- 13 -
While I was failing to achieve sporting prowess, I remember as I walk up onto Primrose Hill, where a group of schoolboys are playing football with the seriousness of Guardian readers discussing independent cinema, I was often supervised by a teacher smoking a cigar. It was Mr Roberts, the one who wrote comic plays about the politics of early imperial Rome, and he was just as averse to exercise as I was.
We were divided up for sport and I certainly wasn’t in the scholarship set there. I was in ‘Group B’ with all the other speccy nerds and, when we were in Mr Roberts’s unenthusiastic charge, we didn’t have to play football – a relief all round as it’s difficult to get a game going when all the players are running away from the ball. Mr Roberts didn’t seem to own a tracksuit and so, instead of having to negotiate the muddy playing field, he just told us to run round the University Parks, where he could stand on the tarmac path in his Chelsea boots and leather jacket, puffing away.
But sometimes football was unavoidable. I didn’t realise that mud had a smell before I first walked into the school’s small pavilion in the corner of the sports field to change from plimsolls into football boots. The floor was littered with dried clods from the bottom of other boys’ boots with holes where the studs had been – like little mud six-pack rings for cork-sized beer cans – and it gave off an odd, flat, nothingy scent. Like the olfactory equivalent of white noise. It depressed me and made me feel sorry for the boys for whom the bland smell of chalk and books was equally unsettling.
I also fiercely resisted attempts to make me try for swimming badges. These were an obsession of my parents, largely because Richard Slater kept getting them. Richard Slater was, like me (and I hope he’ll forgive me for saying so), a timorous weed. We were good friends and our parents were good friends. Then, at some point, we stopped being friends – I don’t really know why. From then on, it seemed, all I would hear about him was his swimming prowess. My parents wouldn’t shut up about what badges he was trying for or getting, and how I should be doing the same thing. It wasn’t just distance swimming but various proficiency and survival awards, named after Olympic metals, which seemed to involve a bewildering range of aqua-activities: treading water for various periods of time in various states of undress, retrieving objects from the bottom of the pool, befriending dolphins, etc. The holders of the gold awards, it seemed to me, would have been able to infiltrate Atlantis.
It was really wearing. I wanted to say: ‘Look, do you want me to actually be Richard Slater? Is that your big idea? Because, I’d say, overall I prefer me to Richard Slater and I think you do too. You don’t get to cherry-pick the good aspects of Richard Slater and add them to all my stuff. You take the Slater swimming but you’ll be stuck with all the other tedious Slaterisms into the bargain!’
But I did feel a bit guilty. What was wrong with me, I wondered, that I found the prospect of going to a swimming pool for weekly lessons, building up to an unnecessary test in which you had to swim a terrifying distance and then fashion a rudimentary float out of a pair of pyjamas, so unappealing? I hated the thought of that test and its pointless survival situation. What was it supposed to prepare us for? A world where air travel has disappeared and, in this post-aeroplane future where we’re all getting liners to the United States because that’s where the food is, the U-boats only attack at night?
So, what did I have to fill the gap where obsessive sport-love wasn’t?
Love Life: obviously not – not at that age. I’m middle-class. And don’t hold your breath, by the way. If that’s what you’re here for, you’ll have to skip forward a long way. But careful you don’t crease the spine because you may just want to get your money back. So, no love life or crushes or trysts. By which I mean both (a) I didn’t have a prepubescent sweetheart, to whom I used coyly to give daisies while wearing a straw hat and posing for a greetings card photographer and with whom I had my first fumbling sexual experiences four or five years later in a hay loft – or possibly a straw loft, full of straw waiting to be turned into hats; and (b) I wasn’t abused.
At some point in 1986 I remember getting an erection watching a Madonna video, although I had absolutely no idea what to do about it and no way of getting in touch with Madonna to ask.
Hobbies: I collected badges. Non-swimming badges. But only out of duty, like a Japanese businessman glumly taking golf lessons. If we went to any tourist attraction – Warwick Castle, the Tower of London, etc. – I would always buy a badge from the gift shop and I kept all those badges in a tin. I never wore them, I never displayed them, they’re probably still in the drawer in Oxford where I last added to them in about 1987.
I don’t know what gift shops sell these days – I never go into them. Probably themed iPod covers, business card cases, novelty condoms, cheese knives and melon ballers. Maybe porn? Maybe you can get tourist-attraction-themed jazz mags where the Madame Tussauds waxworks are all doing each other in a big gangbang. I wouldn’t be surprised. Honestly, what is the world coming to? I’m really surprised.
Speaking of gangbangs, or gangs at the very least, I didn’t join the Cub Scouts. That’s what you had to do if you wanted to become a proper human – or so my parents heavily implied. It would be a great way of meeting other children and broadening my range of interests, so that I didn’t just spend all my time watching Knight Rider – that was their view. I did not share it. I had an aversion to fresh air and didn’t want to go camping. That seemed to be the jewel in the cubs’ crown of activities – or the turd in their cesspit, as I saw it. The concept of the cubs was bad enough: on top of having had to develop friendships and a survival strategy for school, this was a new group where you had to find allies and evade enemies.
Also, it would wipe out an evening a week. I jealously guarded my TV-watching time. It was always being encroached upon by homework (or ‘prep’ as we called it – that’s one of Britain’s hidden class signifiers). I saw no reason to commit to anything else. And also, all the cubs’ activities that didn’t involve going away from home and sleeping outdoors (something my parents were so keen to encourage and, yet, if I’d mooted it in my late teens under the influence of heroin, you can bet they’d have raised objections – honestly, you can’t win with some people) were almost as bad: lighting fires, cooking, sewing, chopping, climbing. All the wholesome shit that I hated and, when brought into contact with, hated myself for hating.
The only hobby I really enjoyed was writing. I developed the habit, whenever we were watching TV as a family and I wasn’t particularly gripped by the programme, of writing a sort of endless fantasy epic. It involved kings and emperors and wizards and dragons and wars. It was sort of cod-Tolkien, I suppose, but even less likely to come to a satisfying conclusion before you lost the will to live.
I wasn’t a Tolkien fan. I spent the best part of a year trying to get through The Lord of the Rings, finally grinding to a halt halfway through The Two Towers. I don’t know why there are adults who treat its tedious daftness with such awed solemnity. That just makes it less fun. And it’s zero fun to start with. Even something that is a tiny bit fun, like pressing the button to make an electric garage door go up, is infinitely more fun than the endless moaning of a jewellery-obsessed, hairy-footed midget.
Anyway, I would write and write and write this epic. It wasn’t supposed to be entertaining – I just did it for the pleasure of filling the pages. I wrote it in play form, enjoying the escapism of seeing drab mundanities being exchanged between people supposedly living in fantastical circumstances. It probably read like an EastEnders script except all the characters were wearing armour or capes or crowns or wizards’ hats. Like an EastEnders Hallowe’en special.
I also loved the look of the playscript format: writing the character’s name in capital letters with the dialogue next to it and how they might say it (‘angrily’, ‘quietly’, ‘waving his wand’, ‘dropping his axe in horror’) and putting all other business in stage directions. I sat there, night after night, filling page after page, gaining satisfaction merely from there being more of it, with no thought of it ever being staged or even read. No wonder my parents encouraged me to join the cubs.
Family: Yes, I had a family, who loved me and whom I took completely for granted. My brother Daniel was born when I was seven and a half, which was an event I was more or less against to be perfectly honest. His arrival was an unsettling experience. I was too old to display a toddler’s resentment that my place at the centre of the universe had been supplanted, but I still experienced those feelings.
Years later, when I was best man at his wedding, this is what I said about it in my speech:
Unlike most best men, I can take the story of the groom right back to the beginning. Well, almost. I’m not going to start discussing my parents’ love life of the early ’80s. That never goes well on occasions such as these. But I do remember when I was told, at the age of seven, that I was soon going to have a little brother or sister. I think my parents were concerned about what my reaction would be because they presented the news as if it was an event entirely designed to please me.
‘You know how you like having friends round to play? And you get annoyed that that can’t happen more often?’ they said. ‘Well, soon there’ll be someone for you to play with all the time!’
I was good at maths. I did a quick calculation. This sibling, I reasoned, was still some months away and I was getting older all the time. So, when this new person was nought, I would be seven and a half. When I was nine, he would be one and a half.
‘Someone for me to play with?!’ I exclaimed to my parents. ‘I don’t play with people who are six! People who are eight don’t play with me! How long will it be before he can talk?’
‘A year and a half,’ ventured my mother.
A year and a half?! That was more time than I could imagine. And presumably, even then, my one-and-a-half-year-old brother wouldn’t exactly be a sophisticated conversationalist. It appeared that my parents’ well-meaning ‘get David a friend to play with’ scheme was hopelessly ill thought-through.
‘Is there any way it can be stopped?’ I asked. I must be one of the few best men ever to have toasted the marriage of a man he initially advocated aborting.
That’s not to say I didn’t love him as soon as he arrived. I did. I worried about him. I wanted to protect him. It would have been awful if anything had happened to him. That all came naturally to me. But I’m afraid I had the imagination to realise that, had Dan never existed, I logically wouldn’t be able to miss him – and neither would I have had to deal with all the changes to our circumstances: the noise, the nappies, the tiredness of my parents, the necessity of moving house. I resented all this even if I didn’t resent him for it.
And I had a strong sense that the standards my parents expected of their offspring were dropping. He seemed to get away with stuff that I didn’t (even when making allowances for infancy – I wasn’t envious of his right to shit on the go). For example, I was pretty convinced that I was never allowed to draw on the walls. When going round the supermarket with Dan and my mum, he would be given a packet of crisps to eat for which we had not yet paid. And we had to leave Santa Claus: the Movie halfway through because he was screaming blue murder. I still don’t know how that ends.
But I hope you’ve inferred from the fact that I was later to be best man at his wedding that our relationship improved after that. By the time he was five, I was properly pleased he was there. I realised I’d be lonely without him. By the time he was 11, I was leaving home and sorry to be abandoning him. Not that he needed my help with our parents, of course. They let him draw on the bloody walls.
Dan still lives in Oxford, where he works for a hedge fund as their ‘official historian’. I don’t know what he tells them other than that, in the long run, you’re fucked whatever you invest in. I don’t see him as often as I’d like, but when I do we generally go to the pub to drink and talk about real ale. We both enjoy that. Deal with it.
The other major change our family underwent while I was at New College School was Grandpa dying. I was ten. In some ways, this is the worst thing that has ever happened to me. It’s definitely the worst thing that ever happened to him.
He was relatively old – 73, I think – which is about par for a death in the mid 1980s, I believe. Not strictly a tragedy, anyway. And I think he’d had a happy life. His marriage was incredibly happy and he loved his daughter and grandchildren very much. He was also properly and unselfconsciously religious which, as a muddle-headed agnostic, I rather envy.
We were very close and I officially considered him the best person in the world. I remember he was a bit fat and he wore black-framed glasses. I remember that he smoked Silk Cut and would send me upstairs to fetch a new packet from a cupboard in which he had also secreted Lindt chocolate animals. I remember that he made very good chips and swam in the sea with a slow, confident crawl. I remember that he was a big fan of Minder. But mainly I remember a feeling of being loved by someone kind and special, who knew that the important things in life were fish and chips, ice cream and the seaside. Had he lived another ten years or so, I would have undoubtedly seen him differently, he wouldn’t have remained perfect in my eyes – no human could. But I would like to have known him with an older brain.
I cried for hours when I heard the news. I went over the awfulness of it hundreds of times and instinctively wrung grief out of myself. It was the most emotionally healthy thing I’ve ever done in my life and, as a result, saddened and oddly aged though I remained as a result, I genuinely came to terms with his death. What worries me about this is that I never cry these days. I lost the ability at some point in my late teens which makes me fear that I’m now emotionally unfused. Or perhaps it’s just because nothing as bad as that has happened to me since?
How ridiculous is it – how absurdly blessed am I – that the death of my grandfather in the middle of my childhood is the worst single event in my life? I’ve had a tremendous run of luck for which I am enormously grateful, but I’m also enormously fearful of it running out.
Friends: I was all right for friends – it wasn’t just aqua-Slater. In fact, I made some very good ones. I’m still in touch with some of the other boys from Form VI, and a few of them are proper friends – people you have things in common with other than your past.
Obviously I didn’t get together and play football with Leo, Ed and Harry. Neither did we dress up and pretend to be The Professionals. Although I’d quite like to do that now, which I must remember the next time I see them. I’d reached the stage where we mostly just sat around and played board games, which wasn’t as exciting as watching Knight Rider – but unfortunately Knight Rider was only on for an hour a week. That’s partly why I was so resentful when my parents complained that I spent ‘all my time’ watching it.
Home: We had dry rot. If you’ve ever had anything to do with dry rot, I know that will have got your attention. ‘Bloody hell, dry rot!’ you’ll be saying like someone with a bad back hearing about a bad back. (If, like me, you’ve had a life blighted by both dry rot and a bad back, my God you must be enjoying this book.) If not, let me tell you, dry rot is a nightmare. It is literally the worst sort of rot.
We had moved house to a place round the corner which was definitely better but in a much worse state of repair. My brother was changing from an incredibly unruly baby, who seemed never to sleep, into a fearless toddler. As a result of having to eradicate the dry rot, my parents were short of money, which worried me. It felt like the writing was on the wall – but that was Dan’s fault. I didn’t want us to become like Lacey’s family from Cagney and Lacey. I wanted us to be like the Bellamys from Upstairs, Downstairs.
But, other than the dry rot and the felt-tip on the skirting-boards, I liked being at home. It was where the television was.