Easily Distracted

by Steve Coogan

  We went to Biarritz on a day trip and walked up and down the beach, looking sideways at all the women sunbathing topless. It was incredibly exciting; in the days before Internet porn, the sight of a woman’s breasts was something to be savoured and logged in the memory bank (mammary bank?).

  Apart from this, the journey proved to be the most exciting part of the trip: the getting there, the being somewhere else.

  I wasn’t particularly impressed by Lourdes. I knew that Our Lady, as we called the Virgin Mary, was quite a pop star in the Catholic world. She has always got top billing. She’s the headline act. I’d seen the 1943 film The Song of Bernadette, in which the teenage peasant girl Bernadette reports countless visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary in a grotto in Lourdes, but I didn’t experience any such visions myself.

  All I can recall of Lourdes now is a huge basilica, the grotto and endless stalls selling religious paraphernalia. I spotted some giant wooden rosary beads and thought they’d make a fantastic gift for my mum and dad. How could they not appreciate supersized rosary beads?

  Now I barely recognise the boy who went to Lourdes. I had a blessed upbringing, but I was an awkward, dreamy kid prone to outbursts of attention seeking. I certainly wasn’t naturally cool like some boys.

  It’s no accident that Alan Partridge exploits those traits of mine that I know might generally be described as failings. A lack of selfconsciousness coupled with acute selfconsciousness. Grasping at knowledge; Alan knows a bit about everything, and we all know a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

  Like Alan, I spent much of my childhood on the outside looking in.

  CHAPTER 16

  I AM A product of my Catholic upbringing. Of my Irish roots. Of my lower-middle-class background. Of the north. Of suburbia. Of the grammar school system. Of the television generation.

  I’m the fourth of six children, five of whom are boys. Our house was a colourful, noisy environment. Quiet contemplation was saved for church on a Sunday.

  When I was a teenager, my parents fostered a series of kids because they took the view that, if you can look after yourself, then you should look after others less fortunate. Mum and Dad came from working-class backgrounds, but were socially mobile, aspirant.

  And education was the way to a better future; knowledge was something to be acquired and appreciated. My dad decided to buy the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which meant that knowledge could be accessed without a trip to the library. It was a step closer to Google, which itself has undermined the Coogan trait of presenting an educated guess as an incontrovertible fact.

  My parents’ Catholicism is the left-wing, Irish kind. The monarchy and the establishment were held at arm’s length; the brutal repression of the Irish by the English informed a scepticism which has served me well.

  My parents are both left of centre. They have traditionally supported the Labour Party because it represents working people and they were working people, but they have coupled this with a natural conservatism that is born of hardship.

  Mine was a household in which everyone was more obsessed with grammar than literature. The illumination of the human condition through good literature was less important than dotting your ‘i’s and crossing your ‘t’s. And never, ever pronounce ‘h’ as ‘haitch’.

  Dad always thought that grammar was more important than creativity. The whole family went to Tuscany for Mum and Dad’s fiftieth wedding anniversary in 2008 and Dad, who is not usually demonstrative, gave an emotional speech in which he qualified his gratitude at our collective good health with a tinge of regret that not all our marriages had gone according to plan.

  One of my brothers shouted out, ‘At least none of us are gay!’

  Another brother immediately countered with, ‘At least none of us is gay!’

  Sexual orientation might be met with a furrowed brow, but grammatical transgression was unforgivable.

  The curse of being lower middle class is knowing just enough to be aware of what you don’t know. There is no blissful ignorance.

  I was born and brought up in Middleton, Greater Manchester. It had been Middleton, Lancashire, until the boundaries were redrawn in 1974 and my father still defiantly insists on saying ‘Middleton, Lancashire’. He thinks ‘Greater Manchester’ has a horrible, municipal, bureaucratic, soulless sound to it and I agree with him.

  Manchester was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and the cooperative movement and was where Engels wrote his letters to Marx. Middleton was a dormer suburb, a former mill town dotted with abandoned cotton mills, sad monuments to a more glorious past. In the nineties, those that hadn’t been demolished had been turned into loft-style living.

  However, I grew up convinced that Middleton was the centre of the universe. There was a small element of Little England about Middleton, and the London I saw in television shows such as The Saint, Department S, The Champions, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and The Baron provided an escape. These shows bore little resemblance to reality: suave men in suits drove Bentleys, and stunning women wore cocktail dresses to impossibly glamorous parties in Mayfair, where they held arch, mannered conversations. It seemed so very far away from my life.

  As you approach middle age, you start to think about where you come from. You start to realise that there is more life behind you than in front of you. It’s where the midlife crisis is born. You see your attitude changing; you do the things that, as a younger person, would have horrified you. What I perceived as weaknesses – inconsistencies, contradictions, prejudices, vanity – I now perceive as strengths. I have become empowered by them.

  As I age, my childhood is a place I increasingly visit in my head. I often think of the opening line of the L. P. Hartley novel The Go-Between: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ It’s been quoted so much that it’s become a cliché, but it remains a germane observation.

  My childhood is a wonderful place to visit. Our parents didn’t tell us they loved us – it’s since become the norm; I tell my daughter every day – but we never doubted we were loved. When you’re from a working-class background as my parents were, you are defined by your actions. Rhetoric was an indulgence. Talking about your feelings was a luxury only afforded to people with ‘too much time on their hands’.

  *

  Both my parents were keen on elevating themselves, but equally they felt selfconscious about moving up the social ladder. This could easily be judged as materialistic; there certainly wasn’t much spirituality about it. Yet they wanted their kids to have a grammar school education and they were keen on respectability. Not in a Daily Mail, curtain-twitching, Hyacinth Bucket kind of way. It was all about having a sense of Christian philanthropy, in which you helped the less fortunate. All, of course, without making a fuss.

  My parents were of the generation that skipped rock ’n’ roll. Their generation moved from childhood to adulthood very quickly; they weren’t forever young like my generation. ‘Teenager’ was an American term that only gained currency in the bountiful fifties, whereas my parents came of age in the immediate post-war years of austerity Britain.

  There was no time to ‘find yourself’ or all those other self-indulgent things we’re so familiar with now. Gap years were a madman’s dream.

  Mum and Dad didn’t have the time to navel-gaze. For them, life was about finding a decent job, making enough money to get by and contributing to society. Once they could look after themselves, they could look after others who were less well off. My parents always maintain it was the simple Catholic, working-class ethos of feeling responsible for the people around you.

  Both my parents came from poor backgrounds. My mum’s family was originally from Ireland. By the 1930s, a significant section of the population had emigrated. Mum, who has a breathtaking archive of letters and school reports, once showed us a heartbreaking letter that my great-aunt Maggie sent her daughter, Mum’s aunt, when her daughter left for America.

  She wrote: ‘I can still remember the last tim
e I saw you, walking up the hill to catch the train … I may as well have dug a hole and buried you in the ground.’

  In the days before commercial flights, it wasn’t as though they could easily come back in the holidays; once they had gone, it was goodbye for ever.

  The shockwave of the Irish famine in the 1860s and the subsequent Irish diaspora meant the country was in a very slow decline. The shrinking population only started to expand again in the 1980s, and even now abandoned, broken mills and cottages litter the west of the country. There was no employment in Ireland; unless you had land or property you simply left as soon as you were old enough to work.

  My maternal grandparents came to England in the 1930s. My maternal grandad (Pop) was a labourer who became an expert floor layer for Semtex, and his wife (Nana) did various jobs and in later years looked after the brethren and students at De La Salle teacher training college. After Pop retired, he worked as a cleaner at the Arndale Shopping Centre in Manchester. He would bring home shoes he’d salvaged from the skip. The shoes were ruined one way or another to stop people from wearing them – they had either been slashed down the side with a knife, or the heel had been ‘cored’ because they’d been on a shop dummy. If it was the latter, my enterprising grandad would make the shoes wearable again by hammering a cork into the hole and shaving it until it was flush with the heel.

  My mum was born in Manchester in 1933. She had a tough time when she was sent back to Ireland during the war. She lived with her uncle and her grandparents while her parents stayed in England to work. Each time the history teacher found a reason to say, ‘And that’s the fault of the bloody English!’ all the children would turn and stare at my mum.

  *

  My dad’s family originally came from Ireland too. My great-grandfather was Irish; ‘Coogan’ is an Irish name. My mother’s maiden name was ‘Coonan’, so she only had to change one letter when she married my dad. It was slightly confusing for us kids: Nana and Pop Coogan and Nana and Pop Coonan (I have asked my parents why they simply didn’t call one set of grandparents ‘grandma and grandad’, but they have never given me a straight answer).

  My dad was born in Manchester and stayed there during the war. My paternal grandmother worked in the cotton mills and talked just like Les Dawson’s old woman character Ada, who theatrically and almost silently mouths most of what she is saying to her friend Cissie, played by Roy Barraclough. The looms in the cotton mills were so loud that the women who worked there had to mouth their words and learn to lip-read. Once home, they would often extend the miming so that the kids wouldn’t know what they were saying.

  Nana Coogan told me a story once about a night during the war.

  A bomb was dropped on the house directly opposite. My dad and his younger brothers, Tommy and Peter, were all in bed together. They were about seven, five and three years old. None of them woke up when the window was blown in, even though the entire bed was covered in tiny shards of glass. Nana spent all night silently picking fragments of glass off them while they slept peacefully.

  Both world wars cast a long shadow: Nana’s neighbours, Agnes and Betty, lived together because they’d lost their husbands in the first world war. So many women widowed by the war ended up living together rather than alone. Looking back, it’s so poignant, but at the time they were just dotted around and we didn’t think much of it.

  Dad grew up in a strict Catholic household; as a kid his father had truanted and misbehaved until he was ‘saved’ by the Christian Brothers. Pop Coogan felt he owed them and so became an upstanding member of the community. Rather like my dad some years later, Pop was the only person in his social circle who had a car, so people were always asking for lifts in his Ford V8.

  Pop Coogan leased the Astoria Ballroom in Plymouth Grove in Manchester in the early 1950s so that he could put on big-band nights for the local working-class Irish community. The Irish were ostracised, so they had to look after each other. But their embracing of big band rather than Irish music showed their desire to assimilate, as did their propensity for dropping ‘O’ from their surnames.

  The ongoing love of all things Irish is a modern phenomenon. In 1970s mainland Britain, in the shadow of the IRA Guildford pub bombings of 1974, the Irish were viewed with suspicion. Ross McWhirter, the co-founder of Guinness World Records, went as far as to suggest that it should be compulsory for Irish people to carry ID. He paid for this with his life when the IRA murdered him on his doorstep. I remember a tearful Roy Castle trying to explain his death to viewers of Record Breakers, a BBC TV children’s favourite.

  Anyway, my dad played sax in a band while his brothers played the trumpet and drums. We were constantly meeting people in the Irish community in Manchester whose parents met at The Astoria, and as a result everyone knew Pierce Coogan.

  Josef Locke and Bernard Manning both sang there before the latter decided to pursue a career as a mildly funny racist bigot.

  Dad was appalled by Manning’s racism and grotesque sexual explicitness. Dad would say that if only he had had his wire cutters with him, he could have cut Manning’s microphone lead and silenced him.

  I didn’t like Bernard Manning either. There is a simple yet significant difference between Les Dawson, whom I respected, and Bernard Manning: the latter’s humour came from a place of contempt and the former’s from a place of love. I used to loathe Manning because he brought northern humour into disrepute.

  I worked at a petrol station for three years when I was in my teens and sometimes Manning would pull up in his white Lincoln Continental. The largest car in America, it had real presence on the road but looked incongruous in the suburban enclave of Middleton. His number plate was ‘I LAF’, which I always read as ‘1 LAF’.

  Not bothering to get out of his car, he’d bark, ‘Fill her up, sunshine, and watch the paintwork.’

  To fill up his car cost about £40, which thirty years ago was a substantial amount of money. Each time I would stop filling it at £36 and pocket the change.

  I’m still happy to have fleeced him out of a bit of cash.

  *

  Pop Coogan was an exceptional MC. He once sat a drunken Irish ogre down and hit him with a non sequitur.

  ‘Is your mother alive?’

  ‘She might be,’ came the surly reply. ‘What’s it to you?’

  Pop looked at him. ‘What would she say if she could see you now? Her son, the apple of her eye, a grown man, fighting like an animal.’

  This triggered a moment of introspection. The young man then slumped on the chair with his head in his hands and wept tears of remorse for himself and his mother. A more inflammatory situation had been averted – and of course it’s always nice to give someone something to think about.

  Pop also used to own a minibus, which he used to deliver all the Irish nurses home. He never made any money out of the club; he was doing it for the Irish community.

  *

  More importantly, for me anyway, my parents met at the Astoria in 1951. My mother noticed my father playing sax and quite liked the look of him. He noticed her for the first time on St Patrick’s Day. There was a big crowd with two bands playing. One was an Irish band with squeeze boxes and banjos, the other the more modern band in which Dad played. As Dad was coming off stage, two girls, one of whom was my mum, asked if they could sit with him.

  My mum, Kathleen, was eighteen and my dad, Tony, was not quite seventeen.

  My dad thought, ‘Gosh, she’s got legs all the way up to her armpits!’

  They both say it was love at first sight. But, this being the 1950s, it wasn’t a wild romance. Not at first. They were friends for a while, meeting up at the dance hall, slowly getting to know each other. She used to wait for him at the school gates, feeling like a cradle-snatcher.

  Dad, who had always tinkered with crystal sets and was more brains than brawn, registered for mandatory national service and was fast-tracked after excelling in his radar exam. He returned home after a year, my parents were married in February 1958, a
nd their first child, Clare, was born in December that year. Dad was playing in the band when the news came through. There was a public telephone at the Astoria. Mum said that someone phoned the hospital for news, and after that the band struck up with ‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls’.

  Dad did an engineering course and in 1967, by the time I was two, was working for IBM. We used to see huge computers with tapes going whoosh! on sci-fi programmes; his job was to fix them for IBM in real life.

  I recently heard a song on Classic FM called ‘IBM 1401, A User’s Manual’ by an Icelandic composer called Jóhann Jóhannsson. I was driving at the time so just glanced at the title displayed on the digital radio. I thought it must be wrong; it was so evocative of my childhood that I couldn’t believe it was actually the name of a song.

  As soon as I got home, I looked Jóhannsson up. His father worked at IBM as a maintenance engineer, but he was also a musician. He programmed the IBM 1401’s memory so that electromagnetic waves could be picked up by a radio receiver sitting on top of the computer. In 1971, when the magnetic tape drive computer was rendered obsolete, he said goodbye to the 1401 by playing the strange, maudlin music he’d recorded on a reel-to-reel. It was as though he’d given this huge computer, big enough to climb inside, a personality.

  Many years later, Jóhann used his father’s recordings as a starting point for a series of songs about technology’s inevitable obsolescence. A music critic described the 2006 album, also called IBM 1401, A User’s Manual, as ‘a pang of longing engendered by the aching nostalgia of a future imagined in the recent past’. It’s exactly that; I was overwhelmed by the music’s nostalgia. I played it for my dad, who was silenced by his memories of a future imagined.

  I remember being asked what a computer was at school and I couldn’t find an easy way of explaining it. Eventually I said it calculated things and processed information. Still nobody really understood. Everybody was sceptical, as though computers might disappear if we ignored them.