Look who it is! (4 page)

* * *

Back in Northampton, though, in the distant days of childhood, home was a happy place. Mum eventually gave birth to Gary, and so when he was older I had a brother to play with. She had actually asked me the year before, when I was playing with my Evel Knievel figure in the garden, whether I
would like a little brother. I can’t remember what I said, but it looks like they went ahead with it anyway.

Even though everything seemed so warm and homely, I still managed to suffer, though, because I was so accident-prone. I remember jumping out of bed on a Monday morning, excited because I had a whole brand new week of school. My family was having new carpets fitted and had taken up the old ones. In my eagerness to run downstairs, I caught my foot under the carpet gripper and ripped all my toenails out. I was in agony and instead of going to school and doing fun things, I had to lie on the settee watching
Pebble Mill at One
like a prisoner of war.

As with all kids, I was into He-Man and
Star Wars
, and any money I received would go to buy a figure that I could act out scenes with. Francesca across the road, who was my age, had great girls’ toys, so we would often pool our resources and make up our own fantasy world. For nearly a year Barbie and Skeletor were co-habiting in Castle Grayskull without a care in the world. Our Castle Grayskull was actually a more feminine affair than usual. Under Francesca’s watchful eye, it had a pink chest of drawers, pink curtains and a big pink double bed.

Contrary to what you might think, I scorned the pink frilliness of Barbie’s world and chose to have ‘wars’ with soldiers. Fuelled by Saturday afternoon reruns of
Sinbad
, I would always have my sword and scabbard at the ready, and if I couldn’t find those, a stick. Looking back, I wish that now I had a tenth of the energy that little Alan used to have. I was a bag of energy, full of beans, always making loads of noise, so much so that Mum cut the tongues out of my Hungry Hippos.

The only glitch in this boyish world that I threw myself into was the time I asked Mum to help me write a letter to
Jim’ll
Fix
It
to ask if I could meet Wonder Woman. I knew her name was Lynda Carter, my mother’s maiden name, and I prayed that she was a relative and that at a family wedding she would turn up, obviously dressed as Wonder Woman, and I could meet her and tell everyone I was related to Wonder Woman. Surprisingly enough, she never turned up – it seems Lynda cares more for her career than she does her own flesh and blood.

It was around my eighth birthday that I started having an unhealthy interest in birdwatching, too. For the next three or four birthdays, I asked for binoculars and books on birds – I even subscribed to a birdwatching magazine. Every month, I would become enthralled by the exotic birds that would grace the glossy front cover. Frustratingly, it would always be a flamingo or a frigate with its beautiful red plumage. This was particularly mean as well as misleading to the keen bird-watcher, as such cover stars were native to such tropical paradise as the Galapagos Islands and there was no way a landlocked ornithologist like myself would ever come across one. I would have to make do with the Canada geese and pied wagtails that I saw at Pitsford Reservoir.

One time we got a free tape of birdsong, that you played to get yourself acquainted with the different calls that you would hear when you were in your hide waiting to see your first bird. The twittering coming from the stereo speakers didn’t really have much of an effect on me, but Big Puss went mental. His eyes as big as ball bearings, he stalked the stereo, ferociously intimidating, hungry for bird-meat. In the end,
when he couldn’t find a bird, he just jumped on me and bit me instead. He was ruthless, a tireless killer and also a sexual predator, and although he had been castrated he still liked to make love to inanimate objects. My teddy bears, my slippers. He would bite the head of my He-Man and grind mercilessly, making a horny purring sound like a next-door neighbour using a strimmer.

This was my first introduction to sex. Mum would come in and hit him with a tea-towel.

‘What’s he doing, Mum?’

‘He’s being dirty.’

So from then on, whenever Big Puss ground away on my teddies or sometimes even me, I would shout, ‘Mum! Big Puss is being dirty! Big Puss is being dirty!’ And Mum would come in with a tea-towel and shoo him away: ‘Dirty cat! Dirty cat!’

I didn’t know what being dirty was – I still don’t think I do – but anyway that’s when I first came across this thing ‘being dirty’, and I learnt it off a big horny ginger tom.

Like most families, the father thinks he rules the roost but it is the mother who is really in control. After my younger brother Gary and I had tired of pleading with our parents for a tortoise, we moved onto dogs. We wanted a pet dog. Dad instantly set out his stall: he wanted a ‘big dog’, a man-dog, a dog that if it was human would enjoy a pint and stare at the barmaid’s arse as she bent down for the cheese and onion crisps. He must have felt pretty emasculated then when we came back with Minstral.

The only way I can describe Minstral is for you to imagine the kind of dog that Paris Hilton has poking out of her
handbag at those Hollywood premières. Minstral was a gorgeous little mongrel a few months old with the most expressive face going. His mother had been a pedigree King Charles Cavalier Spaniel, the breeder told us snootily, but a dirty Jack Russell called ‘Rusty’ had sneaked through the cat flap and raped her. It seems the mother had brought shame upon his council house and wanted nothing to do with its bastard offspring, so we took it off his hands.

Contrary to what you might think, Dad and the bastard dog bonded and from that moment on they were inseparable. They would go to bed at the same time, rise at the same time and go for drives together, with Minstral sitting obediently in the passenger seat. The partnership got so intense that Mum thought the dog was resenting her. So much so that she phoned the vet to say that Minstral was giving her dirty looks. I was horrified. I envisaged the vet nodding sympathetically – ‘Yes, Mrs Carr, that’s right, Mrs Carr’ – while trying to switch on ‘speaker phone’ so everyone in the clinic could listen to this ‘weirdo woman’ in a love triangle with a mongrel.

From that moment on, Minstral and Mum both battled for Dad’s affection; it was a battle that would last the next thirteen years. At least Mum still had her figure; Minstral’s had gone to pot, as every morning Dad would proudly walk him to the newsagent and feed him his body weight in Milky Ways. It’s a classic case of an owner killing the dog with kindness, but his argument was that Minstral would look up with those little expectant eyes, and Dad just couldn’t resist forcing what was to a dog the equivalent of a selection box down the poor creature’s throat. The dog must have been good with the
old expectant-eyes trick because when I did them to Dad (usually mid-cross-country run, pleading with him to stop) he just ignored me and made me touch another tree, while I was gagging for a Milky Way.

* * *

It’s typical, really, that although I was hearing whispers at school that I was not like the other boys – and I don’t think it was because of my birdwatching – the penny never dropped. A few times I had wondered what they meant by the catcalls, and of course now I know, oh yes, I know now very well what they meant. These cringeworthy moments hover in my memory glowing bright pink in neon shouting, ‘Yoo hoo, over here – remember us.’ Sometimes I was guilty of turning the most mundane tasks into ammunition for the bullies.

Every child loves ice cream, and I was no exception. Whenever the hypnotic melody of the ice-cream van would be heard in our cul-de-sac, time would freeze as every child would first run to their mum and dad and shout, ‘Mum, ice-cream van – can we have one?’ and then run to get their shoes. On one occasion, I couldn’t find my shoes and blind panic set in, because I really wanted a 99. All I could find were Mum’s knee-length zip-up leather boots. I thought, ‘Sod it, I’ll wear those.’

By the time I’d put them on the right feet, zipped them up and found a handbag to match (joke), I could hear the ice-cream van’s engine starting up. I ran straight out of the front door to find my fears were confirmed – he was pulling away!
As fast as I could, I chased the ice-cream van through my whole estate in high-heeled boots, shouting, ‘Stop! Stop! I want a 99!’

It was only when I sat down on the kerb, slowly unzipped the boots and coquettishly sucked the flake, that I thought, ‘God, you’re sexy!’ – no, I thought how ridiculous I must look. This was confirmed by the number of neighbours staring and kids giggling.

I knew they were thinking, ‘That’s Graham’s son.’

* * *

Times changed, and when I was eight we stopped going to the freezing wasteland of Great Yarmouth for our holidays and started going on five-hour car journeys behind a string of caravans to Beverley Park in Torquay. That five-hour journey would sometimes take six if my violent car sickness kicked in and I had to vomit on the hard shoulder.

You can imagine the relief when we finally pulled up at Torquay and saw the sun and the crisp blue sky.

‘They call this the English Riviera,’ Mum said, turning round in her seat and smiling at me.

I was amazed. Unlike Great Yarmouth, it really did look like it did in the brochure. (In Great Yarmouth I think they’d superimposed a sun and toilet facilities afterwards.)

Now we were holidaying down south we were joined by an extra person – Nanny Tot. She should have been called Nanny Carr, but my Granddad Wilf was so tall he was nicknamed Tot and it stuck. Nanny Tot didn’t come to Great
Yarmouth with us, as she lived in Newcastle, so if she had wanted to get blown around and pissed on, she could just have gone to Whitley Bay, which was cheaper and nearer. When Nanny found out that we would be going to Devon and it would be free, she decided to tag along.

Nanny Tot was a lovely lady, but frugal to say the least. If she could get out of spending money she would do it. One mention of pocket money would have her diving for her panic button. Once, when I was a baby, she bought me a dress because it was cheaper than a pair of trousers. Gary insists that’s where my ‘trouble’ started.

Every kid is excited when their Nan comes to stay, and we were no exception, but the excitement was doubled because we were going on holiday with ours – yeah! We would collect Nan from the National Express coach station ready for our journey onwards to sunny Devon. She would get off the coach and reach into her bag.

‘Here you are, love. Here’s something for you.’

It would be half a packet of Opal Fruits each – if we were lucky. Sometimes we didn’t get them at all, because if Nanny Tot ever saw a disabled person or someone with learning difficulties, she would put her hand in her bag and whip out our sweets. I remember once in a café Nan going to give a paraplegic my uneaten chips. And if this wasn’t embarrassing enough, Mum then told her off loudly, saying, ‘They want to be treated as equal. They’ve got rights now.’

Nan’s generosity with our sweets to less able-bodied people had a sliding scale of its own – a brain tumour: a whole box of Rowntree’s pastilles; limb missing: Fry’s chocolate
cream; retarded: Bounty; while a stutter would equate to two segments of a Terry’s chocolate orange.

Sadly, Nan’s tightness actually affected her hearing.

‘Can I have 50p to have a ride on the donkeys?’ I begged.

She smiled sweetly and carried on with her crossword.

‘Please, Nan!’

It was no good. She couldn’t hear a thing. If Dad was buying us a fish and chip supper, though, her hearing would become so acute she would have put a bat to shame.

Despite the penny pinching, we did have a lovely time together. Mum and Dad would hit the campsite club and me, Nan and Gary would all sit and try and listen to the television over the noise of the rain pelting down the corrugated-iron roof.

If you were in an even-numbered caravan you were a royal and if you were in an odd-numbered caravan you were a rebel. Whenever you walked around the campsite and came across a redcoat he’d ask, ‘What are you?’

‘Rebel!’ we’d all shout the first year, because we were in caravan 181.

The next year we found ourselves royals. ‘What are you?’

‘Royal!’

Honestly, who needs Disneyland when you can have this much fun?

Those holidays in Devon and eventually Cornwall were so idyllic. The sun always seemed to be shining and there was a lovely sense of peace about the place. Gary was getting older and becoming more fun and we were able to do things together.

For all the picture-perfect innocence, it soon became clear that something ominous was shifting inside me, as I discovered one afternoon whilst walking along the beach with my parents.

‘Alan! Stop that. Stop doing that!’ shouted my mother, pointing at me.

‘What?’

I was subconsciously mincing along with my bucket in the crook of my arm like a handbag and twirling the spade around my fingers like a majorette.

‘Hold it properly!’ she insisted.

I personally thought I looked fabulous but I relented and held it ‘properly’. Boring!

I often wonder whether my parents took it as an omen or whether it even registered, but looking back now I realise it was the thin end of the wedge.

The only argument I remember between my parents took place on holiday, though. It was quite serious. Dad had used Mum’s really expensive shampoo and she was horrified.

‘It’s a waste on your head,’ she retorted. ‘You’re bloody bald!’

It seems it was all right for Mohammed Ali to take the piss out of my father’s lack of hair, but not my mother. He opened the caravan door and flung Mum’s shampoo out so far that it cleared the enormous conifers adjacent to our caravan.

Mum cried out, ‘Alan! Alan! Go and find my shampoo!’

Like a sniffer dog I was released onto the campsite in my pyjamas and slippers, searching for this bloody shampoo. I eventually found it outside the camp shop. It was lying in the car
park next to two pensioners staring up at the sky, hoping that God would deliver them some expensive hair products too.