by Steve Coogan
It was half timbered and blue; someone once described it as ‘broad of beam’, like a spinster in tweed. The perfect car to eat sandwiches in while parked at the beach on a rainy day. Very British.
Specifically, I loved my mum’s Morris Minor, and so I bought myself one that is identical to the one my mother had until it was stolen in the mid-seventies. I went to a Morris Minor garage in Bristol and said, ‘I want you to build a Traveller exactly to this specification and it has to be Trafalgar blue with dove-grey vinyl seats.’
Much as I loved the Morris Minor, I was embarrassed by Dad’s Morris Oxford. It was a dull, functional post-war car that reeked of austerity. It seemed dusty and grey compared to the sleek, bright cars that were on American TV shows, so unglamorous compared to the yellow, red and orange cars that most people drove in the seventies. I wanted Dad to have a car that looked a bit more American, that was a bit sexy.
Dad’s car was the equivalent of a man with a trilby, pipe and slippers, but he didn’t want to upgrade to a sexy car. For him, it was all about the engineer versus the designer. The beauty was in the engineering and not the form. He has very little truck with architects who design from an aesthetic point of view and worry about how they are going to construct it later. I said to him once that form follows function, and he did at least agree.
When Dad announced he was buying a Volvo, I said to myself, ‘Thank God! Anything that’s new will do!’ At the age of nine, I scoured the car section of the local newspaper day and night. I found as many Volvos as I could, including an M-registered model for £1,750. We went to see several together. I was heartbroken when we went to look at one that was £2,000 and some bloke turned up with the cash in a suitcase and took the car away. Dad looked so dejected. Accessing that kind of money would have been a lengthy process for him.
I was stupidly happy when Dad finally bought one.
My car-loving friend at school used to persecute me about the Morris Oxford, and was always reminding me that his dad bought a brand-new Datsun every two years.
‘It’s got tinted windows and air conditioning.’
Then he’d twist the knife. ‘Why does your dad drive a crap old Morris Oxford? They’re rubbish. They look horrible.’
I knew he was right. I was tormented. But I had an ace up my sleeve.
‘Well …’ I hesitated. ‘Your dad has a limp and walks like this.’ I hobbled round the playground as he looked on, crestfallen.
I knew I’d gone too far.
The next day at school he said, ‘I told my mum what you did. She said you must be a very sick person.’
You can see why I’m not on Twitter.
CHAPTER 22
I NEARLY DIED when I was two. My older brother David and I both had meningitis (Mum thought that it was polio and that the doctor wasn’t telling the truth) and we were put in an isolation room at the local Victorian hospital. It was a small room with two beds side by side. I would sit in bed and drive a Matchbox car over the sheets and then get up and give the car to David, who was seven, so he could do the same. At some point a nurse looked in on us and I thought she had a nice, kind face. It’s a simple memory, probably my first.
My mother later told me that I had had a lumbar puncture, in which a needle is inserted into the lower part of the spine with no anaesthetic. Mum wasn’t allowed in the room because they thought she might get hysterical, which in turn might upset me, and it was critical I didn’t wriggle. Some men in white coats took me into a room, held me down and drilled a hole in my spine.
When I was returned to the isolation ward, Mum tells me that I gave her a look as if to say, ‘You betrayed me.’
In the years following my time in hospital, I had waking nightmares and wet the bed. My brothers, with whom I shared a room, would go downstairs and get Dad, who would try to pacify me. It must have been distressing for him because I was screaming wildly and telling him to get away from me. My eyes were open, but I wasn’t awake. I would finally wake up confused and in a state of panic.
The nightmares were always abstract, but horribly real. I was being attacked by an axe or crushed, possibly by two giant balls. Dad would eventually calm me down and I’d be taken downstairs for a cup of cocoa.
I was still having nightmares when I was seven or eight and I wet the bed for a long time, right up until I was eleven or twelve. Initially Dad would wake me up in the night and take me for a pee. He was particularly gentle with me because he used to wet the bed as a child and his mother had been very fierce with him.
When it became clear that the bed-wetting wasn’t going to stop, he ordered a contraption to wake me up that looked like something from Wallace and Gromit: two sheets of wire mesh were sandwiched between the sheets and connected by crocodile clips to a steel box with a toggle switch and a big red light. If I released a tiny bit of pee, it would complete the circuit and the alarm would sound.
Sometimes it was too late and I’d already wet the bed, but mostly I had time to wake up and dash to the loo.
Years later, when I was living in Hove and paying my parents a visit, my dad took me down to the cellar to show me the bed-wetting buzzer again (you never know when you might need one). On the back it said ‘Made in Hove’, which Dad thought was significant, as if somehow my life had come full circle. I was just embarrassed by the memory of bed-wetting.
There was no central heating in the house when I was young, and on a winter’s morning I would wake up, rush across the room to the fan heater, switch it on and kneel in front of it. It was so cold you could see your own breath and, if I’d wet the bed, a huge cloud of steam would rise from the bed when I pulled the bedsheets back.
My four brothers slept in two sets of bunk beds that Dad had constructed from beautiful Paranà pine and brass screws. He had varnished the wood, got hold of Nana Coogan’s old steel bed springs, stripped them down and repainted them. He had then cut thick sponge into the right shape and Mum had stitched a sheet over the top to create a proper mattress.
We had Brentford Nylons on the bed, as advertised by Alan Freeman on television. They were fitted sheets, electric blue – so modern, a real injection of seventies colour – and oddly furry and warm. In the days before continental quilts and then duvets, we had sheet, sheet, blanket, blanket. The sheet was folded over the top of the blanket, very neatly.
Making the bed was a real pain in the arse. It was like being in the army. Kids with duvets don’t know they’re born. In those days ‘go and make your bed’ meant a good fifteen minutes of fiddling around that you were never going to get back.
I was on my own in a single bed because of the bed-wetting, and while I wasn’t exactly isolated, I was slightly separated from my brothers in their bunks. I felt terribly selfconscious about wetting the bed; I’d get up in the morning and wash myself and my pyjama bottoms, then Mum would change the sheets.
I worried about it. I used to think, ‘When is it going to stop? Oh my God, what if I’m still wetting the bed when I grow up?’
In the end, I learned to wake myself up from my nightmares. As soon as the axe attack started, I would distance myself from it. ‘This is so awful,’ I’d think, ‘it can’t be real. It must be a dream. This man is about to attack me, open your eyes.’ Or ‘Mum and Dad aren’t dying, it’s a dream. Open your eyes.’
I would wake up and realise I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, my brothers all fast asleep in their bunks.
Eventually both the nightmares and the bed-wetting stopped. But I had obviously been profoundly traumatised by my experience in hospital as a two-year-old.
*
In spring 1968, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated, Enoch Powell made his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech and anti-Vietnam student protests were in full swing.
Meanwhile, in Middleton, I got lost at the local market. I was only two and I was supposed to be holding on to the side of my brother’s pram, but I let go and almost immediately lost sight of Mum. All I could see were women’s calves in tan tights and the
hems of heavy overcoats, which I tugged on desperately in the hope that one might be my mother. But only the faces of strangers peered down at me.
I started to cry. I was petrified. I thought I’d never find her again.
A kindly old lady – she was probably fifty but seemed ancient to me – lifted me up and took me to the police station. I saw my mum at the end of a long corridor and ran as fast as I could to hug her, but when I arrived I started to hit her instead and shout, ‘Why did you leave me? Why?’
I wasn’t exactly a mummy’s boy, but people would often say, ‘Stephen is a bit soft.’
Kevin went to nursery, but I stayed at home. I wasn’t ready for school, despite being one of the oldest in the year.
I was shocked when I was left alone at school for the first time. ‘Mummy, where are you going? Don’t leave me …’ I felt tiny and alone. I burst into tears.
And then, at break, I stood in the playground, tilted my head back and drank the rain. Simon Bradley came up to me and said, ‘You’ll get worms if you do that.’
I burst into tears again.
*
I was terrified of tests and academic failure from a young age. The more I got myself into a panic, the less I was able to listen and concentrate. I had to keep asking my dad to explain things slowly so that I could grasp them.
For all his engineering knowledge, he was not a born teacher by any stretch of the imagination.
I lived in fear of the SRA reading cards that were used to test comprehension in primary schools in the late sixties and early seventies. I can still remember one called ‘The Pond’ in which you had to count how many times the words ‘pond’ and ‘frog’ were mentioned. I got something wrong and the teacher held it up in a horribly derisory manner in front of the entire class as an example of what not to do.
Everyone laughed at me. ‘Have you seen what he’s done?’
I thought, ‘I’m a thicko.’
When I got home I told Mum I didn’t want to go back to school the next day. She phoned the school and we both went in to see the teacher, who was incredibly nice and reassuring.
I was silently furious. ‘You two-faced cow,’ I thought. ‘You’re only being nice to me ’cause my mum’s here.’
But, much as I was haunted by the idea of failure and humiliation, I didn’t say a word. I didn’t dare.
I wasn’t a troublemaker, but I did get told off. On one occasion, my friend Brendan Tierney was talking to me during a music lesson and the teacher said, ‘If you talk one more time I’ll come and slap your legs.’
I told Brendan to shut up. The teacher saw me talking and called me to the front of the classroom to slap my legs. I was hot with the injustice of it, with anger and embarrassment.
*
In 1972, when I was six, there was a production of The Wizard of Oz at my primary school in which the teacher’s son played the wizard. What were the chances of that? The same teacher, the one who thought I was thick, decided my skill set would be best applied to the non-speaking role of flying monkey number three. Of three.
She obviously knew I had something. A brown jumper. But I didn’t even have that.
All the monkeys had to assemble a costume of brown jumper, brown tights, a brown balaclava and simple pumps. Brown fabric was sewn under the arms of the jumper to make it look as though we had wings. The only brown jumper I could find at home had two orange stripes down the front with wiggly lines in between. Instead of looking like a monkey, I looked like a monkey wearing a jumper. To make it worse, Dad then stitched huge plastic ears on to each side of the balaclava.
We were told to bring a plastic spider to school to throw into the cauldron. All we had at home was a rubber crab.
‘I can’t throw a crab in the cauldron!’ I protested. ‘Witches and evil people don’t throw crabs into cauldrons. Everyone knows that …’
My sister Clare placated me. ‘It’s not a crab, Stephen. It’s a special African spider that looks like a crab.’
‘Are you certain?’
‘Yes,’ she insisted. ‘It’s well known than an African spider looks just like a crab.’
I was sceptical, but on balance satisfied. After all, why would she bother lying about something so stupid?
Someone from Granada TV filmed the play and one afternoon the school television was wheeled into our classroom on its stand so we could all watch the video together. I saw myself during the flying monkey song, sitting in the middle of the two other monkey boys. They were looking straight ahead and singing while my head was bowed. I was so embarrassed by my huge plastic ears that I couldn’t look up. I was staring at my pumps for the entire song.
I wasn’t a confident child. I couldn’t ignore my plastic ears and look into the camera; I was terrified of being humiliated. And yet I was thrilled that the play had been filmed. I went around telling anyone who would listen that I’d been ‘on television’.
CHAPTER 23
I WAS AN unremarkable pupil. I wasn’t a bad kid, I just got through school. I never got an A. I once got a B+, but normally I’d get C+. If I got a B, I was really happy. I was, in fact, astonishingly average. I didn’t ever fully engage with my education although, as I went through grammar school, I did get fired up by subjects such as history.
And occasionally I read a book.
Anything by George Orwell or poetry by Wilfred Owen and William Blake. I found Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary by Terry Jones quite exciting because he was challenging established orthodoxies.
My mum has kept all our reports in a drawer in the kitchen. I’m not surprised by what they say.
A report from St Thomas More from when I was seven concluded: ‘Stephen does good work, but is a very slow worker. Grammar work is very good. Tables very good. Problems present some difficulty. Can do good work. C+.’
My dad, as I’ve mentioned, came from the generation where grammar was more important than literature or art. Shedding light on the human condition couldn’t be measured. Grammar was either correct or it wasn’t.
I had a decent education: I was lucky. My parents were in favour of comprehensive education and railed against the injustice of private schools and the grammar school system, but they were desperate for all their kids to pass the 11-plus.
Failing the 11-plus and going to the local secondary modern was a terrible judgement to put on a child. Most people perceived secondary moderns as simply containment, as if the kids who went there, rather than being educated, were just being kept in a holding pattern before they landed a local factory job, if they were lucky.
Grammar school, on the other hand, felt special. My Catholic grammar school conducted itself as a pseudo public school. We played rugby instead of football, which was probably regarded as proletarian, and uniform was strictly enforced.
I was the first child my parents worried might not pass the 11-plus and they made me practise mock tests at home like mad. If you went to grammar school, there were high expectations to achieve academically at a fairly young age.
I was always slow; I used to take my time and think about things. I never finished essays, because I spent so much time thinking about my story before I started writing. It was frustrating being told off for trying to come up with a good narrative. In 1975 or 1976, I wrote a story in my English exercise book that was eight pages long; I was given permission to finish it off at home and I relished the extra time. I loved writing it: there was a robbery and some boys were hiding down a manhole. The teacher was so surprised that I’d written eight pages instead of the usual three that he made me read it out in front of the class.
Writing creatively for the sake of it didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t have personal discipline; I failed English language O level not once, but twice. Pathetically, I didn’t pass it until I was well into the sixth form. But I didn’t know what the examiners wanted from me and I didn’t think I had anything worth saying. I could write about a robbery, but if I was asked to write an essay about where I lived, I
flew into a panic.
It would never have occurred to me that one day I might be nominated for an Oscar for co-writing a film. My ambition didn’t stretch that far; I couldn’t even describe Middleton, for God’s sake.
Although I had a good, solid education, I don’t think the ‘one size fits all’ education system really helps people like me. I was a daydreamer with a fertile imagination, but school did its best to make learning regimented. It took me a long time to fully realise that I might have something interesting to say.
It wasn’t until I reached my thirties, in fact, that I properly began to have confidence in my own ideas. In a complete volte-face, everything that had made me feel insecure and inadequate suddenly made me feel authentic and enlightened.
*
I wasn’t stupid, but I found it hard to focus on the matter in hand. It’s no surprise that one of my school reports from primary school summed me up thus: ‘A very pleasant child who is capable of good work. Often finishes last in class due to daydreaming.’
I liked to escape to a different world. I used to turn the chairs in the living room upside down to make dens. I played dead. I lived in a fantasy world without ever fully retreating from the real world. I was a bit ditzy.
The family used to laugh at me.
My auntie called me ‘Stevie Wonder’. I’d no idea he was a famous soul singer; I’d never heard of him.
I used to overhear conversations in which the adults would say, ‘What are we going to do with Stephen? He’s away with the fairies.’
It was mostly affectionate, but I remember being upset by a birthday card I was given when I turned ten. It said, ‘Tomorrow, I’m going to sort my life out.’ I felt completely dumb, like I had something wrong with me.
My family used to watch Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, laugh at Frank Spencer and say, ‘He’s just like our Stephen.’
Once they were watching Harold and Maude, one of my favourite films, and someone said I was like Bud Cort’s attention-seeking character. The comparison bothered me. I didn’t want to be perceived as odd, but I was a little odd.