To Dad, it was splitting hairs. His son had escaped the shackles of normal life and made it into a whole different world with all the possibilities that entailed. As he had leapt into that river all those years ago, now his son had jumped from the conveyor belt and refused to be boxed and labelled. His destination, unlike his own, was not going to be dictated. He was going to travel his own free path through literature, words and drama, given an education and ensconced in an industry and environment he would never have otherwise encountered.
He – I – was going to Whiteacre.
8
ANOREXIA
I gave Mum a kiss and then Dad came over. Silently, he hugged me, turned, and walked quickly behind the car. In that moment, I realised he was breaking down. He didn’t want me to see him, and nor did I need to see his face contorted in emotion – I could read exactly what was happening from my mum’s eyes. She’d known this moment of emotional collapse was coming for three days. I hadn’t. I’d expected a big scene with my mum, but she knew she had to be strong. She knew if she fell apart I wouldn’t be able to handle it. She got in the car, the engine revved, and Dad drove off. I was glad I’d not had to face Dad like that. Seeing a bloke cry? Be emotional? It would have been odd, embarrassing. Men don’t show vulnerability – that’s how he would have felt, and that’s how I felt too. It was a window into myself – a window that now, thankfully, reveals a different view. I went upstairs to the flat and listened to Carole King’s Tapestry. That album will forever be connected with saying goodbye to my dad.
Mum and Dad had driven me down to London and we’d had the weekend together. For them, this was an enormous moment – their youngest child was leaving home. Mum, Dad and me had suffered when the twins moved out. Keith went first and the four of us took it badly. Then, twelve months later, Alan went, and the three of us took it badly. We missed them both terribly. Four years later, I was gone too. Imagine what that was like for my mum. In a five-year spell, three lads leaving home. God knows how she handled that. I, of course, was so caught up in my own life that I was blind to their perspective.
For the first eight months, I shared with Mark Carroll, himself now a long-established and successful actor. Remarkably, we’d studied together at Salford Tech, both travelling down to the audition thinking the same thing, This is going to fuck us up – they’re not going to take two northerners, from the same college. But they did. Living away from home wasn’t an issue. I needed to get away, cut the apron strings, and toughen up. But I was very paranoid about drama school itself. I felt like I shouldn’t be there. It was a massive culture shock for someone who had come from a very tight family and a very tight community to now be in the midst of the liberated, and also competitive, world of acting and drama. Thankfully, in those early days, I got close to an actor called Paul Higgins, a young lad from Glasgow, who would go on to star in The Thick of It among many other great roles, and an American actor, Dave Lansbury. In terms of the support that comes from friendship, those two were key, although there was a limit to my openness. The extreme self-doubt I was feeling wasn’t a subject for debate in the pub. Neither was my body dysmorphia, a secret I’d already been hiding for more than ten years but now began to blossom in the most grotesque of ways.
‘Chris,’ my dad would say to me of his childhood, ‘all I remember is being a hungry bastard.’ Dad was very skinny. He had lived through the ’30s, mass unemployment, and the deprivation that came with it. Respite was short – then came the rationing of the Second World War and beyond. Ronnie was one of six children. They were poor. Nana Ecc and Grandpa Pop worked hard, but that was a lot of kids to feed. Food, as in most working-class households, was more than sustenance. Its availability, or lack of, made it a deeply emotional issue.
When Dad himself became a father, his attitude was simple – ‘You eat what’s on your plate.’ And that, for me, was the first rebellion.
I was a healthy eater. I know because my mum told me. But something happened when I was between six and eight years old where I started to get faddy about food. It became a point of great conflict between me and my dad in particular. He was, after all, from a generation where, by necessity, you ate everything that was put in front of you. And there was me sat at the table refusing to eat.
I convinced myself that tomatoes made me heave, beef the same, and I wouldn’t put them in my mouth. I’d get all the stuff about malnutrition and the situation in Biafra, but I wasn’t going to be swayed. Neither were Mum and Dad. They’d make me eat and I’d retch at the table, which would make my dad really angry.
‘You’ll bloody eat it! You’ll sit there until it’s gone!’ Or I’d be sent into the kitchen.
It was sheer defiance. A journey into how far I could push his temper. How much could I stand up to? Psychological strength used in the most negative manner. I wanted to defy him. Not my mum. Him. I was saying, ‘Fuck you.’ I was exerting my will against my dad.
More than that, I was trying to express some kind of fear and separation. Fear at the atmosphere around my dad, and separation at growing up in a house with two pairs. Food was the obvious place to start. It was such an enormous part of the mechanism of the family that the slightest interference with the cogs would mess it up. My mum, I think it’s fair to say, is obsessed with food. She gets incredible pleasure out of talking about it, she’s a very good cook, and her day is planned around mealtimes. She loves the ceremony of food, and the memories.
I was driving her through Hampstead once. ‘Do you know where we are now?’ she asked. In my pretension, I thought she was going to tell me something about the history of the area.
‘That place there’, she pointed at a building, ‘was the first place I ever had chicken Kiev.’
Mum’s obsession stemmed from the same roots as Dad’s, rationing and scarcity. I feel like I got caught in the force of that. Rightly or wrongly – I feel more compelled to say wrongly – I felt oppressed by it. Not that I could have articulated it at the time, but it was like living the ’30s in the ’60s.
Mealtimes became all-consuming for me in a very negative way. I remember distinctly the way my dad ate. He had good manners, but I can recall the smacking of his mouth around food. It used to make me angry – irrationally angry.
He always got the most bread – and that was right, he was the biggest person in the house, the busiest, and the hungriest – but for some reason, from a very young age, again it irritated me. I wanted to challenge his dominance, as if I felt it wasn’t deserved, or he’d done something to invalidate his right to be at the head of the family. I felt the power he had in his hands was being abused. He was using it in a way that shadowed the entire house. Too often in the darkness he cast, it seemed, was my mum. Dad was never a snap-the-fingers type, always said please and thank you, but I felt like she was put upon. I knew Dad was a hard worker, but so was she, and I somehow instinctively felt it was unfair that she should do all the cooking and cleaning. We’re talking pre-feminism. As happens a lot, and especially in those days, the wife becomes a mother to the husband. Again, a mistake, but that was the social model, particularly for the working classes. This was the heyday of the patriarchy, when there was little or no expectation of equality in the home, but I twigged that our domestic set-up wasn’t right.
Dad adored my mum but didn’t always treat her as well as he could have done and, as a child, I was angry about it. I respected my mum completely, but I didn’t respect my dad completely. I challenged him, and probably antagonised him. You could say that’s what happens between the old line and the young, but my brothers didn’t do that. Maybe I had sensed what they hadn’t, that there was an injustice in the relationship between my mum and dad. And an injustice in the way he was with her compared to other people. My mum used to call Dad ‘The Two Ronnies’. She was basically saying he was an absolute sod at home but then could be so totally charming with visitors. When no one was around, he could be moody, withdrawn and nowty. As soon as people were in the house, he was ‘Hail
fellow well met’. There was definitely a public and private side to his character.
I felt my mum had been worn down a little, that she loved my dad but had lost some respect for him along the way. I felt my mum could have lived without my dad but my dad could not have lived without my mum. She had a lot on her plate and there was a period when I’d do things she hadn’t asked me to do, like tidy up, to help out. She would get headaches a lot, and I’d bring her a drink in a special glass that I’d won throwing darts at the fair. I was very ‘mummy’s boy’ and I was angry with Dad a lot of the time on the simple basis of ‘You can’t not be nice to my mum’.
That feeling she was somehow being treated unfairly contributed massively to a highly unsettled equilibrium. Mixed up in that was my own heightened sensitivity, stubbornness, and inbuilt reaction to challenge what I feel is wrong. I was trying to provoke him, provoke something, as if I knew there were unspoken issues and thought, I’ll bring them to a head. When it comes to confrontation, my career has been very much the same. If I encounter an authority figure who passes my X-ray, I can serve them happily. But if I find someone has been abusive with power, then it’s a red rag to a bull. If someone wants to make it nasty, I can make it very nasty – and it began right there at that dinner table. ‘If you want to cross me, if you want to abuse your power, I will challenge you.’ I’m cleverer now, I avoid those situations, but, make no mistake, I can exist in profound discomfort.
I felt like I was an irritant to Dad, that he didn’t have the time for me, and my behaviour was highlighting that as well. So much of my defiance at the table was about ‘You don’t like me’. It wasn’t true. He loved me, but he was a hard-working man. The modern, laid-back dad wasn’t around then. He’d done all the stuff with young kids running around the place with the twins, then, eight years later, I came along. I felt like I was a pain in the arse to him, which I probably was. I was flagging that up and did so by going for his Achilles heel – food. My not eating would, I knew, get to him. It wasn’t conscious, it was instinctive. How could I wind him up? How could I get at him? It was attention. Negative attention, and frightening, but attention. I wasn’t trying to get it from my mum, I was trying to get it from my dad.
Whether my mum and dad saw it as attention-seeking, I’m unsure. I expect they thought, This child is spoilt. I don’t blame them. I totally understand their point of view because all they saw was a kid who wouldn’t eat, an image blurred by their own lifelong experiences with food. And yet, beyond that image, obviously, emotionally, something bigger was happening. I was becoming very aware of myself. I would look at myself in the mirror or in photos when I was six or seven and be highly critical of my aesthetic appearance. I thought I had a pot belly and knobbly knees. I looked at my body and disapproved of it. I almost found it horrifying. I contrasted it with my brothers who I thought were physically very beautiful. My mum used to tell me that when Alan and Keith were younger they were often mistaken for girls. I never was. I was lumbered with my big frame, my height, my broader shoulders. I idealised my brothers. I had a crush on them. My thought process was clear – ‘There’s two of them, and there’s ugly me.’ I had very self-critical, unrealistic expectations. It was the start of a serious condition. I am a lifelong body-hater.
My attitude to my body was only emphasised when I encountered acting. In my mind, actors were thin, aesthetes, sensitive, poetic. I thought I looked like a brickie or a farm labourer, and certainly thought of myself as lacking sensitivity. In effect, I saw myself the way I’d been told the working classes were by the ‘great’ institutions of society. People who physically looked like me and came from my background could not be actors. I really felt the only way I could progress was by physically looking a certain way. My answer to that was to make myself something completely different.
No surprise, then, that food and appearance became my personal commentary the minute I was accepted into drama school on 5 January 1983. Between that date and September when I started, I lost a stone and a half, and that was from a standing start as a perfectly normal lad.
I lost that weight while still eating quite healthily. The problem really started in earnest when I got to Central. I just did not know what I was doing. I genuinely had no idea how I’d got in. Outwardly I was going along with the teaching but inwardly I didn’t feel I had any ability as an actor. At the same time, people had commented on my looks and my physical presence. That, to me, made me feel I was in quite a superficial industry, one not concerned with what’s inside. I’m a unit, quite striking, and that’s it. It was a view that was already formed in my head. Pre-London, my brothers had come to see me in a play at Salford Tech. Afterwards they told me, ‘It’s really weird, you look massive on stage.’ That clicked with me – ‘I’m here because of presence, I’m big, it’s the way I look.’
I’d gone to drama school with a head full of negatives, and nobody at drama school was offering an alternative view. I had no one to turn to and found myself in an environment where the predominance of my fellow students were from London and surrounding areas; people who had, or at least appeared to have, confidence and expectation, having sailed through every test and exam put in front of them. I thought of myself as a dullard, academically inferior. I knew I had a lively curiosity but felt I was ugly, not just physically, but spiritually. If someone has a classical education, they have a frame of references, for example with Shakespeare, which I felt I was totally lacking. I wished I’d had a classical education, without ever actually understanding what it meant. I felt completely out of my depth.
I genuinely hadn’t realised I was working class until I came to London. When you live a working-class life, working class is what you see. I had then entered a drama school in a middle-class area with middle-class people entering a middle-class profession. Aged nineteen, that was too big a realisation to process. With hindsight I can see my struggles. I had no sense of identity. The same can be said of being northern, not something I’d ever felt or considered before I went to drama school, other than an empathy with the life I saw in dramas such as Boys from the Blackstuff. When I was at drama school, though, being northern became very much a thing. The Smiths had broken through, as had a number of northern bands, and then the miners’ strike highlighted the social and political difference between the two halves of the country. Unsurprising, then, that going to London politicised me in a none too subtle way. It was the first time I felt northern working-class. I acted up to that, subsequently adopting all the clichés of the angry young man, but inside was this lonely scared child, a state of flux no better illustrated than in the poetry of Morrissey, which I listened to in private.
Whereas appearing as the Bloody Sergeant in Macbeth with Salford Tech had made me feel I could achieve a life as an actor, as soon as I got into Central, that belief began to disappear. There was a Geordie, a Glaswegian, a Manc, and me, a lad from Salford. The rest were southerners who had a veneer of sophistication that was very, very intimidating. At least, that’s how it felt to me at the time. Looking back now, I expect they were just as anxious as I was. All I felt was that I didn’t belong at the drama school and didn’t belong in my own skin. Maybe that’s what a lot of late adolescents feel – there’s just not a lot of late adolescents who then put themselves up for judgement. That churning inner turmoil meant food soon became one of the last areas over which I had the power to dictate.
When I looked at myself in the mirror, I was constantly seeing fat. Actually, I was skeletal, but all I’d see were exactly the same discrepancies I saw as that small child – the pot belly and the knock knees. Sometimes people would be shocked at my physical state – ‘God, you look thin.’ I’d be pleased. They were telling me I looked beautiful. I’d then try to kill the conversation. I was scared of anyone getting nearer to what was happening. At that point, I didn’t know I was ill, but I was very aware of being unhappy. I hated my physical appearance because, no matter what I did, I was still fat and ugly. I was drowning in self-disgust. To dr
ag my way back to the surface I would try to make myself look how I imagined Shelley or Keats looked.
At my worst, I’d have breakfast and then eat nothing else for the rest of the day. I had a period where I’d get up in the morning and go to a sandwich shop outside West Hampstead station called Mr Gingham – it’s still there – and get two brown barm cakes with hummus, eat them, and that would be it for that day. I’d dream about food all night. All I’d think about was going to Mr Gingham in the morning and getting those sandwiches. I feel very embarrassed and very ashamed. I think how my mum and dad would feel reading this, and my brothers, and I worry, but it was a mental illness – and one that almost saw me choke to death. That particular day I had no breakfast but instead set out a meal for myself, Ryvita with cheese and tomatoes. ‘You can eat when you get in,’ I muttered as I pulled the door of my bedsit shut. I’d thought about nothing else all day, to the extent that when I finally got in, the door had barely closed when I took an enormous bite. The Ryvita was completely lodged in my throat. For five minutes, I thrashed around, desperately gasping for breath, before, somehow, I coughed it up. If I hadn’t, no one would ever have known what was happening. I’d have lain there for days before anyone found me. I’d have died as a direct result of starving myself. A direct result of anorexia. Next day, I left that bedsit as I always did, wearing a mask. ‘Look, everybody, I’m northern, I’m hard.’ I wasn’t going to go out shouting, ‘Look, everyone, I’ve got low self-esteem and an eating disorder.’
I didn’t help my condition by starting a relationship early on at college. The worst thing you can do when you enter a major new arena is find one person in that crowd and have a relationship. The newness, the fear, the nervousness generated by the move means you quickly become dependent on that other person. Effectively, you are finding yourself a mum or a brother or a sister. If that relationship then doesn’t work, you are left fending for yourself.
I Love the Bones of You Page 9