by Simon Pegg
Everyone in Class 7 was infinitely cooler than me, just by being in Class 7. Standing outside Mr Skinner’s classroom, waiting nervously to perform my little improvisation in front of the high council of cool kids at Castle Hill Primary School, I was suddenly infused with an unexpected and enormous sense of excitement and pride.
I burst in with a thespian wail and threw myself on Mr Skinner’s mercy, in a performance which included fake tears and dramatic supplication, much to the one part bemusement, two parts amusement of the assembled class. Even Mr Skinner was at a slight loss in the face of my histrionics. When I had finished my act, I flung the door open with a dramatic flourish, unaware that my own classmates were outside pressing their ears against the door. A huge heap of them fell into the room, much to the further amusement of the class, although I seem to remember Mr Skinner shouting at them angrily, signalling an end to the frivolities.
For a time afterwards I was adopted by some of the older kids, like an amusing puppy; I was famous for being the funny kid and I relished it enormously. My enjoyment of the attention wasn’t motivated by insecurity or a deficit of affection at home. I’m sure psychoanalysis would probably identify some sort of desire for approval in the light, or rather darkness, of my father’s departure, but I think I was always like that, even before I could possibly comprehend the abstractions of my own ego. In wordy psychoanalytical terms, my parents’ divorce and my attempts to rationalise a degree of abandonment may have exacerbated an existing compulsion to perform but does it really matter? And what the hell does exacerbate mean anyway?
The point is, this incident remains firm in my memory as a key moment in the evolution of my interest in performance and comedy. Having won over a tough crowd – a potentially very tough crowd – the success of the impromptu show left me with a sense of accomplishment and confidence that compelled me to do more. I felt confident and assured. Swimming pools? I shit ’em.
Not in them obviously, that’s against the rules.
Nerd Rising
N
ow that you know all about me and my once toxic relationship with chlorinated H2O, let’s return to Gloucester and the business of my mother and father – literally. Shortly after Pendulum broke up, Mum and Dad let the music shop on St Aldate Street go. We moved in with Dad’s parents (lovingly referred to as Mama and Pop-Pop) and lived with them for a year.
At some point towards the end of that year, Mum and I moved to Nan’s house (Mum’s mum) on Clegram Road in south Gloucester. My grandfather Albert (Grampy) had died a few months earlier and Nan was alone in the house for the first time in forty years. I don’t remember the process of uprooting from Mama and Pop-Pop’s to Nan’s; I didn’t even notice that my dad didn’t come with us. I remember waking up one morning, going into the middle bedroom where Mum slept and asking her where Dad was, to which she replied, ‘He’s gone away for a bit.’ The truth was, for various reasons, they had decided to separate. I took it pretty well, considering.
A few weeks later, Dad walked up the side passage to Nan’s back door wearing a check shirt and I ran into his open arms. We saw each other regularly from then on, thanks to my mum’s typically selfless goodwill, and developed a relationship closer to friends than father and son. In that respect, I look back on my parents’ divorce as a good thing, at least for me. It galvanised my relationship with both of them, forming a powerful bond with my mother and facilitating the removal of the kind of male tension that causes rival stags to lock antlers.
Shortly after that, Mum embarked upon a relationship with a man called Richard Pegg, whom she knew from the GODS. His father, John Pegg, another regular at the Olympus Theatre, worked in the Lloyds Bank on Westgate Street, central Gloucester. Whenever my mum and I went into this austere establishment, which was deathly quiet but for the echoing thump of rubber stamps, I would shout at the top of my voice. ‘Where’s John Pegg?’, completely unaware that a few years later, I would call him Grandpa.
Pegg Junior worked in Terry Warner Sports, some five doors down from what used to be John’s Music on St Aldate Street. While living at Mama and Pop-Pop’s, I had become obsessed with The Six Million Dollar Man4 and, subsequently, The Bionic Woman (although my love of the latter was mainly because Lindsay Wagner’s Jaime Sommers gave me a funny feeling in my tummy). In a pre-Star Wars world, Steve Austin was my ultimate hero; a cool, handsome, cyborg astronaut, everything I was looking for in a friend at the time. I was actually slightly jealous when Barney Miller, the Seven Million Dollar Man, appeared in one of the show’s story arcs and distinctly recall feeling a certain amount of Schadenfreude when Barney found himself emotionally incapable of accepting his new super-strong prosthetic limbs and went rogue, only to be apprehended by Steve in a thrilling bionic showdown. Eat that, Barney, I thought to myself as his bionic arms and legs were conveniently dialled down to a ‘normal’ setting, Steve’s my friend, not yours.
The Christmas of 1976 was a clear material reflection of my love for Colonel Austin. It was the first Christmas we had spent at Nan’s without Dad, and perhaps out of some unnecessary sense of guilt, Mum really pushed the sleigh out. Presumably through a combination of credit cards and self-deprivation, she made sure I didn’t want for anything that Christmas morning and woke to a plethora of Six Million Dollar goodies. A Steve Austin rocket ship, for the Steve Austin action figure I already owned, which transformed into a bionic repair station, complete with magnifying window and multiple pipes and switches. I also received a Maskatron action figure, the multiple-faced, bionic nemesis and mad scientist I had never heard of but really wanted.
It’s fair to say I was Austined up to the bionic eyeball(s). It’s interesting to note that two years later, my main Christmas present was a Doctor Who action figure, complete with Tardis and talking Dalek. I was a huge fan of the show, and in 1978 I was lucky enough to meet the fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, at a book signing at Merrits newsagent in Gloucester city centre. He gave me a jelly baby and inscribed my copy of the The Talons of Weng Chiang, a novelisation of one of the television stories. His inscription read: To Simon 8, from Tom Baker, 888.
I still remember drifting away from the signing table, staring at the ink drying on the page and attempting to process the experience of seeing my hero in the flesh. Before the next person could step up to the table, I cut back in line and proudly informed Tom that I been given an effigy of his likeness for Christmas. I recall our conversation clearly.
Me: I’ve got an action man of you.
Tom: That’s marvellous. Have another jelly baby.
I accepted the extra helping of character-based confectionery and walked away a very happy little boy. Twenty-five years later, in the guise of the Editor, evil human nuncio to a bizarre creature called the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe, I faced off against the ninth Doctor, Christopher Eccleston, in a moment of circularity that would have floored my eight-year-old self, had I appeared with the news from the electro-static time ball (ESTB), or perhaps more appropriately a Time And Relative Dimension In Space (Tardis).
Getting back to The Six Million Dollar Man, it was my love for this earlier sci-fi hero that in some respects led to my mother and Richard Pegg getting together. Having already been bought a Steve Austin-style red tracksuit, I asked Mum if I could have a pair of red-and-white Adidas trainers to complete the look. She knew there was a sports shop near where we used to live, and that John Pegg’s son Richard worked there, so we’d have a friendly face to help us locate the correct pair of bionic shoes. In the summer of 1976, we dropped in to make the purchase. The style was in stock but the size was not. Richard promised to order them in and bring them round to my nan’s house, which, a few weeks later, he did. He also asked Mum out on a date. They got married six months later. We moved out of Nan’s house and into 10 Castle Hill Drive, a small semi-detached house in Abbotswood, Brockworth, directly opposite Castle Hill Primary School. Wait, divorce, marriage, emotional turmoil . . . Minnie, come back with my sock!
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nbsp; Castle Hill Primary School in Brockworth, Gloucester, was (and probably still is) separated into seven classes, handily referred to as Class 1, Class 2, etc. Back when I was there, each class had a teacher with whom you would spend a year of your school life. I joined Class 4, halfway through the spring term of 1977. I liked the school immediately. It was bright, clean and exciting. In my recollection, the colours seem more vivid, the light brighter, the air somehow sweeter. It may have been the contrast between my new environment and the grim urbanity of Calton Road Juniors that I had left behind, but I attribute the sensation of freshness associated with those memories to the emotional experience of starting a new life in a slightly more rural setting.
My Class 4 teacher, Mrs Hortop, was a wonderfully maternal and skilled teacher who possessed a killer stare if you were naughty but offered endless encouragement and praise if you applied yourself. Her style of teaching was a far cry from the grim, mean-spirited instruction of my previous teacher; a stern woman with a cloud of dry grey hair who had once blankly informed my mum that I had no academic potential and was somehow at fault arriving at the school with an existing knowledge of cursive handwriting, thanks to my previous place of education. I think she childishly resented me for being something of a smarty-pants, just because I had transplanted from the slightly posher King’s School. Her bitter resentment towards me had actually reduced my mother to tears after one parents’ evening. Mum already felt guilty for removing me from a school I enjoyed attending and suffered deeper insecurities that her divorce may have affected me more than had first been thought. I disliked this teacher almost instantly and consequently had little motivation to meet her twisted standards, sinking into a cycle of insubordination. Fortunately I had an impeccable taste in ‘old school’ trainers (although at the time, they were just ‘school’) and my bionic red-and-white shoes initiated a chain of events that would facilitate the much-needed change of lifestyle.
I made friends quickly in my new environment. I wasn’t particularly shy as a child and had always done well when it came to integrating with other youngsters in parks or on holiday.
As the new boy, I was briefly a point of interest and palled up with two of the more naughty boys, one of whom I later discovered was my second cousin. That happened twice during my time at Castle Hill; both occasions I was already friendly with the person before I found out. Small towns are like that. Occasionally you will discover a person you have known socially for years is your uncle or your cousin. Sometimes they’re both.
Eventually I forged the lasting friendships I would sustain throughout my school career and indeed into my adult life. A boy called Lee Beard caught my interest on my very first day. When I arrived that morning, I was late into the class, having spent time with Mum and the headmaster, getting welcomed and orientated. I walked into Mrs Hortop’s classroom and was introduced to my classmates, who greeted me with that slow, mechanical voice children collectively employ when saying ‘good morning’ or ‘hello’ or ‘join us’. I sat down at my new desk, noticing Meredith Catsanus’s attractive fringe, and got on with whatever fun task we had been set that morning.
Presently, Mrs Hortop asked for a volunteer to go down to the headmaster’s office. Before I could raise an overeager hand, Lee Beard leapt up, causing my stomach to perform a small involuntary somersault. Lee’s right leg was encased in a complex caliper splint made of metal and thick leather, which forced the limb into permanent, enforced extension at an obtuse angle to his body. The shoe at the end of the apparatus had an oddly angled sole, enabling Lee’s foot to make even contact with the ground when he walked, which he did awkwardly but at great speed. I later learned that Lee had a condition called Perthes’ disease, which softens the femoral head of the thigh-bone due to an interruption in the flow of blood to the hip joint. I was extremely shocked that first time I saw Lee’s bionic leg. Half thrilled, half appalled, he seemed to me the living embodiment of those little boy charity recepticles often seen outside supermarkets.
Despite this initial shock, I felt an immediate affinity with Lee. For the first six weeks of my life I had worn a splint to restrict movement in my legs due to my hip joints not being properly formed. This, combined with Lee’s infectious exuberance and obvious sense of humour, inspired me to make a friend of him. I regularly volunteered to carry a chair down to the assembly hall for Lee to sit on (essential, since Lee could not sit on the floor with his mad robot leg) and we developed a closeness that has kept us in contact to this day.
Why is this relevant to my journey towards becoming an actor? Well, Lee and I took two key roles in the first school production I participated in that didn’t involve shepherds. Two years before I performed my Dicky Bird news report with a grazed face, Mrs Hortop cast me as the eponymous and indeed ambiguous hero of Robert Browning’s version of ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ (the same version my nan had committed to memory so many years before), which we performed in front of the school as part of an assembly in 1977. Lee played the little ‘lame’ boy, who cannot keep up with the rest of the village children, as they are led away by the disgruntled Pied Piper, and fails to enter the wondrous portal in the mountain. I remember watching Lee playing out his disappointment at being left alone, eliciting a huge wave of sympathy from the assembled children, and being aware that he had somewhat stolen the show.
By this time Lee’s condition had improved and he no longer wore the rigid brace. Instead his heel was attached to a leather strap around his waist that kept his leg bent up behind him at all times, necessitating the use of crutches. It was the last phase of his treatment before he dispensed with the corrective contraptions completely and embarked upon a mad spurt of energy that lasted about a year before he finally settled down to being a normal little boy.
At the time of the ‘Pied Piper’, he was perfectly cast and cut an affectively poignant figure as he limped away from the closed cave entrance/sports utility cupboard. I remember feeling a little jealous as the audience hung on his every step, but I also felt admiration for his skilful portrayal of rejection and isolation and couldn’t help feeling it was coming from the heart, even then at the tender age of seven, and I never once thought him to be a jammy little fucker.
Performing the show and seeing how it affected the audience made me want to act more, to do something that would make an audience vocalise their emotions the way they did at Lee Beard’s lost little boy – jammy little fucker.
Old School
M
oving up to Class 5 in my second year at Castle Hill Primary, we graduated into the combined tutelage of Mr Miller and Mrs Harvey, the latter having only recently joined. She was younger than Mrs Hortop and for this reason alone she seemed very cool. Whereas Mrs Hortop was the very embodiment of the wise, authoritative schoolteacher, Mrs Harvey possessed a distinct, summery laid-backness, which hinted at the possibility that a teacher could be as much a friend as an educator. She wasn’t the only such teacher at Castle Hill.
Another young, female teacher called Miss Eglise, who taught us music, possessed a similar casual amiability. I had the unsettling experience of seeing Miss Eglise out of school once, playing Tuptim, in a production of The King and I staged by the CODS in their native Cheltenham. In the show, Tuptim is given to the King of Siam as a gift and potential wife, but Tuptim is in love with Lun Tha, the young man who delivers her to the palace, and (SPOILER ALERT) eventually tragedy ensues. It was strange seeing Miss Eglise in a non-school setting, let alone portraying a beautiful young woman with frailties and desires. Towards the end of the show, Tuptim is severely reprimanded for staging a play, which plainly reflects her dismay at being forced to marry someone she doesn’t love. She escapes with her lover but is captured and faces corporal punishment administered by the King himself.
Seeing Miss Eglise play out these emotions, in silky oriental garb, was fairly intoxicating for me. I was fascinated to see her after the show socialising in the bar. She came over to say hello to my mum (and me) and I told her how mu
ch I had enjoyed the show, at which point she gave me a playful hug (an act that was still legal back then). She was glowing with post-performance exhilaration and I remember she smelled lovely. The emotion of the play and the unusual interaction with this suddenly exotic and attractive teacher left me with something of a crush on her and I spent the following Sunday sighing heavily and dreaming of Siam.
When I walked into the assembly hall on the Monday, my heart was racing, I felt as though I knew her better than any of the other children in the school; it was as if we had had some kind of an affair, not that I knew what an affair was. I hadn’t enjoyed any masturbatory fantasies about showering together in a bed and breakfast just off the A40, Shurdington Road. I was pre-masturbatory at the time, although I did regularly pore over the pages of a Lovebirds magazine that I kept under a caravan in an alley near my house (pore over was perhaps the wrong choice of words there).
I saw her across the room standing by her piano in a cream cardigan and blue dress and walked towards her, hoping she would notice me. Sure enough, she glanced across and spotted me, smiling broadly back at her. I placed my hands together as if in prayer and bowed to her like a Siamese prince, at which point all my dreams came true as she reciprocated with a bow that turned into a curtsey. This little in-joke meant the world to me in that moment, it was an acknowledgement of a connection we had forged outside school and as such made us more than teacher and student: we were sort of friends. She married that year, which vaguely disappointed me, I think. She changed her name to something I don’t remember, my lack of recall in this matter being significant perhaps since my strongest memories are as a single woman with an exotic French-sounding name.