As a kid, I found myself mentally split over my brothers. I was proud of the fact there were twins in the family. People would say to me, ‘What’s it like to grow up with identical twin brothers?’ and I would say, ‘What’s it like not to?’ It was my only framework and I liked it because it made us special, and I wanted to be special. I still to this day have the same enthusiasm when I tell people about them – ‘My brothers are twins!’ It’s also a bit sci-fi – ‘Morning,’ coming from two people who look exactly the same. But the feeling that there were two pairs in the house, Mum and Dad, Alan and Keith, and then me, at once part of them and part removed, on the outside observing, absorbing, was overwhelming.
That sense of being different drove a competitiveness in me. I’d get them on the squash court when I was fourteen and they were twenty-two and my attitude was always ‘I’ll beat you’. Which I did. I’d inherited my dad’s hand–eye coordination, whereas Alan and Keith weren’t particularly sporting. But this was a gulf, in age, attitude, reference and experience, that could never be bridged with a little green ball. No matter how much I tried to see the world as they saw it, I never found it any easier than trying to recapture a dream after waking in my sleep. But maybe that’s forever the fate of the youngest. The age difference never seems to go away. George Harrison once noted of Paul McCartney: ‘When I met Paul, I was five years younger than him, and I’m still five years younger than him now.’ I’m still eight years younger than my brothers, even though I’m fifty-five.
It wasn’t just inside the family I would fixate on people; it happened outside our four walls too. At school one day, I was watching a mate called Mark Kavanagh walking along. Isn’t Mark Kavanagh amazing? I was thinking. There is nobody more Mark Kavanagh than him. Mark Kavanagh? I can’t believe he even exists, he’s so original. I did that to few people, not because I was close to them or they were girls I was in love with, but because I was experiencing people in a way that was slightly unusual – as if I had a filter out on me. Maybe that’s where some of the fascination about character, being amazed at the idiosyncrasies of another person, comes from. The basic fact that they are experiencing reality in an entirely different manner, and yet we are coexisting. Seeing the world through others’ eyes – think about it too much and at some point you end up not knowing where they end and you begin.
Having twins meant an unusual experience for Mum, too. Twins weren’t as common as they are now with the advent of fertility drugs. When they did come, it presented a strange dynamic, one in which a mother could be forgiven for feeling excluded. Some might think with twins a mother gets twice as much, but Alan and Keith always looked to each other first. When I came along, it was her first one on one. I asked her once about the eight-year gap between myself and the twins and she said my dad was careful but she wanted another child. She was a fair bit older at that point and was perhaps aware of how the clock was running against her. They had been hoping for a girl and then I came along. I was going to be Alison.
I was twenty-one when Mum told me, quite casually, that she’d had a miscarriage after me. Her revelation stayed with me. As with all kids, it never occurred to me that I might have had other siblings who never made it. I thought how I could have had a younger brother or sister, someone I could have looked after and played with. Even now I know that, if that child had survived, it would have changed the course of my life, because whatever I have done was forged in the crucible of that home and those relationships. Two pairs and me. If I’d had a sibling near my age, I’d have been very much involved with them. Instead, I had a sense of being alone, an only child in a family set-up. I was sat on the outside, being novelistic, freezing moments, cataloguing. I was a difficult kid who spent a lot of time in his own company, joined only by a secret cast of characters. ‘Old Man in the Rain’ entailed me sitting on a fishing basket, half in, half out our back door, being just that, an old man in the rain. ‘The Woman on the Landing’ had a slightly more ghostly presence, while for ‘The Mad Professor’, who resided in my bedroom, I’d get little tubes of glitter and spray aerosols into them. The glitter would go everywhere and the professor would be blown up. My characters weren’t just confined to the house. Morbidly, when I went to the swimming baths, I used to play ‘Dead Man on the Rocks’. I’d lie on the steps, semi-immersed in the water as if I was a corpse. Whenever there was even the lightest dusting of snow, meanwhile, I used to be ‘Scott of the Antarctic’. I’d walk a spiral in our front garden until I got to the centre, where I’d die – because, according to me, that’s what Scott did.
The massive obsession was Sean Connery as James Bond. When I got home from school, I’d get changed into a suitable outfit – pair of blue flares, an odd material with protruding seams and white elastic that had come away from the waistband, and a blue polo neck. Once in my costume, from then on whatever I did was as James Bond – James Bond Makes His Toast, James Bond Goes For A Pee – culminating in me taking a toy gun, with the look of a Walther PPK, and putting my dad’s vinyl album of John Barrie’s greatest hits on a loop. It would reach a finale of me taking a powerful industrial lamp of my dad’s and positioning it so it created a spotlight on the privet hedge. At that point, I’d replicate the iconic gun pose of the Bond opening credits. Or I’d run into the glare as if I’d been spotted in a searchlight. I’d do that for hours. I used to sign my name ‘Chris Eccleston 007’. So embarrassing.
I was obsessed with Sean Connery’s Bond because to me he was the archetype of masculinity. I thought that’s what a man should be. I had all the James Bond annuals and in one picture Connery was knocked out on the floor. Even the way he lay was virile and macho and cool. I’d be on the floor myself, twisting, turning, trying exactly to replicate the body position. Later I’d hear the famous story about Bond producers Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli and Harry Saltzman interviewing Connery for the role, watching afterwards from the window as he disappeared down the street. He got the part, they said, because he walked like a cat.
The guises I’d adopt were for nobody’s benefit but mine. I’d do a lot of things on my own. I’d spend hours in bed reading. If I went outside, I’d be kicking a football, commentating like I was on Match of the Day. I would lose myself so thoroughly in my own imagination that I experienced what I can only describe as a series of petit mal seizures. It happened a few times, like I’d hypnotised myself, convinced myself I was that character, which I think all children are capable of doing – I see it in my daughter Esme, chattering away to herself – until something snapped me out of what I was doing. On one occasion, I went down the stairs and into the living room while in such a state.
‘There’s a rhythm,’ I told my mum and brothers.
They were watching telly and looked at me, confused. ‘What?’
‘Can you not hear it?’ I was going round touching the furniture as if I could feel something. ‘It’s all the same rhythm.’
I’d got so deeply into play that I’d altered my own mental state and was hearing this definite rhythm. Like I was going the way that madness lies. I don’t understand it myself, so who knows what they made of that situation.
Another time, I was convinced there was a Greek statue staring at me through the window. I went downstairs, got Mum and Alan, and took them up to my bedroom.
‘Look! Look at that! There!’ Again, one can only imagine what they were thinking. The only logical explanation is I dreamed the statue so vividly that I could still see it when I woke up.
You could look at this period as the beginning of a third eye, an altered state of consciousness and perception. I wonder also if it was the beginning of what has been branded as my intensity, like a pre-stutter, connected similarly to my power of concentration. Believe me, I can really concentrate hard. When I’m doing takes, or I’m on stage, the concentration is solely on the acting. It has to be, that’s the job. And that is effectively changing my mental state.
It’s not just me who says that. Peter Vaughan acknowledged as much about himself
during filming for Our Friends in the North. We were doing a take, me as Nicky Hutchinson, he as Nicky’s dad Felix, in a typical TV studio where somebody drops a matchstick and it sounds like a bomb’s gone off. There was this tiny noise.
Peter halted. ‘Ah, can we go again please?’ He was slightly angry and embarrassed because he thought he was being indulgent.
‘Do you feel all right, Peter?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but all the antennae are out.’ He meant he had entered a very externalised state. That’s not easy to do. You can’t just flick a switch and go, ‘I’m in character now!’ It needs to happen more naturally. Often it never does. The frustration of being an actor is that so often you are trying to capture something that is completely illusive. A child’s mind, uncluttered by extraneous thoughts, is perhaps in a better position to achieve that disconnection from reality. The point is, with me, I seem to have felt shadows of other characters, real and imagined, all my life.
When I was seven, I went round next door to Lily and Charlie Donegan’s.
‘My Great Auntie Annie’s dead,’ I told them.
Great Auntie Annie had come to live with us as a grey-haired old lady in ill health. She was a matter-of-fact woman who I always found slightly unnerving. Once, I arranged my toy cars on a stool.
‘I’ve parked them up,’ I told her.
‘No, you haven’t,’ she said. ‘They’re all touching, and when cars park there’s always a space.’ You see? Matter of fact.
With Annie in the house, it felt like death was around, purely because she was so ancient. Her presence placed a veil of morbidity over my head. Lily and Charlie came round.
‘She’s not dead, love, she’s asleep.’
Death wasn’t long, however, in manifesting itself. One day she was there, one day she wasn’t, and I’ve since come to realise the event traumatised me. For years afterwards, on a Sunday night when I used to have to go up for a bath, right up to when I was sixteen, I would be terrified that when I came out of the bathroom there’d be a woman in a nightdress with very grey hair staring at me. I know that’s a cliché – the classic grey-haired lady of practically every ghost story ever written – but it was reinforced by the TV of the time. I loved the ITV series Thriller, which presented a different, often haunting, drama each week, and had seen an episode about just this sort of ghostly old lady and another featuring a nun. My fear of a malevolent presence in my house was very potent to me, but because I was sixteen and living in a very macho culture, I was deeply embarrassed that my imagination was so active. No way was I going to tell anyone. Another little oddity kept locked in my head allowed a glimpse of daylight only recently when I used my dread fear of the ghost of Auntie Annie to inform my emotion when I encountered the witches in Macbeth.
There’s part of me that thinks I’ve used my own ‘third eye’ experiences to tell myself how special I am. Nowadays, I would imagine my parents, if asked, would describe me as an imaginative, sensitive child, but there was no language of that back then. I was just Chris being Chris. ‘Eh up – he’s off again.’ You didn’t dwell, you just got on with things. I do know, though, that my house, my box room, my family, played a huge part in who I am.
A crucible for a little boy.
2
SALFORD
‘My function is not to reassure people. I want to make them uncomfortable. To send them out of the place arguing and talking.’
Ewan MacColl
There was another cauldron bubbling away in the background. As much as my heightened imagination was piqued within those four walls in Little Hulton, the overarching influence in my life was 6 miles away down the road.
I came to being in 59 Blodwell Street, Salford, a classic two-up-two-down council property where you stepped straight out onto the street. Not any more – it’s been knocked down. It was unusual to be born at home in the mid-’60s, but Mum had already given birth once – well, twice really – and the rules allowed for the second child, in her case the third, to be born domestically. I didn’t make it easy. I started on the Friday afternoon and didn’t deign to emerge until the Sunday night at five to six. I was 9lb 4oz. My Uncle Joe used to call me Garth after the outsized adventure hero from the Daily Mirror cartoon strip. I’m not sure if Garth was the same, but I remained bald as a coot until I was three.
While there were plenty of slum clearances going on in Salford in the ’60s, Blodwell Street wasn’t one of them. It was simply a row of old terraced houses, outside toilet, bath in front of the fire, the same sort of homes that other cities have regenerated and reinvigorated for new generations. The seed of a move away was only planted in my mum’s head when a neighbour knocked on the door.
‘Would you ever consider moving out of Salford?’ she asked. The woman’s sister was living in Little Hulton and wanted to come back to Salford because she missed it. Essentially, it was an unofficial council swap. My mum was keen, seduced by the inviting prospect of clean air, more room, and the fear that in Salford my brothers were starting to run wild. My dad was completely against it. He would have stayed in Salford, but Mum was from a more aspirant background. She was posh working-class, put in a blue dress as a little girl on election day, not an uncommon occurrence among a good proportion of the working class who’d rejected socialism – ‘We know who we are, we know the king’s the king, and they know what’s best.’
The Conservatives at that time, laughably, embodied morality, whereas support the Labour Party and you were a communist – or a ‘commonist’ as my dad got called when he went to pick my mum up from my Grandma Elliott’s house wearing a red shirt on their first date. Red shirt, suit, fags – that was my dad all over. He was a bit rough while Mum was genteel working-class. Her grandma looked like Queen Victoria, and it was her who put Mum in that little blue dress. Mum’s mum had died when she was four. She wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral. It was deemed not to be proper (I disagree with that – I believe children should not be denied the ritual). Instead she went to the cinema. Afterwards, she was looked after by her dad, Joe. He wasn’t a rough Salford bloke in the way that my Grandad Pop, my dad’s dad, was, but he was still a tough man, with a look of Robert Mitchum I always thought. To be on your own with no wife and a small child, particularly if that child was female, was deemed unmanly, and Joe, still a young man, didn’t bother about Elsie as he should. At one stage, Grandma Elliott came to Salford to see them only to find the little girl in the house on her own. She went to the nearest pub and there was Joe. She went back to the house, took Elsie by the hand, strolled into the pub, and told Joe, ‘She’s coming with me.’ That was it – and I think that’s what he wanted. It didn’t mean the end for their relationship, though. Over time they got to know each other and grew close in later life.
My mum, when she developed her own mind, would also reject the political overtones of the blue dress. That’s not to say she didn’t defer – she and Dad saw the middle class as their betters – but if it came to it and anyone tried to use or trample them, they’d have ’em. She and Dad were Labour. My mum did vote Liberal on occasion, because she would really think about what was being offered; she would see the nuance and still does to this day. My dad never thought about it. He’d have voted for Blair post-Iraq even when we knew the liar he was (actually, by that time dad was too far gone with dementia to notice). For him, politics was very meat and potatoes – ‘You vote for Labour, the party of the working man.’ The Conservatives were ‘bastards – Tory bastards’. We stopped at a service station once and Ted Heath pulled up in the car next to us. My mum was nervous.
‘Ronnie,’ she said, ‘don’t say anything.’ He didn’t. He feared my mum’s ire more than he hated Ted Heath.
Mum definitely had influence over Dad. He respected her and she was never the ‘little woman’ of the relationship. For her part, she knew he lacked the confidence to try something new – if my dad had taken the lead, they’d never have had a holiday, let alone moved home, so she wouldn’t hold back
on being direct. I’m still on the end of that now. ‘Buck your ideas up, Christopher! Maurice isn’t an idiot,’ she told me recently when I was reading my lines to The A Word with her.
Inevitable then that, despite Dad’s initial misgivings over the house in Little Hulton, she got him to go and have a look. What they found was a much bigger home, 1930s, two bedrooms and a box room, semi-detached, garden front and back, on a council estate almost in the countryside, the latter being massive to two people for whom openness and nature meant so much. We’re not talking abject luxury here. The house had no central heating, we had an open fire that heated the water via a back boiler, and oilcloth because Mum and Dad couldn’t afford carpets, but it was definitely a step up from Blodwell Street, the better environment to raise her family for which Mum yearned. In order to pay the rent for the new house, for a while my dad did his shift at Colgate from eight ’til five, came home, had his tea, and then, five days a week, from six ’til ten, worked at Bulmers, the cider brewery, again driving a stacker truck.
I Love the Bones of You Page 2