I Love the Bones of You

by Christopher Eccleston;

  To have such joy in my life is incredible. I am a man who, like the majority, has been held hostage by buried emotion. The ransom could never be paid because the required currency was personal openness and honesty. And yet now, finally, I feel freedom. I was thinking today about some of the major issues in my life, and, as I did so, I became conscious of my mental mechanism. But instead of sinking me into depression and negativity, as would previously happen, that mechanism was positively reinforcing my decisions and the way forward. It was almost as if I could feel the neurons firing in my brain – ‘It will be fine,’ they were telling me, ‘you are doing a good job. It will work out.’ I’ve never had a moment like that, ever, where I’ve felt I’m actively monitoring my own brain activity in a positive manner. Prior to my severe clinical depression, my motor was entirely the opposite. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I am aware of a period of paradise pre-breakdown, but it boils down to a single afternoon when I was walking down Coniston Avenue on the grass verge on a warm summer’s day. A car drove past with the windows down and I could hear ‘Summer Breeze’ by the Isley Brothers on the radio.

  In that moment, I felt blissful – ‘This is me, doing this, right now.’ An awareness of presence, an awareness of happiness. I believe that was a moment of out-of-body euphoria where, for once, briefly, my mental processes emerged from the cloud. Otherwise my engagement with the world was permanently shadowed. I suspect 50 per cent of that is nature, the way I came into this world, my genetic predisposition. The other half is the separation I have talked about, being alone among two pairs, and the years prior to my dad’s nervous breakdown when he moved from being a stacker truck driver to a foreman, years when, while I never thought it intellectually, his rages traumatised me to the point where I firmly believe there was part of me thinking I could die.

  It is my breakdown that finally allowed me a release from the mindset of that terrified little boy, the most terrifying thing to have ever happened to me, and yet by far the most revelatory. But I am acutely aware that many, perhaps the majority, don’t come through such an experience intact. I did, and to do so has given me so much understanding of myself. It’s given me self-respect, and also confidence, because I saw myself through it. I was helped by chemicals, medication and brilliant people, but I went and sought that help.

  A therapist once said to me, ‘We don’t ask to come into this life. We have no choice on the matter. We have no choice when and how we leave. We leave whether we want to or not. And in the middle of those two things is this tranche that we have to make sense of.’ And it’s true. That’s why I drop what happened to my mental health into conversation very easily. I realise it’s part of human experience, it informs every day of my life, and, having been such an extreme event, it was bound to. I was walking along late last year, the dog days of November, and the light was so murky it could have been eight in the morning or eight at night.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I winced, ‘this is miserable.’

  And then I had another thought, Hang on, actually this is great compared to how I once felt.

  That’s a change in me that has been brought about by a near-death experience. The glass is always half full now. It was always half empty before. I faced my own death. I know what that’s like – terrifying – but it has made me calmer. I feel weathered, experienced, happier. I face my problems now with fortitude, not fear. I have come to recognise that I was seeing my world, and my place in it, through an unorthodox prism. The shards that sprang from it included acting and adventure. They also included anorexia, self-loathing and, inexorably, breakdown.

  I’m grateful for the body dysmorphia, grateful for the self-hatred, the combative approach to authority, the self-sabotage, because again, like the breakdown, they will inform my relationship with my children, allowing ongoing and mutual freedom of expression that I hope will help them tackle their own problems in life. I have taken what I learnt from my own father/son dynamic and taken it into that relationship. Dad loved me, could be incredibly tender, and proud, but those expressions of affection were hugely overshadowed by a chronic lack of communication. I internalised a lot of his moods and his frustrations and depressions and would be deeply upset were my children to do the same. Again, that is why I can thank a severe clinical suicidal depression. It was excruciating in its hurt, but it managed to break the chain. I’m at peace now, know where I am, know what I’ve got to do, know where I’m going. My children will surprise me and scare me but I’m ready for anything because I know how extreme and complex I myself was as a child and young person.

  I know also that my mum and dad weren’t afforded the luxury of such awareness. They didn’t have the opportunity to ponder quirks of personality in themselves or anyone else. They were educated until they were fourteen and then kicked out into the workplace. They received one message and one message only – that they, and everyone like them, were worthless. That made the truth of my father difficult to find. When it comes to Albert and Esme, I hope their search for the truth of their dad will be rather easier to uncover, not hidden, shielded behind centuries of stultifying convention in which emotional honesty, by a perverse necessity, was smothered at birth. The truth of their dad will be plain to see. I don’t want them to search online to find out about me, nor feel a need to analyse my performances down the years. Never must they peer hopelessly over a barrier of non-communication. There has been honesty from the start. The cycle of silence has been broken, scrapped, remoulded into something that screams openness.

  Esme asked me the other day, ‘Daddy, do you like Mummy?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘when me and Mummy met, we fell in love and had you. Having two children very quickly is hard on parents in a relationship and then Mummy and Daddy started to not like each other. Now, Esme, as you’ve seen, we are trying to be friends.’

  As a child, I would have liked that level of honesty and candidness with my parents, but it was no more part of Ronnie and Elsie than it had been their parents, and so on and so on before. I completely understand that the openness switch was neither at their fingertips nor was it socially reinforced. Emotion could hold a working-class child back, make them unready for what was to come – what they were for. I am thankful to have been given the opportunity to have a more grounded relationship with my children. Before Albert and Esme, playing football, wrestling, doing a crossword or mock-boxing with my own dad were the happiest things I could ever imagine in my life. They go right to the heart of me. Now, I have a new happiness with my own children. And it is a happiness born of honesty.

  The blight on that happiness is that I don’t live with them. I know I’ve yet to come to terms with that fact. This book will help, the increasing distance from the hospitalisation will help, but it’s something that will always hurt inside. The legal system could certainly help deliver balance for parents and children involved in separation and divorce. Hopefully, we are in the dog days of the Victorian view of men and women and their role in their children’s lives, which has led to institutional and historic bias. In the twenty-first century, an authentic emotional relationship can come from a man as much as a woman. I’ve tried very hard to achieve that with Albert and Esme. Even though there was a six-month hiatus in my relationship with them, it didn’t feel like there was a barrier between us when we resumed because of how involved emotionally and in every other way I had always been in their lives. Until I had children, I was a selfish and self-obsessed man who’d been pursuing his career and taking care of himself and himself alone, but when they came I understood completely that the love comes from the drudgery – the nappies and the sleepless nights – and I was more than ready to put myself aside. I love that unseen side of parenting. If Albert or Esme had colic and I could put them on my shoulder for two or three hours and it went, that to me genuinely felt like a bigger achievement than playing Macbeth. It really did. Parenthood isn’t about me; it’s about them. I’ve spent my life trying to understand human motivation and what shapes us, and now her
e I am involved in shaping other human beings, my flesh and blood, given a wide-open window into how impressionable we are and how we receive the world. It’s fascinating. And they’re yours. Yours and your partner’s. And if that relationship fails, it’s for the legal system to help, equally, for you and your partner to rebuild and share.

  Back in 1932, when Mum entered the world, equality wasn’t even a pipe dream. Dad’s imprint is all over this book, but I’ll never let it be forgotten the huge role Mum has played in my life. While Dad’s investment tended to depend on his mood, Elsie could never be so fickle. Her expectations for herself were secondary to those for her family. The sacrifices she made, conscious or otherwise, have given me a beautiful constancy. I never dream about my mum. Brothers, mates, my dad, are all there, but never my mum. That shows how utterly at peace with her I am. I always was, almost to the point of taking her for granted. Mum is the one I’ve always relied on to be there, and she always has been. Were she to enter my dreams, then that would fall into the realms of her not being there, which, of course, one day is inevitable. She will still, though, like my dad, be the epicentre of myself.

  It says a lot about social conditioning that, even with such a strong female presence, I should have spent so much of my life trying to be like my dad and not trying to be like my dad. There is one element of Ronnie, however, on whose proximity to myself I am unable, at this stage at least, to deliver a verdict. Is dementia going to happen to me? It’s an appropriate question, and one, inevitably, that looms larger as I get older, just as it did for my dad. When he watched Grandpa Pop go mad, it’s unarguable that a thought would have been reverberating in his head – Christ, I hope that doesn’t happen to me. And now I’m thinking the same. But why shouldn’t it? I share so many characteristics with my dad, why should dementia be any different? Here I am, a bloke who’s written this book about his dad and dementia, and there’s almost an inevitability it will happen to me.

  Am I living with that dread? Definitely, there’s an inner fear. I don’t want to be in his position. I felt unbelievable pity for him thrashing about that hospital bed, having this person, me, trying to keep his hand away from his penis to stop him pulling off the catheter. It could have been any human being and I’d have felt the same degree of pity. Could that be me one day? No one can honestly know. But I can’t help but wonder. Certainly, I am more forgetful now than I’ve ever been, but as a parent, as a working person, that’s unavoidable. Memory loss is part of the ageing process. Its little joke is to come just as you have so much to cram in.

  In Macbeth, there was a scene where every night I would bang my head on the floor. I kept thinking, I shouldn’t be doing this – I’m inviting trouble down the line, but I know also that I’ve given myself as good a chance as I can. I’ve kept myself fit all my life, kept the weight off, clearly to extremes at times, and when I have my heart and blood pressure tested, the professionals always tell me how good they are for a man my age. In my mid-fifties, I was recently told I have the metabolic age of a man of forty-two. Maybe, however, personality type will override all that, which makes me think dementia is indeed very likely to call. I’ve echoed my dad, in mind and body, all my life. Is it realistic to expect our paths to diverge over the last few miles? The probability we will remain entwined means I’ve put together a healthcare package for myself in later life. I love Albert and Esme so much. If the time comes when I’m swallowed by dementia, I don’t want them to have to go through what I did with my dad. I don’t want it to consume their lives. I don’t want it to scar again and again and again.

  The difference in the end may be that, unlike Dad, I have been allowed to live. He could have been an actor. He had all the raw materials, intelligence, a mercurial emotional life, life experience. But it was me who was given my freedom. I have a job that I love and that stimulates me. As his soul was caged, so mine has roamed. Maybe that will save me. If it does, there’s a chance I could find myself aged eighty playing King Lear and acting dementia. That resonance isn’t lost on me. If I do play Lear, he will be based on that image of my dad, naked, trying to pull the catheter out – that poor, bare, forked animal. Stripped in every way. As with Macbeth, Dad will be right up there on stage with me.

  Let’s face it, he already physically accompanies me in every role. The resemblance is clear. A cursory glance at any photo in this book will explain where I got that nose, those ears. What always struck me more, though, were his shoes. The left one would be perfect, the right looked older by a decade, smashed up on one side because of his gait. My shoes are a size bigger but exactly the same. Peter Bowker calls my walk the ‘Margate pimp roll’. I have, without any conscious knowledge, quite literally followed in Dad’s footsteps. Perhaps that, more than any mental analysis, any time in an armchair being quizzed by a cigar-puffing psychologist, reveals my essential obsession with Ronnie Ecc.

  I was in two minds whether to write this book. Again and again, well into the process, I have woken in the night and asked myself a simple question, ‘What am I trying to achieve?’ I never drifted back off entirely sure, but I knew the last thing I ever wanted was for these pages to be a celebration of my Wikipedia entry. ‘This is me – look what I’ve done!’ There’s always been a disconnect with me and celebrity. I’ve never embraced it. I’m not stupid, I see people recognise me, but from the first few minutes of it happening around Manchester in the early ’90s, I saw it for what it was, dismissed it, and never engaged with it. That has been a very healthy thing in my life. Forget ‘celebrity’, ‘the business’; I wanted this book to explore elements far more deep and elemental – the nature of father/son relationships, dementia, masculinity, mental health. I wanted it to show that to succeed is not always to keep your head down and try to fit in. And, most importantly of all, I wanted to throw a spotlight on the generations, the millions and millions, for whom ‘success’, defined as anything other than the basic survival of themselves and their family, was a concept of which they were denied to the extent that they were chained, leg, wrist and neck, to an institutionally blessed mindset of zero expectation. To those in charge of those institutions, the working class is as it describes. A production line of workers, nothing more, nothing less. People? With character, hope, intelligence, ambition? Forget it. Get back in your box and shut up.

  I was asked a few years ago to go on the BBC genealogy show Who Do You Think You Are? I agreed and they started looking into my family tree. It says everything that the project went nowhere. They tugged aside the leaves on those branches and concluded, ‘Nothing to see here.’ Generations of working-class people dismissed. Individuals with their own hopes, dreams and stories. Not army generals, industrialists, vaudeville singers, but factory workers, farm labourers, cleaners, nothing in any way ‘sexy’ enough for TV.

  No doubt if someone like me had popped up in the dim and distant, all would have been good. But why? My father had all my abilities, linguistically, physically, and then some. So, no doubt, did generations before him. I get that my life has been far more fulfilled than my father’s and those before him, but for me that makes him the far more interesting story. What do I know of life? I’m not driving stacker trucks all day at Colgate-Palmolive and then going to Bulmers and driving stacker trucks there all night. I’m not cleaning floors in a launderette like Mum. And yet how often is the story of the working class ever told on TV? I don’t mean the dross that is soaps. I mean properly told? The answer is less and less. Working-class stories don’t fit in boxsets. They don’t make money. They don’t fit the business model of selling to global TV. And yet they are the lives that talk to me, define me. They are the lives I find endlessly fascinating. I would like one day to make a series about dementia, play the role of someone in a home, and that same person on his route to getting there. The person he is, was, and everything in between. That person will, of course, intentional or otherwise, be my dad. Until I die, every role I play will be my dialogue with my dad continued.

  There is something ins
ide me that dislikes intensely the fact that we live in a world where only the stories of people like myself ‘matter’. But if readers of this book see I was anorexic, had a nervous breakdown, was wracked with self-doubt, and harboured a rollcall of other issues, and draw something from it, then its writing has been justified. I hope it helps to see that someone, a reasonably successful actor, was actually dodging, and occasionally plunging headfirst, into mental crevasses so sadly familiar to us all. That, like so many others, my life is a 1,000-piece jigsaw tipped daily onto the floor.

  When I read The Boy Who Was Afraid as a child, it was an early indication of how I have spent a lifetime thinking about myself, same as my dad, and his family before him. My mum and dad’s lives were ruled by fear – fear of money, fear of unemployment, fear of illness, fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of not using the right cutlery in a hotel. That parcel was passed along and ended up with me. And yet I wanted to play Macbeth at the RSC, and I did it. I wanted to play a lead at the Olivier Theatre, and I did it. I’m not bigging myself up; I’m saying that anybody else who feels they are The Boy Who Was Afraid can do it too. I want to tell my story because I hope it’s universal. I’ve never felt good enough, always felt afraid, never quite trusted my head, but somehow . . .

  Now I have a book on a shelf too. Again, though, its meaning goes way beyond simple achievement. As soon as the first seed of this idea was sown, I had a single thought, Of all the things my dad could have done, he would have loved to have written a book. It was, I think, my dad’s great unexpressed unconscious desire. His passion for language, his love of crosswords, was where we always connected. If my dad had walked into a bookshop and seen ‘by Christopher Eccleston’, I know he’d have found it incredible. He knew I played Hamlet and countless other significant roles, but if I told him there was going to be a book with our name on it, that would have been a different level. If he was still here to see it, I’d remind him of one thing – all this started with his dictionary.