by John Cleese
So Dad and Mum eloped to London, to the far-off, urbane, cosmopolitan, liberal-minded heart of the British Empire, where nobody gave a solitary hoot for an inflated, half-witted provincial auctioneer with his head up his upper-upper-lower-middle-class arse.
Freedom! In Golders Green, where for two years they lived happily, and Dad acquired so many Jewish friends that he picked up a surprising amount of Yiddish. These fellows took great pleasure in introducing Dad to their unsuspecting friends, just to see the expression on their faces when this unmistakable goy launched into a volley of Central European demotic. I think Dad was secretly proud of his Jewish connections; in an age when there was so much prejudice, he did what he could to work against it, although he was prepared (with Mother) to make an exception of the Welsh. This is a well-established West Country trait, and rooting it out will take many generations, I fear.
But then . . . destiny moved against them. A reconciliation took place with Marwood Cross, and so, inevitably . . . they moved back to Weston-super-Mare, and lived there, reasonably happily at least, until I arrived (also in Weston) in October 1939, a mere thirteen years after their wedding. It seems that in the world of the Cleeses, all roads lead to Weston-fucking-super-fucking-Mare.
By the time Dad was regaling me with his memories of India, though, we had taken up residence in a small seaside town called Burnham-on-Sea, a few miles down the coast from Weston. (Burnham plays an important part in British history, because it was here that a bee killed Viscount Montgomery of El Alamein’s first wife. Monty loved her very much, and had she survived the sting, he might have settled down to a happy retirement. As it was he went off to North Africa to defeat Rommel.) And the reason for the move to Burnham – assuming there was one – was to allow me, at the age of six, to start at a proper school.
The problem was that my parents picked a real stinker. My recollections of it seem to come straight out of Dickens: two large, rather dark rooms illuminated by a fire, with fifteen or so children, all older than me, working in small groups, supervised by a solitary, curt, menacing old crone, who seemed to assume that I should know what I was supposed to be doing without actually bothering to tell me. After a couple of days of bewildered anxiety, things came to a head. The sour old cow gave me a sum much more difficult than any I had encountered before: say, a four-digit number divided by a three-digit number. I guessed how to do it, and got it wrong. Without offering help, she told me to do it again. I failed a second time; she warned me to try hard; I did; I failed again; and she told me to hold my hand out and, grasping it firmly, she caned the palm three times, hard. My first reaction was astonishment: none of my kindergartens had been Catholic establishments, so I was unprepared for this kind of assault. Then it hurt, a lot! My precious palm! When I first started having therapy twenty-five years later, this was one of the first traumas I recalled, and I was astonished at the power of the feelings that came flooding back: anger – no, fury; self-pity; humiliation; a deep, deep sense of hurt; and a pure indignation at not so much the unfairness, but the insanity of punishing someone physically for getting an answer wrong. It is terrifying how much of this deeply unkind, utterly pointless, in fact, mind-bogglingly COUNTERPRODUCTIVE kind of behaviour was meted out to children over the centuries by half-witted, power-crazed zombies like this heinous old bat – a large proportion of such psychopaths allegedly acting in the name of an all-loving God. (A friend of mine attended a school run by Carthusian brothers. When one boy in class made a mistake, the priest produced a strap, asked the question again, and raised the strap to strike him if he repeated his error. The boy remarked, ‘Well, that’s not going to help, is it?’)
But I may have learned something from my brush with sadism. The strongest feeling of all that re-emerged in this therapy session of mine was the final one that bubbled up: an extraordinary, steely determination that I WAS NOT GOING TO LET THIS HAPPEN AGAIN! Somehow, something stirred somewhere in my precious, six-year-old heart, which suggested that I might have a couple of vertebrae knocking around somewhere, and that one day I might get to use them.
So grim was this first experience of school that Dad took me away from the nightmare establishment the next day, and enrolled me in Miss Cresswell’s Academy, a really nice, kind, happy and friendly school, where I coloured pictures of mice in hats and then cut them out very neatly with scissors. Thus I began to rebuild my academic confidence and resume my wussy lifestyle.
Looking back I realise I was a fairly quiet and solitary child (though not a lonely one). Mother said that as a baby I never cried – I probably thought that if I did she might appear – and ever since I read the psychologist Hans Eysenck’s wonderfully clear account of introverts and extroverts, I’ve known I am definitely one of the former. Of course, there’s a continuum between one extreme and the other, with certain individuals, called ambiverts, falling in the middle, with both tendencies in roughly equal proportions. For some people the words only conjure up the caricatures at either end: the tongue-tied, painfully shy Swedish archivist at one end; the loud, insensitive Midwestern car salesman at the other. Such folk assume actors must be extroverts, but a lot aren’t; many performers are big presences on stage, but quite shy off. There is, after all, a huge difference between pretending you’re somebody else and being yourself.
Eysenck also said that introverts have a naturally high level of mental activity, so they are seldom bored and in need of stimulation, because they have enough going on in their heads already. Extroverts, on the other hand, have a lower level of psychic activity: they are prone to boredom, and so need a lot of external stimulation to keep them alert. And that confirms my view that I’m an introvert: I’m never bored, except when I am trapped at a dinner party by people who are bent on impressing me; but I frequently feel overwhelmed, whether it’s by the huge visual displays at Harrods, or by too many emails and phone calls, or by hordes of people coming at me on public occasions, each one determined to tell me that ‘We have something in common!’ (‘My sister’s husband was at Clifton College about twenty years after you, and he used to go to the same sports store where they said you had once bought a pair of batting gloves.’ ‘No! Really?’) But I’ve learned to function perfectly well in extroverted situations and to enjoy them, although afterwards I seem to need a bit of peace and quiet. On the other hand, if I spend the day writing, then I really look forward to a social evening. It’s not black and white, it’s more a question of balance.
Certainly as a six-, seven- and eight-year-old, I spent more time on my own, and with my parents, than with my contemporaries. I played happily alone, running a shop with the help of my stuffed animals, making Meccano models, modelling plasticine, collecting postcards of British birds, and drawing and painting without revealing a shred of talent. I loved comics, reading them with great care, as though I was trying to understand what motivated the characters. Thus I acquired the idea that kicking people’s bottoms was very funny, though in practice this didn’t make them laugh as much as it should have. I needed to spend more time with kids of my age.
So one evening my parents arranged for me to have supper with two boys who lived in the same block of flats, and we listened to a fifteen-minute radio serial called Dick Barton, Special Agent. The adrenalin rush this caused flowed for several days and my parents decided that the experience should not be repeated too often. Another time, I was left with some ‘nice’ boys and girls for a few hours, and, with my eyes on the end of stalks, watched them playing Monopoly. I had simply never realised that life could be so thrilling. I could imagine myself actually joining in and playing a game like this when I was a few years older and it was safe to do so.
Two things about myself I am at a loss to explain. I suddenly became fascinated by cars, and would sit in the back of our little Austin 10, calling out the names of all the oncoming cars with great accuracy. ‘Lagonda! Humber! MGM! Wolseley! Hillman Minx! Jowett Javelin!’ Then, one day, I completely lost interest in them. Overnight! From that moment on, they
bored me rigid. Nowadays I assume that anyone reading a car magazine must be geeky. People comparing the advantages and disadvantages of competing models of motor cars, and showing off their detailed knowledge? Are they insane? One of my greatest fears is to be a key witness in a complicated car pile-up: the police interviewing me would think I was sending them up.
Even odder was my support for Australia at cricket. Where did that come from? Dad talked with real affection about the South Africans and Aussies and Canadians he’d met during the war, but why would I have suddenly decided to become an expert on Australian cricketers of the 20s and 30s? I knew them all: Woodfull and Ponsford, Bradman, Macartney, McCabe, Kippax, Richardson, Oldfield, Clarrie Grimmett (who was a Kiwi who played for Oz, and who could spin a ball so hard it would turn at right angles on a snooker table), Bill O’Reilly, Fleetwood-Smith (the worst batsman Test cricket has ever seen) and the awe-inspiringly fast bowling partnership McDonald and Gregory. Dad and I invented a form of living-room cricket to get us through the winter, which involved bowling a ping-pong ball at a tiny bat held in front of a wooden matchbox holder – and while he was always Hobbs or Sutcliffe or Harold Larwood, I was always the Australians. And this strange quasi-patriotic attachment lasted until the mid-50s when I finally switched my allegiance to the England team. I have not the faintest, remotest, tiniest scintilla of an idea why I once cheered for the Aussies.
And, talking of rum behaviour, around that time something happened that puzzled me a lot. Mrs Phillips, an old lady who lived in a flat upstairs, sent a message asking me to visit her, as she had something she wanted to give me. I can clearly remember climbing the stairs: they were rather steep, and she was sitting at the top, in an armchair, gripping something. She told me to hold my hand out, took my fingertips to steady it, and then stabbed my palm with a specially sharpened stick. (It was one of the thin wooden tapers which people used to help light fires, and she had trimmed the business end into a point.) A healthy, slightly more masculine boy would have taken the taper from her and put her eyes out with it, but, being me, I screamed like a stuck pig, and howled, and sobbed, and . . . what? That was the whole memory, and what fascinates me is . . . what had I done to deserve it? Because clearly I must have done something for which Mrs Phillips was punishing me. This palm-stabbing was not part of an established pattern of behaviour on her part; in Burnham-on-Sea gossip travelled fast – a good bowel movement could not have been hushed up for long – and Mrs Phillips was classified as ‘highly respectable’. Could she perhaps have gone berserk for these two brief minutes of her life, and then resumed normal service for the rest of her days (not, fortunately, to be reckoned in their hundreds)? Or had I done something sneaky and dark and woodsheddy – certainly nothing sexual, for at that age I had no idea what a girl’s penis would look like, but something sordid like putting mustard on her birthday cake, or hiding a spider in her pencil box, or flaying her hamster? I have a strong suspicion I’d perpetrated something vaguely shoddy. What else could possibly explain Mrs Phillips’s premeditated behaviour, the careful planning, the ingenious choice of weapon, the meticulous sharpening, the crafty invitation, the sudden ambush . . . what was it revenge for?
Or was she just bored? I shall never know. And I shall never know whether or not to feel ashamed . . .
Not that I’m pretending that I led an entirely blameless life at the time. I did, for example, make a brief foray into the world of crime: I stole a submarine. Agreed, it wasn’t a very sophisticated submarine, just a three-inch-long piece of grey lead shaped roughly like a submarine (worth about 1p at 2014 prices) which I’d come across at a party, but I did sneakily purloin it both KNOWING IT WAS NOT MINE and in full knowledge that I was DOING SOMETHING WRONG. Somehow I must have given myself away, because Dad worked out that I had thieved it and suggested I take it back and apologise. Which I did, although when I told my victims I’d taken something that belonged to them, I think they were a bit surprised when I produced this tiny lead submarine: they had assumed that the loot would be a bit more substantial. Dad, though, never harped on about what I had done: he simply explained that I shouldn’t have taken it and then got me to return it. End of lesson. I was very lucky to have a dad like that.
Now a BIG thing happens. We have been visiting prep schools in the area, and they all seem rather large and severe and forbidding, but Dad explains that we will be moving to Weston-super-Mare, so I can go to a very nice school there, called St Peter’s, as a day boy. I’ve often been to Weston and it’s huge – not as big as Bristol where Grandpa lives but really big, with a Grand Pier with a sign saying, ‘The Largest Covered Amusement Park in the World’, and a Winter Gardens, and three miniature golf courses. More important, it so happens that in August the Somerset County Cricket team comes to Clarence Park to play three three-day matches in a row, Dad takes me to one of them (to show me how exciting it will be living in Weston), and I am immediately smitten. Just the one match, but it’s a start. I’ve fallen in love for the first time – with cricket and with the Somerset team (especially Bertie Buse, whose moustache is like Dad’s).
When I got back to Burnham, I organised a cricket match, and I made a century! There were only two other players (my Dick Barton friends) but I smashed the tennis ball all around our back garden and achieved a twenty-three-ball hundred! (It turned out to be the only century I ever made.)
So, at the beginning of September we moved to Weston, to the ground floor of a small house on a road called Clarence Park North, right next to the cricket ground, to enter a preparatory school called St Peter’s, where the teachers were mostly men, where there were grown-up boys of twelve and thirteen, and where the headmaster was bald and absolutely enormous.
Chapter 3
HAVING MANAGED TO endure the relentless teasing of my horrid first day at St Peter’s Preparatory School, I lay quietly in my bedroom that night like a new arrival at Colditz, planning how I was going to survive. There was just one shaft of hope: my shadow. I was already very attached to my shadow. He was an older boy named John Reid, and under the St Peter’s system, he had been assigned to me, accompanying me wherever I went, guiding, explaining, warning, encouraging, and making sure that, wherever I was, I knew what I was supposed to be doing. He was very kind and supportive, and, all these years later, I still feel grateful to him, even though he left St Peter’s shortly afterwards, never to be seen again. (By me, that is: I don’t mean that he was suddenly rendered invisible, or even transparent.) Without Reid’s kindness, I think I would have slunk off and hidden in a dustbin, also never to be seen again, since all the other boys seemed to detest me. Certainly, my social skills were poor – for example, I still had the idea that kicking other boys’ bottoms would eventually make me more popular – and I was irritatingly tall, and pathetic and wet, but Reid got me through the first two weeks. After that I had a chance.
I had one other survival technique: I sometimes said things that made the other boys laugh. When this happened I immediately experienced a moment of warmth, of acceptance, of feeling ‘Maybe I am all right, after all.’ Peter Cook always said that he quite deliberately staved off bullying by being funny. I think in my case it was less a conscious activity – more ‘Oh, that felt nice.’ And, as I relaxed, I became funnier, of course, because the spark was always there. So the bullying faded away, and I started, for the first time, to make friends.
So far as schoolwork was concerned, I was quite unexceptional. After a couple of terms of very gentle stuff – dictation, and making papier mâché puppets, and telling stamens from pistils – I moved up to Form II, where all the teachers were men. (Except the headmaster’s wife, who was more than a match for any male at St Peter’s, including the headmaster.) Now I began Latin, which was taught by Captain Lancaster, a fine, military-looking man with an impeccable mane of white hair, a bushy but clipped white moustache, a very red face and a fearsome temper (according to tradition). Learning became a serious business because we were terrified of his getting into a ‘bate
’. A lot of our work with him involved rote learning, which I quite enjoyed: declining nouns and adjectives and conjugating verbs, and my God did he drum it into us, because even today I can still remember it all, without even pausing to think. Funnily enough, I never actually saw him lose his fearsome temper. But that was only because we made sure he didn’t. (Later I discovered that despite his military bearing and title, and his reputation for fierceness, his tendency sometimes to seem a bit gruff was entirely due to his shyness: underneath it all, he was an extraordinarily gentle and sweet-natured man. He would tell us how to recognise birdsong, and read to us from Three Men in a Boat – provided we’d done the work. Somehow his terrifying reputation had obscured his essential kindness, and the fact that he taught PE and boxing and shooting and held the military title of captain all helped the deception.)
I was always quite good at Latin, and at maths. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was because both had a certain simple logic to them that my mind could cope with: you learned rules and then applied them. When it came to English I was only OK, and I was rather bad at everything else, especially French, which left me bewildered: you had to make strange noises I’d never heard before, which bore no relation whatsoever to the words on the page. Why didn’t they? What was the point? Then history! Why was I being told that King Alfred burnt the cakes? If it was that they didn’t want me to burn cakes, why didn’t they just say so? What had King Alfred got to do with it? And anyway, if he was King, why on earth was he doing the cooking? And what was King Canute up to, chatting away to the sea? Why did they make him King if he was barking mad? Surely the courtiers on the beach should have hushed it all up? None of it made any sense at all, and that rattled me, as I was still at an age when I thought things were meant to make sense, and I got quite anxious when they didn’t.