How Did All This Happen?
How Did All This Happen?
John Bishop
If you’re a man of a certain age you’ll know there comes a point in life when getting a sports car and over-analysing your contribution to society sounds like a really good idea.With a good job in sales and marketing and a nice house in Manchester that he shared with his wife and kids, John Bishop was no different when he turned the dreaded 4-0. But instead of spanking a load of cash on a car that would have made him look like a senior stylist at Vidal Sassoon, he stumbled onto a pathway that ultimately lead him to become one of the nation’s best loved comedians. It was a gamble, but boy, did it pay off.How Did All This Happen? is the story of how a boy who, growing up on a council estate dreaming of ousting Kenny Dalglish from Liverpool FC’s starting line-up, suddenly found himself on stage in front of thousands of people nationwide, at an age when he should have known better.In his own inimitable style, John guides us through his life from leaving the estate and travelling the globe on a shoe string, to marriage, kids and the split that led him to being on a stage complaining to strangers one night – the night that changed his life and started his journey to stardom.Wonderfully entertaining and packed with colourful reminiscences and comical anecdotes, this is a heart-warming, life-affirming and ultimately very, very funny memoir from one of the nation’s greatest comedians.
Copyright (#u09671441-da0a-50d6-bbc5-05f0c2624236)
HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
FIRST EDITION
© John Bishop 2013
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
All images are © the author, with the following exceptions:
Image 9 used courtesy of the Southport Visiter; Image 10 © Runcorn & Widnes World; Image 15 and 16 © Steve Porter (Potsy), Image 17 and 18 © Ged McCann; Image 32 © Daniel Sutka; Image 37 © Paul Home, Image 39 © Harvey Collard; Image 41 © Mark Taylor/tangerine; Image 42 © Hamish Brown, Image 43 © ITV/Kieron McCarron; Image 46 © Des Willie, Image 47 © Rhian Ap Gruffydd, Image 48 and 49 © Tom Dymond; Image 50 and 51 © Rhian Ap Gruffydd; Image 52, 53 and 54 © Rhian Ap Gruffydd, Image 55 © Tom Dymond.
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014 Cover photographs © Rankin
John Bishop asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.co.uk/green (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/green)
Source ISBN: 9780007436125
Ebook Edition © October 2013 ISBN: 9780007436156
Version: 2014-07-17
This book is dedicated to Melanie and our sons Joe, Luke and Daniel.
You give me a reason for everything.
CONTENTS
Cover (#u23e1b1cf-71a2-5333-8957-dbee4fcdf9c9)
Title Page (#ubabfb408-33e7-5a46-9676-b9cf4b6ab9da)
Copyright
Dedication (#ub60dd1f3-3d35-56be-972b-946c7a647601)
Acknowledgements
Foreword
1. Hello World
2. My Dad and Cars
3. A Boy Learning Adult Lessons
4. School and a Friend Called Kieran
5. Teenage Kicks
6. All I Learnt in School
7. Newcastle
8. I Don’t Eat Meat, or Fight Paratroopers
9. Moving On
10. The Manchester Years
11. The Great U S of A
12. Football
13. Time to Grow Up
14. Learning to Ride
15. Road to Bangkok
16. Indian Days
17. A Day in Buxton Changed Everything
18. A Yank Called Joe
19. A Town That Didn’t Exist
20. Marriage, Fatherhood and Idiot Friends
21. Babies, a Surprise I Didn’t Want and the Snip
22. Bad Hair Day, Removal Vans and Broken Hearts
23. Frog and Bucket
24. Sometimes I Try to Be Funny
25. We All Have to Die on Our Arse Some Time
26. Life Saver
27. How a Wardrobe Can Change Your Life
28. ‘Mum, I’m on Telly!’
29. Festival of Broken Dreams
30. We Are the Champions!
31. On Tour
32. It’s Always Better When It’s Full
33. Opportunity Knocks
34. 2010 … No Going Back
35. Sport Relief
36. A Family Day at Wembley
37. Week of Hell
Picture Section
Postscript
About the Publisher
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#u09671441-da0a-50d6-bbc5-05f0c2624236)
This book is the book I never thought I would write, because I never imagined I would have lived the life that appears in these pages. I don’t regard my life as anything special: like everyone else, there have been times when I have been so happy I have cried and so sad that there was nothing left to do but laugh. Yet to reach the point of putting it all on paper required the help of various people, some of whom I wish to thank here. I have to thank James Rampton who helped me sift through my thoughts to make what is on the page make sense. Everyone at HarperCollins, particularly Anna Valentine for her support from the first meeting to this eventually being printed; a support that has made all the difference. Gemma Feeney at Etch PR for getting people interested in this book. Lisa Thomas, my agent, business partner and friend who took me on when nobody else wanted me and changed my world. Everyone at LTM for their support, especially Emily Saunders, who manages to know what I should be doing when I have no idea. To the lads – you know who you are and, before you worry, this is my story, not our story, so hopefully no divorces will result from these pages. Thank you for your friendship, for the memories and mostly for the material. I have to thank my mum and dad for guiding me through childhood to becoming the person I am today, and thank Eddie, Kathy and Carol for being on that journey with me as part of the Bishop family. You were the people who made the foundations of the man I am today and I will forever be grateful for that love. My wife, Melanie, I have to thank because in so many ways she is the glue that holds these pages together and without her I am not sure there would be much of a story to tell. My three sons, Joe, Luke and Daniel, to whom I am nothing more than just a pain-in-the-arse dad but who have filled my heart in ways I probably have never been the best at showing. I have to thank my dog Bilko – he doesn’t know it, but badgering me for a walk often allowed me to get my head clear when I didn’t know what to write next. I finally want to thank everyone who has ever bothered to come and see me perform. Comedy changed my life, but without an audience I would just be a man talking to himself and, having done that too many times, I will always appreciate you being there, perhaps more than you will ever know.
FOREWORD (#u09671441-da0a-50d6-bbc5-05f0c2624236)
I looked around the dressing room and all I could see were legends. There were jokes and shared banter between people who had won European Cups, FA Cups, League titles, international caps: men who were known to be part of the football elite.
The home dressing room at Anfield Football Stadium is smaller and more basic than you would imagine; it could easily pass for a changing room in any sports hall across the country. Yet few dressing rooms have been the birthplace of so many hopes and dreams; few dressing rooms have felt the vibration of the home crowd roaring ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ in order to inspire those within to prepare for battle; and few dressing rooms have ever held the mystique of this one, and been the place where millions of people would want to be a fly on the wall.
I was one of those millions of people, but I was not a fly on the wall. I was a member of a squad who was about to find out if he had been selected to play. Kenny Dalglish stood, about to read out the team sheet. So this was what it felt like sitting in the home dressing room at Anfield waiting to hear if you’d been selected. All of my dreams rested on the next few moments as King Kenny read out the team.
I was substitute. I had expected to be substitute. Surrounded by such legends as Alan Hansen, Gary McAllister, Jamie Redknapp, Steve McManaman, Ian Rush, Ronnie Whelan, Jan Mølby, John Aldridge, Peter Beardsley, Ray Houghton and Kenny Dalglish himself, I had never expected to be in the starting line-up. But at least I was putting a kit on. The magical Liverpool red. I was going to walk down the famous tunnel and touch the sacred sign that declares to all the players before they walk onto the pitch: ‘This Is Anfield’. It had been placed there by the legendary manager, Bill Shankly, as a way of gaining a psychological advantage over the opposition, a way of letting them know there is no turning back.
Having first been brought to the ground by my dad as a small boy, I had always fixated that, one day, I would make that famous walk. As a child, a football stadium was a place where men shared their passions, their ambitions and their dreams with those who played for them on the pitch. You could tell that within the confines of a football ground the stoicism that reflected how most working-class men approached their lives was left at the turnstile. Football was a place where you could scream, jump for joy, sing along with strangers, slump in frustration and hold back tears of joy or pain. Anfield to me was the cathedral through which I could pass to heaven because I knew if I could be successful there, then nothing on this earth could beat it. Within a few minutes, I was going to touch that sign as home players do for good luck and warm up in front of the famous Kop. And there was a chance, a very real chance, that I was going get to play in the game itself. This would be my début at Anfield, something I had dreamed about since I was a boy.
I was 42 years of age. The match was a charity game between ex-players of Liverpool and UK celebrities versus a rest-of-the-world team that included ex-professionals and international celebrities. The game was in aid of the Marina Dalglish Appeal and the Hillsborough Family Support Group. Sitting in that dressing room, where only a few people knew who I was, I realised things had changed for me, but little did I know I was about to embark on the craziest four years of my life.
After hearing my name being read out by the legendary Kenny Dalglish, and putting my boots on in the Liverpool dressing room, I said to myself something I often say these days: ‘How did all this happen?’
CHAPTER 1 (#u09671441-da0a-50d6-bbc5-05f0c2624236)
HELLO WORLD (#u09671441-da0a-50d6-bbc5-05f0c2624236)
I entered the world at Mill Road Hospital in Liverpool on 30 November 1966. I was the fourth child to Ernie and Kathleen Bishop, with my siblings – in order of appearance – being Eddie, five years older than me, Kathy, four years older than me, and Carol, who was one year older than me. She had spent most of that year in hospital, having developed problems eating, which was eventually diagnosed as coeliac disease. In fact, on the night that I was born my dad had been in the hospital visiting my sister. I’m sure my dad would have been in the hospital anyway to welcome my arrival into the world, although in 1966 men did not participate in the birth, as is now the fashion.
Having attended the birth of my own three sons, I realise how ineffectual I was, despite spending months in antenatal classes being taught that whilst in the throes of labour my wife would really appreciate having me in her face telling her to breathe. I am not suggesting men should not participate in some way, and I am not belittling the wonderfully emotional experience, but, really, has any woman ever forgotten to breathe during childbirth? I can’t imagine there are any maternity wards around the world where expectant fathers are being handed babies by a sad-looking nurse and finding their joy of fatherhood tarnished by the nurse saying, ‘You have a beautiful new child, but I’m afraid we lost your wife. She simply forgot to breathe and because we were all busy at the other end we never noticed. If only you had been there to remind her.’
Anyway, in the 1960s men didn’t have to put themselves through all that. They just waited until mother and baby were prepared and presented.
The man to whom I was presented, my father, Edward Ernest Bishop, at the time worked on the tugs in the Liverpool docks, guiding the numerous ships that arrived in one of Europe’s busiest ports. Liverpool in the 1960s was said to be the place where it was all happening, but for my mum and dad the swinging sixties basically involved getting married and having kids.
My parents had grown up around the corner from each other on a council estate in Huyton and had not bothered with anyone else from the moment they became childhood sweethearts. My mum still has a birthday card that my dad gave her for her fifteenth birthday, which I think is a beautiful thing and something I know won’t happen in the future, as the practice of writing in cards is coming to an end. I can’t imagine young girls of today keeping text messages or Facebook posts sent to them by their boyfriend. Having said that, for the sake of the planet, the giant padded cards with teddy bears and love hearts on the front bought by the teenage boys of my generation in an attempt to get a grope on Valentine’s Day are probably best left as things of the past in order to conserve the rainforests – although the quilted fronts could always be recycled as very comfortable beds.
My parents were married as teenagers and, shortly afterwards, started having children. That seemed to be the way with everybody when I was a child – I didn’t know anybody whose parents hadn’t done the same thing. I remember being at school when I was 13 years of age and my mate, Mark, telling me that his dad was having his 60th birthday party. I fell off my chair laughing at the image of his father being the age of what I considered a granddad. My dad was young enough for me to play in the same Sunday league side as him when I was 16, although I was under strict instructions to call him Ernie. Apparently shouting, ‘Dad, pass!’ was not considered cool in the Sunday league circles of the early eighties.
Having young parents had a massive impact on the way I saw the world, and perhaps was the driving force behind me wanting to have children myself very shortly after I got married. Or, to be fair, that may well be the result of me being a better shot than I anticipated.
When I entered the world, my dad was 24 and my mum was 23. They had four children, all born in the month of November. All my life I thought the fact that we were born in November was a coincidence; it wasn’t until I was married myself and I became aware of the rhythms of marriage that I realised the month of November comes nine months after Valentine’s Day. If you’re married, you’ll know what I mean; if you’re not, you will do one day.
The first eight months of my life were spent living a few doors away from the hospital on Mill Road in a house that my dad had bought from a man in a pub for £50. You could do that sort of thing in the 1960s. The house was about a mile from the city centre and proved to be perfectly placed, as it allowed my parents the opportunity to walk to the hospital to see my sister Carol, in between looking after the rest of us.
As Carol’s coeliac disease meant she couldn’t digest gluten, throughout our childhood my mum was constantly baking separate things for her. This meant our house very often had that warm smell of baking – although if you have ever eaten gluten-free food you will know the smell is a lot better than the taste. Nice-smelling cardboard is still cardboard.
I don’t have any memory of that first house, and it is no longer there. Someone came from the council and declared it unfit for human habitation, along with many others, as the city council progressed with the slum-clearing project which changed much of the centre of Liverpool in the 1960s. The declaration was upsetting for my dad, as he had just decorated, although I am sure the rats and lack of adequate sanitation had more to do with the council’s decision than his ability to hang wallpaper.
As a result of the clearing of the slum areas, various Scouse colonies sprang up as families were moved out to places such as Skelmersdale, Kirkby, Speke and Runcorn. Getting out of Liverpool was not something my mum and dad would ever have considered; it was all they had both ever known, and Carol was still being treated in the hospital. The council offered various alternatives and, like most decisions in parenthood, my mum and dad did what they thought was best for us.
They chose to move to Winsford, out in Cheshire, the option that was the furthest from the centre of Liverpool – if not in miles, then certainly in character. Winsford had been an old market town, but now had emerging council estates that needed to be populated by people ready to work in the factories of the local, rapidly developing industrial estate.
My dad went for an interview in a cable company called ICL and received a letter saying he had a job at the weekly wage of £21.60. This was a staggering amount at the time, when he was getting £9 a week on the building sites he had moved on to after too many falls into the Mersey had convinced him that tugs were not the future. So, without further ado, we moved. When the removal van arrived, such was the exodus from Liverpool that it was already half-full with furniture from another family, the Roberts, who actually moved into the same block as us in Severn Walk on the Crook Lane estate.
When my dad received his first week’s wages, he was paid £12.60.
Yes, thanks to a typing error, my mum and dad had made the decision to move all the way out to Winsford: a simple clerical mistake was responsible for where I was to spend my formative years. However, I have to say I am glad the lady who typed it (it was 1967 – men didn’t type letters, as they were busy doing man-things like fixing washing machines or carrying heavy stuff) made the mistake, because I cannot think of a better place to have grown up.
If you were a child in the 1960s and somebody showed you the council estate where I lived, you could not have imagined a finer location in the world. Rows of terraced houses that were built out of white brick reflected the sun and made everything seem bright. We lived at 9, Severn Walk, which I always thought was a great address as it had two numbers in it, until I realised the road was actually named after a river. We spent the first ten years of my life at this address. Coming from a slum area within Liverpool, it was an exciting place to be, and my mum even today comments about the joy of discovering such modern things as central heating, a hatch from the kitchen into the living room and, the biggest thing of all, an inside toilet downstairs. Opulence beyond belief to live in a house where someone could be on the toilet upstairs and someone on the toilet downstairs, at the same time, and nobody had to put their coat on to go outside.
When I started to write this book I wanted to go back to the estate and have a look, so, six months ago, I went for a walk there. It was night-time, and I sat on the wall and remembered all the times we had had on the estate, both good and bad, and I will always be grateful for the childhood I had there.
I have to say that the town planners of our estate did a brilliant job in setting out the rows of houses in such a way that you were never more than ten steps away from grass. Every house had a back yard and a front garden, and then beyond that there would be grass. I know that ‘grass’ is a very incomplete description, but that is basically what it was. You either had enough grass to host a football match, an area big enough for a bonfire on Guy Fawkes or any other night you felt like building a fire, or you just had enough grass for your dog to have a dump on when you let it out.
As a child, I don’t recall the concept of poop-scooping existing, and I can’t imagine anything more at odds with the world that I lived in than the image of a grown adult picking up dog shit. Dog ownership involved feeding the animal and giving it somewhere to sleep. Beyond that, nobody expected anything else. Nobody took their dog for a walk – you simply opened the door and let it out. The dog would then do whatever dogs do when left to their own devices, and it would come home when it was ready. The only dogs that had leads when I was a child worked for the police or helped blind people cross the road.
I am not suggesting that we were bad dog owners; in fact, I think the dogs were having a brilliant time, although you only have to slide into dog shit once as a child playing football before you think someone, somewhere should do something. I recall being asked to do a school project about improving the community and I suggested that dog dirt was a real problem. The teacher agreed and asked me what I would suggest to improve the matter. After some thought, I came up with the idea of the dog nappy. The teacher tried to seem impressed and not laugh, but sadly the idea never caught on – as there was no Dragons’ Den in the seventies where my eight-year-old self could have pitched the idea, it became no more than a few pages in my school book. And, instead, picking it up using a plastic shopping bag has become the norm. However, I challenge anyone who has to pick up dog shit first thing in the morning not to think the nappy idea has some legs.
Most of what I remember of my childhood happened outdoors. All we ever did was go out and play, and mums would stand on their steps shouting for us when our tea was ready. I should explain to people not from the North, or who may be too wealthy to understand what I mean by the word ‘tea’, that I am referring to the evening meal, which you call dinner, which is what we call the meal in the middle of the day, which you call lunch. It is important we clear this up, as I would not want you to think I am using ‘tea’ in the cricket sense, and that after a few hours’ play we retired for a beverage and a slice of cake. Instead, the call for tea was an important signal to let you know the main meal of the day was ready. The shout was not something to be ignored, or your portion of scouse (stew) or corned beef hash would end up in one of the other children in the family. Or the dog.
But if you didn’t hear it, someone on the estate would let you know. It is a great illustration of the sense of community we had that all communication was communal. If a mum shouted that her child’s tea was ready, all the other children would pass it on until that particular offspring was located and dispatched home. It was also a great way of getting rid of someone you didn’t like, but while kids can be cruel they can also be stupid. The estate wasn’t that big and everyone knew all the favourite hang-out spots, so when the now-hungry child returned to the gang you had to remember to blame the prank on whichever other kid had gone home for his tea.
I learnt what the place meant to me in 2010 when I was doing my ‘Sunshine’ tour. I was in the dressing room of the Echo Arena in Liverpool, about to perform for the sixth night. The venue had just presented me with an award for the most tickets ever sold there for a single tour: apparently I beat Mamma Mia! by 15,000 tickets. I was having a coffee in the dressing room and chatting with Lisa, my agent, when Alex, my tour manager, said my brother Eddie wanted to have a chat.
When family come to shows, I always see them either before or in the interval, as often I find it easier to do that than at the end of a show. At the end of shows I prefer to be on the road quickly; there is something very exciting and rock ’n’ roll about walking off the stage and straight into a waiting car. Eddie walked in with a gift-wrapped long, thin object. After kissing Lisa hello, he turned to me.
‘Do you want a drink?’ I asked, pointing to the fully stocked fridge that rarely opened as I only drink coffee and water before a show.
‘No. I just wanted to give you this. But don’t open it till I’m gone.’
‘Don’t be daft, you’re there now. I’ll just open it.’
‘No, wait. You’ll see. I’ll see you after.’
With that he walked out, leaving Lisa and me in the room with the parcel. I didn’t know what to make of it, so looked at the message on it, which read:
‘We are all very proud of you, but something so you don’t forget where you are from.’
I looked at it for a moment before Lisa broke into my thoughts. ‘Do you want me to leave whilst you open it?’
‘Don’t be daft,’ I replied. ‘It’s the wrong shape for a blow-up doll, so there can’t be anything embarrassing about it.’
I tore back the paper and realised why Eddie hadn’t wanted to be there when I opened it as a lump climbed into my throat.
‘What is it?’ asked Lisa, concerned that I was supposed to go and perform in front of 10,000 people but looked like I was about to start blubbering over the parcel contents.
‘It’s who I am,’ I said, and showed her the street sign for Severn Walk, which Eddie had nicked from the end of the block.
When I revisited the street to get my bearings for this book, it was nice to see a block of houses built in the sixties with a brand-new street sign. The old one now hangs in my kitchen, in pride of place. You can’t return to your childhood, but you don’t have to leave it, either.
Football was the game of choice for all the boys on the estate. In the seventies, girls did things that involved skipping whilst singing songs, hopscotch on a course drawn in chalk on the pavement, Morris dancing with pom-poms, and being in the kitchen. I am sure my sisters Kathy and Carol did loads of other things, but if they did I never saw them. I was a boy, and boys played football and scrapped. Later, when I was given a second-hand Chopper from my uncle, Stephen, I added trying to be Evel Knievel to my list of activities. Along with the Six Million Dollar Man, Steve Austin, Evel was my first non-footballer hero – quite unusual choices, as one had bionic legs, and the other one was always trying his best to get some by crashing all the time. If you do not know either of the gentlemen to whom I just referred, then you missed out in the seventies, when a man worth $6 million was much more impressive than a person worth the same amount now, i.e. someone playing left back in League One. And, back then, the absence of YouTube meant that seeing a man crash his motorbike whilst trying jump over a queue of buses was classed as global entertainment. It basically meant that, during my childhood, I was attracted to taking risks by crashing my bike after jumping over ramps or jumping off things. Most of the time this was OK, but it did also inadvertently lead to my first discovery that I could make people laugh, more of which later.
Having an older brother who occasionally let me play football with him and his mates meant that when I played with my own age group I was a decent player, and, like any child who finds they are good at anything, I wanted to keep doing it. In terms of sport, this single-minded approach explains why I am rubbish at everything else: I didn’t do anything else. There was the odd game of tennis if we could sneak onto the courts at the park without the attendant charging us, but it seemed a daft idea to play anything else when all you needed for football was a ball and some space – ideally, a space away from house windows and dog shit but, if not, you could play around that. That is one of the great things about being a boy: you can find something you enjoy like football and you don’t have to stop playing it as you grow up. I played it continually for years, and I still play it occasionally now. I haven’t seen either of my sisters play hopscotch since I was 10.
Football was great, but cricket was also an option. People used to spray-paint cricket stumps onto the walls of end-of-terrace houses around the estate. This meant that we always had cricket stumps, but it also meant that we always had cricket stumps that never moved. This caused untold arguments because the bowler and the fielders would often claim that the stumps had been hit, but with no physical proof of this the batter nearly always argued against the decision. This generally caused a row that resulted in a stand-off, which, more often than not, the batsman won – he was holding a cricket bat, after all. I think this is probably the reason why I don’t like cricket – any game where as a child you are threatened with a lump of wood on a regular basis ends up feeling like it’s not worth the hassle.
There was also the odd dalliance with boxing which was something virtually every boy I knew on the estate did from time to time; my cousin, Freddie, achieving some level of success by fighting for England. I didn’t mind fighting as a boy; it was just something we did. My brother Eddie had taken it upon himself to toughen me up, a process that involved him taunting me till I got angry and flew at him, upon which he would then batter me. Older brothers never realise that they are natural heroes to their younger siblings and it was great when Eddie allowed me to hang around with him and his mates, but I would have given anything just to win one of our fights as a kid.
As a child, I would actively seek fights. If I started a new school or club, I would pinpoint the bully in the room and then challenge them to a fight. When I ran out of people in my year at school, I started looking for people a year or two above me. A challenge would be given, an arrangement made and, after school, I would be fighting someone for no reason whatsoever whilst other children stood around and chanted: ‘Zigga-zagga-ooo-ooo-ooo.’ While I never understood what that meant, I also never grasped the concept that by going around looking for a bully to fight I might actually have been the bully, but I did think I was doing the right thing. I was taking on the baddy and more often than not winning, whereupon I would go home and let Eddie know his attempts to toughen me up were working. Eddie, however, would usually say he wasn’t interested and give me a dead leg.
As I type this as an adult, I realise this reads awfully, but that is what life was like on an estate, and none of us thought it should be different. Eddie and I were also acutely aware that my dad had a reputation for being a tough man. He had been taught as a child by his mother, whose matriarchal influence on the family was immense, that you had to stand up for yourself. My nan outlived three husbands and three of her own nine children, and her life and that of her children was one of hardship and battles. Some she won and some she didn’t, but the fight was always there till the very end. She must have been in her seventies when I had to restrain her from getting involved in a fight that had broken out in the room next door to my cousin Gary’s 21st birthday party in Rainhill.
As I grew up and moved in different circles, I learnt that violence very rarely resolves anything and I began to associate with more and more like-minded people. The extent of this change became apparent when I received a call from my dad to say that there was a need for a ‘show of strength’ at my nan’s house. At the time, the council had moved a young family next door and they were basically scumbags: one mum, multiple children and two dads – the kind of neighbours from hell you see on television programmes where you can’t believe such low-grade people exist. There had been a row, and a threat made to my uncle, Jimmy, and my nan, so it was decided that uncles and cousins should arrive at the house to ensure it was known they would face more than just two pensioners should the arguments escalate.
It was a Sunday night and, as a young father, I had been looking forward to going to the pub with my mates. Instead, I asked them to come with me. We arrived at the house and walked in to find it full of the adult men in the family. I looked around the room at battle-ready faces of cousins and uncles, and then back at my mates – Paul, Mickey Duff and Big Derry Gav – and realised that if it kicked off I had perhaps not brought the best team. Paul was an accountant whose hair was rarely out of place; Big Derry Gav got his name from being from Derry, being big and being called Gavin, but as a trainee infant-school teacher the best he could do would be to create weapons from papier-mâchè; while Mickey Duff had perhaps the best contribution to make, if not in the physical sense – he spent most of his time hiding behind my nan – but in the sense that he was the logistics manager in a toilet-roll factory.
As it happened, the police arrived and the situation didn’t escalate. After far too long, the scumbags were moved on, but I have a slight tinge of regret that the success I gained later on had not happened by then, as money and celebrity does bring you the means to resolve such matters. Or the phone numbers of those who can.
Eddie and my dad used to do circuit training in our living room, so I would join them. From the age of seven I found could do more sit-ups than anyone else in the family. This bordered on an obsession for a period, as I would forever be doing sit-ups, one night doing 200 straight, which is a bit mental for a seven-year-old child who is not in a Chinese gymnastic school. We would often then end with a boxing match. This involved my dad going onto his knees and from this position we would hit him, wearing boxing gloves, while he would just jab us away wearing the one glove that was his size. Eddie and I would then spar. One time, Eddie knocked me flat out with a right hook. I got up, dazed, but instead of stopping the session my dad just put on his glove and put Eddie on the floor. We both learnt a lesson that day: neither of us would ever be able to beat my dad.
My dad and his twin brother, Freddie, played football locally, where it was clear they had some form of a reputation. I don’t think they ever sought a fight, but you can tell when people think your dad is hard; it’s just the way people talk when he is around, and the sense of protection that we had as a family when we went anywhere with him. I still have that feeling now, and he is 72. My dad always told us as kids that you should never look for trouble, but never walk away, particularly if you’re in the right. He also said we should never use weapons (Uncle Freddie had nearly bled to death as a youth after being stabbed in the leg), never kick someone when they are down, and, if you’re not sure what is going to happen next, you’re probably best hitting someone.
I think for the life we lived at that time that was sound advice, but it’s not a conversation I have had to have with my sons – they have not lived the same life. To be fair, I have not lived the life that my dad lived, but he could only pass on what he had learnt. My nan had been married before to a Mr Berry and had had three sons: Charlie, Billy and Jimmy. By the time Mr Berry died, Charlie had also died, aged nine, of diphtheria, and been buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave, and my uncle, Billy, had lost a lung to TB. She then married my dad’s father, Fred Bishop, and had Janet, Mary, Edna, Carol and the twins: my dad and Freddie. With eight children in post-war austerity, things were inevitably tough – in one of the few photographs my dad has of himself and Freddie as children, only one of them has shoes on. There had been only one pair of shoes to go around, so they had a fight and the winner wore them for the picture.
Although my mum lived just around the corner, growing up, she never seemed to suffer the same degree of hardship. She was one of three for a start, with older siblings (in the form of John and Josie), and fewer mouths to feed makes a difference to any family. Her mum and dad divorced and her father died the same year I was born, which is one reason why I am named after him. Her mum, my other nan, was married to Granddad Bill, a caretaker of a block of flats in Toxteth, for all the time that I knew her. As children, Eddie and I would play for hours around the flats with Stephen, my uncle, who was in fact not much older than us. Pictures of my mum in her youth reveal a slim, beautiful, dark-haired girl with plaits who grew to be a slim, beautiful woman with a beehive. My mum has always stayed in shape, and I would guess that her dress size has hardly changed in the more than fifty years that she has been married to my dad.
There are not many pictures of my parents before we started to come along, but I love the ones there are. My mum was as close to a film star in looks as could be without actually being one. There is a softness to her features that belies the toughness inside, a toughness that would often hold the family together in years to come. My dad looks strong in all the pictures, with a handsome face and tattoos on his arms and a stocky frame that suggests that he was made to carry things. My dad is of the generation of working-class men who have swallows tattooed on the backs of their hands. He has often said that he regrets getting them done as they give people an impression of him as someone who wants to look tough before they actually get to know him. The reality is, he said he got them done so that people could tell him and his identical twin Freddie apart – not the greatest of strategies, as I don’t know anyone who looks at a person’s hands first, but at least it beats a tattoo on the face. Personally, I would have just worn glasses or perhaps a hat. In truth, my dad has the hands of a man who suits such tattoos. He was born into a world where social mobility was limited and it was essential that you protected what you had, as there was nothing left to fall back on.
If men like my dad were to ever progress through the social order, it was to be through hard graft, and by being prepared to fight your corner in whatever form that fight took. It was the week before Christmas in 1972 when I became completely aware of what it meant to be a family and the cost of standing by your principles. I was six years old and I recall my uncle, John, my mum’s brother, sitting us all down in the living room. My mum was sitting next to him, and we four children were squashed up on the couch.
‘Your dad has gone to prison.’
The words hit me like a train. I didn’t completely understand what they meant, but as everyone else seemed upset I knew it couldn’t be a good thing. One thing I don’t remember is anyone crying; it was as if it was another thing you just had to deal with. My mum sat there with the same inner strength that I always associate with her. No matter what was to follow, I knew she would make sure everything was going to be all right. She had managed to hold the family together when Carol was literally starving to death in hospital and her own father was dying of cancer. She had managed to move as a young mother away from all she had ever known for the benefit of a better life for her children. Her husband going to prison was not going to break my mum, particularly as she supported everything my dad had done.
Uncle John, his voice clear and strong, carried on: ‘Some people may say bad things to you, but never forget your dad did the right thing. You need to be proud, and you boys have to stand up for your mum and sisters.’ For the first time ever, I was given more responsibility than just being able to dress myself in the morning.
My dad had been sentenced to a year in prison as a result of an altercation with two men outside a chip shop. He had had a run-in with the same two men the week before, so when he’d stopped with my mum to get chips on the way home from a night out they had started another argument. When my mum had intervened, they had pushed her so hard she had bounced off the bonnet of a car onto the ground. My dad had reacted to the provocation and, as had happened the week before, both men ended up on the ground and my dad walked away.
To this day my dad is very bitter about the sentence, and even the arresting officers said the case should have been thrown out. On both occasions, my dad was not the aggressor and was defending himself, and on the second occasion was defending his wife. But for his defence he had not been advised very well, which is something that can happen when you are limited financially in the professional advice you can seek.
Months earlier, my dad and Uncle Freddie had been playing in the same football team, and my dad was sent off by the referee for something his identical twin had done. They appealed against the decision and the local FA had upheld their claim that the referee had sent the wrong man off because he could not tell who had committed the offence.
Had my dad just stood in court and simply relayed the events as they happened, there is a very good chance he would have walked free, or at least only been given a suspended sentence. However, it was felt by many on the estates that people who had moved to Winsford from Liverpool would be unfairly treated by the local police and courts. As the other two men were locals, or ‘Woollybacks’ as we called them (an insult to sheep that I have never really understood), he tried to use the same ploy in court that had worked with the local FA. As both men had ended up pole-axed on the ground, it would be impossible, so the plan went, for them to know which twin had hit them. As the judge could not send both my dad and Uncle Freddie to prison, he would have to throw the case out, and that would be the end of that.
The defence didn’t work and, as my dad was sentenced for violence, he was sent to a closed prison. At first he went to Walton Prison in Liverpool and then on to Preston.
He told my mum not to bring us children to visit him, but by the time he had been transferred to Preston he was missing us too much and asked her to bring us in. I remember that day as if it was yesterday. My Uncle Freddie drove us and we arrived early and had to sit waiting in the car, opposite the prison. There were all four of us, Eddie, Kathy, Carol and I, along with my mum and Freddie in the front, yet I don’t recall anyone saying anything as we just sat and waited.
To my six-year-old self, Preston Prison looked like a castle. It was a stone building with turrets and heavy, solid, metal gates that had a hatch, through which the guards behind could check the world outside remained outside.
At the allotted time, we approached the gates along with some other families, and the hatch opened. Before long, a small door swung open, and we were allowed inside, only to be faced by another metal gate.
Standing just in front of it was a guard in a dark uniform holding a clipboard with a list of names on it, which he ticked off with the expression that you can only get from spending your working life locking up other men. My Uncle Freddie said who we had come to see, whereupon we were duly counted and moved towards the next gate. Eventually, after everyone had met with the guard’s approval, the gate in front of us was unlocked and we were allowed to pass though to be faced by yet another gate.
This process of facing locked gate after locked gate was a frightening and dehumanising experience: we were being led through like cattle. We eventually walked up some metal stairs and entered the visitors’ room. I just recall rows of men sitting at tables, all wearing the same grey uniform, in a room with no windows and a single clock on the wall.
When I saw my dad, I broke free of my mum’s hand and ran towards him to give him the biggest hug I had ever given anyone. My dad reciprocated until a guard said we had to break the hug and I had to be placed on the opposite side of the table like everyone else. I know prison officers have a job to do, but who would deprive a six-year-old boy of a hug from the father he had not seen for months? It was not as if I was trying slip him a hacksaw between each squeeze.
‘Have you been good?’ he asked us all, and we each said we had.
‘Good. Have you been looking after your mum?’ he asked then, and for some reason it seemed like he was talking to just me.
I wasn’t so sure I knew what looking after my mum entailed, but I was sure I was doing it, or at least a version of it.
‘I have, Dad,’ I said.
‘They’ve all been good,’ my mum informed him across the table, which seemed to satisfy him.
‘Good,’ he said, with a smile I had never seen before. A smile that appears when someone’s face is trying to match the words that are being spoken, but not quite managing it.
I don’t recall anything else that anyone said. I just remember looking around and thinking my dad didn’t belong with all the other men in grey uniforms. He was my dad, and they were all just strange men wearing the same clothes as him, many sporting similar tattoos on the backs of their hands.
After what to me appeared to be too short a time, my Uncle Freddie said he would take us out so that my mum and dad could talk alone or, at least, be as alone as you can be whilst being watched by prison officers alongside thirty other families visiting at the same time. To soften the disappointment of having to leave, my dad gave us all a Texan bar each, a sweet of its era: chocolate covering something that was as close to being Plasticine as legally possible, so when you chewed it almost took every tooth out of your head with its stickiness. We didn’t get many sweets at the time, so it was a real treat, even if the trade-off was that Dad was in prison. What I didn’t realise at the time was that four Texan bars virtually accounted for a week’s prison allowance. Not for the first or the last time, my dad was giving us children all he had.
During the year that he was away, I can only recall visiting my dad on one more occasion. It was when he was moved to the open prison at Appleton Thorn. I remember the visiting room had windows so that light flooded in, and hugs were not prevented with the same degree of enthusiasm by the prison officers. Before he had left Preston, the governor there had told my dad that he was the first prisoner he had ever transferred to an open prison: by the time you reached Preston you either went onto a maximum-security unit or stayed within the closed-prison sector till your time was served or you died.
The only reason he moved my dad was because of the support he was given by one particular prison guard, Officer Hunt, who stuck his neck out for him and pressed for my dad to be moved. It would be easy to say all prison guards of the time were bad, but clearly this wasn’t the case. Despite one or two close shaves, I have not needed to visit a prison since.
I don’t recall the day Dad came home. You might imagine it would be ingrained in my memory, but somehow it isn’t. While he was away, I remember that things seemed harder than usual. As a family, we never actually felt poorer than our neighbours, but I was aware that some people just had more.
It was when I started junior school at Willow Wood that I was first exposed to people who had more than me – basically, people who did not live on our estate. My two friends from school were Christopher and Clive, and both were posher than I was: Clive lived in a house that had an apple tree in the garden. Despite being at least three miles from where I lived, I would happily cycle or walk there to play. By the time I was in junior school I knew the estate inside out, so leaving it to go on adventures seemed natural.
Clive was clever, and I recall his dad coming home from work once. He was wearing a suit and didn’t need to get a wash before having his tea, which I thought was a really odd thing for a dad not to have to do. I liked Chris because he could draw, which I also enjoyed doing. He lived on the private estate and, to my eyes, he had the perfect life: he was the oldest, so he didn’t have an older brother who always won fights; and his mum didn’t seem to work, so when we played there she would sometimes make us chocolate apples, which is basically a toffee apple but with chocolate instead of toffee.
My mum was great at making cakes and I did get pocket money to spend at the mobile shop on the estate, which was a van in which a bloke sat selling all household goods from pegs to sweets, but I had never come across the concept of the chocolate apple. Chris also seemed to have more toy cars than I could imagine it was possible for one child to own. We would play with his Matchbox cars and, occasionally, I would slip one in my pocket. Once, as I did so, I saw his mum looking at me. I guiltily pulled the car out but I knew there were going to be no more chocolate apples for me. I was not invited around again.
CHAPTER 2 (#u09671441-da0a-50d6-bbc5-05f0c2624236)
MY DAD AND CARS (#u09671441-da0a-50d6-bbc5-05f0c2624236)
In the 1970s, on every council estate, men were to be found under cars. It seemed to me that being an adult man meant you needed to be fixing something, and my dad was constantly fixing something for which he wasn’t qualified. Because he would never give up till what he was mending actually worked, he usually managed to get things to work in such a way that nobody else on the planet was ever able to repair them again, as nobody knew what he had done. Most of the time my dad didn’t know, either.
This was always best illustrated by the range of cars we had. Money was tight, but cars were a necessary luxury, so my dad bought what he could afford, then spent time underneath it trying to make it do what he needed it to.
One car that stands out for me was the Hillman Imp. The name does not inspire much confidence – any name that is one letter away from ‘limp’ is surely not a title to give something that is supposed to transport people around. The Hillman Imp was developed by the Rootes Group to make a small car for the mass market. The fact that most of you will have not heard of either the car or the company tells you all you need to know about its success.
The car had its engine in the back, which would be absolutely fine if you couldn’t smell its workings whilst sitting there. The front bonnet was for storage. If you packed to go on holiday, this had the effect of turning any luggage you put there into a sort of early prototype airbag of clothes and knickers, should you have the misfortune to have a head-on collision. Whereas, if you were hit in the rear, a steaming engine would smack you on the back of the head, forcing you through the windscreen because, as it was still the seventies, nobody wore seat belts.
I recall a conversation with my dad about seat belts and the fact that he never wore one. His rationale was that if you ever drove into a river, the seat belt was another thing you had to deal with before climbing out the car, and that delay could be vital. He was also of the firm belief that if you rolled down a hill, there was always a chance that the belt could trap you in the car when the best thing to do would be to open the door and allow yourself to be thrown free. Needless to say, none of these theories has ever been tested and my dad now does wear a seat belt, but amongst the various jobs he has had in his life, safety officer was never one of them.
Our Hillman Imp was grey with an off-white roof – the best way to describe it is as something smaller than a single bed and less attractive than your average washing machine. And the reason that it stands out in my memory amongst all the other cars my dad had was because of one camping holiday we took in the Welsh hills when I was eight. The tent and various pieces of luggage were housed on the roof of the car as the bonnet was filled with clothes and tins of food: my mum was convinced that the camp shops would over-charge, so instead of being ripped off for tins of beans, soup and corned beef, she had stocked up and loaded the car. The fact that all this extra weight probably slowed us down to the point that we were using more petrol never entered the equation. There was no way she was going to allow anyone to rip us off.
My mum and dad sat in the front of the car, of course, while in the rear was me, 8; Carol, 9; Kathy, 12; Eddie, 13; and Lassie, 35 in dog years. Lassie was a white mongrel that I can’t ever remember not having as a child. She was white all over, apart from a black patch on her eye. Every time someone new met her, they would immediately say, ‘That’s a nice dog – is she called Patch?’ to which we would reply, ‘Don’t be stupid. She’s called Lassie,’ as if it wasn’t obvious enough.
She was a brilliant dog who would dance on her hind legs for biscuits, allow you to dress her up in girls’ clothes for a laugh, and was not a bad footballer. I am not joking about the latter point: Lassie could play. She wasn’t one of those dogs that would see a ball and then want to bite it. No, Lassie would join in by using her nose to win the ball, and then, once directed towards the goal, would keep nosing the ball till she had dribbled past everyone and scored. Because she had more legs than anyone else on the field, she was faster than any of the other players, so she was very good at dribbling. The only problem was that she was not really much good at anything else, and if she did score she didn’t have the awareness to stop, and would carry on running all over the estate, still nosing the ball, unless she became distracted by food or a cat. Also, her distribution was rubbish, so we never let her play with us too often. There is nothing worse than a greedy player, even if they are a dog.
So that was four kids and a dog on the back seat; two adults in the front; a six-berth tent along with deck chairs and a table on the roof; and in the bonnet we had clothes, sleeping bags, tins of food and the camping stove with bottled gas. All of this in a car under which my dad had spent hours making sure things like the brakes actually worked when requested to, rather than when they liked.
I cannot possibly imagine embarking on such a trip now. My kids have been brought up with rear-seat TVs and iPads: at the very least, they put in earphones, listen to music and get lost in their own world. They’ve never travelled for hours on holiday in an overcrowded car to one of the wettest countries in the world, where you are camping in a borrowed tent which, when you get there, takes all night to put up as there are no instructions.
We had to cram into the car, with me by the window due to my propensity to throw up every ten miles of any car journey, let alone one where engine fumes were mixing with those of dog farts. I was often given barley-sugar sweets, which were supposed to help car sickness, although how eating something that tasted of sick mixed with sugar was supposed to stop you from being sick I have never understood.
In all the excitement, we never worried about the potential dangers of being in a car that had dodgy brakes and was massively overloaded with tinned food housed under the bonnet next to gas canisters – therefore having all the potential to turn into a dirty bomb at the moment of impact. We were going on holiday and, as my mum and dad played their favourite country and western songs, we prepared to go to the only foreign country I ever visited until I reached adulthood: Wales.
The holiday was great. My memory of it was of sunshine and the beauty of Bala Lake, albeit strangely mixed with the dread of any approaching hill. Early on in the journey it became clear that, despite its name suggesting it was ‘a man of the hill’, the Hillman would not be able to carry us up any slope of substance, while perhaps the ‘Imp’ part of its name was just the start of the word ‘impossible’, because that was what every hill became.
Once we approached the periphery of Snowdonia National Park my dad knew that if we were to stand any chance of ever reaching our destination the weight in the car would have to be reduced. This meant that on the approach to any hill we would all climb out and, along with the dog, begin the long walk up whilst my dad slowly drove the Hillman Imp to the apex. There he would wait for us all to arrive. That said, he didn’t always get there first: on more than one occasion we walked faster than he could make the car go.
There is nothing more humbling than seeing your dad at the front of a procession of cars, willing his own vehicle onwards, while you arrive at the top of the hill faster than him by walking. The frustration of those caught up in the procession was matched only by our collective desire for the Imp to make it to the top. Failure to do so would only result in the embarrassment of being forced to do a three-point turn in an over-laden car in the middle of an ascent, and start again.
When we had all reconvened at a peak, we quickly reassumed our positions in the car and would be rewarded for our efforts by a trip downhill at as much speed as the Hillman Imp could muster. It was like being in a toboggan as we weaved around the bends, until the gradient changed and we all had to get out and start walking again.
One little-known fact about my dad is that he invented the people carrier. Although his version may, by today’s standards, seem rather primitive, he certainly has to be credited with the concept of taking a van and putting people in it.
After the Imp limped to an early grave, it was a red Ford Escort van that my dad brought home next. The fact that it had no seats in the back never struck us as strange; we had owned vans in the past and all we did as kids was climb in the back and sit on a few cushions.
It seems a successful way to travel until you travel with the childhood version of myself, one whose propensity for car sickness was not helped by such a mode of transport. Being in the back of a van with no windows and a vomiting child is not really the place you want to be.
I don’t know if it was the car sickness or just a wave of inspiration, but my dad then decided that he did not want a Ford Escort van. He wanted a family car, and for that to happen he either had to buy a new car or change the one he had, the latter being the most sensible thing due to our lack of money.
Using an angle grinder, my dad proceeded to cut into the side panels of the van. Even in a road where people working on cars was not an unusual sight, the image of a man with an angle grinder attacking his own car so that sparks were filling the air created a fair amount of interest. After all, in a world of only three television channels something as crazy as this was bound to create a lot of interest. Oblivious, my dad just carried on. He was like Noah building his Ark: my dad had a vision, and even if the rest of the world, including my mum, thought he had lost the plot, he was still going to realise that vision.
Once the side panels came out, my dad then produced some windows that he had ‘found’ in a caravan. I have written ‘found’ in inverted commas because when I recently spoke to him about putting the glass in to replace the side panels he wanted to put me straight right away. Glass would have been dangerous (I never thought I would hear my dad say anything was dangerous when it came to cars), and what he had, in fact, put into the side panels was Perspex, which he had taken from a caravan.
‘A caravan?’ my mum asked. ‘What caravan?’
‘A caravan I found,’ said my dad, and that was the end of that.
As you can imagine, your average caravan window is not made to fit exactly into the shape left behind in a Ford Escort van after the side panels have been removed. So, with the aid of welding and tape, they were customised to the space and made to fit. A seat was added in the back from another car of a similar size found in a scrap yard and, after this was bolted to the floor, my dad stepped back. The people carrier had been invented, although it was probably the most illegal vehicle I have ever ridden in.
The car must have been uninsurable and, by today’s standards, it was a million miles from being roadworthy. We used to climb into it either over the seats at the front or from the rear door, which was designed for loading goods, not children. Whoever failed to get on the rear seat then had to sit in the vestibule area between the newly installed seat and the rear door. Occasionally the rear door would spring open whilst in transit, but not too often, and no kids were lost during the time that we had the car.
I loved that car, and I was sad to see it go. People would look at us whenever we were out in it and, in my mind, that just helped to enhance the magic of it. I never for one second thought the car was being looked at for any other reason than admiration. But, as Christmas approached in 1975, my dad decided it was time to sell his creation. No doubt the pressing matter of getting us kids presents played some part in that decision.
Christmas passed and my dad still had the car, which meant all his money was gone. Then he received a call from a traveller camp on the edge of Winsford.
My dad drove the car to the camp and haggled with the assembled men. It was New Year’s Eve. If he could sell the car, he and my mum could have a rare night out. The deal was struck and the car was sold. After the cash was handed over, my dad asked the inevitable question, ‘How do I get home from here?’ The camp was a fair distance from home and none of his friends was able to pick him up. Getting a taxi to come to a traveller camp was never an easy thing to do, so he asked the man to whom he had just sold the car to give him a lift home in it.
The man shook his head. ‘I’m not driving that till I’ve painted it, but I’ll give you a lift on that.’
He pointed to a Triumph motorbike. There are few things that my dad hates more than motorbikes, but with cash in his pocket and a do to get to, he took the offer and rode home pillion, clinging tight to the driver and with a smile on his face.
The effect of that car didn’t end after it was sold, because my dad used the money to take Eddie and me to the cinema for the first time ever. The film was Jaws, and we went because it was deemed too scary for the girls. I know, but it was 1975 and they probably had things to do in the kitchen.
I could not have been happier. I felt like we had won the pools. I was at a cinema watching the first film I had ever seen that wasn’t a Western. The cinema was in Northwich, a town about eight miles away from Winsford, and the fact that it was somewhere new only added to the excitement of the evening. I loved it when it was just us ‘boys’ together: I saw it as an opportunity to talk to the other men of the tribe about man-stuff like football, cars, conkers – things the girls in the family just wouldn’t understand. This time usually came on a Sunday afternoon, when we would sit in the living room eating our roast dinner watching the weekly Granada football highlights show called Kick Off, which Gerald Sinstadt commentated. It was required viewing for anyone who wanted to watch football whilst eating a Sunday roast and, as Gerald Sinstadt presented it for years, there is a whole generation of men who can’t help salivating as soon as they hear his voice.
I know at times my desire to use these sacred moments for conversation did mean that I became slightly irritating to Eddie and my dad, who had the serious business of football and food to concentrate upon, so a trip out to the cinema was a male bonding experience on a totally different level. I am sure I jabbered away in the car my dad had borrowed for the evening but, once inside the cinema, popcorn in hand, I was just enchanted by the experience, and any notion of bonding over conversation disappeared within seconds.
The film was brilliant, although it did have serious implications for my swimming in the sea for the rest of my life. Like many people, I cannot now put my head under water without hearing, ‘Durum, durum, durum.’ However, I had been introduced to the world of cinema, a world I love to this day. One of my favourite things is going to watch films in the day. I am 46, but it still makes me feel like I am skiving school.
The best car my dad ever had was the Moscovitch. This was a Russian car that embodied the Soviet Union prior to the Wall coming down. It was red for a start, although I am sure you could get different colours. Having said that, I never saw anyone else driving one, except my dad. It was square. Very square. The kind of square you see when a child tries to draw a car, and in all honesty I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that the car was designed by a six-year-old.
In 1970s Russia, passenger comfort obviously was not a priority: if you were not in your Moscovitch, what else would you be doing? Standing in a bread line dreaming about Levi’s jeans, probably. Everything about the car screamed function before purpose, the driver console being unattractive and full of things that could impale you in a collision, but I loved that car. I loved how solid it felt, which may in part be due to the tank metal it was made of. I loved that it was from the exotic Eastern Bloc that we were supposed to be scared of, but which I deduced could not be that bad if they had sold my dad a car. The car lacked mechanical sophistication to such an extent that when my dad lost the keys he began using a pair of scissors in the ignition to start the car. I actually thought my dad might be a Russian spy when he got it, and I allowed some of my mates to think the same.
But I mostly loved it because my dad did. One thing he appreciated the most was the lighter just below the dash-board, which you could press in and which would pop out when it was hot enough for my dad to light his cigarette as he drove. It was the most sophisticated thing I had ever seen. And I broke it.
Whilst sitting in the car waiting for my dad one day in Garston, Liverpool, I couldn’t resist pressing the lighter in. When it popped out, I decided to test how hot it was with the tip of my tongue. Yes, I did just write that. The tip of my tongue. You do not need to be medically qualified to guess the result. I burnt my tongue and it hurt like hell. But, after the initial pain, I was still sitting in the car with nothing to do, so I kept on pushing the lighter in and out until one time when it didn’t pop out again.
My dad returned to the car and immediately went to use the lighter. When it didn’t move, he used his strength to pull it. The internal coil unravelled and the lighter fell apart.
‘Have you been using this?’ my dad asked.
I tried to explain it wasn’t my fault, but due to the burnt tongue I just said, ‘Ummn dun nooo.’
My dad looked at me, and I knew that he knew I had broken it. He looked me in the eye for a moment, sighed and simply said, ‘I liked that lighter.’
Then we drove home. I loved that car because it always reminded me of my dad’s forgiveness and that ‘things’ don’t matter. People do. Even if those people can’t talk due to their own stupidity.
CHAPTER 3 (#u09671441-da0a-50d6-bbc5-05f0c2624236)
A BOY LEARNING ADULT LESSONS (#u09671441-da0a-50d6-bbc5-05f0c2624236)
It was a sunny day early in the summer of 1974 and we all went for a family day out to the swimming baths in Winsford, where the pool was outside. These days, the concept of having an outdoor swimming pool in the north of England would seem crazy, and the fact that it is no longer there perhaps proves that such a venture would be like having a ski slope in the desert (I know they do in Dubai, but they cheat). However, my childhood seems to have been full of sunny days, and we spent many an afternoon at Winsford’s outdoor swimming baths.
As you entered the swimming pool, you were immediately struck by the brightness of it all. The diving board was painted red, and the bottom of the swimming pool was painted pale blue, which always gave the impression of freshness. There was a large pool housing the diving board, and it was a rite of passage one day to jump off the top. On this particular day – I would have been no more than seven – I had not reached the top, although I had gone halfway and was still edging up slowly. There was a shallow children’s swimming pool at the end, beyond which was a small shop where you could buy sweets.
It was here that I saw a friend from school. He had on a scuba mask and was playing in the children’s pool. We spoke for a while before I went back to the base my mum and dad had set up amongst the tables and benches, and where I knew there would be an endless supply of sandwiches and drink. My mum has always possessed the ability to make more sandwiches than she has bread. I know that defies logic, but it’s true. It’s a mum thing that they can just do. I think the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand can probably be explained by Mary making sardine sandwiches.
I was sitting with my family when I noticed a man run and dive into the pool fully clothed. Whilst everybody else was playing, I couldn’t take my eyes off the man under the water, as he seemed to be swimming furiously towards the other side.
Suddenly, he emerged from the water holding a small figure that I immediately recognised as my friend. The lifeguards came running over and the pool immediately began to empty, so that I had a clear, uninterrupted view of the proceedings unfolding in front of me.
In a panic, one lifeguard tried to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while simultaneously another guard tried to administer CPR. Both were working hard, but they appeared to counteract each other. It seemed like only seconds before the sound of a siren could be heard. An ambulance man entered the scene carrying a holdall, striding with the authority of somebody who knew what he was doing. He was tall and wearing a white unbuttoned shirt, black trousers and had black, greased-back hair.
He immediately took control of the situation, picking my friend up by his right ankle and holding him upside down with one arm. Water gushed from his open mouth. But my friend’s body hung listless. Dead. The ambulance man then placed him on the ground with the least degree of ceremony conceivable and shook his head.
The body was carried away under a blanket. The lifeguards seemed just to be standing in shock, while families began to look for little children, holding them tighter as they left than they had when they arrived. I don’t recall there being hysteria or panic after the event, just a sense that something terrible had happened. I saw a woman being led away in tears, and everybody seemed to move slowly and with purpose. The ambulance man had made it clear that there was little point in trying to do anything. It was over.
I understood that my friend was dead, and I knew what ‘dead’ meant, but I couldn’t fully comprehend all that I had seen. Then I noticed that, for the first time in my life, the main pool was empty. I had never seen it empty, as we had never managed to get in before the crowds. But now the surface was as smooth as glass, and nobody appeared to want to penetrate its calm.
As the ambulance drove away with my friend’s body, I felt the overwhelming urge to break the stillness of the moment. Perhaps in an attempt to recreate normality, to return the pool to a place of joy and not a place of fear and death, I ran and dived into the water. As I was in the air, I remember feeling excited at the prospect of being the only person in the whole of the swimming pool.
I broke through the surface, and my breath left me. The water was like ice; colder than it had been moments earlier, and colder than I had ever felt before.
I surfaced and scrambled up the steps before the coldness overwhelmed me, snuggling into a towel and my mother’s arms. I should never have dived in; I could never have made things normal by doing so and, as the coldness entered my bones, a coldness that was not just generated by water temperature, I knew I had made a mistake. But I couldn’t help myself. I had needed to stop being passive; I needed to stop being a witness. I had needed to stop standing still, even if it did result in me sitting in a towel trying to warm up from a cold that I don’t think has ever really thawed.
At school the following week we had a special assembly in which the headmistress told us to pray for my friend. He was not a close friend – he was one of a bunch of mates – but I remember him being cheeky and funny. I also remember him being held up lifeless and dead. Apparently, he had decided to snorkel in the big pool against his mum’s wishes and had got his leg caught in the steps underwater. People had seen him, but as he had a mask on, they had assumed he was just snorkelling. The man who had dived in had noticed the boy had not moved for some time. It was said he was already dead when he was pulled out of the pool.
My friend Clive told me his mother went to the funeral, and that our friend had been buried in a white coffin. I was seven years old, and I had seen death close up for the first time. It didn’t really scare me; I knew that one day it would be coming for me. I just wanted to put it off for as long as I could. At least get to an age when I would not be buried in a child’s white coffin.
Most kids play games where you count to 10 when you get shot and then you are alive again. I didn’t play those games very often after that day. I knew dead meant dead, no matter how long you counted for.
I have to say that, despite gaining a sense of mortality, the experience did not stop me thinking I was indestructible. I don’t know if young girls feel the same way or if it’s the result of reading too many comic books where heroes have super-powers, or if it’s the genetic requirement of potentially one day having to hunt or go to war that makes boys assume they will bounce rather than break. If you have ever been in a family centre where they have climbing frames and a ball pool, you will know what I mean. Little girls play and enjoy the colourful surroundings. Boys fly everywhere, and if they have not fallen off everything in the first 20 minutes they have not had a good time.
I was eight years of age and playing football on a field that we called the orchard. The sun was shining and we were getting to play out longer as spring was turning into summer, with the promise of light nights. Beside the patch of grass on which we were playing there was a fence, which I suppose would have been about eight feet high. Behind the fence there was a private garden full of trees. None of us had ever seen these trees bear fruit, but for some reason the area had become known as the orchard.
Ten minutes into the game, one of the boys kicked the ball and it flew over the fence. I volunteered to do the risky job of fetching it, thinking in my eight-year-old mind that I would be a brave hero if I got the ball back: a cross between Steve Austin and Evel Knievel.
I climbed the fence and jumped down to the other side. I ran quickly to get the ball so that I was not shot by the person who lived in the house – nobody to my knowledge was ever shot, but if you are eight years of age and on an adventure you may as well believe you might get shot for the sake of the excitement. It’s either that, or the possibility of being eaten by a dragon.
I retrieved the ball and kicked it back to my friends. I then began to scale the metal wire of the fence that surrounded the orchard, until I reached the top. The fence was made of hardwire, which was spiky at the top. I don’t actually remember what happened next, but I do recall the decision to jump the eight feet or so down to the ground.
Due to the fashions of the time, I was wearing flares that were so wide that the law of gravity would have allowed me to float down had I chosen to do so. However, I decided to jump, and the flares got caught on the spikes and made me fall the entire way: the first, but not the last, time I fell victim to fashion.
I woke up in hospital. I had damaged my kidneys to the extent that the doctors warned my mum and dad I may need a transplant. As it transpired, my kidneys were actually only bruised, and the doctor suggested I was lucky because, for a boy of my age, I had particularly strong stomach muscles: clearly, all of those obsessive sit-ups had not actually been wasted. I think it was perhaps the only time when something I had done alone in my bedroom had proved to be of any use whatsoever.
It was during this time, in Leighton Hospital near Crewe, that I recall for the first time being able to make people laugh. Living in Winsford and surrounded by the people who had been displaced from Liverpool meant that many on the estate sought to hold on to their Liverpool identity in the most obvious way possible: their accent. Similar to second-and third-generation Irish people in America, who become more Irish than the Irish, many on my estate became more Scouse than they would have been had they never left. I basically grew up around people all trying to ‘out-Scouse’ each other, and this made my accent extremely strong.
Many people think it is strong today, but it has become much more comprehensible with age as I have learnt the importance of being able to communicate in a way that allows people to understand you – not something you immediately comprehend as a child. So, when I was eight years of age and lying in a hospital bed, I became somewhat of a source of entertainment. One particular nurse would affectionately call me ‘Baby Scouse’ and would keep on asking me to say things for her amusement; things that more often than not would involve the word ‘chicken’. There is just something about the construction of that word which makes it sound funny when said in a Scouse accent. The nurse would even bring other nurses to my bed, so that I could say the chosen sentence of the day. It would be something like: ‘Why did the chicken cross the road? How do I know? I’m not a chicken!’ Two chickens in one sentence – comedy gold – and the nurses would start their shift with a giggle.
In some respects, this might sound inappropriate behaviour by nursing staff. These days there would be an enquiry, and I would seek compensation for the trauma and victimisation, as well as the anguish that has meant I can no longer eat chicken. However, I not only enjoyed the attention, I also enjoyed the sound of making other people laugh. And not only other people, but strangers, people who knew nothing about me till I said something funny. That sensation has never left me, and I feel blessed that it is now the way I make my living. The other thing that has been with me all my life is the enjoyment of entertaining nurses. However, that is not for this book. Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink. Pass the chicken!
CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_d1594c0b-3086-5486-84c4-50d13c8047b2)
SCHOOL AND A FRIEND CALLED KIERAN (#ulink_d1594c0b-3086-5486-84c4-50d13c8047b2)
When I was 10 we left Winsford and moved to a brand new council estate in Runcorn. I joined Murdishaw West Primary School, along with Carol, while Eddie and Kathy went to Norton Priory Comprehensive, a 20-minute bus ride away.
Eddie at this point was very close to leaving school anyway, which suited him, as he hated it. He left as quickly as he could at the age of 15, which is quite ironic in many respects because, as I write this, having already completed an art degree in his forties, Eddie is now studying for his GCSEs in English and Maths to enable him to train to become a teacher. Prior to that, his adult life had been spent as a professional footballer playing for Chester and Tranmere, and as a welder, both careers fitting my image of him more than standing at the front of a classroom. But my own career change, too, shows that anything is possible.
Kathy, on the other hand, did well at school and left to train as a nursery nurse, knowing straight away that it was her vocation. She has now spent much of her working life looking after young children in nurseries and schools. I’ve visited her current school a few times to do an assembly for the children, and it is obvious why many people choose such a profession. Kids can be wonderful things – particularly when you can say goodbye to them at 3.30 p.m. Carol also went back to university and gained a degree in Community and Youth Studies, which led her to working at the young offender’s institute at Appleton Thorn, the former open prison our dad had been in. She now works as my PA, which is probably more challenging at times than working with delinquents.
For me, a new school was always an opportunity to make new friends and have fun. Playing football is a great way to make new allegiances, particularly if you are quite good, and I settled into my new school very quickly. It reflected the estate that it served: it was new, fresh and seemed to suggest potential in the very fabric of its walls. The classrooms were bright, and it was the first time that a teacher had a real influence on me.
Mr Jameson was our classroom teacher. Like all junior school teachers, he was charged with teaching us everything, from spelling and painting to world geography and maths. He also ran the school football team. Primary and junior school teachers at that time were like the Google of their age; they had to have an answer for everything, and Mr Jameson managed it all with a degree of calm control.
In one game, we played a nearby school and we won the game convincingly. Mr Jameson’s unruffled demeanour was notable in its contrast with the lunatic teacher from the other school, who stood on the sidelines screaming till his face went red. We almost felt bad for the lads we were playing against but, as they were from the next estate, it was our duty to hammer them.
After the game, we shook hands and did the obligatory three cheers for the opposition, which I always thought was good but belonged more in a rowing club than between teams from two council estates. I recall Mr Jameson speaking quietly afterwards to the opposing teacher, whose face quickly cooled from red to a pinkish shade of pale. None of us heard what was said, but for a day or so around the school it was rumoured that Mr Jameson had said, ‘Sorry you lost, but you’re a prick.’
However, what made him have an impact on me was that he recognised that not only did I like to play football and do all the other things that boys do, but I also enjoyed writing poetry and stories, and he would often allow me to continue working on a story long after the rest of the class had moved on to something else. I always valued this encouragement, and he made me feel confident, even if at times my spelling left us all confused. Every child going through the primary school system deserves someone like Mr Jameson to give them a hint that they can be something more than they can imagine.
It was good to go back to the school on the day that he retired, by then as headmaster. In the short time I was there, he made me the school football team captain, encouraged my imagination, and broke up the occasional fights I was involved in. He basically gave me confidence, and that has been an invaluable thing throughout my life (although, to be honest, I’ve often had much more confidence than I have had ability at times).
If there was ever a job I think I would have liked, it is that of a teacher in a junior school. I think those who work in education are some of the best of people we have. They have often chosen to take the opportunity to shape lives and influence our society rather than pursue a better-paid profession. I accept there are a fair few who fall into it because they partied through university and didn’t know what else to do or couldn’t get any other job. However, in my life, I know certain teachers changed the way I saw the world, and that cannot be said as readily about many people I have met as an adult.
I can still name the teachers who had a real influence on me:
1. Mr Jameson: for the reasons stated above.
2. Miss F: primary-school teacher who had a Spitfire, long blonde hair, lived in Sandbach and was, no doubt, my first crush, but as I was only six I didn’t act on it.
3. Miss J: comprehensive-school teacher on whom I definitely had a crush from the age of 13. I did act on this, but not till I left sixth form, details of which will not feature on these pages, but for which I shall always be grateful.
4. Mr Hilton: comprehensive-school PE teacher who put a great deal of time and effort into the sport at our school. He made me the captain of my secondary-school football team. (We didn’t have any other sports teams. There was once a lesson in rugby taken by another teacher, but a few broken collar bones and a fight later, that ended.) He also took me to all the town team games, and that eventually lead to a trial for the county under-15s team.
There were two games to be played that day, and I was put in the second group. We stood in the snow for ages till it was time to play, and then those supposedly watching didn’t notice for ten minutes that one team only had nine men. I scored and had one of my best games ever. Mr Hilton assured me I was probably the best player on the pitch, and as he was not prone to empty praise I was very encouraged by his comments. Everyone knew that getting into the county team was the first real step to being scouted by a club – it was the first vital step in your dream becoming a reality.
Those in charge with selecting the team were taking a long time to do it, however. They were huddled over clip boards and team sheets, so Mr Hilton told me to take the opportunity of a lift home from my friend’s dad so I could get warm. ‘You did well,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you with the good news later.’
A few hours later he phoned the house to tell me I had not got in. It was the biggest disappointment of my life, and I locked myself in the bathroom till the tears subsided. On the phone he sounded as disappointed as I was, explaining that the teachers picking the team were from a private school in Chester, and that the majority of the squad selected came from their school. It was just another example of how money can buy you opportunity.
Years later, my youngest son, Daniel, played against that same school in the final of a schools cup. The Chester school had consistently won the cup in previous years; Daniel’s school had never even reached the final before. And yet they won. At the final whistle I nearly ran onto the pitch to complete the revenge by waving my victorious fist in front of the Chester school children, parents and staff. Thankfully, common sense told me that as my feelings of being wronged had occurred some thirty years earlier it was unlikely to have involved anyone on the other side of the pitch. Even so, the fact that their official school photographer was reluctant to take a team picture of our boys suggested to me that it was still an institution of tossers.
Mr Hilton had been very supportive in all my school years, using the leverage of the football team to ensure I kept up my schoolwork and didn’t drift, as some of the other lads did.
In the final year the team was good enough to get into a number of the local finals, and I always felt I let Mr Hilton down when I was sent off during one final for punching the centre-half from a school in Helsby. Even to this day I don’t know why I did it: perhaps it was because the lad had long hair and a beaded necklace and looked much cooler than me – he just seemed to irritate me to the point that I punched him. It wasn’t even a good punch, but what hurt more is the fact that I had let Mr Hilton down. I was 16 at the time and I never managed to apologise properly. So if he reads this, I just want to say, ‘Sorry, sir.’
5. Mr Logan: an English teacher who had encouraged me, along with my other English teacher Mrs Withers, through my O-levels in English Language and Literature. He talked me into returning to school when I had left, basically altering the whole course of my life – and that is no exaggeration.
6. Ms Philips: the headmistress of the comprehensive school who bent the rules to allow me to do A-levels and to comply with Mr Logan’s plans for me.
There were other teachers who had more contact with me during my school life and who had more direct influence on me, but that decision, taken with no small consequence, changed the world for me. I will be eternally grateful to both Mr Logan and Ms Philips.
7. Mr Debbage: the teacher who became a friend by giving me somewhere to live when I first moved to Manchester, but who also guided me through my History O-and A-levels, giving me a love of the subject I still retain to this day. He left teaching, as many skilled people do, to move into other areas and effectively became a professional card player. But Bridge’s gain was education’s loss, because he was the most brilliant of teachers, particularly at A-level standard, where he wasn’t having to fight with a room full of varying degrees of interest and intellect, which is the challenge teachers – particularly those in the comprehensive system – face.
8. Miss Boardman: my class tutor through all of my senior-school years. We saw her every day, and it is impossible for someone like that not to have an influence on you. She was only a few years older than us: for many of the teachers in the school it was their first job and they were roughly 8 to 12 years older than the pupils. That is a lot when you’re 11, but it’s not so much when you’re 16. She died too early. I managed to go to her funeral, which was both a sad and a celebratory affair, and I was glad I went. Let’s be honest, you don’t go to a teacher’s funeral unless they meant something to you, and she did.
I am not suggesting this is my Goodbye, Mr Chips moment, but I do feel teachers need to be celebrated. So thank you to all the ones who have been in my life. Thanks, too, even to the ones I didn’t like or who were rubbish at their job. You taught me something: the valuable lesson that some people in authority are pricks.
My education became disrupted as I entered the final year of junior school due to an operation I had on my left leg. At the time I was playing a lot of football, and the GP suggested quite reasonably that the pain in my leg must be ligament damage. As a result, his treatment was rest and a compression bandage.
However, the pain became unbearable after a few weeks and, despite the rest, there seemed to be no improvement. As I was unable to walk, my mum had to wheel me up and down the hill to the GP practice balanced on my bike, to ask if there was any other possible explanation. On many occasions they made the mistake of saying no, until she insisted I be referred to hospital.
Eventually, the referral to the hospital was made. I remember the day the ambulance came to collect me. Just as it arrived, I was sick, either with fear or illness. I don’t recall very much of what happened after that, apart from being prepared for surgery with my mum and dad standing either side of the bed, and my dad leaning in to kiss me on my forehead.
This was at a time when we were years past kissing: goodnight was a nod to my mum and a handshake to my dad – I’m glad to say that my family is so much more demonstrative now than we were then. One thing I have learnt from my travels over the years is that the British approach to displaying affection needs to improve. Now, when I see my mum and sisters and female family members or friends, we always kiss – although London-based females confuse me easily with the one or two cheek thing. Personally, after one cheek, if you are going again, you may as well throw the tongue in.
Eddie, my dad and all male family members get a handshake. Indeed, after a night in a bar with a few dozen Romanian miners (which I will come to later), I always shake hands with any male group I am in. It’s good manners, it breaks down barriers, and I think it shows some class – which is something you don’t always expect to learn from men who spend most of their time down a hole.
Lying on a hospital trolley about to be operated on and having both parents kiss me on the head made me start to think something was wrong. Which it was. Upon arrival at the hospital, my leg had been X-rayed and checked by the aptly named Mr Bone. Mr Bone had diagnosed a condition called osteomyelitis, a bone infection which he said was akin to having an abscess inside my left femur, the size of which, he informed my parents, was a huge cause for concern. He then advised my mum and dad that the next 24 hours would be critical.
In his words, he was operating to try to save my leg, although he told them if the operation was at all delayed and the abscess burst, then it could potentially become systemic. After that, there was a real danger I would die.
His plan was to try to drain the poison out of my leg, although he felt that the damage caused was already such that my leg would probably never grow beyond its current size – I was 11 at the time. It would then either be such a hindrance that I would want it amputated, or I could live a decent life with a built-up shoe.
Of course, I knew nothing of this when my mum and dad kissed me.
Luckily the operation was a success, but I did require a month in hospital and six months with a walking stick, followed by visits to the physiotherapy unit for a further three years, till they were satisfied that the leg was growing in tandem with the other one. I quite enjoyed having the walking stick, which I used to throw for Lassie to chase until I realised she would never bring it back. There is nothing more pathetic than chasing your own dog for your walking stick, when you need a walking stick to walk.
When I was eventually signed off by the physiotherapy department some three years after the operation, I knew how lucky I was. The final sign-off meant that they believed I was fixed for life, and in reality I was: I have never had any problems with my leg, and after the rehabilitation period I was able to do everything as if it had never happened. Yet I knew that not everyone was that fortunate.
During my time in hospital I became aware of a boy in the same ward as me. He had visitors, but he never really noticed them as he lay looking at the ceiling. Sometimes his mum would just sit on a chair next to his bed and cry; other times, she would come with a priest who would administer Holy Communion, but all the time he just lay looking up, communicating using weak flicks of his eyelids.
His name was Kieran, and when I was able get out of my bed I started going over to him with my cartoons. My leg at this point was attached to a drip, which was pumping antibiotic fluid directly into the bone, with another bag to collect the putrid, black-red infection as it drained. I was not able to move all over the ward, but I could make it to the other side of the room to his bed – it only took me around 15 minutes. When the nurses saw that I was visiting Kieran, thankfully they moved his bed next to mine.
Kieran and I became good friends, mainly because we were the only ones in there for more than a few days and because we were very close in age. I would read comics with him or just talk, or show him things. Gradually his winks were accompanied by grunts, and it was clear he was on his way back from the damage that had been caused when he had been knocked over by a van whilst out playing.
When I left hospital I was genuinely sad to be saying goodbye to Kieran. We kept in touch and, during my frequent visits to the hospital, I called in to see him on the ward and later at his house, when he had been deemed well enough to be transferred home, near Warrington. When my hospital visits ended and I had no reason to visit Warrington, our communication reduced to the odd letter or card, and a very occasional phone call, although his speech still had some way to go to be fully comprehensible and his handwriting looked like it had been a struggle to complete the words.
Then, one morning, when I was getting ready to go to school, my dad opened a letter over breakfast. I recognised the handwriting as belonging to Kieran’s mum. I could see from his expression that my dad had a message to pass on. He handed me the letter. Kieran had died. Despite his improvement he hadn’t been strong enough to ward off normal infections and had lost his fight for life.
Kieran had died as a consequence of an accident that could have been avoided. As always with these happenings that can ruin lives, there would have been many nights spent by all involved wishing that those split-second decisions that had put Kieran in front of that van had been different. Like my school friend in the swimming pool.
I was 17 and, once again, I was reminded that nothing in life is guaranteed.
CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_5fa05818-ef8c-5874-8427-4c892bf1fde5)
TEENAGE KICKS (#ulink_5fa05818-ef8c-5874-8427-4c892bf1fde5)
I have teenage boys now. I look at their life and not only do I not understand them because they are teenagers and their job is to be incomprehensible to their parents, but also because their life is nothing like the life I had at their age. When I was a teenager, we did not have any form of communication apart from talking either face-to-face, being on the house phone or writing. Admittedly, the letter-writing side was in reality limited to notes around the classroom, usually involving a very poor caricature of the teacher with enormous genitals. Which now seems rather odd. Why would it be funny to suggest the man in front of you had a huge cock? But, for some reason in a world before YouTube, it was the funniest thing we could think of.
Valentine’s Day cards were the only other time I recall writing to communicate. They were things to be prized, and size certainly mattered. During my teenage years I would give my girlfriend a Valentine’s card that was the size of a Wendy house, or padded so it was like a duvet in a box, although admittedly a duvet with a doe-eyed teddy bear on it. I wouldn’t for a minute suggest that I was in any way more romantic than any other teenage boy, but from an early age I learnt that you have to invest if you want something, and an impressive card, in my mind, stood you in good stead for a fondle.
I sometimes miss the simplicity of teenage relationships, though – the ability to end it by telling your mate to tell her mate that she was ‘chucked’ just seems so much more honest in its own cowardly way than the text/Facebook route chosen by teenagers today. I also miss the progressive nature of the physical relationship. The gradual stages of fumbling and endless snogging to suddenly being allowed entry into unchartered waters so that you take another tiny step towards manhood – all of that held an excitement that is hard to replicate at any other stage of your life. A mate of mine said to me that reducing his golf handicap was giving him the same buzz that he received from achieving the gradual progression through the bases when he was a teenage boy. There is nothing that can define you more as a middle-aged man than having a friend who is as excited by lowering his golf handicap as he once was by learning how to undo a bra. Age is a cruel thing.
Today, the first indication that your teenage child is having a relationship is the increasing size of their mobile phone bill. The notion that teenage romance led to hours on the phone was somewhat alien in my youth: talking on the house phone at all was a rare event. The phone was for emergencies. Besides, the phone lived on a table positioned in the hallway under the stairs – the most public place in the house. Nowadays, people are suggesting that parents need to monitor their children’s activities on social networking sites to find out to whom they are talking. That wasn’t required in the eighties – if your mum wanted to know what you were up to, she just sat on the stairs.
Today, every individual in my house has their own mobile phone, and we have various telephone extensions around the house – to the extent that it is impossible not to be available for immediate communication. This has created a difficult situation for this generation of teenagers, as they have never known anything but instant communication. If the internet goes down in my house, it’s the end of the world, and the children immediately get in touch with social services to report neglect.
But the flip side to this is that if they leave the house and I want to know where they are going and what they are doing, I just ring them. (If you are a parent, you know that I’m lucky if they bother to answer the phone or tell me the truth, but allow me my fantasy.) Telecommunication has lost all its magic for them, which is sad in some ways. They will never know the excitement of a phone call after nine at night: anyone ringing our house that late was only doing it to say someone was dead, and it was always great family fun to guess who before the phone was picked up.
Often the quickest way to converse with teenagers today is via text, even if they are in the same room. I once had a text row with my son when we were sitting on the same couch! I lost, as every adult that tries to communicate with the ‘youth of today’ inevitably will do when the process of communication involves only using your thumbs. Watching my kids texting looks a blur to me: it’s like their two thumbs are having a race. Their head is bowed, and the concentration on the face and the general stillness could easily be interpreted as meditation, were it not for the frenetic thumb action. Having a text row with them is pointless because before you can finish your text to them they have replied, told you how wrong you are, how great everyone else’s parents are and how you are ruining their life.
This evolution of communication is the biggest difference between my kids and my own development as a teenager. For me, football provided a way to enter the adult world. During my teenage years my dad ran Sunday league teams. We would travel together as a squad, play the game, go to the pub afterwards and be home for the Sunday roast my mum had prepared. During those years I learnt how to be amongst men. I also learnt that if you make a commitment, you stick to it. So even on wet Sunday mornings, when your bed was calling you, you got up and went to play on whatever pitch you were sent to that week.
Trying to recall my teenage years, I can remember football constantly being there. The academy system that most clubs run these days did not exist then, so it was possible to believe you might become a professional footballer even if you hadn’t been scouted by the time you were 20. There were always examples of top-flight footballers who, a few years earlier, had been playing Sunday league football. The consequence was that amateur football was very vibrant: people still had dreams, and those dreams had a chance of being realised. It wasn’t difficult to get kids together either, because everyone wanted to play. In a world without computer games or, for that matter, home computers, and where children’s TV was only on for a few hours after school, if you didn’t go out and do something your options were very limited.
Having run kids’ teams myself in recent years, I don’t recall levels of parental involvement or interference being as high back then, either. I don’t recollect my dad having to drop us off and pick us up in the same way my wife and I have spent the last few years doing – to the point that if there is one luxury I have allowed myself, it is to set up a taxi account. My secret ambition is to one day own a car and sell it years later, without it ever having been used to ferry them anywhere. When my oldest son recently passed his driving test, my wife and I sat back and planned what we would do with all the spare time we would now gain from not driving him around. She is considering a second degree and I am planning to learn Chinese.
The truth was that we expected less then. Youth teams barely had full kits, let alone matching hoodies and personalised bags. The parents who did come generally did so to support the lads; there was no need for rope around the pitch to prevent irate parents coming onto the field to either support or bollock their little Johnny. The level of organisation in youth football now is impressive. Team coaches have to pass an approved FA coaching course, people involved are CRB checked, and my son’s under-15 team has to line up to have their photo ID-checked by the opposition manager before every game.
I think some of this can be overkill, like being CRB-checked to take your own son and his friends to a game, even though they all stayed at your house the night before. (This was actually suggested to me a few years ago – you can imagine my response.) It’s great to be organised, but you don’t want to take the simple pleasure out of the game. Although I do think the ID cards are a good idea, as it prevents teams playing ‘ringers’: I recall playing a game against one team when I was 15, which we lost. At the end of the game their bearded centre-half drove himself and his watching wife and kids home.
As a teenager the team I played for was Halton Sports. It was run by my dad’s friend, Joe Langton, whose son, Peter, also played. Joe was a barrel-chested man with a bald head, the crown of which was framed by short, blond hair. He always sported a neat moustache. A strong man whose day job was laying flag stones, Joe was almost square in shape. The joke amongst the lads was that he had once been six-foot-seven and a house had fallen on him to make him the square five-foot-six he actually was. Joe took it so seriously that he would often turn up in a three-piece suit, ready for an interview with Match of the Day should they turn up.
The team was good. The better players from our school team played, boys like Mark Donovan, Sean Johnson and Curtis Warren – not the infamous Liverpool gangster, but a fast, ginger-haired lad who scored a lot of goals. We were joined by good lads from the schools’ representative team, like John Hickey and Peter Golburn. I only list the names because none of us became professional footballers – which was an obvious ambition for us all – and every single one of those listed would have been good enough.
I would possibly suggest that playing in Joe’s team was the highest sporting success most of us enjoyed, as we spent one season completely unbeaten and won most things in the years that we played. My dad kept all the newspaper clippings of my resulting football career, and I always look at the coverage of that period with affection.
• • •
Apart from playing football, there was not a lot to do on the estate. When I was a bit older I volunteered at a cancer hospice, but in my early teens I never went to a youth club or anything of that nature, and generally just hung around on my bike doing all the things teenage boys do. I never really got into too much trouble. Scrapping had been replaced by an interest in girls, and the knowledge that as you all grew bigger it hurt more when you got hit. I never did the drinking-cider-on-a-wall-and-smoking thing that many started to do in their mid-teens because I had promised my dad I would never smoke, a promise he made all four of us make to him from a very early age, and which none of us has broken – apart from allowing myself the odd cigar. (That habit began one night in a posh hotel in Valletta, Malta. I found myself alone with an 80-year-old barman called Sonny, drinking a glass of whisky and listening to Frank Sinatra. Having a cigar seemed the most appropriate thing in the world.)
When I was 13 and feeling the need to be more independent and spread my wings outside the estate, football things were replaced by a bicycle. It was a silver ‘racer’, which basically meant it weighed a ton but had curved handlebars. Due to a cock-up by the catalogue company, I didn’t actually get the bike till Easter, so on Christmas Day my present was a box containing Cluedo. A great game, but not a great way to get around the estate. I hope I hid my disappointment well enough on the day when asking through gritted teeth – when my mates were all out on their new bikes – ‘Was it Professor Green with the lead piping?’
With the ability to stagger repayments, the catalogue was the avenue through which many people on the estate purchased things that were out of their reach financially. Every time a White Arrow van arrived on the estate, you knew someone was getting something from the catalogue. The bike was my final present as a child. Every year previously for Christmas I received something football-related. After the bike, all my Christmas presents were things to make me look good or allow me to go out; in other words, money or clothes. Unless it was a book voucher, which no kid wants as a Christmas present – you may as well give them an abacus and say, ‘Go and try to be a bit cleverer next year.’
The progression of a boy’s life can be mapped out by the Christmas presents he receives: a kit; a ball; one year I got a Subbuteo set with two teams, England and Uruguay. Nobody knew where Uruguay was, but they played in a blue kit and all the players were painted brown, so when I played Subbuteo, it was always England v the Black Everton.
As I got older, other things became more important to me, such as trying to be fashionable. I particularly remember receiving my first Fred Perry T-shirt, a yellow one with brown trim, which I don’t think I took off until it was physically too small to get on and had begun to look like a bra. But the only way of providing you with something that allowed you to make up your own mind was with money. Cash became king in my teenage years when it came to presents. I could buy records, although I never went too crazy on this: I rationalised that there is always new music, so why spend your money on something you like now when something better may be out next week? These are the decisions you had to make when it came to records, as they were things of permanence, not like a download. Even if you weren’t playing it, you had to put it somewhere, and I couldn’t always be bothered with that level of responsibility. Besides, being the youngest allowed me to listen to the music the others brought into the house, on either vinyl or cassette. I realise for readers of a certain age these things may as well be tablets of stone, and for others they provided hours of musical joy, but to me they were just more things I had to put away.
By the time I was 15 I had discovered girls. I knew they had existed before, obviously – I lived with two of them. But I mean I became more interested in them than I was in my mates. However, it should be made clear that I wasn’t exactly a lothario when it came to girls, and I had all the awkwardness that comes with being a teenage boy. These ranged from thinking that the best way of attracting the attention of a girl you fancied was by throwing something at her head (Paula); to being so unworldly wise that the first time a girl French-kissed me I pulled away, spat on the floor and shouted, ‘What did you stick your tongue down my mouth for? You dirty cow!’ (Jane).
This growing interest coincided with a failed car-stealing incident. It was not an unusual pastime for teenage boys on the estate to steal motor scooters from gardens. They were easy to jump-start, and you could have a few hours of fun before the petrol ran out, someone crashed or you just left it somewhere – usually always stupidly close to home, to save the walk.
Somehow, we had never been caught doing this. So, emboldened, we decided one afternoon when at my friend Mark’s house that he should steal his dad’s car. This was a big, golden-brown British Leyland Princess which Mark had been shown how to drive by his dad, although admittedly only for 50 yards. His mum and dad were away for the weekend, and Mark was being checked on by his older sister, but was basically left to his own devices. After some thought, we all decided it would be great to drive around the estate in the car.
Mark was a bit less enthusiastic, I recall, but, being egged on by the four of us, he capitulated. He took the keys, and off we set. He reversed safely enough and, despite it being the middle of a Saturday afternoon, none of the neighbours seemed concerned when five 14-year-old boys started driving down the street.
Mark managed to get over two relatively busy junctions and had avoided knocking over any number of kids playing in the street before the car suddenly stopped. He tried to change gear but nothing happened.
We were all sitting in a stolen car in the middle of the estate when a man in a van stopped and asked what was wrong. Not, ‘What are you lot doing in the car?’ but, ‘What’s wrong?’
With his help, it was decided the clutch had gone and that the only way back to the house was to push it. A journey of 10 minutes’ driving is a lot longer when four teenage boys are pushing a car steered by their friend, and it may have been during it that the penny dropped in my head: ‘My mates are idiots. I should be trying to get girls’ bras off instead.’
I really was no big hit with the girls. I was never actually shy, just unsure. I understood boys. You knew what made each other laugh (farts), and you knew that if someone was annoying, then eventually someone else would punch them. It was never the same with girls. They could say something to me, and I would just be stumped. I would just think, ‘Laughing must be wrong as nobody has farted, and punching them is out of the question.’
I eventually got over my awkwardness and was able to have a few dalliances, before going steady with a girl called Denise. She had hair that was a mixture of red and auburn, a great athletic figure from playing school hockey and netball, and a wicked sense of humour. And I am grateful that during my later teenage years, when I could have been doing other things, she allowed me the opportunity to fumble my way to manhood with her.
We went out with each other in that typically teenage on-off fashion for years; people assumed that we would one day get married. That is what you did on the estate: if you found someone who was good enough, it seemed to make sense to get married. I remember my dad even asking me once if I thought I would marry her. I was 17. As the father of 17-year-old boys of the modern era, I am not sure I could even ask them to commit to taking the dog for a walk without expecting a phone call telling me the dog had ran off and it was my fault because I asked them to do it in the first place.
The reality was that I wanted something more than the estate had to offer; I just wasn’t sure what it was. But I was about to find out.
CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_0b6d8486-5648-555c-9e36-420aa3ab15a2)
ALL I LEARNT IN SCHOOL (#ulink_0b6d8486-5648-555c-9e36-420aa3ab15a2)
I left school for the first time when I was 16. I had gained six O-levels and four CSEs. At that time, the education system was split between those who teachers thought were academically capable enough to achieve an O-level, and those they considered ‘less able’, who sat CSEs. I fell into the bracket of pupils who were regarded as a little bit of both. In Physics and Maths everyone sat the same examination, and you were either awarded an O-level or a CSE. This worked out well for me, as I achieved an O-level in both. I doubt that was what my teachers expected of me, particularly as the only thing I can remember about physics was setting my hair on fire trying to see if the central hole in the Bunsen burner continued up through the flame. If you’re interested, it doesn’t. And I think it is fair to say that if you are stupid enough to set yourself on fire, you are lucky to get any qualification, let alone a coveted O-level.
At my school, this batch of O-levels was a fairly impressive figure. Within my household, school was something that we all went to but never really expected much from. My mum attended all the parents’ evenings, but the only time I recall my dad showing more than a passing interest was the summer I left.
‘You mum tells me you’ve done some O-levels.’
‘Yer.’
‘Good, hope you get them.’
That was that, and I guess that was all that needed to be said.
With what appeared to be a healthy clutch of qualifications, I was encouraged by the school to return to the sixth form. It had only just been set up, as whilst the total student population was pushing towards 2,000, they weren’t particularly successful in recruiting candidates for sixth form: there was just 11 people in it. But, after due consideration, I went for it.
This decision was based on the belief that if I were to gain A-levels I could do a degree, and if I did a degree, I could do a job where I would not need to get a wash when I came home from work, like Clive’s dad. In my mind, I could end up doing something interesting, taxing, and where you wore a suit: perhaps be a solicitor. No ordinary, boring solicitor, but more of a Petrocelli-type, caravan-dwelling advocate, the sort of lawyer who stood up for the innocent poor who couldn’t pay for justice. If you never saw the brilliant series starring Barry Newman, it is a great indication of how times have changed. Who would trust a lawyer now who lived in a caravan?
To be a lawyer was an impressive aspiration within my family, so I perpetuated the idea that I wanted to train to be a solicitor for many years. In fact, I’m sure there are still some family members who think it would have been better to have a lawyer in the family than a comedian.
However, my attendance at sixth form lasted all of one day. At that time, anybody staying on at school sixth form only received family allowance. This was the princely sum of £6.50 per week, as opposed to the £24 per week afforded by the government to all those on a Youth Opportunity Scheme. It was 1982, the recession was beginning to bite, and there were very few jobs around. But the government policy guaranteed all 16 to 18 year olds a place on one of these schemes.
Along with this, when I arrived at the sixth form wearing brand-new jeans, I was promptly informed that jeans were not acceptable so I would have to get some trousers.
At the time, Eddie had left home to take up residence in a flat in Southgate, an estate built to look like washing machines and with about as much practical application as a washing machine when it came to somewhere to live; Kathy was training to be a nursery nurse; and Carol was on a Youth Opportunity Scheme. My dad was trying to make a living making and selling wrought-iron furniture, such as telephone tables, which were such a staple of every home at the time. The idea was that when you used the phone you sat sort of side-saddle at the table. No wonder people of a certain age seem to droop as they get older – for a large part of their life they are having conversations on the phone at a ridiculous angle. My mum had a part-time job washing dishes in the kitchen of a factory canteen on the industrial estate. In essence, I didn’t feel I could return home and say to my mum I required new trousers. Instead, I felt I should be bringing money into the household and paying my way.
I had already applied for a job at the main factory in Runcorn: ICI. Along with my mate, Vic, I received a letter saying I had the got the job, to start in the second week of September. ICI was a huge chemical plant and the job in question was as a mail lad. That was the actual job description; it was a job for a ‘lad’ – girlies need not apply. And to my knowledge, none of them did. Most followed other paths, like my then girlfriend Denise, who trained to be a hairdresser. At least the old system made things very simple, as I’m sure if the ‘mail lad’ job were to exist at all in the world of emails it would be called something like ‘communications distribution individual’.
So I left school and went to work delivering mail at ICI. This involved getting a bus at 6.30 a.m. to arrive at work for 7. We would then collect the bicycles that were left at the security gate each evening and ride down the hill to the mail office. Getting up early was worth that ride downhill. Everyone should start the day going downhill on a bicycle. It was great fun – apart from the rain and snow and cold. OK, so it was great about eleven days of the year, but they were still great days.
We’d finish by 3 o’clock and, two nights a week, I would then go to night school in Widnes to study A-levels in English and Law. I may not have been in the sixth form, but I didn’t want my education to stop.
One day, on the way home from ICI, and while still wearing my steel-cap ICI safety boots, my ICI safety jacket and my ICI safety trousers, I called in to the school sixth form. It was there that I bumped into Mr Logan. Mr Logan had been my English teacher during my O-level period and would have been my A-level teacher had I stayed in the sixth form. He asked me how I was getting on, and I explained that I was working and doing A-levels at night school. He asked if I’d consider returning to the sixth form in January, but as I was then earning £42 a week, to leave that to return to a family allowance of just £6.50 a week didn’t seem viable.
In reality, I was beginning to have doubts about ICI and the future. I remember one day I fell into conversation at the plant with one of the men who always seemed to be walking around wearing boiler suits and hard hats, but never actually doing much. He was a friendly man in his late fifties with a warm face and a frame that suggested he enjoyed a roast dinner, and a disposition that suggested he had never seen how that roast dinner was made. He had worked at ICI all of his life.
‘You’ve got a job for life here, son,’ he informed me proudly, as he lit a cigarette, completely ignoring the No Smoking signs and the miles of pipework around his head carrying flammable chemicals. ‘Yes, son, no reason you won’t be taking your pension here.’
I remember looking around at the myriad pipes transporting chemicals all over the plant, and thinking, ‘Is this the view I have to spend the rest of my working life looking at?’
I think one of those great things about advice is that it is often given to make one point but ends up making entirely the opposite one. I could think of nothing worse than giving my life away so cheaply. Some people are lucky enough to find contentment in such security, but for me it felt as if someone was pouring water over my bonfire so the flames would not get too high. To stay in the same place of work all my life, get married, live in the same area, go to the same pubs, see the same faces until one by one we popped our clogs was like being handed a life of limitation that I just couldn’t accept. It’s a life that suits many people down to the ground, and in many ways I have always been envious of them. I never thought I was better than anyone else; I just knew I wanted something different. The problem was, I wasn’t sure what that was.
In the discussion with Mr Logan I had told him that the only option for me to return to full-time education of any nature was to take a part-time course at the local further-education college. If you were able to study part-time there, then you were able to claim unemployment benefits, which would mean £18 a week rather than £6.50. Still a long way behind the £42 a week I was currently earning, but at least a step to bridge the gap. The difficulty was that you were not allowed to study in school sixth forms part-time, only in FE colleges. If you were studying in a school, then you had to be classed as a full-time student for the school to receive the payment from the local education authority to cover your attendance. Mr Logan had said he would talk to the headmistress, Ms Philips, and see if there was any way around this.
I came into school a few days later to have a conversation with them both. The reality was stark and clear: I could not continue to do night-school A-levels one night a week over one year and realistically expect to pass. But, on the other hand, I couldn’t afford to leave my job. After some deliberation, it was agreed that the school would give me a letter that I could take to the unemployment exchange to say that I was studying part-time. Once they accepted this and guaranteed I would receive my dole, then I would leave my job.
The school was basically gambling that the unemployment office would not get in touch with the education services who, had they found out I was only studying part-time, would not have given the school the full remittance for my place, while Ms Philips would have faced serious questions about why she had told lies.
Everything was agreed and the letter was accepted. I was to return to school to do English and History A-levels, whilst I was to continue at night school once a week to study Law. It was a decision that would change everything I would do from then on, and it opened the door to a new world of potential opportunity.
What I had not envisaged was how this plan would sound to anybody else when I tried to explain it. The night that everything was agreed with the teachers, I went home to tell my mum and dad. I knew that they had been proud that I had been taken on at ICI as it offered one of the few permanent jobs for anyone my age in the area, but I assumed they would be pleased with my decision to leave, particularly once I had explained the financial side of things.
However, my announcement was met with blank stares. The kind of stares I would have expected if I had said I was going to join the Foreign Legion. Clearly what had left my mouth was the least expected thing in the world, and we sat talking until nearly midnight over endless cups of tea.
Although my mum was more supportive, my dad was clear and honest in his view. He did his best to convince me that having a job with prospects was so much better than taking a chance on doing A-levels and only possibly going to university. At this point, only my cousin Karen had gone to university, and it was generally accepted as something not for the likes of us.
Also, Karen was clever and known to be so. I was a boy and so intellect was balanced by my ability to carry things, and within our family history we were more greatly predisposed to the latter as a way to make a living. I knew I was going against the grain, but I also knew I had to tell them that this was what I wanted to do.
As I write these words now, it almost feels like I am talking about ‘coming out’ to my family that I read books. It wasn’t so dramatic; it was more that I was gambling on something better and needed them to see it too, although at the time A-levels appeared as useful as magic beans. There were no jobs, so why give up a perfectly good one in the hope of another one in the future?
I set my argument out as best as I could: I wanted something more than it appeared I could achieve if I did not change direction.
After hours of talking, my dad summarised it all in just one sentence: ‘I think it could be a mistake, but you have got to try. If you don’t try, you will always wonder what might have happened.’
And that was that. From that moment, I had their full support and they never questioned my decision. It was a great relief that they supported me: once my mum and dad get behind you, they are there for the long haul, and you can’t ask more of anyone.
So for the first time, but not the last, I left a well-paid job to try to achieve something against the advice of many, but with the support of those who mattered.
Eighteen months later, I was sitting in the passenger seat of a second-hand BT van next to my mum, as my dad was driving us north to what was then Newcastle Polytechnic. My mum could have said goodbye at home and let me travel up with my dad, or they could have put me on a train. Instead, they wanted to make the eight-hour round trip in a car none of us was sure could make it in order to say goodbye properly, because that’s what loving parents do. The van had been acquired a few weeks before, and it was another in the long list of unique vehicles my dad has owned. With a top speed of 50 mph, the journey took a very long time.
In actuality, it had taken 18 years. I was leaving home and saying goodbye to start the next stage of my life.
CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_15075378-0247-50a7-920f-40d5865d10c1)
NEWCASTLE (#ulink_15075378-0247-50a7-920f-40d5865d10c1)
Newcastle didn’t exactly work out for me as I had planned. I enjoyed my first term there, and I liked the people that I met. However, I had gone to study an English and History degree having achieved a ‘B’ in my History and an ‘Ungraded’ in my English A-levels.
The English grade had shocked the school to the extent that they had paid to have the paper remarked. They had predicted at least a ‘B’ grade, but when the paper was returned it was clear why the ungraded mark had been given. Somewhere in the exam my brain had turned to mush, and my mild dyslexia had gone berserk: I had written some words backwards, some upside down, whilst others were just illegible. Although I certainly am not the greatest speller in the world, and had been tested for dyslexia on a number of occasions, I had never before displayed such a meltdown.
I have always put my inability to spell down to the fact that in junior school we were taught to spell phonetically, which means speaking the word slowly as you spell it. The problem with such a process is that if you speak with an accent as thick as mine, and live in an environment where you are not surrounded by the written word to counterbalance your exposure to these sounds, then it is easy to make mistakes. I was 10 before I realised the word ‘there’ did not have a ‘d’ in it.
What happened that day has never happened since, and it is still inexplicable to me. But, using the grades I achieved in General Studies and the Law exam I did at night school as a trade-off, the school had somehow convinced Newcastle Poly they should allow me to do a degree in a subject that I failed at A-level. Which you have to say is no mean feat.
I began the course in Newcastle full of enthusiasm. It was my first time living away from home and I immediately fell in love with the city and its people. To this day, it is one of the first places I look for when I have a tour booked. I was living in the student hall of residence and threw myself into the social life that this presented. I gained a casual girlfriend called Anne and managed to get myself into the first XI football team, which provided a great social network. It also provided fantastic trips away, as Newcastle Poly sports teams were generally regarded as quite strong.
On one particular trip, we were to play against Edge Hill University, a teacher training college near Ormskirk. I can’t remember the score, but I know we won, and what I can remember is that after the game we went to the student union for a drink – only to find out the ratio of girls to men at Edge Hill was roughly 4 to 1. We had a whip-round to convince the bus driver to allow us to stay a few hours longer, and at the end of the evening we returned to the team bus triumphant. Every single player (apart from Lawrence, who played in goal and whose cousin attended that college and to whom he’d had to talk all night) had got at least a snog. It was a fantastic feeling to be amongst a body of men who had arrived in new lands and challenged the local men to do battle on the football pitch, emerging victorious and then finding pleasure among the local women. It was probably the closest I will ever come to being a Viking.
Despite the fun I was having in Newcastle, I was quickly becoming disillusioned with the course. In truth, my experience in literature has been limited to books that I was forced to read for school rather than books I wanted to read; it was only during my A-level course that I had begun to read books for pleasure. Prior to that, if it was not a comic book or a Roy of the Rovers annual, I never read anything.
I regret those wasted years, and I am pleased that my three sons are avid readers. I still don’t read as much as I would like, but I attempt to have at least one book always on the go. This does also lead to the accumulation of a mass of books that I have started on a train journey somewhere and never finished. I used to feel guilty about not finishing books but, as I’ve become older, I have come to the conclusion that this is not my fault – if the book was any good, I would have finished it.
This could be a very pragmatic way to explain my laziness, or it could simply be true. Books are the only thing that you embark upon feeling responsible for your own enjoyment of it; even if the first 50 pages are rubbish, there is a sense of defeat if you don’t finish it. That doesn’t happen in any other art form; it certainly doesn’t happen in comedy. You can’t be rubbish for 20 minutes to the extent that the audience get up and leave without seeing the conclusion of your act, and feel totally reassured that on their way home they will think it’s their fault.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/john-bishop/how-did-all-this-happen/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
John Bishop
If you’re a man of a certain age you’ll know there comes a point in life when getting a sports car and over-analysing your contribution to society sounds like a really good idea.With a good job in sales and marketing and a nice house in Manchester that he shared with his wife and kids, John Bishop was no different when he turned the dreaded 4-0. But instead of spanking a load of cash on a car that would have made him look like a senior stylist at Vidal Sassoon, he stumbled onto a pathway that ultimately lead him to become one of the nation’s best loved comedians. It was a gamble, but boy, did it pay off.How Did All This Happen? is the story of how a boy who, growing up on a council estate dreaming of ousting Kenny Dalglish from Liverpool FC’s starting line-up, suddenly found himself on stage in front of thousands of people nationwide, at an age when he should have known better.In his own inimitable style, John guides us through his life from leaving the estate and travelling the globe on a shoe string, to marriage, kids and the split that led him to being on a stage complaining to strangers one night – the night that changed his life and started his journey to stardom.Wonderfully entertaining and packed with colourful reminiscences and comical anecdotes, this is a heart-warming, life-affirming and ultimately very, very funny memoir from one of the nation’s greatest comedians.
Copyright (#u09671441-da0a-50d6-bbc5-05f0c2624236)
HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
FIRST EDITION
© John Bishop 2013
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
All images are © the author, with the following exceptions:
Image 9 used courtesy of the Southport Visiter; Image 10 © Runcorn & Widnes World; Image 15 and 16 © Steve Porter (Potsy), Image 17 and 18 © Ged McCann; Image 32 © Daniel Sutka; Image 37 © Paul Home, Image 39 © Harvey Collard; Image 41 © Mark Taylor/tangerine; Image 42 © Hamish Brown, Image 43 © ITV/Kieron McCarron; Image 46 © Des Willie, Image 47 © Rhian Ap Gruffydd, Image 48 and 49 © Tom Dymond; Image 50 and 51 © Rhian Ap Gruffydd; Image 52, 53 and 54 © Rhian Ap Gruffydd, Image 55 © Tom Dymond.
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014 Cover photographs © Rankin
John Bishop asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.co.uk/green (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/green)
Source ISBN: 9780007436125
Ebook Edition © October 2013 ISBN: 9780007436156
Version: 2014-07-17
This book is dedicated to Melanie and our sons Joe, Luke and Daniel.
You give me a reason for everything.
CONTENTS
Cover (#u23e1b1cf-71a2-5333-8957-dbee4fcdf9c9)
Title Page (#ubabfb408-33e7-5a46-9676-b9cf4b6ab9da)
Copyright
Dedication (#ub60dd1f3-3d35-56be-972b-946c7a647601)
Acknowledgements
Foreword
1. Hello World
2. My Dad and Cars
3. A Boy Learning Adult Lessons
4. School and a Friend Called Kieran
5. Teenage Kicks
6. All I Learnt in School
7. Newcastle
8. I Don’t Eat Meat, or Fight Paratroopers
9. Moving On
10. The Manchester Years
11. The Great U S of A
12. Football
13. Time to Grow Up
14. Learning to Ride
15. Road to Bangkok
16. Indian Days
17. A Day in Buxton Changed Everything
18. A Yank Called Joe
19. A Town That Didn’t Exist
20. Marriage, Fatherhood and Idiot Friends
21. Babies, a Surprise I Didn’t Want and the Snip
22. Bad Hair Day, Removal Vans and Broken Hearts
23. Frog and Bucket
24. Sometimes I Try to Be Funny
25. We All Have to Die on Our Arse Some Time
26. Life Saver
27. How a Wardrobe Can Change Your Life
28. ‘Mum, I’m on Telly!’
29. Festival of Broken Dreams
30. We Are the Champions!
31. On Tour
32. It’s Always Better When It’s Full
33. Opportunity Knocks
34. 2010 … No Going Back
35. Sport Relief
36. A Family Day at Wembley
37. Week of Hell
Picture Section
Postscript
About the Publisher
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#u09671441-da0a-50d6-bbc5-05f0c2624236)
This book is the book I never thought I would write, because I never imagined I would have lived the life that appears in these pages. I don’t regard my life as anything special: like everyone else, there have been times when I have been so happy I have cried and so sad that there was nothing left to do but laugh. Yet to reach the point of putting it all on paper required the help of various people, some of whom I wish to thank here. I have to thank James Rampton who helped me sift through my thoughts to make what is on the page make sense. Everyone at HarperCollins, particularly Anna Valentine for her support from the first meeting to this eventually being printed; a support that has made all the difference. Gemma Feeney at Etch PR for getting people interested in this book. Lisa Thomas, my agent, business partner and friend who took me on when nobody else wanted me and changed my world. Everyone at LTM for their support, especially Emily Saunders, who manages to know what I should be doing when I have no idea. To the lads – you know who you are and, before you worry, this is my story, not our story, so hopefully no divorces will result from these pages. Thank you for your friendship, for the memories and mostly for the material. I have to thank my mum and dad for guiding me through childhood to becoming the person I am today, and thank Eddie, Kathy and Carol for being on that journey with me as part of the Bishop family. You were the people who made the foundations of the man I am today and I will forever be grateful for that love. My wife, Melanie, I have to thank because in so many ways she is the glue that holds these pages together and without her I am not sure there would be much of a story to tell. My three sons, Joe, Luke and Daniel, to whom I am nothing more than just a pain-in-the-arse dad but who have filled my heart in ways I probably have never been the best at showing. I have to thank my dog Bilko – he doesn’t know it, but badgering me for a walk often allowed me to get my head clear when I didn’t know what to write next. I finally want to thank everyone who has ever bothered to come and see me perform. Comedy changed my life, but without an audience I would just be a man talking to himself and, having done that too many times, I will always appreciate you being there, perhaps more than you will ever know.
FOREWORD (#u09671441-da0a-50d6-bbc5-05f0c2624236)
I looked around the dressing room and all I could see were legends. There were jokes and shared banter between people who had won European Cups, FA Cups, League titles, international caps: men who were known to be part of the football elite.
The home dressing room at Anfield Football Stadium is smaller and more basic than you would imagine; it could easily pass for a changing room in any sports hall across the country. Yet few dressing rooms have been the birthplace of so many hopes and dreams; few dressing rooms have felt the vibration of the home crowd roaring ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ in order to inspire those within to prepare for battle; and few dressing rooms have ever held the mystique of this one, and been the place where millions of people would want to be a fly on the wall.
I was one of those millions of people, but I was not a fly on the wall. I was a member of a squad who was about to find out if he had been selected to play. Kenny Dalglish stood, about to read out the team sheet. So this was what it felt like sitting in the home dressing room at Anfield waiting to hear if you’d been selected. All of my dreams rested on the next few moments as King Kenny read out the team.
I was substitute. I had expected to be substitute. Surrounded by such legends as Alan Hansen, Gary McAllister, Jamie Redknapp, Steve McManaman, Ian Rush, Ronnie Whelan, Jan Mølby, John Aldridge, Peter Beardsley, Ray Houghton and Kenny Dalglish himself, I had never expected to be in the starting line-up. But at least I was putting a kit on. The magical Liverpool red. I was going to walk down the famous tunnel and touch the sacred sign that declares to all the players before they walk onto the pitch: ‘This Is Anfield’. It had been placed there by the legendary manager, Bill Shankly, as a way of gaining a psychological advantage over the opposition, a way of letting them know there is no turning back.
Having first been brought to the ground by my dad as a small boy, I had always fixated that, one day, I would make that famous walk. As a child, a football stadium was a place where men shared their passions, their ambitions and their dreams with those who played for them on the pitch. You could tell that within the confines of a football ground the stoicism that reflected how most working-class men approached their lives was left at the turnstile. Football was a place where you could scream, jump for joy, sing along with strangers, slump in frustration and hold back tears of joy or pain. Anfield to me was the cathedral through which I could pass to heaven because I knew if I could be successful there, then nothing on this earth could beat it. Within a few minutes, I was going to touch that sign as home players do for good luck and warm up in front of the famous Kop. And there was a chance, a very real chance, that I was going get to play in the game itself. This would be my début at Anfield, something I had dreamed about since I was a boy.
I was 42 years of age. The match was a charity game between ex-players of Liverpool and UK celebrities versus a rest-of-the-world team that included ex-professionals and international celebrities. The game was in aid of the Marina Dalglish Appeal and the Hillsborough Family Support Group. Sitting in that dressing room, where only a few people knew who I was, I realised things had changed for me, but little did I know I was about to embark on the craziest four years of my life.
After hearing my name being read out by the legendary Kenny Dalglish, and putting my boots on in the Liverpool dressing room, I said to myself something I often say these days: ‘How did all this happen?’
CHAPTER 1 (#u09671441-da0a-50d6-bbc5-05f0c2624236)
HELLO WORLD (#u09671441-da0a-50d6-bbc5-05f0c2624236)
I entered the world at Mill Road Hospital in Liverpool on 30 November 1966. I was the fourth child to Ernie and Kathleen Bishop, with my siblings – in order of appearance – being Eddie, five years older than me, Kathy, four years older than me, and Carol, who was one year older than me. She had spent most of that year in hospital, having developed problems eating, which was eventually diagnosed as coeliac disease. In fact, on the night that I was born my dad had been in the hospital visiting my sister. I’m sure my dad would have been in the hospital anyway to welcome my arrival into the world, although in 1966 men did not participate in the birth, as is now the fashion.
Having attended the birth of my own three sons, I realise how ineffectual I was, despite spending months in antenatal classes being taught that whilst in the throes of labour my wife would really appreciate having me in her face telling her to breathe. I am not suggesting men should not participate in some way, and I am not belittling the wonderfully emotional experience, but, really, has any woman ever forgotten to breathe during childbirth? I can’t imagine there are any maternity wards around the world where expectant fathers are being handed babies by a sad-looking nurse and finding their joy of fatherhood tarnished by the nurse saying, ‘You have a beautiful new child, but I’m afraid we lost your wife. She simply forgot to breathe and because we were all busy at the other end we never noticed. If only you had been there to remind her.’
Anyway, in the 1960s men didn’t have to put themselves through all that. They just waited until mother and baby were prepared and presented.
The man to whom I was presented, my father, Edward Ernest Bishop, at the time worked on the tugs in the Liverpool docks, guiding the numerous ships that arrived in one of Europe’s busiest ports. Liverpool in the 1960s was said to be the place where it was all happening, but for my mum and dad the swinging sixties basically involved getting married and having kids.
My parents had grown up around the corner from each other on a council estate in Huyton and had not bothered with anyone else from the moment they became childhood sweethearts. My mum still has a birthday card that my dad gave her for her fifteenth birthday, which I think is a beautiful thing and something I know won’t happen in the future, as the practice of writing in cards is coming to an end. I can’t imagine young girls of today keeping text messages or Facebook posts sent to them by their boyfriend. Having said that, for the sake of the planet, the giant padded cards with teddy bears and love hearts on the front bought by the teenage boys of my generation in an attempt to get a grope on Valentine’s Day are probably best left as things of the past in order to conserve the rainforests – although the quilted fronts could always be recycled as very comfortable beds.
My parents were married as teenagers and, shortly afterwards, started having children. That seemed to be the way with everybody when I was a child – I didn’t know anybody whose parents hadn’t done the same thing. I remember being at school when I was 13 years of age and my mate, Mark, telling me that his dad was having his 60th birthday party. I fell off my chair laughing at the image of his father being the age of what I considered a granddad. My dad was young enough for me to play in the same Sunday league side as him when I was 16, although I was under strict instructions to call him Ernie. Apparently shouting, ‘Dad, pass!’ was not considered cool in the Sunday league circles of the early eighties.
Having young parents had a massive impact on the way I saw the world, and perhaps was the driving force behind me wanting to have children myself very shortly after I got married. Or, to be fair, that may well be the result of me being a better shot than I anticipated.
When I entered the world, my dad was 24 and my mum was 23. They had four children, all born in the month of November. All my life I thought the fact that we were born in November was a coincidence; it wasn’t until I was married myself and I became aware of the rhythms of marriage that I realised the month of November comes nine months after Valentine’s Day. If you’re married, you’ll know what I mean; if you’re not, you will do one day.
The first eight months of my life were spent living a few doors away from the hospital on Mill Road in a house that my dad had bought from a man in a pub for £50. You could do that sort of thing in the 1960s. The house was about a mile from the city centre and proved to be perfectly placed, as it allowed my parents the opportunity to walk to the hospital to see my sister Carol, in between looking after the rest of us.
As Carol’s coeliac disease meant she couldn’t digest gluten, throughout our childhood my mum was constantly baking separate things for her. This meant our house very often had that warm smell of baking – although if you have ever eaten gluten-free food you will know the smell is a lot better than the taste. Nice-smelling cardboard is still cardboard.
I don’t have any memory of that first house, and it is no longer there. Someone came from the council and declared it unfit for human habitation, along with many others, as the city council progressed with the slum-clearing project which changed much of the centre of Liverpool in the 1960s. The declaration was upsetting for my dad, as he had just decorated, although I am sure the rats and lack of adequate sanitation had more to do with the council’s decision than his ability to hang wallpaper.
As a result of the clearing of the slum areas, various Scouse colonies sprang up as families were moved out to places such as Skelmersdale, Kirkby, Speke and Runcorn. Getting out of Liverpool was not something my mum and dad would ever have considered; it was all they had both ever known, and Carol was still being treated in the hospital. The council offered various alternatives and, like most decisions in parenthood, my mum and dad did what they thought was best for us.
They chose to move to Winsford, out in Cheshire, the option that was the furthest from the centre of Liverpool – if not in miles, then certainly in character. Winsford had been an old market town, but now had emerging council estates that needed to be populated by people ready to work in the factories of the local, rapidly developing industrial estate.
My dad went for an interview in a cable company called ICL and received a letter saying he had a job at the weekly wage of £21.60. This was a staggering amount at the time, when he was getting £9 a week on the building sites he had moved on to after too many falls into the Mersey had convinced him that tugs were not the future. So, without further ado, we moved. When the removal van arrived, such was the exodus from Liverpool that it was already half-full with furniture from another family, the Roberts, who actually moved into the same block as us in Severn Walk on the Crook Lane estate.
When my dad received his first week’s wages, he was paid £12.60.
Yes, thanks to a typing error, my mum and dad had made the decision to move all the way out to Winsford: a simple clerical mistake was responsible for where I was to spend my formative years. However, I have to say I am glad the lady who typed it (it was 1967 – men didn’t type letters, as they were busy doing man-things like fixing washing machines or carrying heavy stuff) made the mistake, because I cannot think of a better place to have grown up.
If you were a child in the 1960s and somebody showed you the council estate where I lived, you could not have imagined a finer location in the world. Rows of terraced houses that were built out of white brick reflected the sun and made everything seem bright. We lived at 9, Severn Walk, which I always thought was a great address as it had two numbers in it, until I realised the road was actually named after a river. We spent the first ten years of my life at this address. Coming from a slum area within Liverpool, it was an exciting place to be, and my mum even today comments about the joy of discovering such modern things as central heating, a hatch from the kitchen into the living room and, the biggest thing of all, an inside toilet downstairs. Opulence beyond belief to live in a house where someone could be on the toilet upstairs and someone on the toilet downstairs, at the same time, and nobody had to put their coat on to go outside.
When I started to write this book I wanted to go back to the estate and have a look, so, six months ago, I went for a walk there. It was night-time, and I sat on the wall and remembered all the times we had had on the estate, both good and bad, and I will always be grateful for the childhood I had there.
I have to say that the town planners of our estate did a brilliant job in setting out the rows of houses in such a way that you were never more than ten steps away from grass. Every house had a back yard and a front garden, and then beyond that there would be grass. I know that ‘grass’ is a very incomplete description, but that is basically what it was. You either had enough grass to host a football match, an area big enough for a bonfire on Guy Fawkes or any other night you felt like building a fire, or you just had enough grass for your dog to have a dump on when you let it out.
As a child, I don’t recall the concept of poop-scooping existing, and I can’t imagine anything more at odds with the world that I lived in than the image of a grown adult picking up dog shit. Dog ownership involved feeding the animal and giving it somewhere to sleep. Beyond that, nobody expected anything else. Nobody took their dog for a walk – you simply opened the door and let it out. The dog would then do whatever dogs do when left to their own devices, and it would come home when it was ready. The only dogs that had leads when I was a child worked for the police or helped blind people cross the road.
I am not suggesting that we were bad dog owners; in fact, I think the dogs were having a brilliant time, although you only have to slide into dog shit once as a child playing football before you think someone, somewhere should do something. I recall being asked to do a school project about improving the community and I suggested that dog dirt was a real problem. The teacher agreed and asked me what I would suggest to improve the matter. After some thought, I came up with the idea of the dog nappy. The teacher tried to seem impressed and not laugh, but sadly the idea never caught on – as there was no Dragons’ Den in the seventies where my eight-year-old self could have pitched the idea, it became no more than a few pages in my school book. And, instead, picking it up using a plastic shopping bag has become the norm. However, I challenge anyone who has to pick up dog shit first thing in the morning not to think the nappy idea has some legs.
Most of what I remember of my childhood happened outdoors. All we ever did was go out and play, and mums would stand on their steps shouting for us when our tea was ready. I should explain to people not from the North, or who may be too wealthy to understand what I mean by the word ‘tea’, that I am referring to the evening meal, which you call dinner, which is what we call the meal in the middle of the day, which you call lunch. It is important we clear this up, as I would not want you to think I am using ‘tea’ in the cricket sense, and that after a few hours’ play we retired for a beverage and a slice of cake. Instead, the call for tea was an important signal to let you know the main meal of the day was ready. The shout was not something to be ignored, or your portion of scouse (stew) or corned beef hash would end up in one of the other children in the family. Or the dog.
But if you didn’t hear it, someone on the estate would let you know. It is a great illustration of the sense of community we had that all communication was communal. If a mum shouted that her child’s tea was ready, all the other children would pass it on until that particular offspring was located and dispatched home. It was also a great way of getting rid of someone you didn’t like, but while kids can be cruel they can also be stupid. The estate wasn’t that big and everyone knew all the favourite hang-out spots, so when the now-hungry child returned to the gang you had to remember to blame the prank on whichever other kid had gone home for his tea.
I learnt what the place meant to me in 2010 when I was doing my ‘Sunshine’ tour. I was in the dressing room of the Echo Arena in Liverpool, about to perform for the sixth night. The venue had just presented me with an award for the most tickets ever sold there for a single tour: apparently I beat Mamma Mia! by 15,000 tickets. I was having a coffee in the dressing room and chatting with Lisa, my agent, when Alex, my tour manager, said my brother Eddie wanted to have a chat.
When family come to shows, I always see them either before or in the interval, as often I find it easier to do that than at the end of a show. At the end of shows I prefer to be on the road quickly; there is something very exciting and rock ’n’ roll about walking off the stage and straight into a waiting car. Eddie walked in with a gift-wrapped long, thin object. After kissing Lisa hello, he turned to me.
‘Do you want a drink?’ I asked, pointing to the fully stocked fridge that rarely opened as I only drink coffee and water before a show.
‘No. I just wanted to give you this. But don’t open it till I’m gone.’
‘Don’t be daft, you’re there now. I’ll just open it.’
‘No, wait. You’ll see. I’ll see you after.’
With that he walked out, leaving Lisa and me in the room with the parcel. I didn’t know what to make of it, so looked at the message on it, which read:
‘We are all very proud of you, but something so you don’t forget where you are from.’
I looked at it for a moment before Lisa broke into my thoughts. ‘Do you want me to leave whilst you open it?’
‘Don’t be daft,’ I replied. ‘It’s the wrong shape for a blow-up doll, so there can’t be anything embarrassing about it.’
I tore back the paper and realised why Eddie hadn’t wanted to be there when I opened it as a lump climbed into my throat.
‘What is it?’ asked Lisa, concerned that I was supposed to go and perform in front of 10,000 people but looked like I was about to start blubbering over the parcel contents.
‘It’s who I am,’ I said, and showed her the street sign for Severn Walk, which Eddie had nicked from the end of the block.
When I revisited the street to get my bearings for this book, it was nice to see a block of houses built in the sixties with a brand-new street sign. The old one now hangs in my kitchen, in pride of place. You can’t return to your childhood, but you don’t have to leave it, either.
Football was the game of choice for all the boys on the estate. In the seventies, girls did things that involved skipping whilst singing songs, hopscotch on a course drawn in chalk on the pavement, Morris dancing with pom-poms, and being in the kitchen. I am sure my sisters Kathy and Carol did loads of other things, but if they did I never saw them. I was a boy, and boys played football and scrapped. Later, when I was given a second-hand Chopper from my uncle, Stephen, I added trying to be Evel Knievel to my list of activities. Along with the Six Million Dollar Man, Steve Austin, Evel was my first non-footballer hero – quite unusual choices, as one had bionic legs, and the other one was always trying his best to get some by crashing all the time. If you do not know either of the gentlemen to whom I just referred, then you missed out in the seventies, when a man worth $6 million was much more impressive than a person worth the same amount now, i.e. someone playing left back in League One. And, back then, the absence of YouTube meant that seeing a man crash his motorbike whilst trying jump over a queue of buses was classed as global entertainment. It basically meant that, during my childhood, I was attracted to taking risks by crashing my bike after jumping over ramps or jumping off things. Most of the time this was OK, but it did also inadvertently lead to my first discovery that I could make people laugh, more of which later.
Having an older brother who occasionally let me play football with him and his mates meant that when I played with my own age group I was a decent player, and, like any child who finds they are good at anything, I wanted to keep doing it. In terms of sport, this single-minded approach explains why I am rubbish at everything else: I didn’t do anything else. There was the odd game of tennis if we could sneak onto the courts at the park without the attendant charging us, but it seemed a daft idea to play anything else when all you needed for football was a ball and some space – ideally, a space away from house windows and dog shit but, if not, you could play around that. That is one of the great things about being a boy: you can find something you enjoy like football and you don’t have to stop playing it as you grow up. I played it continually for years, and I still play it occasionally now. I haven’t seen either of my sisters play hopscotch since I was 10.
Football was great, but cricket was also an option. People used to spray-paint cricket stumps onto the walls of end-of-terrace houses around the estate. This meant that we always had cricket stumps, but it also meant that we always had cricket stumps that never moved. This caused untold arguments because the bowler and the fielders would often claim that the stumps had been hit, but with no physical proof of this the batter nearly always argued against the decision. This generally caused a row that resulted in a stand-off, which, more often than not, the batsman won – he was holding a cricket bat, after all. I think this is probably the reason why I don’t like cricket – any game where as a child you are threatened with a lump of wood on a regular basis ends up feeling like it’s not worth the hassle.
There was also the odd dalliance with boxing which was something virtually every boy I knew on the estate did from time to time; my cousin, Freddie, achieving some level of success by fighting for England. I didn’t mind fighting as a boy; it was just something we did. My brother Eddie had taken it upon himself to toughen me up, a process that involved him taunting me till I got angry and flew at him, upon which he would then batter me. Older brothers never realise that they are natural heroes to their younger siblings and it was great when Eddie allowed me to hang around with him and his mates, but I would have given anything just to win one of our fights as a kid.
As a child, I would actively seek fights. If I started a new school or club, I would pinpoint the bully in the room and then challenge them to a fight. When I ran out of people in my year at school, I started looking for people a year or two above me. A challenge would be given, an arrangement made and, after school, I would be fighting someone for no reason whatsoever whilst other children stood around and chanted: ‘Zigga-zagga-ooo-ooo-ooo.’ While I never understood what that meant, I also never grasped the concept that by going around looking for a bully to fight I might actually have been the bully, but I did think I was doing the right thing. I was taking on the baddy and more often than not winning, whereupon I would go home and let Eddie know his attempts to toughen me up were working. Eddie, however, would usually say he wasn’t interested and give me a dead leg.
As I type this as an adult, I realise this reads awfully, but that is what life was like on an estate, and none of us thought it should be different. Eddie and I were also acutely aware that my dad had a reputation for being a tough man. He had been taught as a child by his mother, whose matriarchal influence on the family was immense, that you had to stand up for yourself. My nan outlived three husbands and three of her own nine children, and her life and that of her children was one of hardship and battles. Some she won and some she didn’t, but the fight was always there till the very end. She must have been in her seventies when I had to restrain her from getting involved in a fight that had broken out in the room next door to my cousin Gary’s 21st birthday party in Rainhill.
As I grew up and moved in different circles, I learnt that violence very rarely resolves anything and I began to associate with more and more like-minded people. The extent of this change became apparent when I received a call from my dad to say that there was a need for a ‘show of strength’ at my nan’s house. At the time, the council had moved a young family next door and they were basically scumbags: one mum, multiple children and two dads – the kind of neighbours from hell you see on television programmes where you can’t believe such low-grade people exist. There had been a row, and a threat made to my uncle, Jimmy, and my nan, so it was decided that uncles and cousins should arrive at the house to ensure it was known they would face more than just two pensioners should the arguments escalate.
It was a Sunday night and, as a young father, I had been looking forward to going to the pub with my mates. Instead, I asked them to come with me. We arrived at the house and walked in to find it full of the adult men in the family. I looked around the room at battle-ready faces of cousins and uncles, and then back at my mates – Paul, Mickey Duff and Big Derry Gav – and realised that if it kicked off I had perhaps not brought the best team. Paul was an accountant whose hair was rarely out of place; Big Derry Gav got his name from being from Derry, being big and being called Gavin, but as a trainee infant-school teacher the best he could do would be to create weapons from papier-mâchè; while Mickey Duff had perhaps the best contribution to make, if not in the physical sense – he spent most of his time hiding behind my nan – but in the sense that he was the logistics manager in a toilet-roll factory.
As it happened, the police arrived and the situation didn’t escalate. After far too long, the scumbags were moved on, but I have a slight tinge of regret that the success I gained later on had not happened by then, as money and celebrity does bring you the means to resolve such matters. Or the phone numbers of those who can.
Eddie and my dad used to do circuit training in our living room, so I would join them. From the age of seven I found could do more sit-ups than anyone else in the family. This bordered on an obsession for a period, as I would forever be doing sit-ups, one night doing 200 straight, which is a bit mental for a seven-year-old child who is not in a Chinese gymnastic school. We would often then end with a boxing match. This involved my dad going onto his knees and from this position we would hit him, wearing boxing gloves, while he would just jab us away wearing the one glove that was his size. Eddie and I would then spar. One time, Eddie knocked me flat out with a right hook. I got up, dazed, but instead of stopping the session my dad just put on his glove and put Eddie on the floor. We both learnt a lesson that day: neither of us would ever be able to beat my dad.
My dad and his twin brother, Freddie, played football locally, where it was clear they had some form of a reputation. I don’t think they ever sought a fight, but you can tell when people think your dad is hard; it’s just the way people talk when he is around, and the sense of protection that we had as a family when we went anywhere with him. I still have that feeling now, and he is 72. My dad always told us as kids that you should never look for trouble, but never walk away, particularly if you’re in the right. He also said we should never use weapons (Uncle Freddie had nearly bled to death as a youth after being stabbed in the leg), never kick someone when they are down, and, if you’re not sure what is going to happen next, you’re probably best hitting someone.
I think for the life we lived at that time that was sound advice, but it’s not a conversation I have had to have with my sons – they have not lived the same life. To be fair, I have not lived the life that my dad lived, but he could only pass on what he had learnt. My nan had been married before to a Mr Berry and had had three sons: Charlie, Billy and Jimmy. By the time Mr Berry died, Charlie had also died, aged nine, of diphtheria, and been buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave, and my uncle, Billy, had lost a lung to TB. She then married my dad’s father, Fred Bishop, and had Janet, Mary, Edna, Carol and the twins: my dad and Freddie. With eight children in post-war austerity, things were inevitably tough – in one of the few photographs my dad has of himself and Freddie as children, only one of them has shoes on. There had been only one pair of shoes to go around, so they had a fight and the winner wore them for the picture.
Although my mum lived just around the corner, growing up, she never seemed to suffer the same degree of hardship. She was one of three for a start, with older siblings (in the form of John and Josie), and fewer mouths to feed makes a difference to any family. Her mum and dad divorced and her father died the same year I was born, which is one reason why I am named after him. Her mum, my other nan, was married to Granddad Bill, a caretaker of a block of flats in Toxteth, for all the time that I knew her. As children, Eddie and I would play for hours around the flats with Stephen, my uncle, who was in fact not much older than us. Pictures of my mum in her youth reveal a slim, beautiful, dark-haired girl with plaits who grew to be a slim, beautiful woman with a beehive. My mum has always stayed in shape, and I would guess that her dress size has hardly changed in the more than fifty years that she has been married to my dad.
There are not many pictures of my parents before we started to come along, but I love the ones there are. My mum was as close to a film star in looks as could be without actually being one. There is a softness to her features that belies the toughness inside, a toughness that would often hold the family together in years to come. My dad looks strong in all the pictures, with a handsome face and tattoos on his arms and a stocky frame that suggests that he was made to carry things. My dad is of the generation of working-class men who have swallows tattooed on the backs of their hands. He has often said that he regrets getting them done as they give people an impression of him as someone who wants to look tough before they actually get to know him. The reality is, he said he got them done so that people could tell him and his identical twin Freddie apart – not the greatest of strategies, as I don’t know anyone who looks at a person’s hands first, but at least it beats a tattoo on the face. Personally, I would have just worn glasses or perhaps a hat. In truth, my dad has the hands of a man who suits such tattoos. He was born into a world where social mobility was limited and it was essential that you protected what you had, as there was nothing left to fall back on.
If men like my dad were to ever progress through the social order, it was to be through hard graft, and by being prepared to fight your corner in whatever form that fight took. It was the week before Christmas in 1972 when I became completely aware of what it meant to be a family and the cost of standing by your principles. I was six years old and I recall my uncle, John, my mum’s brother, sitting us all down in the living room. My mum was sitting next to him, and we four children were squashed up on the couch.
‘Your dad has gone to prison.’
The words hit me like a train. I didn’t completely understand what they meant, but as everyone else seemed upset I knew it couldn’t be a good thing. One thing I don’t remember is anyone crying; it was as if it was another thing you just had to deal with. My mum sat there with the same inner strength that I always associate with her. No matter what was to follow, I knew she would make sure everything was going to be all right. She had managed to hold the family together when Carol was literally starving to death in hospital and her own father was dying of cancer. She had managed to move as a young mother away from all she had ever known for the benefit of a better life for her children. Her husband going to prison was not going to break my mum, particularly as she supported everything my dad had done.
Uncle John, his voice clear and strong, carried on: ‘Some people may say bad things to you, but never forget your dad did the right thing. You need to be proud, and you boys have to stand up for your mum and sisters.’ For the first time ever, I was given more responsibility than just being able to dress myself in the morning.
My dad had been sentenced to a year in prison as a result of an altercation with two men outside a chip shop. He had had a run-in with the same two men the week before, so when he’d stopped with my mum to get chips on the way home from a night out they had started another argument. When my mum had intervened, they had pushed her so hard she had bounced off the bonnet of a car onto the ground. My dad had reacted to the provocation and, as had happened the week before, both men ended up on the ground and my dad walked away.
To this day my dad is very bitter about the sentence, and even the arresting officers said the case should have been thrown out. On both occasions, my dad was not the aggressor and was defending himself, and on the second occasion was defending his wife. But for his defence he had not been advised very well, which is something that can happen when you are limited financially in the professional advice you can seek.
Months earlier, my dad and Uncle Freddie had been playing in the same football team, and my dad was sent off by the referee for something his identical twin had done. They appealed against the decision and the local FA had upheld their claim that the referee had sent the wrong man off because he could not tell who had committed the offence.
Had my dad just stood in court and simply relayed the events as they happened, there is a very good chance he would have walked free, or at least only been given a suspended sentence. However, it was felt by many on the estates that people who had moved to Winsford from Liverpool would be unfairly treated by the local police and courts. As the other two men were locals, or ‘Woollybacks’ as we called them (an insult to sheep that I have never really understood), he tried to use the same ploy in court that had worked with the local FA. As both men had ended up pole-axed on the ground, it would be impossible, so the plan went, for them to know which twin had hit them. As the judge could not send both my dad and Uncle Freddie to prison, he would have to throw the case out, and that would be the end of that.
The defence didn’t work and, as my dad was sentenced for violence, he was sent to a closed prison. At first he went to Walton Prison in Liverpool and then on to Preston.
He told my mum not to bring us children to visit him, but by the time he had been transferred to Preston he was missing us too much and asked her to bring us in. I remember that day as if it was yesterday. My Uncle Freddie drove us and we arrived early and had to sit waiting in the car, opposite the prison. There were all four of us, Eddie, Kathy, Carol and I, along with my mum and Freddie in the front, yet I don’t recall anyone saying anything as we just sat and waited.
To my six-year-old self, Preston Prison looked like a castle. It was a stone building with turrets and heavy, solid, metal gates that had a hatch, through which the guards behind could check the world outside remained outside.
At the allotted time, we approached the gates along with some other families, and the hatch opened. Before long, a small door swung open, and we were allowed inside, only to be faced by another metal gate.
Standing just in front of it was a guard in a dark uniform holding a clipboard with a list of names on it, which he ticked off with the expression that you can only get from spending your working life locking up other men. My Uncle Freddie said who we had come to see, whereupon we were duly counted and moved towards the next gate. Eventually, after everyone had met with the guard’s approval, the gate in front of us was unlocked and we were allowed to pass though to be faced by yet another gate.
This process of facing locked gate after locked gate was a frightening and dehumanising experience: we were being led through like cattle. We eventually walked up some metal stairs and entered the visitors’ room. I just recall rows of men sitting at tables, all wearing the same grey uniform, in a room with no windows and a single clock on the wall.
When I saw my dad, I broke free of my mum’s hand and ran towards him to give him the biggest hug I had ever given anyone. My dad reciprocated until a guard said we had to break the hug and I had to be placed on the opposite side of the table like everyone else. I know prison officers have a job to do, but who would deprive a six-year-old boy of a hug from the father he had not seen for months? It was not as if I was trying slip him a hacksaw between each squeeze.
‘Have you been good?’ he asked us all, and we each said we had.
‘Good. Have you been looking after your mum?’ he asked then, and for some reason it seemed like he was talking to just me.
I wasn’t so sure I knew what looking after my mum entailed, but I was sure I was doing it, or at least a version of it.
‘I have, Dad,’ I said.
‘They’ve all been good,’ my mum informed him across the table, which seemed to satisfy him.
‘Good,’ he said, with a smile I had never seen before. A smile that appears when someone’s face is trying to match the words that are being spoken, but not quite managing it.
I don’t recall anything else that anyone said. I just remember looking around and thinking my dad didn’t belong with all the other men in grey uniforms. He was my dad, and they were all just strange men wearing the same clothes as him, many sporting similar tattoos on the backs of their hands.
After what to me appeared to be too short a time, my Uncle Freddie said he would take us out so that my mum and dad could talk alone or, at least, be as alone as you can be whilst being watched by prison officers alongside thirty other families visiting at the same time. To soften the disappointment of having to leave, my dad gave us all a Texan bar each, a sweet of its era: chocolate covering something that was as close to being Plasticine as legally possible, so when you chewed it almost took every tooth out of your head with its stickiness. We didn’t get many sweets at the time, so it was a real treat, even if the trade-off was that Dad was in prison. What I didn’t realise at the time was that four Texan bars virtually accounted for a week’s prison allowance. Not for the first or the last time, my dad was giving us children all he had.
During the year that he was away, I can only recall visiting my dad on one more occasion. It was when he was moved to the open prison at Appleton Thorn. I remember the visiting room had windows so that light flooded in, and hugs were not prevented with the same degree of enthusiasm by the prison officers. Before he had left Preston, the governor there had told my dad that he was the first prisoner he had ever transferred to an open prison: by the time you reached Preston you either went onto a maximum-security unit or stayed within the closed-prison sector till your time was served or you died.
The only reason he moved my dad was because of the support he was given by one particular prison guard, Officer Hunt, who stuck his neck out for him and pressed for my dad to be moved. It would be easy to say all prison guards of the time were bad, but clearly this wasn’t the case. Despite one or two close shaves, I have not needed to visit a prison since.
I don’t recall the day Dad came home. You might imagine it would be ingrained in my memory, but somehow it isn’t. While he was away, I remember that things seemed harder than usual. As a family, we never actually felt poorer than our neighbours, but I was aware that some people just had more.
It was when I started junior school at Willow Wood that I was first exposed to people who had more than me – basically, people who did not live on our estate. My two friends from school were Christopher and Clive, and both were posher than I was: Clive lived in a house that had an apple tree in the garden. Despite being at least three miles from where I lived, I would happily cycle or walk there to play. By the time I was in junior school I knew the estate inside out, so leaving it to go on adventures seemed natural.
Clive was clever, and I recall his dad coming home from work once. He was wearing a suit and didn’t need to get a wash before having his tea, which I thought was a really odd thing for a dad not to have to do. I liked Chris because he could draw, which I also enjoyed doing. He lived on the private estate and, to my eyes, he had the perfect life: he was the oldest, so he didn’t have an older brother who always won fights; and his mum didn’t seem to work, so when we played there she would sometimes make us chocolate apples, which is basically a toffee apple but with chocolate instead of toffee.
My mum was great at making cakes and I did get pocket money to spend at the mobile shop on the estate, which was a van in which a bloke sat selling all household goods from pegs to sweets, but I had never come across the concept of the chocolate apple. Chris also seemed to have more toy cars than I could imagine it was possible for one child to own. We would play with his Matchbox cars and, occasionally, I would slip one in my pocket. Once, as I did so, I saw his mum looking at me. I guiltily pulled the car out but I knew there were going to be no more chocolate apples for me. I was not invited around again.
CHAPTER 2 (#u09671441-da0a-50d6-bbc5-05f0c2624236)
MY DAD AND CARS (#u09671441-da0a-50d6-bbc5-05f0c2624236)
In the 1970s, on every council estate, men were to be found under cars. It seemed to me that being an adult man meant you needed to be fixing something, and my dad was constantly fixing something for which he wasn’t qualified. Because he would never give up till what he was mending actually worked, he usually managed to get things to work in such a way that nobody else on the planet was ever able to repair them again, as nobody knew what he had done. Most of the time my dad didn’t know, either.
This was always best illustrated by the range of cars we had. Money was tight, but cars were a necessary luxury, so my dad bought what he could afford, then spent time underneath it trying to make it do what he needed it to.
One car that stands out for me was the Hillman Imp. The name does not inspire much confidence – any name that is one letter away from ‘limp’ is surely not a title to give something that is supposed to transport people around. The Hillman Imp was developed by the Rootes Group to make a small car for the mass market. The fact that most of you will have not heard of either the car or the company tells you all you need to know about its success.
The car had its engine in the back, which would be absolutely fine if you couldn’t smell its workings whilst sitting there. The front bonnet was for storage. If you packed to go on holiday, this had the effect of turning any luggage you put there into a sort of early prototype airbag of clothes and knickers, should you have the misfortune to have a head-on collision. Whereas, if you were hit in the rear, a steaming engine would smack you on the back of the head, forcing you through the windscreen because, as it was still the seventies, nobody wore seat belts.
I recall a conversation with my dad about seat belts and the fact that he never wore one. His rationale was that if you ever drove into a river, the seat belt was another thing you had to deal with before climbing out the car, and that delay could be vital. He was also of the firm belief that if you rolled down a hill, there was always a chance that the belt could trap you in the car when the best thing to do would be to open the door and allow yourself to be thrown free. Needless to say, none of these theories has ever been tested and my dad now does wear a seat belt, but amongst the various jobs he has had in his life, safety officer was never one of them.
Our Hillman Imp was grey with an off-white roof – the best way to describe it is as something smaller than a single bed and less attractive than your average washing machine. And the reason that it stands out in my memory amongst all the other cars my dad had was because of one camping holiday we took in the Welsh hills when I was eight. The tent and various pieces of luggage were housed on the roof of the car as the bonnet was filled with clothes and tins of food: my mum was convinced that the camp shops would over-charge, so instead of being ripped off for tins of beans, soup and corned beef, she had stocked up and loaded the car. The fact that all this extra weight probably slowed us down to the point that we were using more petrol never entered the equation. There was no way she was going to allow anyone to rip us off.
My mum and dad sat in the front of the car, of course, while in the rear was me, 8; Carol, 9; Kathy, 12; Eddie, 13; and Lassie, 35 in dog years. Lassie was a white mongrel that I can’t ever remember not having as a child. She was white all over, apart from a black patch on her eye. Every time someone new met her, they would immediately say, ‘That’s a nice dog – is she called Patch?’ to which we would reply, ‘Don’t be stupid. She’s called Lassie,’ as if it wasn’t obvious enough.
She was a brilliant dog who would dance on her hind legs for biscuits, allow you to dress her up in girls’ clothes for a laugh, and was not a bad footballer. I am not joking about the latter point: Lassie could play. She wasn’t one of those dogs that would see a ball and then want to bite it. No, Lassie would join in by using her nose to win the ball, and then, once directed towards the goal, would keep nosing the ball till she had dribbled past everyone and scored. Because she had more legs than anyone else on the field, she was faster than any of the other players, so she was very good at dribbling. The only problem was that she was not really much good at anything else, and if she did score she didn’t have the awareness to stop, and would carry on running all over the estate, still nosing the ball, unless she became distracted by food or a cat. Also, her distribution was rubbish, so we never let her play with us too often. There is nothing worse than a greedy player, even if they are a dog.
So that was four kids and a dog on the back seat; two adults in the front; a six-berth tent along with deck chairs and a table on the roof; and in the bonnet we had clothes, sleeping bags, tins of food and the camping stove with bottled gas. All of this in a car under which my dad had spent hours making sure things like the brakes actually worked when requested to, rather than when they liked.
I cannot possibly imagine embarking on such a trip now. My kids have been brought up with rear-seat TVs and iPads: at the very least, they put in earphones, listen to music and get lost in their own world. They’ve never travelled for hours on holiday in an overcrowded car to one of the wettest countries in the world, where you are camping in a borrowed tent which, when you get there, takes all night to put up as there are no instructions.
We had to cram into the car, with me by the window due to my propensity to throw up every ten miles of any car journey, let alone one where engine fumes were mixing with those of dog farts. I was often given barley-sugar sweets, which were supposed to help car sickness, although how eating something that tasted of sick mixed with sugar was supposed to stop you from being sick I have never understood.
In all the excitement, we never worried about the potential dangers of being in a car that had dodgy brakes and was massively overloaded with tinned food housed under the bonnet next to gas canisters – therefore having all the potential to turn into a dirty bomb at the moment of impact. We were going on holiday and, as my mum and dad played their favourite country and western songs, we prepared to go to the only foreign country I ever visited until I reached adulthood: Wales.
The holiday was great. My memory of it was of sunshine and the beauty of Bala Lake, albeit strangely mixed with the dread of any approaching hill. Early on in the journey it became clear that, despite its name suggesting it was ‘a man of the hill’, the Hillman would not be able to carry us up any slope of substance, while perhaps the ‘Imp’ part of its name was just the start of the word ‘impossible’, because that was what every hill became.
Once we approached the periphery of Snowdonia National Park my dad knew that if we were to stand any chance of ever reaching our destination the weight in the car would have to be reduced. This meant that on the approach to any hill we would all climb out and, along with the dog, begin the long walk up whilst my dad slowly drove the Hillman Imp to the apex. There he would wait for us all to arrive. That said, he didn’t always get there first: on more than one occasion we walked faster than he could make the car go.
There is nothing more humbling than seeing your dad at the front of a procession of cars, willing his own vehicle onwards, while you arrive at the top of the hill faster than him by walking. The frustration of those caught up in the procession was matched only by our collective desire for the Imp to make it to the top. Failure to do so would only result in the embarrassment of being forced to do a three-point turn in an over-laden car in the middle of an ascent, and start again.
When we had all reconvened at a peak, we quickly reassumed our positions in the car and would be rewarded for our efforts by a trip downhill at as much speed as the Hillman Imp could muster. It was like being in a toboggan as we weaved around the bends, until the gradient changed and we all had to get out and start walking again.
One little-known fact about my dad is that he invented the people carrier. Although his version may, by today’s standards, seem rather primitive, he certainly has to be credited with the concept of taking a van and putting people in it.
After the Imp limped to an early grave, it was a red Ford Escort van that my dad brought home next. The fact that it had no seats in the back never struck us as strange; we had owned vans in the past and all we did as kids was climb in the back and sit on a few cushions.
It seems a successful way to travel until you travel with the childhood version of myself, one whose propensity for car sickness was not helped by such a mode of transport. Being in the back of a van with no windows and a vomiting child is not really the place you want to be.
I don’t know if it was the car sickness or just a wave of inspiration, but my dad then decided that he did not want a Ford Escort van. He wanted a family car, and for that to happen he either had to buy a new car or change the one he had, the latter being the most sensible thing due to our lack of money.
Using an angle grinder, my dad proceeded to cut into the side panels of the van. Even in a road where people working on cars was not an unusual sight, the image of a man with an angle grinder attacking his own car so that sparks were filling the air created a fair amount of interest. After all, in a world of only three television channels something as crazy as this was bound to create a lot of interest. Oblivious, my dad just carried on. He was like Noah building his Ark: my dad had a vision, and even if the rest of the world, including my mum, thought he had lost the plot, he was still going to realise that vision.
Once the side panels came out, my dad then produced some windows that he had ‘found’ in a caravan. I have written ‘found’ in inverted commas because when I recently spoke to him about putting the glass in to replace the side panels he wanted to put me straight right away. Glass would have been dangerous (I never thought I would hear my dad say anything was dangerous when it came to cars), and what he had, in fact, put into the side panels was Perspex, which he had taken from a caravan.
‘A caravan?’ my mum asked. ‘What caravan?’
‘A caravan I found,’ said my dad, and that was the end of that.
As you can imagine, your average caravan window is not made to fit exactly into the shape left behind in a Ford Escort van after the side panels have been removed. So, with the aid of welding and tape, they were customised to the space and made to fit. A seat was added in the back from another car of a similar size found in a scrap yard and, after this was bolted to the floor, my dad stepped back. The people carrier had been invented, although it was probably the most illegal vehicle I have ever ridden in.
The car must have been uninsurable and, by today’s standards, it was a million miles from being roadworthy. We used to climb into it either over the seats at the front or from the rear door, which was designed for loading goods, not children. Whoever failed to get on the rear seat then had to sit in the vestibule area between the newly installed seat and the rear door. Occasionally the rear door would spring open whilst in transit, but not too often, and no kids were lost during the time that we had the car.
I loved that car, and I was sad to see it go. People would look at us whenever we were out in it and, in my mind, that just helped to enhance the magic of it. I never for one second thought the car was being looked at for any other reason than admiration. But, as Christmas approached in 1975, my dad decided it was time to sell his creation. No doubt the pressing matter of getting us kids presents played some part in that decision.
Christmas passed and my dad still had the car, which meant all his money was gone. Then he received a call from a traveller camp on the edge of Winsford.
My dad drove the car to the camp and haggled with the assembled men. It was New Year’s Eve. If he could sell the car, he and my mum could have a rare night out. The deal was struck and the car was sold. After the cash was handed over, my dad asked the inevitable question, ‘How do I get home from here?’ The camp was a fair distance from home and none of his friends was able to pick him up. Getting a taxi to come to a traveller camp was never an easy thing to do, so he asked the man to whom he had just sold the car to give him a lift home in it.
The man shook his head. ‘I’m not driving that till I’ve painted it, but I’ll give you a lift on that.’
He pointed to a Triumph motorbike. There are few things that my dad hates more than motorbikes, but with cash in his pocket and a do to get to, he took the offer and rode home pillion, clinging tight to the driver and with a smile on his face.
The effect of that car didn’t end after it was sold, because my dad used the money to take Eddie and me to the cinema for the first time ever. The film was Jaws, and we went because it was deemed too scary for the girls. I know, but it was 1975 and they probably had things to do in the kitchen.
I could not have been happier. I felt like we had won the pools. I was at a cinema watching the first film I had ever seen that wasn’t a Western. The cinema was in Northwich, a town about eight miles away from Winsford, and the fact that it was somewhere new only added to the excitement of the evening. I loved it when it was just us ‘boys’ together: I saw it as an opportunity to talk to the other men of the tribe about man-stuff like football, cars, conkers – things the girls in the family just wouldn’t understand. This time usually came on a Sunday afternoon, when we would sit in the living room eating our roast dinner watching the weekly Granada football highlights show called Kick Off, which Gerald Sinstadt commentated. It was required viewing for anyone who wanted to watch football whilst eating a Sunday roast and, as Gerald Sinstadt presented it for years, there is a whole generation of men who can’t help salivating as soon as they hear his voice.
I know at times my desire to use these sacred moments for conversation did mean that I became slightly irritating to Eddie and my dad, who had the serious business of football and food to concentrate upon, so a trip out to the cinema was a male bonding experience on a totally different level. I am sure I jabbered away in the car my dad had borrowed for the evening but, once inside the cinema, popcorn in hand, I was just enchanted by the experience, and any notion of bonding over conversation disappeared within seconds.
The film was brilliant, although it did have serious implications for my swimming in the sea for the rest of my life. Like many people, I cannot now put my head under water without hearing, ‘Durum, durum, durum.’ However, I had been introduced to the world of cinema, a world I love to this day. One of my favourite things is going to watch films in the day. I am 46, but it still makes me feel like I am skiving school.
The best car my dad ever had was the Moscovitch. This was a Russian car that embodied the Soviet Union prior to the Wall coming down. It was red for a start, although I am sure you could get different colours. Having said that, I never saw anyone else driving one, except my dad. It was square. Very square. The kind of square you see when a child tries to draw a car, and in all honesty I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that the car was designed by a six-year-old.
In 1970s Russia, passenger comfort obviously was not a priority: if you were not in your Moscovitch, what else would you be doing? Standing in a bread line dreaming about Levi’s jeans, probably. Everything about the car screamed function before purpose, the driver console being unattractive and full of things that could impale you in a collision, but I loved that car. I loved how solid it felt, which may in part be due to the tank metal it was made of. I loved that it was from the exotic Eastern Bloc that we were supposed to be scared of, but which I deduced could not be that bad if they had sold my dad a car. The car lacked mechanical sophistication to such an extent that when my dad lost the keys he began using a pair of scissors in the ignition to start the car. I actually thought my dad might be a Russian spy when he got it, and I allowed some of my mates to think the same.
But I mostly loved it because my dad did. One thing he appreciated the most was the lighter just below the dash-board, which you could press in and which would pop out when it was hot enough for my dad to light his cigarette as he drove. It was the most sophisticated thing I had ever seen. And I broke it.
Whilst sitting in the car waiting for my dad one day in Garston, Liverpool, I couldn’t resist pressing the lighter in. When it popped out, I decided to test how hot it was with the tip of my tongue. Yes, I did just write that. The tip of my tongue. You do not need to be medically qualified to guess the result. I burnt my tongue and it hurt like hell. But, after the initial pain, I was still sitting in the car with nothing to do, so I kept on pushing the lighter in and out until one time when it didn’t pop out again.
My dad returned to the car and immediately went to use the lighter. When it didn’t move, he used his strength to pull it. The internal coil unravelled and the lighter fell apart.
‘Have you been using this?’ my dad asked.
I tried to explain it wasn’t my fault, but due to the burnt tongue I just said, ‘Ummn dun nooo.’
My dad looked at me, and I knew that he knew I had broken it. He looked me in the eye for a moment, sighed and simply said, ‘I liked that lighter.’
Then we drove home. I loved that car because it always reminded me of my dad’s forgiveness and that ‘things’ don’t matter. People do. Even if those people can’t talk due to their own stupidity.
CHAPTER 3 (#u09671441-da0a-50d6-bbc5-05f0c2624236)
A BOY LEARNING ADULT LESSONS (#u09671441-da0a-50d6-bbc5-05f0c2624236)
It was a sunny day early in the summer of 1974 and we all went for a family day out to the swimming baths in Winsford, where the pool was outside. These days, the concept of having an outdoor swimming pool in the north of England would seem crazy, and the fact that it is no longer there perhaps proves that such a venture would be like having a ski slope in the desert (I know they do in Dubai, but they cheat). However, my childhood seems to have been full of sunny days, and we spent many an afternoon at Winsford’s outdoor swimming baths.
As you entered the swimming pool, you were immediately struck by the brightness of it all. The diving board was painted red, and the bottom of the swimming pool was painted pale blue, which always gave the impression of freshness. There was a large pool housing the diving board, and it was a rite of passage one day to jump off the top. On this particular day – I would have been no more than seven – I had not reached the top, although I had gone halfway and was still edging up slowly. There was a shallow children’s swimming pool at the end, beyond which was a small shop where you could buy sweets.
It was here that I saw a friend from school. He had on a scuba mask and was playing in the children’s pool. We spoke for a while before I went back to the base my mum and dad had set up amongst the tables and benches, and where I knew there would be an endless supply of sandwiches and drink. My mum has always possessed the ability to make more sandwiches than she has bread. I know that defies logic, but it’s true. It’s a mum thing that they can just do. I think the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand can probably be explained by Mary making sardine sandwiches.
I was sitting with my family when I noticed a man run and dive into the pool fully clothed. Whilst everybody else was playing, I couldn’t take my eyes off the man under the water, as he seemed to be swimming furiously towards the other side.
Suddenly, he emerged from the water holding a small figure that I immediately recognised as my friend. The lifeguards came running over and the pool immediately began to empty, so that I had a clear, uninterrupted view of the proceedings unfolding in front of me.
In a panic, one lifeguard tried to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while simultaneously another guard tried to administer CPR. Both were working hard, but they appeared to counteract each other. It seemed like only seconds before the sound of a siren could be heard. An ambulance man entered the scene carrying a holdall, striding with the authority of somebody who knew what he was doing. He was tall and wearing a white unbuttoned shirt, black trousers and had black, greased-back hair.
He immediately took control of the situation, picking my friend up by his right ankle and holding him upside down with one arm. Water gushed from his open mouth. But my friend’s body hung listless. Dead. The ambulance man then placed him on the ground with the least degree of ceremony conceivable and shook his head.
The body was carried away under a blanket. The lifeguards seemed just to be standing in shock, while families began to look for little children, holding them tighter as they left than they had when they arrived. I don’t recall there being hysteria or panic after the event, just a sense that something terrible had happened. I saw a woman being led away in tears, and everybody seemed to move slowly and with purpose. The ambulance man had made it clear that there was little point in trying to do anything. It was over.
I understood that my friend was dead, and I knew what ‘dead’ meant, but I couldn’t fully comprehend all that I had seen. Then I noticed that, for the first time in my life, the main pool was empty. I had never seen it empty, as we had never managed to get in before the crowds. But now the surface was as smooth as glass, and nobody appeared to want to penetrate its calm.
As the ambulance drove away with my friend’s body, I felt the overwhelming urge to break the stillness of the moment. Perhaps in an attempt to recreate normality, to return the pool to a place of joy and not a place of fear and death, I ran and dived into the water. As I was in the air, I remember feeling excited at the prospect of being the only person in the whole of the swimming pool.
I broke through the surface, and my breath left me. The water was like ice; colder than it had been moments earlier, and colder than I had ever felt before.
I surfaced and scrambled up the steps before the coldness overwhelmed me, snuggling into a towel and my mother’s arms. I should never have dived in; I could never have made things normal by doing so and, as the coldness entered my bones, a coldness that was not just generated by water temperature, I knew I had made a mistake. But I couldn’t help myself. I had needed to stop being passive; I needed to stop being a witness. I had needed to stop standing still, even if it did result in me sitting in a towel trying to warm up from a cold that I don’t think has ever really thawed.
At school the following week we had a special assembly in which the headmistress told us to pray for my friend. He was not a close friend – he was one of a bunch of mates – but I remember him being cheeky and funny. I also remember him being held up lifeless and dead. Apparently, he had decided to snorkel in the big pool against his mum’s wishes and had got his leg caught in the steps underwater. People had seen him, but as he had a mask on, they had assumed he was just snorkelling. The man who had dived in had noticed the boy had not moved for some time. It was said he was already dead when he was pulled out of the pool.
My friend Clive told me his mother went to the funeral, and that our friend had been buried in a white coffin. I was seven years old, and I had seen death close up for the first time. It didn’t really scare me; I knew that one day it would be coming for me. I just wanted to put it off for as long as I could. At least get to an age when I would not be buried in a child’s white coffin.
Most kids play games where you count to 10 when you get shot and then you are alive again. I didn’t play those games very often after that day. I knew dead meant dead, no matter how long you counted for.
I have to say that, despite gaining a sense of mortality, the experience did not stop me thinking I was indestructible. I don’t know if young girls feel the same way or if it’s the result of reading too many comic books where heroes have super-powers, or if it’s the genetic requirement of potentially one day having to hunt or go to war that makes boys assume they will bounce rather than break. If you have ever been in a family centre where they have climbing frames and a ball pool, you will know what I mean. Little girls play and enjoy the colourful surroundings. Boys fly everywhere, and if they have not fallen off everything in the first 20 minutes they have not had a good time.
I was eight years of age and playing football on a field that we called the orchard. The sun was shining and we were getting to play out longer as spring was turning into summer, with the promise of light nights. Beside the patch of grass on which we were playing there was a fence, which I suppose would have been about eight feet high. Behind the fence there was a private garden full of trees. None of us had ever seen these trees bear fruit, but for some reason the area had become known as the orchard.
Ten minutes into the game, one of the boys kicked the ball and it flew over the fence. I volunteered to do the risky job of fetching it, thinking in my eight-year-old mind that I would be a brave hero if I got the ball back: a cross between Steve Austin and Evel Knievel.
I climbed the fence and jumped down to the other side. I ran quickly to get the ball so that I was not shot by the person who lived in the house – nobody to my knowledge was ever shot, but if you are eight years of age and on an adventure you may as well believe you might get shot for the sake of the excitement. It’s either that, or the possibility of being eaten by a dragon.
I retrieved the ball and kicked it back to my friends. I then began to scale the metal wire of the fence that surrounded the orchard, until I reached the top. The fence was made of hardwire, which was spiky at the top. I don’t actually remember what happened next, but I do recall the decision to jump the eight feet or so down to the ground.
Due to the fashions of the time, I was wearing flares that were so wide that the law of gravity would have allowed me to float down had I chosen to do so. However, I decided to jump, and the flares got caught on the spikes and made me fall the entire way: the first, but not the last, time I fell victim to fashion.
I woke up in hospital. I had damaged my kidneys to the extent that the doctors warned my mum and dad I may need a transplant. As it transpired, my kidneys were actually only bruised, and the doctor suggested I was lucky because, for a boy of my age, I had particularly strong stomach muscles: clearly, all of those obsessive sit-ups had not actually been wasted. I think it was perhaps the only time when something I had done alone in my bedroom had proved to be of any use whatsoever.
It was during this time, in Leighton Hospital near Crewe, that I recall for the first time being able to make people laugh. Living in Winsford and surrounded by the people who had been displaced from Liverpool meant that many on the estate sought to hold on to their Liverpool identity in the most obvious way possible: their accent. Similar to second-and third-generation Irish people in America, who become more Irish than the Irish, many on my estate became more Scouse than they would have been had they never left. I basically grew up around people all trying to ‘out-Scouse’ each other, and this made my accent extremely strong.
Many people think it is strong today, but it has become much more comprehensible with age as I have learnt the importance of being able to communicate in a way that allows people to understand you – not something you immediately comprehend as a child. So, when I was eight years of age and lying in a hospital bed, I became somewhat of a source of entertainment. One particular nurse would affectionately call me ‘Baby Scouse’ and would keep on asking me to say things for her amusement; things that more often than not would involve the word ‘chicken’. There is just something about the construction of that word which makes it sound funny when said in a Scouse accent. The nurse would even bring other nurses to my bed, so that I could say the chosen sentence of the day. It would be something like: ‘Why did the chicken cross the road? How do I know? I’m not a chicken!’ Two chickens in one sentence – comedy gold – and the nurses would start their shift with a giggle.
In some respects, this might sound inappropriate behaviour by nursing staff. These days there would be an enquiry, and I would seek compensation for the trauma and victimisation, as well as the anguish that has meant I can no longer eat chicken. However, I not only enjoyed the attention, I also enjoyed the sound of making other people laugh. And not only other people, but strangers, people who knew nothing about me till I said something funny. That sensation has never left me, and I feel blessed that it is now the way I make my living. The other thing that has been with me all my life is the enjoyment of entertaining nurses. However, that is not for this book. Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink. Pass the chicken!
CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_d1594c0b-3086-5486-84c4-50d13c8047b2)
SCHOOL AND A FRIEND CALLED KIERAN (#ulink_d1594c0b-3086-5486-84c4-50d13c8047b2)
When I was 10 we left Winsford and moved to a brand new council estate in Runcorn. I joined Murdishaw West Primary School, along with Carol, while Eddie and Kathy went to Norton Priory Comprehensive, a 20-minute bus ride away.
Eddie at this point was very close to leaving school anyway, which suited him, as he hated it. He left as quickly as he could at the age of 15, which is quite ironic in many respects because, as I write this, having already completed an art degree in his forties, Eddie is now studying for his GCSEs in English and Maths to enable him to train to become a teacher. Prior to that, his adult life had been spent as a professional footballer playing for Chester and Tranmere, and as a welder, both careers fitting my image of him more than standing at the front of a classroom. But my own career change, too, shows that anything is possible.
Kathy, on the other hand, did well at school and left to train as a nursery nurse, knowing straight away that it was her vocation. She has now spent much of her working life looking after young children in nurseries and schools. I’ve visited her current school a few times to do an assembly for the children, and it is obvious why many people choose such a profession. Kids can be wonderful things – particularly when you can say goodbye to them at 3.30 p.m. Carol also went back to university and gained a degree in Community and Youth Studies, which led her to working at the young offender’s institute at Appleton Thorn, the former open prison our dad had been in. She now works as my PA, which is probably more challenging at times than working with delinquents.
For me, a new school was always an opportunity to make new friends and have fun. Playing football is a great way to make new allegiances, particularly if you are quite good, and I settled into my new school very quickly. It reflected the estate that it served: it was new, fresh and seemed to suggest potential in the very fabric of its walls. The classrooms were bright, and it was the first time that a teacher had a real influence on me.
Mr Jameson was our classroom teacher. Like all junior school teachers, he was charged with teaching us everything, from spelling and painting to world geography and maths. He also ran the school football team. Primary and junior school teachers at that time were like the Google of their age; they had to have an answer for everything, and Mr Jameson managed it all with a degree of calm control.
In one game, we played a nearby school and we won the game convincingly. Mr Jameson’s unruffled demeanour was notable in its contrast with the lunatic teacher from the other school, who stood on the sidelines screaming till his face went red. We almost felt bad for the lads we were playing against but, as they were from the next estate, it was our duty to hammer them.
After the game, we shook hands and did the obligatory three cheers for the opposition, which I always thought was good but belonged more in a rowing club than between teams from two council estates. I recall Mr Jameson speaking quietly afterwards to the opposing teacher, whose face quickly cooled from red to a pinkish shade of pale. None of us heard what was said, but for a day or so around the school it was rumoured that Mr Jameson had said, ‘Sorry you lost, but you’re a prick.’
However, what made him have an impact on me was that he recognised that not only did I like to play football and do all the other things that boys do, but I also enjoyed writing poetry and stories, and he would often allow me to continue working on a story long after the rest of the class had moved on to something else. I always valued this encouragement, and he made me feel confident, even if at times my spelling left us all confused. Every child going through the primary school system deserves someone like Mr Jameson to give them a hint that they can be something more than they can imagine.
It was good to go back to the school on the day that he retired, by then as headmaster. In the short time I was there, he made me the school football team captain, encouraged my imagination, and broke up the occasional fights I was involved in. He basically gave me confidence, and that has been an invaluable thing throughout my life (although, to be honest, I’ve often had much more confidence than I have had ability at times).
If there was ever a job I think I would have liked, it is that of a teacher in a junior school. I think those who work in education are some of the best of people we have. They have often chosen to take the opportunity to shape lives and influence our society rather than pursue a better-paid profession. I accept there are a fair few who fall into it because they partied through university and didn’t know what else to do or couldn’t get any other job. However, in my life, I know certain teachers changed the way I saw the world, and that cannot be said as readily about many people I have met as an adult.
I can still name the teachers who had a real influence on me:
1. Mr Jameson: for the reasons stated above.
2. Miss F: primary-school teacher who had a Spitfire, long blonde hair, lived in Sandbach and was, no doubt, my first crush, but as I was only six I didn’t act on it.
3. Miss J: comprehensive-school teacher on whom I definitely had a crush from the age of 13. I did act on this, but not till I left sixth form, details of which will not feature on these pages, but for which I shall always be grateful.
4. Mr Hilton: comprehensive-school PE teacher who put a great deal of time and effort into the sport at our school. He made me the captain of my secondary-school football team. (We didn’t have any other sports teams. There was once a lesson in rugby taken by another teacher, but a few broken collar bones and a fight later, that ended.) He also took me to all the town team games, and that eventually lead to a trial for the county under-15s team.
There were two games to be played that day, and I was put in the second group. We stood in the snow for ages till it was time to play, and then those supposedly watching didn’t notice for ten minutes that one team only had nine men. I scored and had one of my best games ever. Mr Hilton assured me I was probably the best player on the pitch, and as he was not prone to empty praise I was very encouraged by his comments. Everyone knew that getting into the county team was the first real step to being scouted by a club – it was the first vital step in your dream becoming a reality.
Those in charge with selecting the team were taking a long time to do it, however. They were huddled over clip boards and team sheets, so Mr Hilton told me to take the opportunity of a lift home from my friend’s dad so I could get warm. ‘You did well,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you with the good news later.’
A few hours later he phoned the house to tell me I had not got in. It was the biggest disappointment of my life, and I locked myself in the bathroom till the tears subsided. On the phone he sounded as disappointed as I was, explaining that the teachers picking the team were from a private school in Chester, and that the majority of the squad selected came from their school. It was just another example of how money can buy you opportunity.
Years later, my youngest son, Daniel, played against that same school in the final of a schools cup. The Chester school had consistently won the cup in previous years; Daniel’s school had never even reached the final before. And yet they won. At the final whistle I nearly ran onto the pitch to complete the revenge by waving my victorious fist in front of the Chester school children, parents and staff. Thankfully, common sense told me that as my feelings of being wronged had occurred some thirty years earlier it was unlikely to have involved anyone on the other side of the pitch. Even so, the fact that their official school photographer was reluctant to take a team picture of our boys suggested to me that it was still an institution of tossers.
Mr Hilton had been very supportive in all my school years, using the leverage of the football team to ensure I kept up my schoolwork and didn’t drift, as some of the other lads did.
In the final year the team was good enough to get into a number of the local finals, and I always felt I let Mr Hilton down when I was sent off during one final for punching the centre-half from a school in Helsby. Even to this day I don’t know why I did it: perhaps it was because the lad had long hair and a beaded necklace and looked much cooler than me – he just seemed to irritate me to the point that I punched him. It wasn’t even a good punch, but what hurt more is the fact that I had let Mr Hilton down. I was 16 at the time and I never managed to apologise properly. So if he reads this, I just want to say, ‘Sorry, sir.’
5. Mr Logan: an English teacher who had encouraged me, along with my other English teacher Mrs Withers, through my O-levels in English Language and Literature. He talked me into returning to school when I had left, basically altering the whole course of my life – and that is no exaggeration.
6. Ms Philips: the headmistress of the comprehensive school who bent the rules to allow me to do A-levels and to comply with Mr Logan’s plans for me.
There were other teachers who had more contact with me during my school life and who had more direct influence on me, but that decision, taken with no small consequence, changed the world for me. I will be eternally grateful to both Mr Logan and Ms Philips.
7. Mr Debbage: the teacher who became a friend by giving me somewhere to live when I first moved to Manchester, but who also guided me through my History O-and A-levels, giving me a love of the subject I still retain to this day. He left teaching, as many skilled people do, to move into other areas and effectively became a professional card player. But Bridge’s gain was education’s loss, because he was the most brilliant of teachers, particularly at A-level standard, where he wasn’t having to fight with a room full of varying degrees of interest and intellect, which is the challenge teachers – particularly those in the comprehensive system – face.
8. Miss Boardman: my class tutor through all of my senior-school years. We saw her every day, and it is impossible for someone like that not to have an influence on you. She was only a few years older than us: for many of the teachers in the school it was their first job and they were roughly 8 to 12 years older than the pupils. That is a lot when you’re 11, but it’s not so much when you’re 16. She died too early. I managed to go to her funeral, which was both a sad and a celebratory affair, and I was glad I went. Let’s be honest, you don’t go to a teacher’s funeral unless they meant something to you, and she did.
I am not suggesting this is my Goodbye, Mr Chips moment, but I do feel teachers need to be celebrated. So thank you to all the ones who have been in my life. Thanks, too, even to the ones I didn’t like or who were rubbish at their job. You taught me something: the valuable lesson that some people in authority are pricks.
My education became disrupted as I entered the final year of junior school due to an operation I had on my left leg. At the time I was playing a lot of football, and the GP suggested quite reasonably that the pain in my leg must be ligament damage. As a result, his treatment was rest and a compression bandage.
However, the pain became unbearable after a few weeks and, despite the rest, there seemed to be no improvement. As I was unable to walk, my mum had to wheel me up and down the hill to the GP practice balanced on my bike, to ask if there was any other possible explanation. On many occasions they made the mistake of saying no, until she insisted I be referred to hospital.
Eventually, the referral to the hospital was made. I remember the day the ambulance came to collect me. Just as it arrived, I was sick, either with fear or illness. I don’t recall very much of what happened after that, apart from being prepared for surgery with my mum and dad standing either side of the bed, and my dad leaning in to kiss me on my forehead.
This was at a time when we were years past kissing: goodnight was a nod to my mum and a handshake to my dad – I’m glad to say that my family is so much more demonstrative now than we were then. One thing I have learnt from my travels over the years is that the British approach to displaying affection needs to improve. Now, when I see my mum and sisters and female family members or friends, we always kiss – although London-based females confuse me easily with the one or two cheek thing. Personally, after one cheek, if you are going again, you may as well throw the tongue in.
Eddie, my dad and all male family members get a handshake. Indeed, after a night in a bar with a few dozen Romanian miners (which I will come to later), I always shake hands with any male group I am in. It’s good manners, it breaks down barriers, and I think it shows some class – which is something you don’t always expect to learn from men who spend most of their time down a hole.
Lying on a hospital trolley about to be operated on and having both parents kiss me on the head made me start to think something was wrong. Which it was. Upon arrival at the hospital, my leg had been X-rayed and checked by the aptly named Mr Bone. Mr Bone had diagnosed a condition called osteomyelitis, a bone infection which he said was akin to having an abscess inside my left femur, the size of which, he informed my parents, was a huge cause for concern. He then advised my mum and dad that the next 24 hours would be critical.
In his words, he was operating to try to save my leg, although he told them if the operation was at all delayed and the abscess burst, then it could potentially become systemic. After that, there was a real danger I would die.
His plan was to try to drain the poison out of my leg, although he felt that the damage caused was already such that my leg would probably never grow beyond its current size – I was 11 at the time. It would then either be such a hindrance that I would want it amputated, or I could live a decent life with a built-up shoe.
Of course, I knew nothing of this when my mum and dad kissed me.
Luckily the operation was a success, but I did require a month in hospital and six months with a walking stick, followed by visits to the physiotherapy unit for a further three years, till they were satisfied that the leg was growing in tandem with the other one. I quite enjoyed having the walking stick, which I used to throw for Lassie to chase until I realised she would never bring it back. There is nothing more pathetic than chasing your own dog for your walking stick, when you need a walking stick to walk.
When I was eventually signed off by the physiotherapy department some three years after the operation, I knew how lucky I was. The final sign-off meant that they believed I was fixed for life, and in reality I was: I have never had any problems with my leg, and after the rehabilitation period I was able to do everything as if it had never happened. Yet I knew that not everyone was that fortunate.
During my time in hospital I became aware of a boy in the same ward as me. He had visitors, but he never really noticed them as he lay looking at the ceiling. Sometimes his mum would just sit on a chair next to his bed and cry; other times, she would come with a priest who would administer Holy Communion, but all the time he just lay looking up, communicating using weak flicks of his eyelids.
His name was Kieran, and when I was able get out of my bed I started going over to him with my cartoons. My leg at this point was attached to a drip, which was pumping antibiotic fluid directly into the bone, with another bag to collect the putrid, black-red infection as it drained. I was not able to move all over the ward, but I could make it to the other side of the room to his bed – it only took me around 15 minutes. When the nurses saw that I was visiting Kieran, thankfully they moved his bed next to mine.
Kieran and I became good friends, mainly because we were the only ones in there for more than a few days and because we were very close in age. I would read comics with him or just talk, or show him things. Gradually his winks were accompanied by grunts, and it was clear he was on his way back from the damage that had been caused when he had been knocked over by a van whilst out playing.
When I left hospital I was genuinely sad to be saying goodbye to Kieran. We kept in touch and, during my frequent visits to the hospital, I called in to see him on the ward and later at his house, when he had been deemed well enough to be transferred home, near Warrington. When my hospital visits ended and I had no reason to visit Warrington, our communication reduced to the odd letter or card, and a very occasional phone call, although his speech still had some way to go to be fully comprehensible and his handwriting looked like it had been a struggle to complete the words.
Then, one morning, when I was getting ready to go to school, my dad opened a letter over breakfast. I recognised the handwriting as belonging to Kieran’s mum. I could see from his expression that my dad had a message to pass on. He handed me the letter. Kieran had died. Despite his improvement he hadn’t been strong enough to ward off normal infections and had lost his fight for life.
Kieran had died as a consequence of an accident that could have been avoided. As always with these happenings that can ruin lives, there would have been many nights spent by all involved wishing that those split-second decisions that had put Kieran in front of that van had been different. Like my school friend in the swimming pool.
I was 17 and, once again, I was reminded that nothing in life is guaranteed.
CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_5fa05818-ef8c-5874-8427-4c892bf1fde5)
TEENAGE KICKS (#ulink_5fa05818-ef8c-5874-8427-4c892bf1fde5)
I have teenage boys now. I look at their life and not only do I not understand them because they are teenagers and their job is to be incomprehensible to their parents, but also because their life is nothing like the life I had at their age. When I was a teenager, we did not have any form of communication apart from talking either face-to-face, being on the house phone or writing. Admittedly, the letter-writing side was in reality limited to notes around the classroom, usually involving a very poor caricature of the teacher with enormous genitals. Which now seems rather odd. Why would it be funny to suggest the man in front of you had a huge cock? But, for some reason in a world before YouTube, it was the funniest thing we could think of.
Valentine’s Day cards were the only other time I recall writing to communicate. They were things to be prized, and size certainly mattered. During my teenage years I would give my girlfriend a Valentine’s card that was the size of a Wendy house, or padded so it was like a duvet in a box, although admittedly a duvet with a doe-eyed teddy bear on it. I wouldn’t for a minute suggest that I was in any way more romantic than any other teenage boy, but from an early age I learnt that you have to invest if you want something, and an impressive card, in my mind, stood you in good stead for a fondle.
I sometimes miss the simplicity of teenage relationships, though – the ability to end it by telling your mate to tell her mate that she was ‘chucked’ just seems so much more honest in its own cowardly way than the text/Facebook route chosen by teenagers today. I also miss the progressive nature of the physical relationship. The gradual stages of fumbling and endless snogging to suddenly being allowed entry into unchartered waters so that you take another tiny step towards manhood – all of that held an excitement that is hard to replicate at any other stage of your life. A mate of mine said to me that reducing his golf handicap was giving him the same buzz that he received from achieving the gradual progression through the bases when he was a teenage boy. There is nothing that can define you more as a middle-aged man than having a friend who is as excited by lowering his golf handicap as he once was by learning how to undo a bra. Age is a cruel thing.
Today, the first indication that your teenage child is having a relationship is the increasing size of their mobile phone bill. The notion that teenage romance led to hours on the phone was somewhat alien in my youth: talking on the house phone at all was a rare event. The phone was for emergencies. Besides, the phone lived on a table positioned in the hallway under the stairs – the most public place in the house. Nowadays, people are suggesting that parents need to monitor their children’s activities on social networking sites to find out to whom they are talking. That wasn’t required in the eighties – if your mum wanted to know what you were up to, she just sat on the stairs.
Today, every individual in my house has their own mobile phone, and we have various telephone extensions around the house – to the extent that it is impossible not to be available for immediate communication. This has created a difficult situation for this generation of teenagers, as they have never known anything but instant communication. If the internet goes down in my house, it’s the end of the world, and the children immediately get in touch with social services to report neglect.
But the flip side to this is that if they leave the house and I want to know where they are going and what they are doing, I just ring them. (If you are a parent, you know that I’m lucky if they bother to answer the phone or tell me the truth, but allow me my fantasy.) Telecommunication has lost all its magic for them, which is sad in some ways. They will never know the excitement of a phone call after nine at night: anyone ringing our house that late was only doing it to say someone was dead, and it was always great family fun to guess who before the phone was picked up.
Often the quickest way to converse with teenagers today is via text, even if they are in the same room. I once had a text row with my son when we were sitting on the same couch! I lost, as every adult that tries to communicate with the ‘youth of today’ inevitably will do when the process of communication involves only using your thumbs. Watching my kids texting looks a blur to me: it’s like their two thumbs are having a race. Their head is bowed, and the concentration on the face and the general stillness could easily be interpreted as meditation, were it not for the frenetic thumb action. Having a text row with them is pointless because before you can finish your text to them they have replied, told you how wrong you are, how great everyone else’s parents are and how you are ruining their life.
This evolution of communication is the biggest difference between my kids and my own development as a teenager. For me, football provided a way to enter the adult world. During my teenage years my dad ran Sunday league teams. We would travel together as a squad, play the game, go to the pub afterwards and be home for the Sunday roast my mum had prepared. During those years I learnt how to be amongst men. I also learnt that if you make a commitment, you stick to it. So even on wet Sunday mornings, when your bed was calling you, you got up and went to play on whatever pitch you were sent to that week.
Trying to recall my teenage years, I can remember football constantly being there. The academy system that most clubs run these days did not exist then, so it was possible to believe you might become a professional footballer even if you hadn’t been scouted by the time you were 20. There were always examples of top-flight footballers who, a few years earlier, had been playing Sunday league football. The consequence was that amateur football was very vibrant: people still had dreams, and those dreams had a chance of being realised. It wasn’t difficult to get kids together either, because everyone wanted to play. In a world without computer games or, for that matter, home computers, and where children’s TV was only on for a few hours after school, if you didn’t go out and do something your options were very limited.
Having run kids’ teams myself in recent years, I don’t recall levels of parental involvement or interference being as high back then, either. I don’t recollect my dad having to drop us off and pick us up in the same way my wife and I have spent the last few years doing – to the point that if there is one luxury I have allowed myself, it is to set up a taxi account. My secret ambition is to one day own a car and sell it years later, without it ever having been used to ferry them anywhere. When my oldest son recently passed his driving test, my wife and I sat back and planned what we would do with all the spare time we would now gain from not driving him around. She is considering a second degree and I am planning to learn Chinese.
The truth was that we expected less then. Youth teams barely had full kits, let alone matching hoodies and personalised bags. The parents who did come generally did so to support the lads; there was no need for rope around the pitch to prevent irate parents coming onto the field to either support or bollock their little Johnny. The level of organisation in youth football now is impressive. Team coaches have to pass an approved FA coaching course, people involved are CRB checked, and my son’s under-15 team has to line up to have their photo ID-checked by the opposition manager before every game.
I think some of this can be overkill, like being CRB-checked to take your own son and his friends to a game, even though they all stayed at your house the night before. (This was actually suggested to me a few years ago – you can imagine my response.) It’s great to be organised, but you don’t want to take the simple pleasure out of the game. Although I do think the ID cards are a good idea, as it prevents teams playing ‘ringers’: I recall playing a game against one team when I was 15, which we lost. At the end of the game their bearded centre-half drove himself and his watching wife and kids home.
As a teenager the team I played for was Halton Sports. It was run by my dad’s friend, Joe Langton, whose son, Peter, also played. Joe was a barrel-chested man with a bald head, the crown of which was framed by short, blond hair. He always sported a neat moustache. A strong man whose day job was laying flag stones, Joe was almost square in shape. The joke amongst the lads was that he had once been six-foot-seven and a house had fallen on him to make him the square five-foot-six he actually was. Joe took it so seriously that he would often turn up in a three-piece suit, ready for an interview with Match of the Day should they turn up.
The team was good. The better players from our school team played, boys like Mark Donovan, Sean Johnson and Curtis Warren – not the infamous Liverpool gangster, but a fast, ginger-haired lad who scored a lot of goals. We were joined by good lads from the schools’ representative team, like John Hickey and Peter Golburn. I only list the names because none of us became professional footballers – which was an obvious ambition for us all – and every single one of those listed would have been good enough.
I would possibly suggest that playing in Joe’s team was the highest sporting success most of us enjoyed, as we spent one season completely unbeaten and won most things in the years that we played. My dad kept all the newspaper clippings of my resulting football career, and I always look at the coverage of that period with affection.
• • •
Apart from playing football, there was not a lot to do on the estate. When I was a bit older I volunteered at a cancer hospice, but in my early teens I never went to a youth club or anything of that nature, and generally just hung around on my bike doing all the things teenage boys do. I never really got into too much trouble. Scrapping had been replaced by an interest in girls, and the knowledge that as you all grew bigger it hurt more when you got hit. I never did the drinking-cider-on-a-wall-and-smoking thing that many started to do in their mid-teens because I had promised my dad I would never smoke, a promise he made all four of us make to him from a very early age, and which none of us has broken – apart from allowing myself the odd cigar. (That habit began one night in a posh hotel in Valletta, Malta. I found myself alone with an 80-year-old barman called Sonny, drinking a glass of whisky and listening to Frank Sinatra. Having a cigar seemed the most appropriate thing in the world.)
When I was 13 and feeling the need to be more independent and spread my wings outside the estate, football things were replaced by a bicycle. It was a silver ‘racer’, which basically meant it weighed a ton but had curved handlebars. Due to a cock-up by the catalogue company, I didn’t actually get the bike till Easter, so on Christmas Day my present was a box containing Cluedo. A great game, but not a great way to get around the estate. I hope I hid my disappointment well enough on the day when asking through gritted teeth – when my mates were all out on their new bikes – ‘Was it Professor Green with the lead piping?’
With the ability to stagger repayments, the catalogue was the avenue through which many people on the estate purchased things that were out of their reach financially. Every time a White Arrow van arrived on the estate, you knew someone was getting something from the catalogue. The bike was my final present as a child. Every year previously for Christmas I received something football-related. After the bike, all my Christmas presents were things to make me look good or allow me to go out; in other words, money or clothes. Unless it was a book voucher, which no kid wants as a Christmas present – you may as well give them an abacus and say, ‘Go and try to be a bit cleverer next year.’
The progression of a boy’s life can be mapped out by the Christmas presents he receives: a kit; a ball; one year I got a Subbuteo set with two teams, England and Uruguay. Nobody knew where Uruguay was, but they played in a blue kit and all the players were painted brown, so when I played Subbuteo, it was always England v the Black Everton.
As I got older, other things became more important to me, such as trying to be fashionable. I particularly remember receiving my first Fred Perry T-shirt, a yellow one with brown trim, which I don’t think I took off until it was physically too small to get on and had begun to look like a bra. But the only way of providing you with something that allowed you to make up your own mind was with money. Cash became king in my teenage years when it came to presents. I could buy records, although I never went too crazy on this: I rationalised that there is always new music, so why spend your money on something you like now when something better may be out next week? These are the decisions you had to make when it came to records, as they were things of permanence, not like a download. Even if you weren’t playing it, you had to put it somewhere, and I couldn’t always be bothered with that level of responsibility. Besides, being the youngest allowed me to listen to the music the others brought into the house, on either vinyl or cassette. I realise for readers of a certain age these things may as well be tablets of stone, and for others they provided hours of musical joy, but to me they were just more things I had to put away.
By the time I was 15 I had discovered girls. I knew they had existed before, obviously – I lived with two of them. But I mean I became more interested in them than I was in my mates. However, it should be made clear that I wasn’t exactly a lothario when it came to girls, and I had all the awkwardness that comes with being a teenage boy. These ranged from thinking that the best way of attracting the attention of a girl you fancied was by throwing something at her head (Paula); to being so unworldly wise that the first time a girl French-kissed me I pulled away, spat on the floor and shouted, ‘What did you stick your tongue down my mouth for? You dirty cow!’ (Jane).
This growing interest coincided with a failed car-stealing incident. It was not an unusual pastime for teenage boys on the estate to steal motor scooters from gardens. They were easy to jump-start, and you could have a few hours of fun before the petrol ran out, someone crashed or you just left it somewhere – usually always stupidly close to home, to save the walk.
Somehow, we had never been caught doing this. So, emboldened, we decided one afternoon when at my friend Mark’s house that he should steal his dad’s car. This was a big, golden-brown British Leyland Princess which Mark had been shown how to drive by his dad, although admittedly only for 50 yards. His mum and dad were away for the weekend, and Mark was being checked on by his older sister, but was basically left to his own devices. After some thought, we all decided it would be great to drive around the estate in the car.
Mark was a bit less enthusiastic, I recall, but, being egged on by the four of us, he capitulated. He took the keys, and off we set. He reversed safely enough and, despite it being the middle of a Saturday afternoon, none of the neighbours seemed concerned when five 14-year-old boys started driving down the street.
Mark managed to get over two relatively busy junctions and had avoided knocking over any number of kids playing in the street before the car suddenly stopped. He tried to change gear but nothing happened.
We were all sitting in a stolen car in the middle of the estate when a man in a van stopped and asked what was wrong. Not, ‘What are you lot doing in the car?’ but, ‘What’s wrong?’
With his help, it was decided the clutch had gone and that the only way back to the house was to push it. A journey of 10 minutes’ driving is a lot longer when four teenage boys are pushing a car steered by their friend, and it may have been during it that the penny dropped in my head: ‘My mates are idiots. I should be trying to get girls’ bras off instead.’
I really was no big hit with the girls. I was never actually shy, just unsure. I understood boys. You knew what made each other laugh (farts), and you knew that if someone was annoying, then eventually someone else would punch them. It was never the same with girls. They could say something to me, and I would just be stumped. I would just think, ‘Laughing must be wrong as nobody has farted, and punching them is out of the question.’
I eventually got over my awkwardness and was able to have a few dalliances, before going steady with a girl called Denise. She had hair that was a mixture of red and auburn, a great athletic figure from playing school hockey and netball, and a wicked sense of humour. And I am grateful that during my later teenage years, when I could have been doing other things, she allowed me the opportunity to fumble my way to manhood with her.
We went out with each other in that typically teenage on-off fashion for years; people assumed that we would one day get married. That is what you did on the estate: if you found someone who was good enough, it seemed to make sense to get married. I remember my dad even asking me once if I thought I would marry her. I was 17. As the father of 17-year-old boys of the modern era, I am not sure I could even ask them to commit to taking the dog for a walk without expecting a phone call telling me the dog had ran off and it was my fault because I asked them to do it in the first place.
The reality was that I wanted something more than the estate had to offer; I just wasn’t sure what it was. But I was about to find out.
CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_0b6d8486-5648-555c-9e36-420aa3ab15a2)
ALL I LEARNT IN SCHOOL (#ulink_0b6d8486-5648-555c-9e36-420aa3ab15a2)
I left school for the first time when I was 16. I had gained six O-levels and four CSEs. At that time, the education system was split between those who teachers thought were academically capable enough to achieve an O-level, and those they considered ‘less able’, who sat CSEs. I fell into the bracket of pupils who were regarded as a little bit of both. In Physics and Maths everyone sat the same examination, and you were either awarded an O-level or a CSE. This worked out well for me, as I achieved an O-level in both. I doubt that was what my teachers expected of me, particularly as the only thing I can remember about physics was setting my hair on fire trying to see if the central hole in the Bunsen burner continued up through the flame. If you’re interested, it doesn’t. And I think it is fair to say that if you are stupid enough to set yourself on fire, you are lucky to get any qualification, let alone a coveted O-level.
At my school, this batch of O-levels was a fairly impressive figure. Within my household, school was something that we all went to but never really expected much from. My mum attended all the parents’ evenings, but the only time I recall my dad showing more than a passing interest was the summer I left.
‘You mum tells me you’ve done some O-levels.’
‘Yer.’
‘Good, hope you get them.’
That was that, and I guess that was all that needed to be said.
With what appeared to be a healthy clutch of qualifications, I was encouraged by the school to return to the sixth form. It had only just been set up, as whilst the total student population was pushing towards 2,000, they weren’t particularly successful in recruiting candidates for sixth form: there was just 11 people in it. But, after due consideration, I went for it.
This decision was based on the belief that if I were to gain A-levels I could do a degree, and if I did a degree, I could do a job where I would not need to get a wash when I came home from work, like Clive’s dad. In my mind, I could end up doing something interesting, taxing, and where you wore a suit: perhaps be a solicitor. No ordinary, boring solicitor, but more of a Petrocelli-type, caravan-dwelling advocate, the sort of lawyer who stood up for the innocent poor who couldn’t pay for justice. If you never saw the brilliant series starring Barry Newman, it is a great indication of how times have changed. Who would trust a lawyer now who lived in a caravan?
To be a lawyer was an impressive aspiration within my family, so I perpetuated the idea that I wanted to train to be a solicitor for many years. In fact, I’m sure there are still some family members who think it would have been better to have a lawyer in the family than a comedian.
However, my attendance at sixth form lasted all of one day. At that time, anybody staying on at school sixth form only received family allowance. This was the princely sum of £6.50 per week, as opposed to the £24 per week afforded by the government to all those on a Youth Opportunity Scheme. It was 1982, the recession was beginning to bite, and there were very few jobs around. But the government policy guaranteed all 16 to 18 year olds a place on one of these schemes.
Along with this, when I arrived at the sixth form wearing brand-new jeans, I was promptly informed that jeans were not acceptable so I would have to get some trousers.
At the time, Eddie had left home to take up residence in a flat in Southgate, an estate built to look like washing machines and with about as much practical application as a washing machine when it came to somewhere to live; Kathy was training to be a nursery nurse; and Carol was on a Youth Opportunity Scheme. My dad was trying to make a living making and selling wrought-iron furniture, such as telephone tables, which were such a staple of every home at the time. The idea was that when you used the phone you sat sort of side-saddle at the table. No wonder people of a certain age seem to droop as they get older – for a large part of their life they are having conversations on the phone at a ridiculous angle. My mum had a part-time job washing dishes in the kitchen of a factory canteen on the industrial estate. In essence, I didn’t feel I could return home and say to my mum I required new trousers. Instead, I felt I should be bringing money into the household and paying my way.
I had already applied for a job at the main factory in Runcorn: ICI. Along with my mate, Vic, I received a letter saying I had the got the job, to start in the second week of September. ICI was a huge chemical plant and the job in question was as a mail lad. That was the actual job description; it was a job for a ‘lad’ – girlies need not apply. And to my knowledge, none of them did. Most followed other paths, like my then girlfriend Denise, who trained to be a hairdresser. At least the old system made things very simple, as I’m sure if the ‘mail lad’ job were to exist at all in the world of emails it would be called something like ‘communications distribution individual’.
So I left school and went to work delivering mail at ICI. This involved getting a bus at 6.30 a.m. to arrive at work for 7. We would then collect the bicycles that were left at the security gate each evening and ride down the hill to the mail office. Getting up early was worth that ride downhill. Everyone should start the day going downhill on a bicycle. It was great fun – apart from the rain and snow and cold. OK, so it was great about eleven days of the year, but they were still great days.
We’d finish by 3 o’clock and, two nights a week, I would then go to night school in Widnes to study A-levels in English and Law. I may not have been in the sixth form, but I didn’t want my education to stop.
One day, on the way home from ICI, and while still wearing my steel-cap ICI safety boots, my ICI safety jacket and my ICI safety trousers, I called in to the school sixth form. It was there that I bumped into Mr Logan. Mr Logan had been my English teacher during my O-level period and would have been my A-level teacher had I stayed in the sixth form. He asked me how I was getting on, and I explained that I was working and doing A-levels at night school. He asked if I’d consider returning to the sixth form in January, but as I was then earning £42 a week, to leave that to return to a family allowance of just £6.50 a week didn’t seem viable.
In reality, I was beginning to have doubts about ICI and the future. I remember one day I fell into conversation at the plant with one of the men who always seemed to be walking around wearing boiler suits and hard hats, but never actually doing much. He was a friendly man in his late fifties with a warm face and a frame that suggested he enjoyed a roast dinner, and a disposition that suggested he had never seen how that roast dinner was made. He had worked at ICI all of his life.
‘You’ve got a job for life here, son,’ he informed me proudly, as he lit a cigarette, completely ignoring the No Smoking signs and the miles of pipework around his head carrying flammable chemicals. ‘Yes, son, no reason you won’t be taking your pension here.’
I remember looking around at the myriad pipes transporting chemicals all over the plant, and thinking, ‘Is this the view I have to spend the rest of my working life looking at?’
I think one of those great things about advice is that it is often given to make one point but ends up making entirely the opposite one. I could think of nothing worse than giving my life away so cheaply. Some people are lucky enough to find contentment in such security, but for me it felt as if someone was pouring water over my bonfire so the flames would not get too high. To stay in the same place of work all my life, get married, live in the same area, go to the same pubs, see the same faces until one by one we popped our clogs was like being handed a life of limitation that I just couldn’t accept. It’s a life that suits many people down to the ground, and in many ways I have always been envious of them. I never thought I was better than anyone else; I just knew I wanted something different. The problem was, I wasn’t sure what that was.
In the discussion with Mr Logan I had told him that the only option for me to return to full-time education of any nature was to take a part-time course at the local further-education college. If you were able to study part-time there, then you were able to claim unemployment benefits, which would mean £18 a week rather than £6.50. Still a long way behind the £42 a week I was currently earning, but at least a step to bridge the gap. The difficulty was that you were not allowed to study in school sixth forms part-time, only in FE colleges. If you were studying in a school, then you had to be classed as a full-time student for the school to receive the payment from the local education authority to cover your attendance. Mr Logan had said he would talk to the headmistress, Ms Philips, and see if there was any way around this.
I came into school a few days later to have a conversation with them both. The reality was stark and clear: I could not continue to do night-school A-levels one night a week over one year and realistically expect to pass. But, on the other hand, I couldn’t afford to leave my job. After some deliberation, it was agreed that the school would give me a letter that I could take to the unemployment exchange to say that I was studying part-time. Once they accepted this and guaranteed I would receive my dole, then I would leave my job.
The school was basically gambling that the unemployment office would not get in touch with the education services who, had they found out I was only studying part-time, would not have given the school the full remittance for my place, while Ms Philips would have faced serious questions about why she had told lies.
Everything was agreed and the letter was accepted. I was to return to school to do English and History A-levels, whilst I was to continue at night school once a week to study Law. It was a decision that would change everything I would do from then on, and it opened the door to a new world of potential opportunity.
What I had not envisaged was how this plan would sound to anybody else when I tried to explain it. The night that everything was agreed with the teachers, I went home to tell my mum and dad. I knew that they had been proud that I had been taken on at ICI as it offered one of the few permanent jobs for anyone my age in the area, but I assumed they would be pleased with my decision to leave, particularly once I had explained the financial side of things.
However, my announcement was met with blank stares. The kind of stares I would have expected if I had said I was going to join the Foreign Legion. Clearly what had left my mouth was the least expected thing in the world, and we sat talking until nearly midnight over endless cups of tea.
Although my mum was more supportive, my dad was clear and honest in his view. He did his best to convince me that having a job with prospects was so much better than taking a chance on doing A-levels and only possibly going to university. At this point, only my cousin Karen had gone to university, and it was generally accepted as something not for the likes of us.
Also, Karen was clever and known to be so. I was a boy and so intellect was balanced by my ability to carry things, and within our family history we were more greatly predisposed to the latter as a way to make a living. I knew I was going against the grain, but I also knew I had to tell them that this was what I wanted to do.
As I write these words now, it almost feels like I am talking about ‘coming out’ to my family that I read books. It wasn’t so dramatic; it was more that I was gambling on something better and needed them to see it too, although at the time A-levels appeared as useful as magic beans. There were no jobs, so why give up a perfectly good one in the hope of another one in the future?
I set my argument out as best as I could: I wanted something more than it appeared I could achieve if I did not change direction.
After hours of talking, my dad summarised it all in just one sentence: ‘I think it could be a mistake, but you have got to try. If you don’t try, you will always wonder what might have happened.’
And that was that. From that moment, I had their full support and they never questioned my decision. It was a great relief that they supported me: once my mum and dad get behind you, they are there for the long haul, and you can’t ask more of anyone.
So for the first time, but not the last, I left a well-paid job to try to achieve something against the advice of many, but with the support of those who mattered.
Eighteen months later, I was sitting in the passenger seat of a second-hand BT van next to my mum, as my dad was driving us north to what was then Newcastle Polytechnic. My mum could have said goodbye at home and let me travel up with my dad, or they could have put me on a train. Instead, they wanted to make the eight-hour round trip in a car none of us was sure could make it in order to say goodbye properly, because that’s what loving parents do. The van had been acquired a few weeks before, and it was another in the long list of unique vehicles my dad has owned. With a top speed of 50 mph, the journey took a very long time.
In actuality, it had taken 18 years. I was leaving home and saying goodbye to start the next stage of my life.
CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_15075378-0247-50a7-920f-40d5865d10c1)
NEWCASTLE (#ulink_15075378-0247-50a7-920f-40d5865d10c1)
Newcastle didn’t exactly work out for me as I had planned. I enjoyed my first term there, and I liked the people that I met. However, I had gone to study an English and History degree having achieved a ‘B’ in my History and an ‘Ungraded’ in my English A-levels.
The English grade had shocked the school to the extent that they had paid to have the paper remarked. They had predicted at least a ‘B’ grade, but when the paper was returned it was clear why the ungraded mark had been given. Somewhere in the exam my brain had turned to mush, and my mild dyslexia had gone berserk: I had written some words backwards, some upside down, whilst others were just illegible. Although I certainly am not the greatest speller in the world, and had been tested for dyslexia on a number of occasions, I had never before displayed such a meltdown.
I have always put my inability to spell down to the fact that in junior school we were taught to spell phonetically, which means speaking the word slowly as you spell it. The problem with such a process is that if you speak with an accent as thick as mine, and live in an environment where you are not surrounded by the written word to counterbalance your exposure to these sounds, then it is easy to make mistakes. I was 10 before I realised the word ‘there’ did not have a ‘d’ in it.
What happened that day has never happened since, and it is still inexplicable to me. But, using the grades I achieved in General Studies and the Law exam I did at night school as a trade-off, the school had somehow convinced Newcastle Poly they should allow me to do a degree in a subject that I failed at A-level. Which you have to say is no mean feat.
I began the course in Newcastle full of enthusiasm. It was my first time living away from home and I immediately fell in love with the city and its people. To this day, it is one of the first places I look for when I have a tour booked. I was living in the student hall of residence and threw myself into the social life that this presented. I gained a casual girlfriend called Anne and managed to get myself into the first XI football team, which provided a great social network. It also provided fantastic trips away, as Newcastle Poly sports teams were generally regarded as quite strong.
On one particular trip, we were to play against Edge Hill University, a teacher training college near Ormskirk. I can’t remember the score, but I know we won, and what I can remember is that after the game we went to the student union for a drink – only to find out the ratio of girls to men at Edge Hill was roughly 4 to 1. We had a whip-round to convince the bus driver to allow us to stay a few hours longer, and at the end of the evening we returned to the team bus triumphant. Every single player (apart from Lawrence, who played in goal and whose cousin attended that college and to whom he’d had to talk all night) had got at least a snog. It was a fantastic feeling to be amongst a body of men who had arrived in new lands and challenged the local men to do battle on the football pitch, emerging victorious and then finding pleasure among the local women. It was probably the closest I will ever come to being a Viking.
Despite the fun I was having in Newcastle, I was quickly becoming disillusioned with the course. In truth, my experience in literature has been limited to books that I was forced to read for school rather than books I wanted to read; it was only during my A-level course that I had begun to read books for pleasure. Prior to that, if it was not a comic book or a Roy of the Rovers annual, I never read anything.
I regret those wasted years, and I am pleased that my three sons are avid readers. I still don’t read as much as I would like, but I attempt to have at least one book always on the go. This does also lead to the accumulation of a mass of books that I have started on a train journey somewhere and never finished. I used to feel guilty about not finishing books but, as I’ve become older, I have come to the conclusion that this is not my fault – if the book was any good, I would have finished it.
This could be a very pragmatic way to explain my laziness, or it could simply be true. Books are the only thing that you embark upon feeling responsible for your own enjoyment of it; even if the first 50 pages are rubbish, there is a sense of defeat if you don’t finish it. That doesn’t happen in any other art form; it certainly doesn’t happen in comedy. You can’t be rubbish for 20 minutes to the extent that the audience get up and leave without seeing the conclusion of your act, and feel totally reassured that on their way home they will think it’s their fault.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/john-bishop/how-did-all-this-happen/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
John Bishop
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Биографии и мемуары
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 25.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: If you’re a man of a certain age you’ll know there comes a point in life when getting a sports car and over-analysing your contribution to society sounds like a really good idea.With a good job in sales and marketing and a nice house in Manchester that he shared with his wife and kids, John Bishop was no different when he turned the dreaded 4-0. But instead of spanking a load of cash on a car that would have made him look like a senior stylist at Vidal Sassoon, he stumbled onto a pathway that ultimately lead him to become one of the nation’s best loved comedians. It was a gamble, but boy, did it pay off.How Did All This Happen? is the story of how a boy who, growing up on a council estate dreaming of ousting Kenny Dalglish from Liverpool FC’s starting line-up, suddenly found himself on stage in front of thousands of people nationwide, at an age when he should have known better.In his own inimitable style, John guides us through his life from leaving the estate and travelling the globe on a shoe string, to marriage, kids and the split that led him to being on a stage complaining to strangers one night – the night that changed his life and started his journey to stardom.Wonderfully entertaining and packed with colourful reminiscences and comical anecdotes, this is a heart-warming, life-affirming and ultimately very, very funny memoir from one of the nation’s greatest comedians.