On Saturday 29 July 1981 Prince Charles and Lady Diana were married, and their wedding clashed with that year’s Cub camp. Now I don’t know if Akela called Buckingham Palace and asked the royals to change the date of the ceremony, but if she did they must have refused. So Akela and Baloo set up a little black and white television in a field and powered it off a car battery so we could watch this sadly unsuccessful marriage commence. However, it was all quite long and boring if you were a ten-year-old boy. What’s more us boys had become very distracted by something in one of the tents. A penis.
One of the boys had got out his willy and it had gone all hard. He was inviting other boys (even those not in his six) to come into his tent and hold it for a short while. Now I don’t know if seeing me do that hula dance had given him the idea that I might like that sort of thing, but I was beckoned inside for my turn. I held his willy for the allotted time, and as I heard the crowds lining the Mall cheer as Charles and Diana kissed on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, I had my first sexual experience.
On the last night of camp we sat around the campfire, and one of the older boys who already had a wisp of armpit hair asked, ‘Do you still play with toys?’
‘Oh yes,’ I replied. ‘I love my Action Man; sometimes he even marries my sister’s Barbie when Ken is away.’
‘I don’t.’
I was incredulous. What was there in life without playing with toys? ‘What do you do?’
‘Listen to the radio. Sit on a wall with my mates,’ he replied.
How on earth could either of those things be more exciting than choosing honeymoon outfits for Action Man? I thought.
It was the first time I contemplated that my childhood would end. And soon.
Little by little I was growing up. The Falklands War in 1982 proved to be a turning point. Having been brought up on World War II films, I was thrilled that Britain was at war again. I was eleven and unthinkingly patriotic. I had grown up saluting the Union flag at Cubs and singing the national anthem at school. At church parade (the first Sunday in every month, when the Scouts and Guides were made to attend) the vicar gave a sermon about the war and asked us, ‘If there was an Argentine boy here you wouldn’t want to fight him, would you?’
‘Yes!’ we all answered.
I eagerly watched the war unfold on television, from the tin of Argentinian corned beef being thrown through their embassy window to the British fleet leaving port for their ‘surprise attack’ (as Sue Townsend so wittily put it in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole), to the sinking of the Belgrano and then HMS Sheffield. The terrible injuries. The loss of life. My excitement faded as I began to realize that war was hell. My Action Men were boxed up and put in the loft, never to come down again. Slowly I was growing up.
It was time to leave Cubs. And join the Sea Scouts.
Sea Scouts sounds funny. Scouts sounds camp, but Sea Scouts sounds really camp. However, being a Sea Scout wasn’t funny or camp.
It was disturbing …
3
A Dutch Nudist Camp
I didn’t go to a conventional Sea Scout group. Our leader lived with his mother, was an ex-merchant seaman and didn’t like the official Sea Scout uniforms and so kitted us all out in Navy surplus. Most of the games we played in the hall involved him chasing and spanking us. Our leader would thoughtfully hire out a sauna so we could all sweat together, and on camp holidays bathtime would go on for hours. This would involve us all queuing up in the nude, and then being dunked in a big barrel of water before being spanked again. It wasn’t all spanking though; sometimes we would go canoeing or sailing – we were Sea Scouts after all. Water sports involved putting on wetsuits. One time I saw the leader easing a young recruit into rubber.
‘The wetsuit won’t go on unless you take your swimming trunks off,’ he said.
The boy reluctantly took off his trunks.
‘And it’s best I rub baby oil into your legs to help it on.’
Which he did. It took a long while to get that wetsuit on.
One day on a Scout sailing trip I forgot my cagoule and the leader ordered me to take down my shorts and pants and bend over. At first I thought it was some kind of joke – he couldn’t really physically punish me in front of all these people, standing outside in the marina? Although my parents sometimes whacked me at home, I had escaped the ruler or slipper or cane at school. However, for him the forgotten cagoule (on a day with not a hint of rain) was a perfect opportunity to unleash his sadistic streak. At first all I heard was the sharp thwack of the baton make contact with my skin; I felt nothing at all. But a fraction of a second later the burning sting that spread like wildfire across my buttocks was so terrific that all I could do was gasp. I held onto a boat for support, otherwise I might have toppled over. As I stood up unsteadily, tears ran down my cheeks.
When I returned home two days later I secretly examined my buttocks in the bathroom mirror and saw the baton-shaped raised red block of skin was still there, even then hot to the touch. The leader then hand-picked a few of his favourite boys (some current and ex-Scouts) to go on a special unofficial Scout camp with him. It was a nudist camp. In Holland. Once through the gates we took off all our clothes. We cooked, washed and dried up completely naked. We even slept in the same tent together as him. Naked, of course. Now I don’t know what the rules are for Scout leaders, but I’m assuming you have to remain clothed at all times when with the boys in your care. When I returned home I told my mother where I had been.
‘We went to a nudist camp, Mum.’
‘No, you can’t have done,’ she replied.
‘We did.’
‘Don’t lie, David.’
‘I am not lying!’
It’s so unthinkable it still seems like a lie. But it isn’t. It’s true. What happened at the Sea Scouts wasn’t sexual abuse as such, it all felt more innocent than that, but it was still very strange.
However, there were good times at Sea Scouts. The leader’s helper had a guitar, and we would sit around the campfire and sing songs, ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, the latter of which I would pretend to be so moved by that I would make out I was crying, much to everyone’s amusement. We would do impressions of the characters in The Young Ones or listen to the Smiths, though I was laughed at for not knowing what ‘mammary glands’ were, mentioned by Morrissey in the song ‘Handsome Devil’.
The older boys would tell scary stories in the tents at night. One involved an old woodcutter who axed his whole family and could still be heard chopping wood in the forest at night. Another was even more gruesome. A young couple are driving in the country at night, and their car breaks down, so the man goes out to try and find a phone box. Later she hears a tapping sound on the roof of the car. The police arrive and tell her to get out of the car but not to look back. Unable to help herself, she looks back and sees a beast tapping her boyfriend’s head on the roof.
And of course we would fiddle with each other in the dark. And in the light sometimes too. One boy I developed a sustained attraction for, and we would often pair off. After we were intimate he would be so full of anger at what he had done he would become violent with me. That would be enough to make anyone deeply confused about sex. What’s more this boy had lost a parent, and in my childish mind I believed they were looking down on us. My whole experience of sex at this time can be summed up in one word. Shame.
It was at Scouts that I attempted to kill myself.
Looking back on my childhood now, I remember how much I felt isolated and alone. How withdrawn I was. How deeply things would upset me. How often I would cry and not quite know why. Now I realize I was suffering with depression, a disease that has blighted my adult life.
Once a year we went on a camping weekend as a pack, without the leaders. My pack was called Kestrel. Without the watchful eye of the leader, it all went very Lord of the Flies. Arguments turned into fights, and one boy nicknamed Frazzle – we all had nicknames; mine, carried over from school, was Cuthbert – hit me with a log. (I
f you are familiar with William Golding’s masterpiece, I was definitely Piggy.) It was dusk and I ran off into the darkening woods. Being hit by the log compounded my misery, and even though I was only twelve, I had long felt that my life was not worth living.
Earlier in the day we had all been playing with a rope swing over a stream, and I returned there. Having an extensive knowledge of knots from my years as a Cub and Scout, I knew how to make a noose. I walked up the muddy bank of the stream, put the noose around my neck, then launched myself off the bank. I felt the rope tighten and crush my neck. My eyes started watering and I choked, feeling as if I was going to throw up. My feet skimmed the bank and dragged in the cold stream. I was too tall. I tried other positions, but it was impossible, so I removed the rope from around my neck and hid in the woods. Now it was dark, ‘real country dark’ as Anthony Burgess writes in A Clockwork Orange, and I crept back up to the camp, lay down behind a tree and watched as the other boys sat around the fire. Frazzle was crying, I wondered why. I watched them for quite a while. Outside of it all again.
I watched and waited behind the tree, and when a Land Rover pulled up I worried that I would get into trouble and walked back into the camp. Frazzle leaped up and tried to attack me again, but was held back. Now he was attacking me for running away.
The boy nominally in charge said to the man in the Land Rover, ‘It’s all right – we found him!’ The car drove off. ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ asked the boy.
‘In the woods, hiding,’ I replied.
‘You fucking cunt. We had to call out the warden.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I don’t want you in our group any more.’
‘OK,’ I said, trying not to look at anyone.
I never told them about trying to hang myself. That would have made them even angrier. I never ever told a single person. Until now.
It would not be the only time I would try to take my own life.
By now I had passed an exam to go to senior school a year early. My mum bought me the seven-inch single of Queen’s ‘Flash’ by way of congratulations. I still have it. I loved the film Flash Gordon so much (I still have a huge crush on Ming’s feline daughter Princess Aura played by Ornella Muti) I even wrote a letter to Jim’ll Fix It.
Dear Jim’ll,
Please can you fix it for me to meet Brian Blessed who plays the King Vultan in Flash Gordon. And please can you fix it for me to be a Hawkman for the day? Basically I just really want to be on TV.
Yours Sincerely,
David Williams age 10
Now I realize I should have written in with a more unusual request, like ‘Please can you fix it for me to be Muslim for the day.’ The more imaginative fix-its always made it onto the show. Needless to say Jim never fixed it for me. However, twenty-five years later while on the Little Britain Live tour I spotted Brian Blessed in a theatre car park. We had a performance that night and he was about to appear in pantomime there as Captain Hook. Feeling pretty famous at the time, as Little Britain had been running on BBC1 for a few years and the tour was on its way to playing to a million people in the UK, I approached him, assuming he would recognize me. He didn’t.
‘Mr Blessed?’
He turned around to face me, obviously a little annoyed that I had distracted him from rummaging around in the boot of his car, probably for Captain Hook’s hook.
‘Yes?’ he boomed.
‘Well, I er …’ I soldiered on. ‘Well, when I was young I wrote to Jim’ll Fix It and asked to meet you.’
‘Yes’.
‘Well, er, now I have …’
Without a word he returned to rummaging around in his boot. However famous you think you are, there will be always be someone who hasn’t a clue who you are and thinks you are just another nutter. I tiptoed off into the dark.
So the release of the single ‘Flash’ heralded the beginning of eight years at Reigate Grammar School. The change was an immediate shock to the system. Having been among the tallest at Collingwood, now I was among the shortest. Some of the older boys at my new school had facial hair; others even drove themselves in every day.
Perhaps I found this new environment disorientating, as for the first time in my school life I did something bad. I copied another boy’s work in a French test, and the teacher spotted the same mistakes in our answers. I was therefore given a detention, but knowing neither of them was in a well paid job and they made huge sacrifices to send me to this school I was too afraid to tell my mum and dad. Inexorably the day of the detention came. I would have to stay after school for an hour, and since I took the school coach home and we lived seven miles away I couldn’t lie about it. Every morning I sat next to an older boy called William Conqueror (WC or Bogs as he was nicknamed) on the coach, and he told me what I should do.
‘Go to the toilets at breaktime, stick your fingers down your throat until your eyes water —’
‘What?’ I squeaked.
‘Trust me. Then come into your next lesson and tell the teacher that you’ve been puking up. The secretary will call your mum at work and she’ll come and pick you up and you’ll miss your detention.’
It sounded like a brilliant plan. So I did exactly what he said, very nearly puked up for real sticking my fingers down my throat, and was duly ushered to the sick bay, which was really just a cupboard under the stairs. My mum turned up an hour later looking very worried, and we went home. I forced down some mince and potatoes and listened to Jimmy Young before lying in bed for the rest of the day.
I was free.
However, what I hadn’t envisaged was that the school would simply give me another detention the next week. This time I just didn’t turn up. So they gave me another. And another. And another.
One Saturday morning a letter from the school to my mum and dad arrived.
Dear Mr and Mrs Williams,
We regret to inform you that your son David Williams was given a detention for copying another boy’s work in a test. He failed to attend detention on the 2nd, 9th, 16th, 23rd, 30th of January, 6th, 13th, 20th, 27th of February, and 4rd, 11th and 18th of March. We therefore have no option than to give him a double detention on 24th of March, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Please confirm receipt of this letter.
Yours Sincerely,
Mr P. Hamlyn (Headmaster).
Aged ten I was a serial detention dodger.
‘It costs us so much to send you to that school,’ yelled my dad.
My mum couldn’t speak for crying. I had let them both down badly. They were giving me the education their parents could never afford for them, and I was ruining it for myself. And been given a double detention. I still feel bad about it. For the first hour of the detention I had company, a boy who during a chemistry lesson had burned another boy’s blazer with some tongs. The language teacher Miss Benson was invigilating, and set him 100 lines and me 200. For the second hour I was on my own, and unlike one of those criminals who is hardened by punishment, I never did anything bad like that again.
Miss Benson made a huge impression on a group of us boys in the first year while she was attempting to teach us Latin. Learning Latin involved lots of verb conjugating, in this case listing all the present indicative versions of a word. The verb in question was facio, which translates as to make or do. So we sat there bored out of our brains on a hot summer’s afternoon as Miss Benson asked us to repeat after her … ‘Fácioˉ, facıˉs, facit, fácimus, fácitis, fáciunt.’
Now when you are an eleven-year-old boy, your teacher nearly saying the word fuck is the funniest thing in the world. One particularly brave boy at the back murmured ‘fuckio’ instead of ‘fácioˉ ’. Of course we all exploded with laughter but were shocked into silence when Miss Benson, a scary-looking lady with an upturned nose and long black hair who was nicknamed Booga Benson,* demanded that the boy repeat what he had just said. Of course he didn’t want to say it, but she cajoled him.
‘Fuckio,’ he finally said.
‘That’s funny is it? Fuckio? A ma
n and a woman fucking? To fuck, to be fucking, to have been fucked?’
Being a Latin teacher, Miss Benson couldn’t help conjugating the verb.
Now I have a juvenile sense of humour at the best of times, but aged eleven this was the funniest thing I had ever heard and I burst out laughing.
‘Do you think that’s funny, Williams?’
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘Get out!’ she screamed.
For the rest of the class I stood outside in the afternoon sunshine, trying to laugh as quietly as possible so Miss Benson wouldn’t hear. I still think it’s funny now. However, soon it would be my turn to make everyone else laugh …
4
The First Laugh
Reigate Grammar School put on plays twice a year. When I was in the first year they staged an operetta called All The King’s Men, set during the English Civil War. The school only had girls in the sixth form, and this was to be performed by the younger boys only. The operetta featured the King’s wife, Queen Henrietta Maria. The boy who was originally cast pulled out; he probably couldn’t face putting on a dress. For me that was a plus.
My English teacher Mr Shipton always wore shoes with steel toecaps. This led to wild theories that he had no toes or special mechanical toes or robot toes, depending on what you chose to believe. One day he asked me to stay behind when the lesson had finished.
‘Williams? Would you like to play the Queen in this term’s operetta?’ he enquired.
‘Yes!’ I shrieked excitedly.
Why had he chosen me? I wondered. Perhaps Mr Shipton had seen me playing Wonder Woman in the school playground, spinning around singing the programme’s theme tune pretending to transform from mild-mannered Diana Prince into the superheroine herself.
I was inescapably effeminate. I never contrived it. I couldn’t help it.
The way I ran, the way I threw a ball, the way I talked, the way I flicked my hair … was just like a girl. In my case, a big fat ugly girl. In early life this tends to go unchecked, though as soon as secondary school starts and boys start asserting their masculinity, being effeminate gets you noticed. Not in a good way. ‘Gay!’ was shouted at me in the playground most days. It was the worst thing you could be called at school.
Camp David Page 3