by Steve Coogan
The atmosphere was electric and yet somehow otherworldly.
I remember looking across at my mum and seeing that she was fast asleep. I was appalled.
I didn’t care that Bond films embraced style over content. Everything about them was exotic. It was the first time I realised there was a world out there that was very different from Middleton. A world outside my own. One full of glamorous people with fast cars and stunning women. I didn’t know any women of that age. People in their twenties were alien to me: everyone I knew was the same age as me, or one of my siblings, or my parents, who were in their late thirties when I was growing up. And my parents weren’t exactly hip and happening.
Dad turned forty in 1975, so I remember him very clearly in his late thirties.
I remember coming back from church one Sunday and discussing Elvis’s death.
‘How old was he?’ my dad asked.
‘He was quite old,’ I replied. ‘He was forty-two.’
‘Do you mind?’ said Dad. ‘I’m forty-two.’
*
When Mum’s youngest brother, Bernard, got married in 1970, the wedding was full of guys with big hair, beards, bell-bottom trousers and unbuttoned shirts with flappy collars, who looked like Mungo Jerry. Bernard, who is my godfather, dressed well. He worked for a shirt company and for a while we all got free ties. Big, fat, satin ties.
Everyone had big hair in 1970. Everyone, that is, except my dad. Even at the age of five, I was aware of my dad always being one step behind. He had a short back and sides when the whole world had long hair.
Only my dad and NASA ground control had short hair.
And a Polish boy at school called Marcus. Heartless as we were, we used to laugh at his short back and sides. We’d say, ‘The war is over, Marcus.’ He also wore drainpipes; we thought his dad must have been so cruel to make him wear narrow trousers. Didn’t he get where it was at?
Of course, although when I started at school it was patch pocket trousers and fat knotted ties, by the time I was leaving everyone was wearing thin ties and drainpipes.
The most risqué thing Dad did was to grow a goatee beard.
He was cornered at a works do by a member of senior management.
‘Tony, the beard …’ someone said from IBM. ‘What are you hiding?’
It wasn’t, they explained, part of the company image. Perhaps, as an American company, they thought there was something slightly subversive about having a beard.
There was, ironically, always something vaguely cultish about IBM, which is manifest in a quote attributed to its founder: ‘There are two kinds of people in the world, IBMers and everyone else.’
With so many hippies around, Dad’s beard may have been seen as a threat to the very fabric of society, but he didn’t shave it off. He had, thank goodness, a certain polite defiance and a measured individualism. He loved the ‘white heat of technology’ but didn’t want to become a robot. He wanted us to be morally upstanding and respectable without fitting in.
He would always say to us, ‘What’s wrong with you, don’t you want to be different?’
No. We wanted to fit in. We certainly didn’t want to be different if it meant driving around in a knackered old Morris Oxford Estate. All my mates’ dads had brand-new Ford Cortinas in primary colours, Choppers, colour TVs and central heating.
Towards the end of his time as a computer engineer, Dad carried on wearing a suit even though the younger engineers, the Steve Jobs generation, were turning up to work in more casual clothes. And he always kept his tools in a nice attaché case.
He eventually left IBM and went to work for a rival company that maintained IBM equipment. He knew his role was obsolete when he went to mend a broken printer and someone helped him download a program that diagnosed the problem and fixed it remotely. While the computer was fixing itself, he just sat in a chair and waited, his attaché case unopened.
*
I can admire his style now, but I was constantly embarrassed by my dad when I was growing up. I thought I knew about fashion. Dad and kids like Marcus had no idea. It was all about having your hair combed over your ears, bell-bottom trousers, spearpoint collars and penny round collars.
At my first communion in 1973, I wore a white nylon shirt with a penny round collar. I must have been pretty trendy for an eight-year-old. This was the era of elasticated snake or ‘s’ belts, which had an elongated ‘s’ as a buckle, and we never seemed to be out of nylon-rich skinny polo necks.
By the time I was ten, however, I was wearing a dark brown cheesecloth shirt with a white tie and I thought I looked like Al Capone.
Mum kept, rather randomly, a drawer full of old pairs of jeans. In the mid-seventies, my brother Martin would choose a pair, unpick the stitching and add four triangular denim pieces. The drainpipe jeans were transformed into bell bottoms.
Meanwhile, I became increasingly aware of Dad being a good decade out of fashion. He had a fifties suit in the sixties, and a sixties suit in the seventies. The suit he wore until 1974 was from about 1965. He was still wearing a suit that he’d bought ten years before. To me, that was a lifetime ago. The suit was prehistoric.
Then one day he went to Marks & Spencer and bought a flared suit. It blew our minds that he had finally bought a suit that looked good. It was pale blue, had flared trousers, white lapels and two vents in the back. My brothers and I were properly impressed. Even better, Dad’s hair was now nudging his collar. It was 1974 and he was finally with it.
*
The media representation of society often skews reality. The 1920s weren’t, for 99 per cent of the population, about the Bloomsbury set. In the same way, the 1960s weren’t, for most of Britain, about the sexual revolution and the emancipation of women.
The media has long been obsessed with the notion that the world changed in the sixties. The truth is that while London changed, we were simply playing catch-up in suburbia. My parents read about women’s libbers, but they didn’t actually know any. There might be hushed whispers of, ‘She’s a women’s libber …’ It was all a bit Invasion of the Body Snatchers: some of them are among us.
There was a local woman, Mrs Walker, who was formidable, a kind of Amazonian Margaret Thatcher. She was very tall, her husband slightly shorter. We heard these stories about how she made him iron his own shirts.
‘The poor man,’ I thought, ‘he must have been enslaved by his wife.’
Hippies remained equally foreign to my parents. They didn’t dismiss them as terrible people, but I think their general view was ‘Peace and love is all very well, but taking your top off and running around in the mud is unacceptable behaviour.’
In lieu of not making a fuss or showing off, my parents felt it best to embrace modesty. As a family we were imbued with the ethos of keeping our heads down while taking care over our appearance and looking smart. Dad showed us how to polish our own shoes when they got scruffy in the hope that they would last as long as possible. The polish is still in the same drawer in the kitchen.
Once or twice a year we’d all go on a trip to Tommy Ball’s shoe warehouse in Blackburn, which only closed down in 2008. It was a near-legendary day out for northerners of a certain class. All the shoes were tied together with a piece of string that was fed through a hole drilled in the side, and thrown over a wooden horse.
You could try on as many pairs as you liked, but you couldn’t really practise walking in them. At best you could have a bit of a shuffle.
Not only was the promise of a new pair of shoes ridiculously exciting, it was also dressed up as ‘a day out in Blackburn’. Wow.
My friends had dads who were not respectable and who wore their shirts open while driving slightly sporty cars. My parents weren’t impressed by a local guy, a judo instructor, who wore a medallion and drove a very flashy Ford Capri S John Player Special. It was black with gold detailing. He looked like he was driving around in a giant packet of high-tar cigarettes.
Dad always took pride in his appearance, carefully c
urling his moustache at the ends before going to church. Even now, he styles his moustache and always wears a tie under his sweater.
But style was one thing, fashion something else entirely. He was still dressed like Don Draper in Mad Men when everyone else, wearing brown flares and kipper ties, looked like they were in The Sweeney.
He used to spit out the words ‘fashion and fad’ as though simply saying them might bring an end to the world.
CHAPTER 20
MY DAD COULD be very black and white, with very few grey areas. It took me a long time to realise that you don’t have to make your mind up definitively. You can float somewhere in the middle and shift from one opinion to another.
I’d watch a film with my dad and he’d make an instant moral judgement about a character: ‘What that man did was totally wrong. He should never have killed that man. It was totally unnecessary.’
I used to think, ‘Why are you spoiling the film? It’s just a bloody film.’
Sometimes he would say that a television character should behave in a more Christian way and I would surreptitiously raise my eyes to heaven. Ultimately, however, I knew that my parents’ eagerness for social justice was a positive force: they were determined to do the right thing and treat people properly.
My aunt Molly tells a story about my parents.
When she got pregnant out of wedlock in 1967 and decided to give her child up for adoption, Dad, who was thirty-three and had five children of his own at this point, asked if he should contact the father. Molly declined.
Towards the end of her pregnancy, she chose to go to a place in Wales run by nuns.
I asked her about this when I was making Philomena. She told me how cruel the nuns were. They tried to make the young women clean the floor on their hands and knees even while heavily pregnant and insisted all washing was done by hand despite the presence of a working twin-tub washing machine. Because Aunt Molly was in her twenties, she had the fortitude to refuse. She found a mop to clean the floor and used the twin tubs to do her washing.
The nuns’ lack of compassion continued when Molly gave birth. She was scolded for holding on to the bedstead as she pushed the baby out; a nun slapped her hand away and said, ‘Pull yourself together.’
It was almost barbaric.
While Molly was still pregnant, Mum and Dad offered to adopt her child. They wanted to keep the baby in the family; he and Mum would be happy to say it was their child. Molly agreed, so, while she was in Wales, Mum and Dad were busy buying baby clothes, a pram, a cot, nappies, and so on.
As soon as the baby was born, Aunt Molly changed her mind. She rang her mother and said, ‘She’s beautiful. I want to keep her.’
Hilariously my nana said, ‘You can’t let Tony and Kath down. They’ve been looking forward to this.’ As if a deal was a deal.
In tears my aunt rang my dad. All the preparations my parents had been making for the new arrival had been a charade.
‘We knew you’d change your mind,’ my dad said. ‘We just didn’t want anyone else to be let down.’
Molly said that as soon as she arrived home and stepped through the front door, all the things my parents had bought for baby Sarah were waiting there.
*
At some point when I was growing up, I said to Brendan Tierney, ‘Someone says my cousin is a bastard.’
With great authority, Brendan said, ‘She’s only a bastard if your aunt had sex with someone. Did your aunt have sex with anyone before the baby?’
I replied, ‘No. Definitely not. She would never have done anything like that.’
‘In which case,’ he said, ‘your cousin is not a bastard.’
*
My mum and dad started fostering kids when my brother Brendan, the youngest, was five and Clare, the oldest, was sixteen and in the sixth form. The Catholic Children’s Rescue Society was run by nuns, but the kids they placed in foster homes weren’t necessarily religious.
The kids would stay in the guest bedroom for a few months, sometimes more. I was probably a bit resentful when they came and a bit sad when they left. My parents would always cut the adopted kids a lot of slack, but we got on with them and had days out together.
Every now and again a social worker would come round to check on the kids. Sometimes I was interviewed separately from my mum and dad, but I didn’t mind; for the most part I enjoyed having new people around the house.
Sarah and Cheryl came in 1975. I fancied Sarah, who was eleven to my nine. I used to play ‘murder in the dark’ and use it as an excuse to grab hold of her and have a grope. Does that constitute an historic sex crime? I’ll expect a knock on the door soon.
They went to a Protestant school around the corner, so I’d walk part of the way with them. They would turn one way and we’d turn another.
Sometimes the kids would be crying when they first arrived because they’d left their mum behind.
Two brothers, Kurt and Rolf, came the same year. Kurt was five and Rolf was just three. I remember sitting on the stairs with them when I came home from junior school at lunchtime. Kurt was crying because their mother had left them in this strange house and Rolf was comforting his older brother. I felt so sorry for them.
I did a half-hearted song-and-dance routine, pulling faces and generally being silly. I felt great satisfaction in giving them some momentary respite from their sadness.
Then came Edward and Michelle. Edward had a wonky foot, so he wore callipers. He was always falling over but would just pick himself up and carry on running.
John Madden came in 1976. He was a very affable chap.
Debbie and Andrew turned up as newborn babies and stayed until they started responding and interacting by smiling and waving. It must have been very hard for my mum. We heard his adoptive parents changed Andrew’s name to Lee. What can you do?
Jerry came in 1978 when she was sixteen. She had a troublesome relationship with her father and stayed for a few years.
Tina came the same year, when she was fourteen. She’d been adopted but her new family were too strict; they wouldn’t let her watch Top of the Pops because they considered it to be morally degenerate.
Both Jerry and Tina stayed in touch with us.
Lam Dien, a Vietnamese boat girl, came and stayed with us for about a year in 1983. She loved Benny Hill and the Carry On films, which always left me a bit nonplussed. I would sit there watching such dross because we didn’t have a remote control and I couldn’t be bothered to get up from the sofa. Meanwhile, Lam Dien would be drowning in tears of laughter.
One evening, when the TV channels had closed down, as they did in those days, and the brain-numbing monotone signal finally dragged me off the sofa, I switched off the TV and chatted to Lam Dien about fleeing Vietnam.
We stayed up for hours while she told me in quite graphic detail about her escape, those she had left behind, those who had been killed. She told me very matter-of-factly how gunmen had opened fire on the boat and how she had lain down as her friends returned fire at the government forces.
I finally understood why she needed to laugh.
Finally, Maria came in the early nineties, when she was eleven. She eventually asked if my parents would adopt her and she took our name; she’s still very much part of the extended family.
*
The police once came round and thought our house was a community centre. There were kids everywhere and a pinball machine in the corner of the living room. Mr Eddisford, who lived next door, used to come over and play pinball without even saying hello. He would simply nod at us as he walked past the kitchen table.
Mr Eddisford was a butcher. One Christmas, in the days before organic food, he bought us a 48lb turkey which must have been pumped full of steroids. It was so unwieldy that we had to kick it into the oven and slam the door shut. It probably came out square-shaped.
On the other side of the house was Mrs Howarth, whose first name I never knew. She was very conservative, like a very old Margaret Thatcher. She’d been a mag
istrate and pretty much lived in the kitchen; despite being very well off, she only wanted to heat that one room. Her house was like Miss Haversham’s in the sense that it was frozen in the 1930s.
Mum still sent us round there because Mrs Howarth was a ‘lonely old lady’ and Catholics always have to see past people’s faults.
Tina was mixed race and Mrs Howarth used to say to me, ‘Aren’t your parents worried about having a brown girl in the house?’
I would reply, ‘I love brown girls. In fact, when I grow up I think I’m going to marry a brown girl and have lots of caramel-coloured babies.’
Mrs Howarth would wince and clasp her hands to her chest as though she was almost physically in pain. ‘If your mother could hear you now!’
She would discuss her Conservative politician relatives, telling the same stories time and again. ‘My uncle ran for the local council …’
There was a large park in Blackley called Boggart Hole Clough which had a lake in it. The uncle’s campaign was: ‘Vote for Bennett and a lake in the Clough.’
My brother Martin would say, ‘That’s not very good. Loads of people are starving and can’t pay their rent and he’s basing his campaign around a lake in the Clough.’
Mrs Howarth would say, ‘Oh no! Everyone loves the lake.’
Sometimes Brendan Tierney called for me and Mum would tell him I was next door, with Mrs Howarth. So he would knock on her door. He’d been round a dozen times before, but her memory was shot.
She’d peer at him and say, ‘Do I know you?’
Brendan would ask if I was there and, when she didn’t register, he’d sigh then say, ‘Vote for Bennett and a lake in the Clough’ as if it were a Cold War password.
She’d warm up immediately. ‘Oh, do come in!’
*
Mr Stott the tramp would appear once a week for a cup of tea, a sandwich and yesterday’s newspaper. He was invited into the hall, where he had a comfortable seat and a small table. We were always very polite to him as children, and he was a regular visitor from the late sixties right up to the early eighties, when he died.