Where Did It All Go Right? (14 page)

8.
As a registered adult junkie for ice-cold drinks, I find it quaint that such a thing was noteworthy then. But it was.

9.
Marbles was the sport of kings between 1975 and 1977. I think perhaps the likes of John Lewis, Andy Virgin and Dave Watson, who joined Abington Vale Middle School from somewhere due north like Boothville or Parklands, imported the craze. But the playground at Abington Vale was tailor-made, with a modern drainage system that meant concrete channels all around the perimeter with a furrow the perfect width for marble-rolling. A tiered marble hierarchy held sway: ‘gobbies’ or ‘gobs’ were large-size marbles, which had to be struck twice by the regular kind in order to be claimed; ‘habitats’ or ‘habbies’ were opaque – also worth two of your standard glassy marble (though if you had a mutant transparent one without its regulation wisp of colour, it was a ‘clear’ and worth a ‘habby’ or a ‘gobby’). Ball bearings, or ‘ball bears’, extremely rare, were another matter altogether. Some bright spark, probably Lewis, discovered that there were miniature ball bearings in the end of a certain type of ink cartridge and attempted to play with those, but it was risky as they actually went irretrievably down the drain. Such innocent larks. Honestly, breaktime was like a Victorian etching of boys at play.

10.
I told you we were poor. Poor but resourceful.

11.
A modest black plastic tube containing a yellow inflatable dinghy. I am pleased to report that this item, along with most of our Action Man uniforms, boots, guns and equipment, lives on – in a box at my parents’ house, where it continues to grant hours of pleasure to my nephews Ben and Jack.

12.
See Chapter 13
.

13.
I’m not very happy about this. You can’t give a baby booze! (We must assume it was no more than a nip.)

14.
And there was us with our Special Missions Pod.

five

Spook and Fancy

The British Elvis.

(A 12-year-old David Bowie answers the question

‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’)

WHEN I WAS
in Mrs Munro’s class, aged 7–8, she asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. We were instructed to draw a picture of it in our jotters. No problem. I had already decided what I wanted to be and it was this: a ‘cartoonist’. (I guardedly apply those inverted commas only because I think my idea of what a cartoonist actually
did
for a living was a little – shall we say – two-dimensional.)

I remember the picture I drew that day, so clearly I could reproduce it for you now – if I had a jotter.

In it, the grown-up Andrew is sitting at a table with a big pencil in his fist and a wad of paper before him and he is just
drawing cartoons. Really fast
. Pictures of identifiable figures like Top Cat and members of the Hair Bear Bunch are flying off the table and falling around me like autumn leaves.

A somewhat idealised vision of the cartoonist’s lot I grant you: just draw cartoons until it’s time to clock off and go home – but draw them
really fast
. Understandably for a 7–8-year-old, I had no concept of who I was drawing the cartoons
for
, or why these people would want me to just draw Hair Bear on a sheet of paper and give it to them (after I’d picked it up off the floor of course); but this was a mere formality, like benefits and share options. As far as my young mind was concerned, cartoonists produced cartoons like
bakers
baked bread and fishermen fished for fish. I drew cartoons like this at home and I would like to turn that into a career please.

Perhaps I knew that somewhere down the long and industrialised animation process there
were
people who simply churned out preliminary sketches with pencils in their hands, and maybe pieces of paper did fly off their desks. In any case, I wanted to be one of them when I grew up. Have felt tips – will earn a handsome living.

And so it eventually came to pass. Some twelve years after the jotter vision, having graduated from Chelsea School of Art in 1987 with a 2:1 in Graphic Design (Mum and Dad have the certificate up), I spent at least a calendar year living solely off my artistic wits, drawing cartoons for money. That’s all I did. It was hairy at times but not once in that first trading year did I go overdrawn at the bank on the day of the month my mortgage payment went out (the 21st – it’s etched on my mind). I drew cartoons not of the Hair Bear Bunch, but of reindeers for corporate Christmas cards (including one for Virgin Atlantic), and cartoon cyclists for a Variety Club bike ride poster, and a cartoon sheepdog to help schoolchildren learn to love the benevolent works of ICI (I had uncomplicated morals in 1988), and cartoon owls and wizards and bears to go on the cover of
Puzzled
puzzle books, the kind you buy at stations. And sometimes, yes, I drew roughs with a pencil and the paper flew off my table.

I know, career Nostradamus.

Do other kids of 7–8 know precisely what they’re going to be when they grow up? Or do they just pick a random job, draw a picture of it and hope for the best? A lot of kids inevitably want to do what their dad does (or these days of course their stepdad). It’s a logical if unimaginative place to start and that’s why doctors beget doctors, actors form acting dynasties and circus people never seem to advertise for trainee clowns and acrobats. But my dad did something indistinct in an office! What inspiration was that to a boy who regularly blew up the guns at Navarone?

Dad was, in layman’s terms, an ‘insurance man’, which meant so little to me as a child that I actually pretended he was a policeman once. It was in Mrs Cox’s class so I must have been about 6 or 7: we had been asked to write down what job our dads did in our
exercise
books and draw a picture of it. Well how would
you
draw a man explaining the benefits of taking out full cover with personal liability? Paul Cockle’s dad was a pig farmer: easy. Kim Gupta’s dad was a doctor: finished! My dad was an insurance man. I couldn’t even spell ‘insurance’.

So it was that I denied my own father and drew him as a copper. There were mitigating circumstances – it was nearly home time and you had to queue up at Mrs Cox’s desk for spellings and the queue was looking long and there was no way I was going to miss
Pixie & Dixie
on telly. So with little or no regard for the dishonesty and bald opportunism of my actions I wrote these words:

‘My dad is a policeman.’

And drew a picture of him doing it. Easy. Finished!

My friends were really impressed. Probably thought he was a detective or something as he always wore plain clothes when he drove us to school.

It’s no surprise that I didn’t want to be an insurance man. It appears I didn’t even want my dad to be one. And to his eternal credit, he never
once
suggested it as a desirable career path either. He never put his arm around me, looked out of the window and said, ‘Son, people will always want insurance …’

It was, however, a proud moment for him when he took me to the AA Portakabin on the way to the M1 and signed me up for membership in 1985, sagely advising me to pay the extra for Home Start (which of course I needed more than any other service when I was at Chelsea Art School in Mum’s knackered old Metro). He didn’t but should’ve said, ‘You’re a man now, son. Fully covered. Nothing more I can teach you.’

Dad recently retired, but he was an insurance man for the whole of his working life. Started out as an office boy and ended up a company director. It may seem dull and officey – box files and bulldog clips – but as I grew older and wiser I realised it’s actually quite an existential job, insurance. It’s an entire industry founded on imponderables and unthinkables; they actually sell you death, pestilence, infirmity, accident and ‘acts of God’ (as they are still called with a straight face). People
will
always want insurance.

Insurance men are very much like policemen in fact: much
maligned
until you
need
one. Never mind Woody Allen’s facetious line from
Love and Death
(which raised my hackles on Dad’s behalf when I first heard it): ‘There are worse things than death. If you’ve ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman, then you’ll know what I’m talking about.’

Yeah, and when your Central Park East apartment goes on fire, who you gonna call, Woody? There’s nothing wrong with insurance salesmen, or spending an evening with one, and anyway my dad wasn’t a salesman, he was a ‘man’.

That said, office life held no allure for me, aged 7–8. I wanted to draw Spook and Fancy off
Top Cat
and I wanted to be paid through the nose for it. Why? Because I could. I had … a talent for it. I WAS TALENTED.

Talent. I’m uncomfortable with the word, and don’t give me Mozart or McCartney. I prefer aptitude, faculty, capacity, bent … the more prosaic definitions for ‘being good at something’. Talent suggests gift, and gift suggests God given and I don’t believe in God or his acts so how can I countenance him giving things out?

I could draw though. In fact I could draw like a boy possessed. From an early age if you put a pen in my hand I could make a recognisable shape with it on paper. I quickly graduated to copying – in itself quite a skill, but little more – and pretty soon there wasn’t a character in
TV Comic
or
Yogi and His Toy
that I couldn’t reproduce by hand: Mighty Moth, Deputy Dawg, Texan Ted (‘Big hat, big head’), not just Spook and Fancy but every member of Top Cat and his gang.

Then I moved up to reproducing the casts of
Wacky Races, The Hair Bear Bunch, Josie and the Pussycats
, the family out of the Giles annuals (which Uncle Pete kept for me) and anyone and everyone from my regular comics:
Beano, Buster, Knockout, Whizzer and Chips, Shiver and Shake, Beezer, Whoopee!, Monster Fun, Cracker, Krazy
and its memorable spin-off
Cheeky Weekly
. Devouring these – and the inimitable style therein of artists like Leo Baxendale, Robert Nixon, Tom Patterson and Frank McDiarmid, whose signatures I would soon be seeking out like favourite brands – I was able to create my own hybrid characters, and eventually my own comic strips and entire comics. My comics were called things like
Bingo!, Ace!
and
Smashw’n
’Gloop
.
¹
I sold one of my earliest self-made comics in Class 3 to Jonathan Bailey for 2p and Richard Goodhall told me I could be arrested because I didn’t have a licence and I believed him. I’m sure I could’ve squared it with my dad, the policeman.

Drawing was my middle name. All I ever got for birthday presents were felt-tips and pads and crayons and colouring books and paints and Pop-a-Point pencils. In my early days I drew a lot of clowns because I was scared of them, and later I drew characters from old black and white horror movies because I was scared of them too – as in, too scared to watch the films when they came on TV but not too scared to fill my room with Aurora glow-in-the-dark models of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Phantom of the Opera. (There I go again, controlling my fear by getting it down.)

Relatives would
ooh
and
aah
at my drawings. ‘Isn’t he good at drawing?’ they would coo. ‘I’m going to be a cartoonist when I grow up,’ I would say, and they probably thought to themselves, ‘Dream on.’ So I did.

I only ever sent one letter to
Jim’ll Fix It
. It was in 1976. I asked Jim – or Jim’ll as we called him – to fix it for me to meet my hero, the aforementioned
Daily Express
cartoonist Giles, so I could show him how good
I
was at cartoons. I even drew some Giles characters on my letter and used coloured pens on the envelope as if no Jim wannabe had ever thought of that before. It was all for naught; I never got a sniff. But then neither did Simon and he’d asked Jim’ll to fix it for him to visit the Action Man factory, which ought to
have
been right up the programme’s street with their appetite for subliminal advertising. (It might have been just the piece of cross-promotion to save Palitoy from the storm cloud of post-Vietnam pacifism, but alas, no.)

Anyway, you get the picture. I was a child prodigy and it was Jim’ll’s loss if he couldn’t see it from my letter. I took Mum and Dad’s arts patronage for granted of course, as kids are wont to do. My parents never tried to stop me drawing. They never discouraged me from thinking of it as a career option – even when school started
talking about
career options, the point at which less empowering parents might have developed cold feet.

One parents’ evening at middle school they brought up the subject of my artistic bent and I don’t know exactly what was said, but the upshot was, I was allowed to go into Mrs Andrews’s art class at lunchtimes to do ‘extra art’. A bit like overtime really. (Angus came with me – he was shit at art, but we were buddies and it felt like a privilege to be indoors when you had to go outdoors.)

In 1977, when I was twelve, Mum and Dad entered me for special Saturday morning art classes at Nene College, the local ‘tech’ which is these days a university because they’ve got a photocopier
and
a kettle. Sixty kids took the entrance exam, including Angus, which involved drawing ‘a load of old junk’ (hey! art school!), and doing some painting. I passed. Angus, who was very much along for the ride, did not. Thus, alone, I entered a brave new world of advanced art, taught in echoey old rooms by people who chain-smoked and weren’t Mrs Andrews. We did tone and shade and colour exercises and everything.
²

Why didn’t I just put the beret on and be done with it?

I did appreciate the fact that my parents allowed me to explore my inner self through cartoons and colour exercises, but not fully until years later. As I’ve said, you see, they thought I had talent; a
gift
handed down to me from God with a big ribbon around it like a packet of Pop-a-Point pencils. And yet – geneticists will be ahead of me here – my dad could also draw a bit. Maybe I got it from him, along with the thick, dark, Italianate hair, inner calm and the overenthusiastic eyebrows.