My first day at Collingwood Boys’ School was dominated by a strong sense of foreboding. Thirty little boys in their new uniforms were led into a classroom. Most cried and tried to leave before registration was called, but our mothers abandoned us there. If you wet your pants, you were given a spare pair to change into and the soiled ones to take home in a clear plastic bag that you could present to your mother at the school gate. Did it have to be clear?
On the surface it was just another suburban private school with pretensions to being Eton; we would walk from the main building to the dining hall by crossing the road, doffing our caps to waiting motorists as we did so. The delight of the motorists taught me the value of good manners. Any frustration at being delayed would be banished by a simple old-fashioned gesture. However, the headmaster was a furious little man with a beard who reeked of cigars and dog.
We boys didn’t see him much, although we could always smell where he had been. The pupils only met him when he wanted to punish some minor wrongdoing. To instil a deep sense of fear in all of us, corporal punishment was not done in the privacy of his office. No, he preferred to punish boys in the dining hall at lunchtime. The young offenders would be marched out and lined up, some already in tears. As the rest of us tried to eat our Spam fritters at the long tables, they were ordered to unfold their hands. Mr Richardson would then take a wooden ruler and whack them hard and repeatedly on their palms. His face went a furious colour as he did this. The boys’ hands would inevitably waver as he punished them, so he would grab their wrists and hold them in place so he could keep whacking. Sometimes the ruler would break, half of it flying into the air. This would elicit nervous laughter in all of us sitting on the uncomfortable benches staring at our now even less appetizing fritters. However, within moments, another wooden ruler would be produced and the whacking would continue. It is strange to think I am describing England in the late 1970s; it reads more like a Charles Dickens novel.
If the headmaster at my primary school was a demon, the dinner lady Mrs Pierce was an ogre. She had the face she deserved, one contorted over the years to a permanent expression of sourness, as sour as her dreaded gooseberry crumble, and a thick moustache above her lip. She never smiled. She couldn’t. Mrs Pierce despised children, so she was in the perfect job to make their lives a misery day after day. It was as if she was an evil villain who had escaped from a Roald Dahl story. One boy, Wilson, had a written note from his mother stating he did not have to eat any fruit or vegetables except chips. However, if any of the rest of us dared turn our little noses up at her boiled cabbage or fishcakes or dreaded stews she would jab her long steel serving spoon in your direction like a weapon and bark, ‘I will rap your knuckles faster than you can say Jack Spratt!’
One Friday, after barely edible liver and onions, it was stewed peaches for pudding. I didn’t like peaches at the best of times, but stewed? It seemed cruel even to the peaches. Unlike Wilson (who has now probably since died of scurvy) with his extraordinary excuse note, I had no choice but to try and eat them. I fished some out of the bowl with my spoon. Even the smell disagreed with me. Holding my nose I put them in my mouth. I chewed and found their hairy texture revolting, let alone the taste. I tried hard to swallow, but I couldn’t. I knew I would throw up if I did. So now I had warm stewed peaches in my mouth, and uneaten cold stewed peaches in my bowl.
Mrs Pierce was patrolling the tables with her spoon ready to rap the knuckles of any child who dared not finish every last morsel of her dessert. ‘Finish your peaches, boy,’ she snarled, spitting over my bowl as she did so.
Quicker than I could say Jack Spratt, I spooned the remaining peaches into my mouth, but again I just couldn’t bring myself to swallow. But then I hatched a brilliant plan. I would store the stewed peaches in my cheek and spit them into a bush on the walk back from the dining hall to the main school building. However, Miss Kinetter (a pretty young lady teacher we all loved who had hair like an Afghan hound – I still look at Afghan hounds with longing today) walked alongside me all the way, so I sat all afternoon through maths and history with stewed peaches in my cheek. I’m not sure how long I planned to store them in there like a hamster, but when the bell rang to signal the end of school that day I still had them. As usual my mum picked me up in the family Vauxhall Viva.
‘Nice day at school, love?’
‘Mmm, erm, umm, erm,’ I mumbled. It was difficult to speak with my cheek stocked with stewed and now decomposing fruit.
‘What’s that in your cheek?’
I checked in the rear-view mirror. My left cheek was a lot rounder than my right.
‘Stewed peaches,’ I mumbled.
Mum laughed and found a tissue, and then invited me to spit the peaches out into it. It was a minor victory over Mrs Pierce.
My first appearance on stage was at Collingwood and it was a dismal failure. I was cast as Father Christmas in the end-of-term play. The role of Father Christmas is normally associated with an older actor – for example Lord Attenborough waited until he was seventy to play him. However, I was thrust into the red outfit aged five, with a large bag of cotton wool sellotaped to my face.
‘NO, WILLIAMS, NO!’ bellowed Mr Kirby, a karakul hat(loaf-shaped headgear made of sheep fleece favoured by Soviet leaders)-wearing teacher, from the back of the sports hall as we tried to navigate through the dress rehearsal.
I only had one line: ‘The children are all waiting for their presents.’ However, the cotton wool had made my one and only contribution inaudible.
‘You’re mumbling through your beard!’ proclaimed Mr Kirby.
‘I can talk louder, sir,’ I mumbled through my beard.
‘What?’ replied Mr Kirby.
‘I SAID I CAN TALK LOUDER, SIR!’
‘No, no, lose the beard.’
Reluctantly I took off the beard. In the car on the way home my sister Julie asked me, ‘Were you meant to be an elf?’
Aside from being invited up on stage with some other children during a pantomime on the end of the pier in Bournemouth starring Radio 1 DJ Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart as Buttons in Cinderella – when I got an inadvertent laugh from the matinee audience when he gave me a packet of sweets and I told him, ‘I don’t like Spangles’ – I didn’t appear on stage again until the early 1980s. During those years, when my age and weight were both still in single figures I had no desire to be an actor; I wanted to be Tarzan, lord of the apes. Having seen all of the Johnny Weissmuller films on BBC2 at teatime, I thought the best way to emulate Edgar Rice Burroughs’s hero was to leap around the house wearing only my pants calling,
‘AAAAAYYYYYYAAAAAAAYYYYYAAAAAAA!!!!!!!’
After being Tarzan didn’t work out, I decided to be Sherlock Holmes. Having seen all of the Basil Rathbone films on BBC2 at teatime, I put a sign on my door that read, DAVID WILLIAMS, MASTER DETECTIVE. One of my uncles travelled a lot through work and had bought me a silk dressing gown on a business trip to Hong Kong, and at a Cub Scout jumble sale I had found a magnifying glass. So I sat alone in my bedroom in my dressing gown holding my magnifying glass waiting for someone to knock on my door with a case to solve. No one did.
When I was young I had the full set of grandparents. My mother’s father we called Grampie. Of the generation who thought smoking was good for them, he developed throat cancer when I was very young and had a laryngectomy, which promised to prolong his life for a couple of years. One day I walked in on Grampie clearing the fluid out of the tube that sat behind a piece of gauze on his neck. It was connected to a metallic suitcase, and it was making a whirling gurgling sound. Grampie looked deeply ashamed that I had seen him like that, and I walked out of the room. He knew he didn’t have long to live and heaped love upon me and my sister, his only grandchildren. He even bought me the most beautiful Hornby railway set, which he couldn’t afford, but died before he could give it to me for my eighth birthday. I never really got to know him.
Fortunately I did get to know my dad’s dad, Grandad. He was the person who mad
e me laugh most as a child. Arthur Williams had left Wales on his own aged fourteen to try and find a job in London. He worked in hotels most of his life and even shot down a Nazi plane in World War II. Julie and I would squeal with delight when he took his false teeth out and talked gobbledygook, and like all children we wanted him to do it again and again and again. He let my sister and I stay up late to watch the wildly violent TV show The Professionals when we slept over on a Friday night.
‘Yes, Grandad, we’re allowed to watch The Professionals at home, aren’t we, Julie?’ I lied.
He knew I was lying but let us stay up and watch it anyway. On Saturday morning Grandad would take us swimming in Morden Baths (twenty-five years later Matt and I would by chance shoot our most famous Little Britain sketch there, the Lou and Andy diving board one, as well as Vicky Pollard smoking in the swimming pool). I would swim into my grandad’s big fat stomach and pretend I was bouncing off. Afterwards we would have a race home. We children would run through the alleyway and he would drive his brown Princess on the road, no doubt pulling over for five minutes at a bus stop to let us win. Then he would cook us a big fried breakfast.
Being around him was pure pleasure because he was like a child too. One day he surprised us and took us to the circus, the one and only time I have ever been. Grandad took me to see Star Wars at the cinema again and again because he knew I loved it so much, and bought me my first Star Wars figures. He and my nanny had a pond in their garden, and one day I was using an old McDonald’s polystyrene burger box as a boat for Han Solo, Chewbacca, Princess Leia, C-3PO and R2-D2. Now the Wookiee was a great deal bigger than the other figures, and I hadn’t balanced it right. To my horror the ‘boat’ capsized. I burst into tears. I had lost my favourite toys. And my short life was over.
When I ran into the kitchen to tell him, Grandad followed me out to the garden and rolled up his sleeve. He knelt down and spent all afternoon with his arm deep in the pond, searching through the sludge and frogspawn for my beloved figures.
‘Now, there’s R2-D2.’
‘Thanks, Grandad,’ I said as I wiped the green slime off the little robot figure.
‘Who else is still down there?’
‘Luke Skywalker,’ I said.
He spent a good few hours dredging for the simple farm boy from Tatooine who turned out to be in the spare bedroom upstairs all along, but if Grandad was angry he didn’t show it.
Years later Simon Pegg and I would meet some of the actors and crew at the premiere after-party of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, the least shit of all the prequels. Kenny Baker (R2-D2) was charming; Antony Daniels (C-3PO) was flirty; even the great George Lucas spoke to us. Then Simon approached Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca.
‘Hi, Peter, it’s Simon Pegg. I met you at Comic Con —’
Peter waved him away with his giant hand as one might swat a fly. He was so fantastically rude, it made Simon and I laugh for years afterwards.
When I was nine years old I decided I was going to leave home. I had had an argument with my parents over having my TV viewing rationed. That was the worst punishment I could imagine – not being able to watch The Dukes of Hazzard. My plan was to go and live in Banstead Woods, so I packed some Kendal mint cake and my magnifying glass into the little nylon camouflage rucksack bought at the Royal Tournament. Then I wrote a short goodbye note to my family and slipped out the front door, not closing it behind me so as not to make a sound. I raced up to the woods and tried to find a bit that wasn’t muddy so I could sit down. There rather embarrassingly I bumped into my Cub Scout leader, who was out walking her dog.
‘Oh hello, Akela.’
‘Hello, David.’
‘In case you were wondering, I am just waiting for my mum and dad to pick me up. I told them that tree there.’
‘Oh OK,’ muttered an unconvinced Akela. ‘See you on Monday for Cubs.’
‘Oh yes,’ I replied. I suppose I could still go to Cubs. Damn it, I forgot to bring my uniform.
After an hour or so of crouching by a damp tree I got bored and returned home, thinking that my family wouldn’t have missed me. However, my mum was in tears and my dad was full of rage. They had been driving around and around looking for me. Little did I know then what fate might meet a small boy alone in the woods.
My dad sent me straight to bed even though his parents were coming over that afternoon. The curtains were drawn and I lay in bed unable to sleep. After an hour or so I heard their Princess pull up in the drive. When they came in, I listened to their conversation downstairs.
‘Where’s David?’ asked my grandad.
‘He’s been sent to bed. He tried to run away from home,’ replied my dad.
‘Oh no. Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
There was a pause before my grandad said, ‘I want to see him.’
‘You can’t,’ replied Dad. ‘He’s being punished.’
‘Please, I want to see him.’
Then I heard the stairs creak as my portly grandad made his way upstairs and opened my bedroom door. I pretended to be asleep for a moment, but then he came and sat on the bed and gave me a hug.
‘Don’t run away, David,’ he said. ‘We don’t know what we’d do without you.’
‘Sorry, Grandad.’
A few years later he would die a long slow painful death. The last time I saw him he was sitting in the back room of his little house in Morden. He had a red tartan blanket over his knees, his face grey with pain. Grandad had a brain tumour. When I walked into the room, he tried to smile, but the pain was too great, and his face wouldn’t let him. I wanted to show him some of my new Star Wars figures. He nodded slowly, and then I was led away by my father. I didn’t know it then, but we had been brought round to say goodbye.
Grandad always had Imperial Leather soap in his bathroom, and whenever I smell that, I think of him and how he made me laugh and laugh and laugh just by taking his teeth out and talking gobbledygook.
I hope I’m like him when I’m a grandad.
My grandmothers only came into focus for me when their husbands died. They had both been disapproving of their more mischievous partners. My mother’s mum, Violet Ellis – Nanny E – never cared for me much; my sister was her favourite, something she never disguised. Arthur’s widow, Ivy Williams – Nanny Williams – adored me though, and I adored her. I saved up my pocket money and bought her a brooch of a little owl sitting on a crescent moon for her birthday. I took her upstairs to my bedroom to give it to her, as I knew my immediate family would have disapproved of me spending so much money like that. It was twenty-five pounds, which then was a fortune to me, and my nanny was so touched she cried. She couldn’t keep it a secret but immediately put it on and paraded around the party showing it to people.
Perhaps I wouldn’t have wanted to run away to live in the woods without the guiding influence of Lord Baden-Powell, who at that time nearly forty years after his death still instilled in young boys a love of the outdoors. From the age of eight I was a Cub Scout. On Monday nights I would put on a thick green jumper and itchy grey shorts and learn to tie knots and that the most important thing to keep in your pocket was a piece of string. I managed to acquire an armful of badges. For the entertainer badge I had an idea that will not surprise you: I was going to do a hula dance. Elvis Presley had recently died on the toilet and his Aloha From Hawaii concert had been repeated on television. So I donned a grass skirt, a bikini top, a garland of flowers and a wig (20p in a jumble sale), and baffled the other Cubs and their parents in a night of otherwise more traditional entertainment. The music was ‘Bali Hai’ from the musical South Pacific. I performed the dance with another boy, Tom, who very reluctantly put a grass skirt over his uniform and burst into tears through sheer embarrassment during our routine. Despite me being considerably more committed to cross-dressing and performing a Hawaiian dance than Tom, Akela rewarded us both with badges.
The next week it was my turn to cry.
It was the spo
rts badge, and I, despite all that leaping around in my pants pretending to be Tarzan, liked my mum’s cakes too much and was a fat child. However hard I tried, I just couldn’t jump high enough or run fast enough and was the only boy Baloo failed that day. It was nigh on impossible to fail a Cub badge – the tasks for each one were little more than a formality. If you expressed an interest in something, anything, there was a badge for it, and your mother had better get her sewing kit out. But, however hard I tried, the sports badge eluded me. As we walked back down the alleyway to the Cub hut, I felt so humiliated in front of all the other boys I cried. It was the first time I was made to confront my lack of physical ability. Perhaps I’m the only person in the history of the world to both fail my Cub Scout sports badge and be honoured at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Awards.*
On a Cub camp our Akela took us all on a march along a river, resplendent in our completely-inappropriate-for-the-hot-summer’s-day green woollen jumpers and thick grey shorts. We stopped for a picnic, and I noticed a sprinkler watering the field that backed onto the canal. Stepping back to avoid the sprinkler, I fell backwards into the canal. Down and down I went, into the cold murky water. I couldn’t hear a thing. I opened my eyes. All I could see were out-of-focus green weeds either side of me, and above me the sunlight dancing on the ceiling of water. Was my short uneventful life to end here in a watery grave?
Slowly I floated up, and as my head bobbed out of the water I was hastily hauled onto the bank. My heavy uniform was soaked with river water, so I was told to take off my clothes, and sat on the bank in my white underpants, eating a packed lunch of jam sandwiches. My clothes were laid out on the grass to dry. Thick wool doesn’t dry in the time it takes to eat a jam sandwich and some Hula Hoops, so by the time we were ready to leave, my Cub uniform was still saturated. So the pack marched back to the campsite, all the other boys in their uniforms, me in a damp and dirty pair of white underpants. My shoes squelching with every step. It would not be my last experience of river swimming.
Camp David Page 2