Where Did It All Go Right?

by Andrew Collins

  10. The complete artistic works of the young Andrew Collins are stored in a suitcase in my parents’ attic. I went through the whole lot in researching this book, an exhausting delight (boy, did I get through a lot of National Provident Institution paper). My desire to be published was strong from an early age. I made a very early book based on the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland. It’s primitively drawn but I have clearly remembered the whole story, in order, from seeing the film at the pictures. The spelling, however, is rudimentary: ‘Alic in wudland et the bisgs wich mad her vere big.’ (Alice in Wonderland – her full name – ate the biscuits which made her very big.) There is a comic based on the Harlem Globe Trotters – or at least the Hanna-Barbera cartoon – which has a slack narrative structure but guess what, our heroes are playing basketball against a team of clowns (the story is called ‘Clownball’).

  11. I have created some crazy characters called The Clown Gang – Noddy, Big Ears and Ugly. Ugly, though male, wears a bra. Don’t ask.

  12. We saw Charlie Caroli and his gang (Jimmy the Frozen Face, Charlie Jnr among them) live in 1978, by which time I had obviously got over my fear of being pulled out of the audience, even though a pantomime, which is what it was, is fertile ground for audience participation.

  eleven

  Leeds Mug

  It’s such a fine line between stupid … and clever.

  David St Hubbins, This Is Spinal Tap (1984)

  I FEAR MY own Fever Pitch would be a slim volume. When Nick Hornby talks in the book of his footballing life flashing before his eyes, it reaches back over a quarter of a century to 1968 when he was 11 and takes in Cup Finals, League Championships, internationals, replays, non-league games, cup ties and ‘all those terrible nil-nil draws against Newcastle’ (actually, there were only two of those but it felt like more).

  Me? I went to see England play twice, and that’s it – once in November 1979 against Bulgaria (we won 2–0), and again in November 1980, a World Cup qualifier against Switzerland (we seem to have lost 2–1 but the match report in my diary is a little impenetrable: ‘well-known Hans-Jorg Pfinster scored the second-half Swiss un-own goal’). I loved being in the crowd at Wembley both times – the atmosphere walking into the place the first time blew me away, as it would any boy. But I never once went to the County Ground to see the Cobblers play – thus I missed out on the rain-lashed romance of local allegiance.

  Because I drifted away from football in the Eighties and never truly went back, I sometimes forget what an avid follower of the game I was, albeit restricted to games on TV, football stickers, Subbuteo leagues, playground chatter. I didn’t read Shoot! but I knew all the grounds in the first four divisions and could draw many of the club badges from memory. I never missed an FA Cup Final on telly, and neither did Dad (we ate salted peanuts from a bowl on that special day each May, sometimes the kind with raisins in). If you’d asked me between the ages of 10 and 13 which team I supported I would have said Liverpool (I had found my brand), but that all changed when I started Weston Favell Upper School in September 1978. A lot did.

  As we have seen, I sailed through Abington Vale Middle School a star pupil, top of the class or thereabouts for the duration.1 I left there in the summer of ’78 with my head held high: 169 credits falling out of my pockets, not a mark under 72 in my final exams, confident, unselfconscious and ready to take on whatever life threw at me.

  Unfortunately, it threw life at me.

  * * *

  Weston Favell Upper School was a nice enough place. Well-stocked, modern and mixed, and reasonable cycling distance from home. It was where I wanted to be. I had spent much of the final term at Abington Vale in pathetic hypothetical terror of being forced by numbers and circumstance to attend ‘the boys school’ (crash of thunder, horses whinny). Northampton School For Boys, or the NSB, used to be the town grammar school – the one my dad had attended in the Fifties. They had dragged it into the Seventies of course, but I still feared it because it was a St Custard’s-like institution that struck me as the sort of place which had bullying and canings and the blue goldfish. (Jasper Carrot did a routine in the Seventies about having his head flushed down the toilet at school: ‘Have you seen the blue goldfish?’) Also, aged 13, I didn’t want them to take all the girls away. I was getting to like the girls.

  I needn’t have worried. The cards fell in my favour, I was granted my first choice, and thus avoided the single-sex path – which I still maintain is an unhealthy one, engendering suspicion and myth-making between the genders at exactly the wrong time. To reiterate: Weston Favell Upper School was where I wanted to be.

  Unfortunately, many of my chums went off to the blue-blazered NSB (Eddy, Griff, Johnny, Kim, Nivek). Not all of them, but enough to reduce my chances of ending up next to someone I knew. So my first shock at the new school was finding myself in form 3CN, bereft of any other Abington Vale kids. No Angus, no Hirsty, no Lewis, no Doboe. No mates. I was on my own for the first time since day one of primary school, separated from the pack, and as if to rub salt into this particular wound the wheel of fortune sat me next to the biggest spaz2 in the class on day one: we’ll call him Burns.3 He didn’t know anybody either. Wide-eyed, pale-skinned, jittery and cursed with a limp, Burns was the runt and he was sat next to me. What chance did I have?

  I didn’t spend the whole live-long day with 3CN – we were streamed for maths, and art and design saw us split again into random sets – but for the most part, these were my new schoolmates. And they all knew each other; these kids seemed tight, tribal, as if they went back a long way together. What’s worse, they were naughty, irreverent, scruffy. They were an element. The male ringleaders – and I will never forget their names – were Bill Jeyes, Lee Masters, Simon Triculja and Gaz Smith, a walking clique of in-jokes, back-chat and swagger. They were the family, with geographical satellites like Chris Bradshaw and Kev Bailey as honorary caporegimes. All came from the other side of the Wellingborough Road: Parklands, Lumbertubs, Boothville. By opting for the coeducational utopia of Weston Favell Upper School, I had entered a new gene pool. None of their dads did something indistinct in an office.

  It’s not like my previous school had been a genteel academy for Fotherington-Thomases, but it was quite a culture shock for me, moving due north to a school whose catchment area extended beyond the estates named after places in Somerset and Devon. I look back on it now as a character-building social mix, the bedrock upon which comprehensive schools should be founded, but at the time, I just wanted there to be less hardos in my class.

  To them, looking spruce and carrying a briefcase was an admission of homosexuality. For the first time in my life, I was a swot. I hadn’t changed, of course, but the demographic scenery had. That which had made me top of the class just one short summer ago now made me a creep and a poof: a target. The scales had tipped: being clever was now uncool, and I was subsequently forced to readjust.

  I didn’t want to be lumped in with a deadleg like Burns. Sadly, for most of the first term, I was. Academic excellence held no sway here. The portcullis of cool had come down, and I was on the wrong side of the bars.

  It was like being exposed as a stabiliser-assisted cyclist by Anita Barker, except the pain and humiliation were stretched out across weeks. Weeks without end. I had flirted with the Molesworth dictum but the truth is, I used to like school. Now it really was ‘the jug’.

  My diary, as we know, generally presents a united front, favouring upbeat sheen over the brutal truth. I hated Weston Favell Upper School so much I actually wrote it in my diary. You can see the positive spin draining away in my first week there. On Tuesday I’m putting on a brave face (‘Our form teacher is nice Miss Chapman … today wasn’t as bad as I imagined’), by Wednesday I’m telling it like it is: ‘There is no-one in my class I know or want to know. I hate my class.’ Tellingly, I have crossed out the last comment but you can read through the scribble. I hated my class.

  What I didn’t write was that I cried at night that first week
. I even voiced my anxiety (boiled down to the simple fact that there were no Abington Vale kids in my class) to Mum and Dad, and they contacted head of year Mr Bowden. He had me in his office and – without crying – I told him why I was unhappy in school, hoping it was not too late to put me in a new form, perhaps the one with Angus in. No chance. The rotund, sausage-fingered Bowden placated me like a true diplomat (he really did have a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, incidentally) and sent me on my way. I was a condemned man.

  Clinging to after-school and Saturday morning art classes for salvation, I made a big decision. To rise above the myopic ‘cool’ of the northern-estates kids and forge my own academic path through the next three years of school, immune to their sneers. Not really. I decided to pretend to be thick and try and get in with them.

  Thus began my quest for cool.

  * * *

  All thoughts of academic excellence were pushed aside in favour of this much more important campaign: to move among the hard kids and gain acceptance. I scored an early own goal by joining Mr Bowden’s ornithology club – Gaah! What on earth was I thinking of? – but this was short-lived and only involved one field trip which took place at the weekend, so Bill, Lee, Si and Gaz never knew about it.4

  Bill, Lee, Si and Gaz were my heroes, or more accurately my antiheroes. I wanted to be like them: cheeky, stylish, obdurate … thick. It was impossible to separate their cool from their ignorance. They had little interest in learning. They would happily martyr themselves on the altar of failure rather than bow and scrape to authority, even nice Miss Chapman. To be like them I would not only have to denounce the class spaz and answer back to the odd teacher, I would have to regress to an uneducated state to prove my manhood.

  In the lessons I shared with 3CN I actually pretended to be dimmer than I was. I put my hand up less, volunteered never, and cranked my knowledge down a few notches. As Les Dawson always used to say, pretending to play the piano badly takes as much skill as playing it well. It takes a smart kid to affect stupidity. You need to know all the answers in order to deliberately get a handful wrong. It became second nature to me to throw in a couple of wrong answers in tests, thereby ensuring I would never again come top.

  In an English test with Mr Gilbert we were asked who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. I put ‘Lee Harper’, secure in the knowledge that it was Harper Lee. I got it wrong as planned, and I secretly awarded myself two points: one for knowing it, the other for looking good. I wonder if Mr Gilbert knew.

  I was leading a double life. In school I was this new, damaged version of my old self: tie in a big Windsor knot (as was the fad), sports bag in place of the old briefcase, and the beginnings of an attitude (when I was picked out of a line-up in PE by the dreaded Mr Blogg, I made such a do-I-have-to? meal of the walk to the centre of the gym he asked mockingly if I needed an injection). Meanwhile, at home, I was a proud member of the ELO Fan Club and a regular reader of Look-In, playing squash with my dad, and hanging out with Hirsty and Angus (both of whom would be branded ‘bum chums’ by Bill, Lee, Si and Gaz). Of course it’s a pathetic, cowardly way to live your life, but to me at the time it was a necessity.

  This was growing up, albeit a ruthlessly accelerated kind. That Christmas, one of my main presents was Lego. Alright, it was a ‘technical set’ but it was still interlocking plastic bricks. It would be my last toy. When we got back to school, Mr Sharman asked our group in ‘building craft’ (a self-explanatory design option) what we got for Christmas. Unfortunately there were two relative hardos in my group, Wayne and Tarry, and I realised on the spot that I simply could not admit I’d had Lego. I frantically ran through my present list in my mind for something ‘cool’ and the best I could come up with was a Leeds United mug.

  ‘What about you, Andrew?’

  ‘A Leeds mug.’

  ‘A Leeds mug?’

  There was much sniggering. The other kids, including Wayne and Tarry, thought I must be some kind of pauper. Tiny Tim with his Christmas cup, and grateful for it.

  Another own goal in the cool play-offs? Actually no. Being poor was obviously cooler than being rich, and anyway, I had publicly confirmed my allegiance to Leeds United. And guess who supported Leeds United? Bill, Lee, Si and Gaz …

  Switching my loyalties from Liverpool to Leeds was no great hardship. (Good thing I wasn’t a proper football fan, eh?) Liverpool may have been top of the table, but at least Leeds were in the first division. The true glory days of Billy Bremner and Norman Hunter under Don Revie may have been over but they still had a degree of cool, not least since the new badge came in, which was a rounded, cartoon-like ‘L’ with the ‘U’ tucked inside it. (If they lost a few games, and they did, you could always blame manager Jimmy Adamson.) Now, looking back, I’m sure Bill, Lee, Si and Gaz didn’t all support Leeds at the outset – I’ll bet a couple of them fell into line. It may have even been a conspiracy – who shall we support at the new school then? – but it played so well in a gang. Kev Bailey and Chris Bradshaw were Leeds too. Well they had to be. And so did I.

  The big day came on 29 November (quite a way into that all-important first term). Dad bought me home a Leeds scarf. Yellow with blue and white stripes, it cost £2.20 and was pocket money well spent. This was my ticket to acceptance. I remember the first day I wore it, a frosty Tuesday, walking from the bike sheds to class flushed with a mixture of self-conscious guilt and genuine pride in my new colours. I had changed my stripes.

  Miss Chapman groaned and said, without malice, ‘Oh you don’t support Leeds as well do you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, aware that the tribal council were watching me. They were unable to mock. They didn’t exactly proffer me an approving nod or kick Chris Bradshaw off his seat and offer it to me, but their artificial allegiance to the yellow, white and blue was so strong, they had to respect my choice. (They had no idea I supported Liverpool a few weeks earlier, as I had never worn a red scarf. For all they knew I had been an LUFC man all my life.)

  This was an important stage in my development. I was now a Leeds fan for the sake of cultural homogeny and it felt good. I covered one of my exercise books with a picture of a Leeds player (I forget which, possibly Parlane or Hird) and monitored their progress each week in case I should ever fall into conversation with the firm.5 I never did – it wasn’t that kind of acceptance. It’s not as if they had been bullying or picking on me before – Burns took all that heat with his dodgy leg – I just needed to be able to hold my head up in their company; to not be a poof or a creep or a swot. I saw Kev Bailey after school once or twice, but that was as close as I ever got to the hard kids’ manor.

  Offering up my Leeds mug after Christmas had marked a new dawn. At the start of 1979 I put all childish things behind me. I started buying seven-inch singles with my pocket money, and grown-up magazines like Film Review and New Musical Express. I made new schoolfriends from outside 3CN, like Pete Sawtell, Matthew Allen, Craig McKenna, Andy Howkins, Dave Griffiths – real and lasting friends, among whom I could be myself.

  Once O-level options dominated the timetable, my time spent in the same room as Bill, Lee, Si and Gaz became limited to registration, PE and the odd design class. I could handle that. They even started talking to me when they discovered I could draw scurrilous caricatures of the teachers to order. Alan Evans, a behemoth6 who operated in their anti-authoritarian orbit, and ruddy sidekick Dougie Lines once asked me to help them with their maths homework (they were in a lower stream) – they probably thought they were getting me to do it for them, but they weren’t. There were no heavy manners. I did it as a favour. I think they even thanked me. Probably called me ‘Collins’ but I could live with that. Chris Bradshaw and I bonded at the shallow end of the swimming pool – neither of us could swim. He proudly showed me that he had hair on his toes. What a man.

  In fact, all this bare-faced assimilation actually loosened me up a bit as an individual. Wearing trainers for lessons even though it’s against school rules, for instance (what har
m is there in that?). Forgetting to do up my top button. Getting caught reading Cracked magazine by Mr Twinn in maths. Going to school discos and only dancing to the punk songs. After all, nobody likes a square.

  Ah yes, punk rock. It came to Northampton late, predictably enough. And can you guess who Weston Favell’s first punks were? Bill, Lee, Si and Gaz.

  1. My school reports for Abington Vale Middle make me blush. I appear to have had two days off sick in three years, and the teachers’ comments vary all the way from ‘Andrew has worked with great enthusiasm and skill throughout the year’ to ‘Andrew has worked conscientiously and consistently throughout the year’. I am commended for my uniform by form teacher Mrs Dennison (‘Excellent. Neat and tidy appearance’) and they even say I am ‘making steady progress’ in PE!

  2. I use the insensitive vernacular only for evocative effect. Spastic was the accepted term for the mentally and physically handicapped at the time, and kids are cruel, cruel bastards. We also used ‘flid’ as an insult, derived from Thalidomide, often accompanied by a short-armed mime. Joey Deacon – handicapped, book-dictating hero of Blue Peter – greatly influenced the generic playground impersonation for ‘spaz’, tongue behind bottom lip, that sort of drill. If I could go back and live my childhood again, I would, but I fear I would exhibit exactly the same shallow, unhelpful view towards the disabled. At least by Weston Favell I had faced down my fear of the handicapped. At primary school I was literally frightened of spastics. It was a basic aversion to something I didn’t understand, a form of innate xenophobia, I guess. I was scared of my own human fallibility. Mrs Munro’s boy, Steven, frequently came to school (he went to a ‘special school’): partially sighted with huge milk-bottle glasses, he was deaf too, which meant he spoke in a foreign tongue and loudly. I as good as hid from him. More fool me.