by Derren Brown
I, left alone for a moment in the lounge while the water was begrudgingly secured, had an impulsive flashback to myself at eight years old, a not dissimilar character to Jeff (we were both rather precocious, creative and cheeky), and for the first time, conversely, saw myself, at a distance, as an adult. There I was, eight years old and suddenly at the doorway, having guiltily tiptoed downstairs, knowing I might be in for trouble but excited to eavesdrop and ultimately trespass on the arcane alliance of adults: a private downstairs world, audible only through the grown-up peals of muffled laughter that would permeate the floorboards and mattress which separated us. I stood there, in Jeff’s place, seeing these adults sat across from each other, drinking Daddy’s drinks in the special glasses, feet up, talking in that manner that adults never do when children are there to be aware of and included. I saw my adult self sat over there, all grown-up and foreign, in the way I knew I had seen Uncle Stuart and my father talking one night after curiosity had snuck me back in, the request for water ready at my lips for when I was caught. At that moment, as a wave of Sartrean nausea found me, I took in the whole of my friend’s room through Jeff’s eyes: the upturned boxes with books stacked on them, the ethnic CD-tower in the naive folk-shape of a giraffe that years later, amplified in size, would dimly play in his mind as he recollected the house where he grew up (Did we have a big statue like a giraffe?). I saw these as future memories, and among them, myself: the murky recollection of a late-night Friend of Dad’s, all whisky and jumpers and feet up on footstools, laughing and relaxing in that unfamiliar way.
This adult world was not there to be seen, save for those times when, having changed into my pyjamas, I was allowed to come back down and say goodnight (a time when the mood of the room would already have changed to something unknown; when I would be surplus to requirements rather than the centre of attention), or when at the house of a family friend I would be brought down later, in my sleeping bag and over my father’s shoulder, my cheek and jaw bouncing against his shoulder-bone as we descended the stairs. I would clutch the mouth of the sleeping bag a little around me to stay warm (the bottom was always folded up and held in place to stop it from dragging, which allowed me to skim and wriggle my toes against the trough of the silky lining); we would go down into the hallway, past cooing, whispering aunts and rosy grown-ups, through the adult milieu, I pretending to be asleep but burying my head deeper into shirt collar and jumper to hide my face; then out into the sudden brace of cold night air, briskly up the garden path and into the car. My mother would open the doors as my father approached to place me inside. If I had successfully maintained the pretence of sleep, I would not be expected to assist this process and could enjoy being passively bundled in and gently placed on the back seat – a delicate, snoozing son-parcel.
My parents would drive home, and with my face submerged into the crook of the back seat, I would, as I dozed, listen to them talking about someone’s new girlfriend or criticising the food from that night, their voices taking on the strange other-world quality that parents’ voices adopt in the front seats of cars when you are young and have your eyes closed in the back. I was so aware at that age of this peculiar change in vocal tone that I would enjoy opening my eyes periodically to look up and see the streetlights strobing past the window or the night view swing round as we turned corners, just to close them once more and hear the sound of my parents’ conversation change again from that of Mummy and Daddy, who were present and within touching distance, to the strange, detached voices that might have come from a radio, separate from me, indeterminately far away, not quite those of real, nearby people.
This enjoyment has remained with me as an adult: the ease of falling asleep while others talk in the room around me; the soporific nature of background chatter once tiredness closes my eyes; the shift in how those voices are heard and how differently attention is paid once one has cut oneself off and publicly abandoned any chance of contributing. No longer do the sounds impinge; a wall has been built, and in the back of the car I would relish the cosiness of my more immediate sensory world: breathing into the trough of the back seat and feeling the moist warmth on my face as condensed child-breath trickled down the pocked leather; the drool around the corner of my mouth which dampened the sleeping bag still pulled high around my chin; the stretching out of legs to press my feet against the arm-rest of the far door in order to quietly open the ashtray set into it, hooking my big toe under the lip of its pull-open lid and finding the leverage to facilitate the manoeuvre while pushing gently down on it with my other toes to avoid the noisy pop when it sprang out.
The love of the bouncing, trundling car gave rise to the game of anticipating when we were about to pull into our driveway, and therefore when the deliciously snug ride would be over. I would aim to recognise the ascent of York Road, a steep hill close to my parents’ house, by the pushing and groaning of the car and my rolling deeper into the seat, and the sharp right as we flattened out at the top. I would then feel for the inevitable deceleration, the unmistakable sweep round to turn into the drive, and the bump-scrape-bump as the pavement gave way to the steep decline and confirmed, lamentably, that we had arrived home.
All this flooded rapidly through my mind as the brief, rising gurgle of my friend filling a tumbler with water came through from the kitchen. As father reprimanded son in the hallway over a crime that I hoped also touched the former with recognition and love, I made some calculations in my head regarding the age of my mother and father and found myself arriving incredulously at the conclusion that I could remember my parents at the age I myself was. I realised that my earliest memories of my mother (two quite alien aspects long since abandoned: long brown hair and a cigarette) were of her around thirty. Thirty! Startled, I considered myself, at that moment the same age – an eternal student in Bristol, full of nonsense, preposterous in many ways – and thought what a travesty it would have been for someone as naive as me to be accountable for a child. Suddenly, my parents were just young people doing their best with a kid, rather like these friends of mine in Bath who had children, one of whom was now being forced to explain to his own child why he could not just sit quietly with us and not say anything.
My parents shrank like those primary-school desks, bedroom cabinets and magic hats. I reconsidered all the frustrations and complaints I’d had as a child and saw this man and woman as I could imagine myself, coping as well as they could with an infant, learning as they went, abandoning their old lives of trips to Brighton in a series of sports cars of which my father still talks so proudly, and taking on the vast responsibility of bringing up a child. And me! How naively had I fought with my father and sided with my mother; how ludicrously could I still nurture the mundane, inevitable grumbles of progeny towards them, decades later, as if this young couple – then the same age as me – had done anything other than their brave and extraordinary best.
This reverie was ended by my friend’s return to the room, and we continued our conversation as I swung between absorption in the topics at hand and the imaginary observing of our chatter from the perspective of an unnoticed eight-year-old standing in the doorway.
I imagine there was a point, around nine or ten years old, when I indignantly expected to be allowed to attend these dinner parties of my parents; it was particularly confusing to be told I could not, when the guests were all people who seemed to like me. Either my parents held their ground, or their parties became fewer and further between than I remember, but I have no memory of ever being ushered into these hallowed gatherings. Other than Christmas with my grandparents, or family gatherings on Boxing Day, I cannot remember sitting with adults around our dining-room table. However, I know for sure that these events occurred when I was younger, due firstly to this faint memory of exclusion, and secondly to the seemingly constant presence of empty After Eight mints boxes in the house.
A sickly whiff of mint fondant mixed with dark chocolate clings stickily to many of my early memories at home. These kitsch slivers of co
nfectionery, with their trademark prescription of the precise hour at which consumption becomes lawful, were the insignia of seventies middle-class suburban life, to be followed in the eighties by Viennetta and Ice Magic (a bland, faux-chocolate topping of unholy fashioning that would harden unnaturally once it came into contact with ice-cream), and, in my mind, inextricably associated with the purchasing and reading of the Daily Mail, which I imagined at the time to be one of the posher papers in circulation. I remember a moment at school when I was set straight by a mocking classmate on that account, and complained bitterly to my parents upon coming home that we were using a sub-standard means of keeping up with topical events. My parents, rightly, were annoyed at my precocious indignation, and refused to change papers. To this day it makes me uneasy that this illiberal publication is still their primary source of enlightenment regarding world events.*
The ubiquitous post-prandial square, launched in the early sixties, pioneered the concept of the After Dinner Mint. Before 1962, it seems we were happy with a mug of tea, a healthy constitutional or spanking the kids to round off a meal; today when dining out, due to this one-time piece of forward thinking by Rowntree, we are privately rather pleased when our coffee arrives with a concomitant conflation of mint and formed chocolate. These petits fours seem to accompany coffee as naturally as a cigarette does for so many. The After Eight boxes, either brought by guests as gifts or more likely bought by my mother in anticipation of an imminent dinner party, would be taken the morning after the gathering and placed in the sitting room, next to the record player. I was allowed to help myself to whatever remained.
Each square was slipped into a crisp black paper sleeve, glued along three sides, reminiscent in miniature of the singles covers of that era. The front of each bore a suggestion of a rococo golden clock set to seven minutes past eight, and on the back a crescent of paper was removed along the top edge to aid with the removal of the confectionery, rather like the convenient half-moon of access offered on the back of my Bicycle card box. My mother, knowing the value of presentation, would serve about half of the chocolates, still sheathed, spread in a loose fan upon a floral-bordered tea plate. This meant that any little envelopes left in the box would normally, upon removal, cede a chocolate as expected. There were rarely any empties, but a glance along the row from above would normally settle whether any had been left (perhaps my mother had stolen a chocolate herself by removing it from its packet but leaving the latter empty in the box): a neat, evenly spaced series of paper edges, every other one a mint-thin-width apart, promised a full yield from whatever packets remained. I would then upset this regularity (both that of the paper-edge-spacing and of the packet-to-mint-thin ratio) by removing the thins but leaving their paper covers inside.* When only a few had been removed in this way, it was easy enough to tell where the empty wrappers were, but after a crucial tipping point had been reached, the box became a mess of black papers. The visual check was confusing and redundant, and it was very hard to tell when all the chocolates had been eaten. Thus, I was occasionally able to have the pleasure of finding a final chocolate or two when all hope had been abandoned. This belonged to the fond category we might label ‘childhood moments of delighted surprise’, most typified by the realisation, closely following a morning’s resentfully early awakening, that the day in question is a Saturday and that there is no need to get up for school.
The mints were, and still are, delicious, and home experiments showed the gustatory advantages of refrigerating them first; of eating five at a time in a pile; and on occasion, when a mint had been left too long under the lamp and melted messily into its housing, of peeling apart the paper wrapper to scrape, with the teeth, chocolatey fondant from the inside.
However, it was the box that provided the unexpected pleasure and the relevance to our story. Inside the original black-and-green box of my childhood there was a secret flap. (The modern, green Nestlé container has been changed, as all things must be, and now we have a softer, more ergonomic clock design on the front and the flap has sadly been replaced by a secured piece of card that does not hinge.) It sat between the front facet of the box and the black corrugated paper that is still used to hold the mints,* and allowed the lid to close neatly and tuck inside without disturbing the chocolates. This long flap was the width and height of the box, and thus inadvertently created a secret compartment inside the otherwise innocent chocolate container.
This used to fascinate me. Possibly it reminded me at some level of the secret flaps inside my magic hat. As I remember, it could be lowered to rest flat against the bottom of the box, or brought up to sit behind the front side, which meant, as I think about it now, that something flat, placed inside the box, could be vanished or switched by the lowering or lifting of the flap. I was too young to perceive this precise potential for a magical method, but was also unable to understand why the flap was there at all, so I would sit and be gripped by the potential for jiggery-pokery without knowing quite what could be jigged or poked. Occasionally a confused trick of sorts would emerge, where method was all and discernible effect was absent: a piece of paper, for example, was shown to be placed into the flap, which was then openly lowered before closing the box; upon opening the box, the piece of paper could be seen in the expected place. Shazam. My first, entirely unmagical, trick.
Part Three: Cigarette Chopper
This befuddled half-sense of infant conjuring may never have developed had it not been for Hamleys. Not the sprawling giant of a toy-shop on Regent Street, but rather a lesser-known, modest sub-branch of the same in Croydon. I can remember nothing of this particular shop, save that it had a small counter upstairs that stocked magic tricks, most of them plastic-moulded and ready to perform. Neither can I recall at what age I would have visited the shop, but I imagine I was somewhere in my early teens. My memory even of the magic department is faint: I make shady images of a glass counter and of some dark packaging; I remember that the tricks seemed expensive, and I recall saving up to buy the plastic Cigarette Chopper.
On second thoughts, I may not actually have saved up. Around this time I was a budding thief, and while I doubt I would have been able to swipe the trick from Hamleys, I imagine I would have at least acquired most of the coins necessary from the change my father kept in his jeans, which normally lay discarded on the ottoman in my parents’ bedroom. I would sometimes creep slowly into that room, which was directly above the sitting room where they were watching television, keeping near the wall, aware that the floor was ready to creak loudly, stopping if it did so and lifting my foot so gradually that the board beneath could silently regain its position, eventually reaching the flung-away trousers in question (usually the jeans but sometimes the grey Farahs), whereupon I would tip the contents from the pocket into my hand. If the bounty was plenty, I would pilfer a couple of pound coins, and perhaps a fifty-pence piece too.
I have heard a few times in my life that shoplifting begins with stealing sweets, and escalates from there. This was certainly true in my case. At some young age I would reach into a shop’s open display of Blackjacks or Fruit Salads and remove a handful, then change my mind and seemingly drop them back in, while retaining a couple in what I would now think of as a loose Finger Palm or Thumb Clip. I might then pick up something larger like a Mars Bar with my other hand, place the guilty one with the palmed penny sweets into my pocket to remove some change, leave the purloined confectionery within as I emerged with a few coins, and then, following a pantomime realisation that I did not have enough money, return the chocolate to the display and walk out. Or if I had the cash, I would fairly buy Pineapple Cubes, Aniseed Twirls or Aniseed Balls (which would turn dogs insane, I was once told), but boost my boiled booty with a few illegally acquired soft chews.
The late eighties introduced to the retail shelves a range of gadgets and stylish gizmos without which a teenager such as myself simply could not do. At the age of seventeen I worked on Saturdays in a suit-hire outlet, fitting out gangs of Croydon men with frock-
suits, morning coats, cummerbunds and cravats. During lunchtime breaks I would browse the neighbouring shops and frequently help myself to whichever of these new contrivances was accessible and appealing. I would pick up a small object behind a larger one, then sneak the former away into a coat sleeve or inside pocket while remaining apparently fascinated by the latter. I saw my first compact disc while working in the suit-shop: a classical compendium, brought in by an elderly customer, who had asked the manager to pack it in with his suit. I was intrigued, and soon after began to assemble a malfeasant collection of such discs myself, filched from the nearby That’s Entertainment! music and video shop on the way to the bus-stop. These were very early days of CDs, and this particular shop did not display the casings separately from the discs, so, being also the era before doorway alarms and security tags, I could help myself to whatever I fancied. A box set of classical composers, and several individual discs were dropped into bags or smuggled out under an overcoat.
I was never caught, though I did once set off the alarms in Harrods by walking out of the music department with a Luther Vandross cassette tape in my pocket. (My co-workers at the suit-shop were soul-lovin’ black or mixed-race men whose opinions of what constituted good music entirely moulded my own musical tastes at that age. Before taking this job, I had no interest in music of any sort, but by eighteen, stolen cassettes or CDs of Alexander O’Neal, Luther, Cameo and others joined substandard introductions to Schubert and cheap versions of Beethoven on my bedroom shelf.) I was shopping in the Knightsbridge emporium with P— from school, who was unaware of the fact that I had slipped the cassette into my pocket while we were chatting. I was convinced that my days as a petty shoplifter were about to end in humiliation and criminal action when I realised that the sudden piercing whining that screamed through the air had been caused by my ill-judged exit past the sensors. At that point I noticed peripherally two store detectives heading over to us, so acted out to P— (but really for the detectives’ benefit) a display of embarrassed confusion over how a tape I had meant to buy had ended up so closely upon my person. They believed or at least accepted the charade, and I was not apprehended, but this event hastened my decision to end the long spree.
