery – after all, you couldn’t have everything in the Kays mailorder catalogue. (Well, you could if you were cousin Dean, but he didn’t have any brothers and sisters, as we were constantly reminded.) For the record, of the heavily TV-advertised board games, neither did we have Buck-A-Roo, Ker-Plunk, Game of Life, Battlin’ Tops or Crossfire, and by the time I got Haunted House second-hand from Carl Merrick – he was, significantly, bored with it – the cardboard dividers were all bent. We had Mouse Trap, after much parental pestering – indeed, I solemnly promised Dad that I would never get bored with it. Well, it looked so complex and wondrous in the TV ads. And to be fair to MB Games, I didn’t get bored with it for ages. The day I took it out into the back garden at Nan Mabel’s and filled the tub into which the diver plunges with real water – to make it more exciting – was the day I had officially got bored with Mouse Trap.
I dare say I would’ve got bored with Operation a lot quicker. Once you’d made it flash and buzz a few times, and successfully removed the tap from Sam’s patella (water on the knee), it was all over bar the shouting.
My ingrown toenail was removed skilfully and without anything flashing or buzzing in about the time it would’ve taken me to tire of the board game. I was given the nail as a souvenir (more medical detritus wrapped up and taken home like cake after a party) and I kept it for a while, but I don’t think I ever showed it to anyone to impress them. I had been under the knife, albeit one morning during the school holidays, and it felt a bit like a rite of passage.
I am still a hospital virgin. I have only ever accompanied other people to casualty since my second stitch twenty-odd years ago and I have never weed in a bedpan. The longest I’ve ever been laid up was in my early thirties when my fatigued body made me have two weeks off work with a mysterious ‘flu’. I didn’t read any American and European literature but I did make an important decision: work less hard. After all, being ill is rubbish.
I spent all of my formative years running on whatever naturally occurring kiddy fuel keeps you mobile and boundless even when you eat no greens and drink only thick squash.
I admit, I wish I’d looked after me teeth, but I wasn’t ‘very, very puny’ like David Bowie, I was a Superman. Alright, a Superman with a chill and a devil of an ulcer.
1. Rolling Stone magazine, 12 February 1976. Bowie also said, ‘I took a look at my thoughts, my appearance, my expressions, my idiosyncrasies and didn’t like them. So I stripped myself down, chucked things out and replaced them with a completely new personality.’
2. During my immediate post-college years I did indeed once wake up with a ‘dead arm’. It took the best part of a day to return to normal. I had slept on it funny.
3. When the family spoke of it, this day was rather luridly described as the one when I ‘cracked my head open’. On another occasion, I was indulging in the frowned-upon habit of tipping on my chair while sat at the dining table, drawing. You, like my parents, can see this coming: I tipped too far and went crashing through the French windows. The miracle of it was, I walked away without a single cut, despite all the broken glass Mum had to pick out of my hair. Little stunt man.
4. Actually, I stuck a dart in my finger in 1976, although it didn’t require hospital treatment. Having tired of regular games of darts out in the garage we took to pinning pictures on the dartboard – to make it more interesting. I was fixing one up with some spare darts and missed. Went straight in to my finger where nail meets flesh.
5. My heart is warmed by the fact that Pam Ayres is still going. A complete anthology of her comic verse, The Works, reprinted to celebrate her 25 years in showbiz, is available from BBC Books. ‘Oh, I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth’ dates back to 1974.
1976
Selected Extracts From My Diary
A BLUE DIARY from the publisher Collins, which I’m sure gave me a huge amount of satisfaction at the time. I have customised it by simply applying a single football sticker to the cover – upside down to prove what a trainee Dadaist I am, aged eleven. The sticker bears the squinting face of JOHN HOLLINS of Queen’s Park Rangers. Another little joke (my dad’s name being JOHN COLLINS). Hey, we had to make our own entertainment in 1976.
Very little graffiti on the inside covers, though this diary was a major shift forward, artistically. We move up to two days per page: much more space to fill – or feel guilty for not filling – and a spare half page every week called NOTES, utilised variously: a plan view of Action Man’s fictional barracks (Holston Barracks); a list of my favourite Peanuts characters (from the top, Charlie Brown, Linus, Sally, Lucy, Freda, Schroeder, Snoopy, Woodstock …); a catalogue of my jokes and tricks (snappy gum, mouse matchbox, nail thru’ finger, etc.); and marginally improved little cartoons to illustrate the text, such as, 26 April: a big rock falling in the stream and soaking Simon while we were dam-building.
And it’s back to joined-up writing with OCCASIONAL CAPITALS for emphasis.
Thursday, 1 January
Dean slept last night and this morning we watched television. This afternoon me and Simon played a fab game of Action Man with four Action Men. Simon’s gripping was Captain Carson and his other one was Sergeant Scott (Scotty) and my gripping was Lieutenant Simpson and my non-gripping was Warrant Officer Nixon.1 We were in the scout car, tank and turbo copter. And we fought a load of Germans with our bare hands, then we all went down the park. Before tea me and Simon saw Spiderman. Tonight me and Simon watched Carry On Again Doctor and it was brill. And then Love Thy Neighbour and Two Ronnies.
Monday, 5 January
This morning Simon and I played a brill game of Action Man about two vandals smashing up our camp. After that I went round Wilson’s and he had got Up Periscope for Christmas and Escape From Colditz Castle (it is different to my Colditz). Roobarb was also there so all three of us playe
d Escape From Colditz Castle. This afternoon Auntie Sue came round and Johnny, Simon and I played spies and we were after Melanie and Melissa. Tonight me and Simon started playing Colditz but we had to have a hair wash and then it was Ask the Family so we had to pack up. After Ask the Family it was Z Cars.
Wednesday, 7 January
This morning we had double maths and we did more fractions. This afternoon we had art. Our group was with Mrs Hooton and we did writing about milk because we didn’t have the stuff to make milk shakes. We are going to make milk shake next week, with scrambled egg on toast. Mum didn’t get me ‘King of the Cops’ record,2 but I listened to Wilson’s when he came round and I’ve copied the words out on paper. Tonight Uncle Brian and Auntie Janis baby-sitted and me and Simon watched Oh No – It’s Selwyn Froggitt!
Thursday, 8 January
I stayed for dinners and we had chicken pie and for afters sponge with chocolate custard. This afternoon we had games and our group did rugby with Mr Hanna and it was brilliant.3 I was in the scrum and I got filthy. It’s lucky we have showers. I went round Wilson’s after school and we played Up Periscope. Tonight me and Simon had an ice cold drink of orangeade and we watched Top of the Pops (‘King of the Cops’ wasn’t on it) and after that we saw a new series called Happy Ever After starring Terry Scott.
Sunday, 11 January
This morning I started making a new comic called Crunch. I have done three pages already. This afternoon we went down Nanny Collins and I got my Monster Fun. We all looked at Nan’s old photos. We watched The Prince and the Pauper4 and Holiday ’76 and they showed you a holiday in Scotland. After tea me and Simon played Subbuteo and the score was 0–0. Then we watched World About Us about insects and we went up to bed and I ordered my Scoop book (Ice Cold in Alex) and got my dinner money ready.
Where Did It All Go Right? Page 12