A few years ago I was walking through Covent Garden in London, and some youths recognized me and yelled, ‘Oi oi, Little Britain! Fucking queer!’ Even though I was clearly on a date with a woman, they still shouted it. So I am fully aware of how effeminate I am. Of course I play up to it on TV to elicit laughs, pretending to have a crush on Simon Cowell on Britain’s Got Talent and calling him ‘my Simon’. It’s naturally within me, and always will be. And of course my Simon is pretty hot.
So at eleven years old I was effeminate enough to be given the role of the Queen in a school play without even having to audition. There was also the fact that no one else wanted to do it. Queen Henrietta Maria was a non-speaking role. All I had to do was sit and fan myself while my ladies-in-waiting sang me a song. My mum found me a very nice wedding dress that looked suitably queenly, and I found a curly black acrylic wig in a jumble sale for 25p. When I put on my costume at the dress rehearsal I noticed I was the only boy who wore a wig and had the best dress by far. I sat there with my nose in the air, fanning myself in rehearsals. It never occurred to me that it might be funny.
Finally the night of the performance came. My dad, mum and sister were all in the audience. There were titters when I first trolled on. Then I sat down and started fanning myself in the most regal way I could imagine, and the titters turned into guffaws. I’m sorry to say I completely upstaged Trimbee’s beautiful falsetto and the pretend lute playing from Lambourne.
Stepping off the stage that night, I was a hundred times happier than I could ever say. I had generated laughter. Loud, explosive, wonderful laughter. It was as beautiful as moondust. Just by fluttering my fan or sticking my nose up higher I had created this sound that would be my drug until this day. I sat beaming in the back seat of the Maxi on the way home. ‘I was telling people, my son’s the Queen,’ said my delighted mum.
After letting my parents down so terribly with the detention drama, I had made my mum proud. What’s more I knew what I wanted to do with my life.
I wanted to make people laugh.
And more importantly I wanted to wear a dress.
Twice a year at school there was no rugby or cricket during games; instead there was a compulsory cross-country run. Three miles around Reigate park. For the first 100 yards everyone would sprint wildly, then the pack would spread out and I would find myself at the back with the other fat boy, Halliday. We would then walk the remainder of the course chatting. Despite the mud, and the rain, and the cold, and the stinging nettles, and the bracken, it was actually quite an enjoyable way to spend an afternoon. However, when we came in sight of the changing block we would see the hundred or so other boys, who had all by this time showered and changed, waiting for us. It was a tradition that the stragglers were jeered as they crossed the finish line, so we would speed up, our fat little thighs chafing together as we ran. Neither of us wanted to be last. I always prided myself on not being quite as fat as Halliday, or Fattygay as he was inevitably called by the other boys. And Halliday prided himself on not being as effeminate as me. Coming last was the ultimate shame, so both fatties would throw ourselves over the finish line as the other boys laughed in that cruel mocking way that boys do.
Even if I wasn’t the fattest boy in the year, I was still overweight. I would raid the flapjack tin when I got home from school. I was sixteen stone by the time I was sixteen. Comfort eating or pure greed? Most likely a mixture of both. Pieces of cake or biscuits or chocolate could instantly sweeten the sourness of my life. If you have been called gay all day in the playgroud, a cake when you returned home from school offered some consolation. A fairy cake of course.
However, home wasn’t the sanctuary it might have been. As I grew up, feelings of alienation from my family immersed me. When my parents punished me, I would fall silent. I wouldn’t speak. More punishment would follow – no television, no pudding – and the hours of silence would become days. Finally my mum would plead with me. Seeing how upset she was, I would always break my vow of silence.
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ I would say, meaning it.
‘Right, let’s try and have a bit of a better attitude in future.’
‘Yes, Mum,’ I said, never really sure what she meant by this.
‘Now go and apologize to your father,’ she would order.
So I would creep into the living room, where he would be drinking tea and watching the news.
‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ I would say. In my head I was saying, I’m not sorry.
Every time this happened, and it happened often, my defiance grew.
Like at most schools, it was survival of the fittest at Reigate Grammar. A boy in the year above me had an upturned nose so was greeted by his fellow pupils with a burst of the song ‘Pigs in Space!’ (from The Muppet Show). One day he just wasn’t at school; he had left, presumably unable to take it any more. Another boy, Broach, had a twisted mouth from birth and couldn’t pronounce his ‘r’s properly, so he became ‘Bwoach’. I was friends with Broach: I was always drawn to outsiders. They tend to be the most interesting characters. Broach and I even looked at pictures of naked ladies in Fiesta magazine together. One day he too was gone, and never came back, most probably hoping that in another school no one would make fun of his speech impediment. Lendon was unusually hairy for his age, and was accompanied by a chant: ‘Chewbacca! Chewbacca! Chewbacca Lendon!’
The teachers had nicknames too. As well as Booga Benson, there was Monkey-man Stather, a lovely slightly deaf teacher called Mr Gardener, who was known completely unfairly as Sterile John, Ratty Burnett and Mr Worthen, who was known simply as Bastard.
Ratty taught French and unsurprisingly vaguely resembled a rat. He was a very sensitive soul. Once he overheard me ask the boy in the booth next to me in the language laboratory, ‘How much longer have we got of this crap?’
‘Crap? CRAP?’ he said, stammering with emotion. ‘Williams, get out!’ I left the classroom for the vague embarrassment of standing in the corridor. Through the door I could hear him weeping. ‘Crap? I work so hard on these lessons …’
The other boys had to console him; one even offered him his hanky. Normally we would have welcomed seeing a teacher have a nervous breakdown, but Mr Burnett was a sweet man. Unfortunately Mr Burnett’s complete and utter humiliation was only a term away. At Christmas the whole school gathered in the local church for a special service. The vicar took the sermon and thought that instead of starting with the Bible, he would tell us a story that ended up relating to it. It’s a common trick: one time I even witnessed a vicar segue from Laurel and Hardy to the Crucifixion.
‘When I was a boy I asked for a mouse for Christmas, but my parents bought me a rat …’
Eight hundred boys tittered.
The vicar didn’t think his story was that funny, but he continued: ‘And so I named him Ratty.’
There were huge waves of laughter now. This was the best Christmas service ever.
Of course the vicar had no idea about Mr Burnett’s nickname or his appearance, and, emboldened by the response, went on: ‘That’s right. Ratty the rat!’
Collective hilarity was now rocking the church. ‘Ratty! Ratty! Ratty! Ratty!’ Boys were now craning for a glimpse of poor Mr Burnett, who had his head in his hands.
‘So Ratty the rat became —’
The headmaster approached the lectern and whispered in the vicar’s ear. Abruptly the confused clergyman announced the next hymn. We boys never knew how he would have got from Ratty the rat to the baby Jesus.
Writing was increasingly something I enjoyed. All that time spent on my own in my bedroom had given me an active imagination. A few of us boys decided to do an alternative school magazine. The official one, The Pilgrim (named after our school hymn), came out once a year, and was a dry list of rugby results and the like. Ours was going to be ‘by the kids for the kids’ and we called it Wall Scrawl (forgive us, we had just turned fourteen). There were video reviews (some of X-rated films that we hadn’t seen) and humorous drawings of teache
rs. I wrote this review of a day out I had had with my friend Bowling at Alton Towers:
STUNG AT ALTON TOWERS
I was there for six hours and managed to go on only four rides. The queueing time ranged from one to two hours and the rides last one to two minutes, working out at about £1 each.
Adding to the discomfort of the day, I was stung by a wasp which crawled down my shirt, and when I enquired if there was a First Aid post at hand I was annoyed to hear the nearest one was two miles away!
I was so pleased with the pun on ‘stung’.
Other pieces I wrote display the beginnings of an anti-authoritarian streak. I wrote a piece TEN FACTS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT MR NICHOLSON. Mr Nicholson was a handsome PE teacher with a resemblance to cricketer Ian Botham, and was never seen out of his shell suit.
He is studying nuclear physics with the Open University.
He is really 4'11" tall but his trainers add 2" to his height.
He once met Jimmy Savile’s brother-in-law at a tennis club in Wandsworth.
His real name is Ian Botham.
He hates poseurs.
His moustache is 100% cashmere.
His secret ambition is to be a Franciscan monk.
He writes poetry for the Financial Times.
He doesn’t like wearing designer sportswear.
He is the only person in the world, apart from Barry Norman, who bought the Film ’86 signature tune.
It wasn’t P. G. Wodehouse, but it wasn’t a bad start.
We sold copies of Wall Scrawl at break and lunch, and felt like we were living a plotline from Grange Hill. However, with declining sales (the boys realized it was not worth 25p after all and they would rather buy a Lion Bar from the tuck shop) we all lost interest, and Wall Scrawl closed after only three issues.
You were cool at Reigate Grammar School if you excelled at sport. Rugby and cricket were the two sports that we were poured into whether we liked it or not. However, the school did have an open-air swimming pool, and despite being overweight, I was selected to be in the school team. Martin Russell was head of PE. He was one of the nice teachers, if not the nicest, and the coach of the swimming team. A small group of us would travel to other reasonably posh schools and swim races with them. I never ever won one – someone was always faster than me – but I loved being in the water, and Mr Russell could see that and allowed me to swim in the pool unsupervised at lunchtimes. My parents also enrolled me in a swimming club, Sutton & Cheam, and I practised for an hour in Cheam Baths every Wednesday night. The highlight was stopping at the Happy Fish chip shop on the way home. At the club I never won a race either.
However, my body, so heavy and ungainly on land, loved being in the water. The feeling of solitude underwater, and being alone with my thoughts, if only for as long as I could hold my breath, was something I also treasured. As races were all 50, 100, 200 or 400 metres, I could never beat the sporty kids. However, put me in over a distance of 22 or even 140 miles, and maybe I could win. Perhaps if Mr Russell had never let me practise on my own in the school pool at lunchtimes, I would never have one day swum the Channel or the Thames.
In the early 1980s we lived under the reign of Thatcher. Growing up in Surrey, we were expected to be right wing. There was only one black boy in the entire school, and one day our form teacher played a brilliant trick on us. We were about to have a new headmaster, and a black man was seen being shown around the school. One particularly prejudiced pupil demanded to know who the man was.
‘It’s the new headmaster,’ he told us. We were outraged. Chaos and confusion reigned.
‘He’s black, sir. He can’t be the headmaster,’ piped up one little boy.
‘Why not?’ asked the teacher.
And of course we couldn’t find an answer. For the first time we had been confronted with our own unthinking racism. Some teachers really are magnificent.
There were girls only in the sixth form and you had to fancy them. Our collective crush was on Sarah Prescott-Smith – or SPS as we had to call her as we mentioned her name so much, just like little girls now have to call One Direction 1D. If you talk about one subject so much you have to abbreviate it. SPS was the prettiest girl in the school, perhaps even in the entire Borough of Reigate and Redhill.
‘I just saw SPS in the canteen,’ one of us would say.
‘She smiled at me!’ said another.
‘No she didn’t,’ piped up another eleven-year-old. ‘She loves only me!’
We even wrote ‘I Love SPS’ on our books. There were plenty of other girls in the sixth form, but Sarah Prescott-Smith was by far the prettiest, and besides we didn’t know the names of any of the others.
In the years that followed, boys would come into school on a Monday morning full of tales of exploits with girls they had met at parties at the weekend. I wasn’t cool enough to be invited to those parties. I imagined if I ever did, I would tell a girl that I was dying of a terminal disease so she might take pity on me and show me at least one of her breasts. One Monday morning Sharman came into registration with a big smile on his face and waved his middle finger under all our noses, boasting that he had put it inside some girl. It certainly smelt like he had. Sharman and others would tell stories that had me enthralled …
‘Within minutes all the rugby team had a girl and were rolling around the floor with them.’
Images of Caligulan excess played in glorious Technicolor in my mind. The truth was probably less exciting. I wondered when I would be allowed entry to this kingdom of sex. As a teenager I was both prurient and prudish. I was so full of self-loathing that in my mind it was unthinkable that any girl would ever want me. I hated everything about myself.
The way I looked.
How I spoke.
Even how I thought.
It was a symptom of my (yet to be identified) depression.
In my head I believed myself to be completely and utterly unworthy of love. The homosexual encounters I had experienced at Sea Scouts filled me with a gigantic sense of wrongness.
Guilt.
Shame.
Self-loathing.
My life had only just begun but I felt that I had already ruined it.
My parents were generous enough to send me on a school skiing trip to Courcheval in France. One night there was a disco in the youth hostel we were staying in for all the youngsters, and the fifty or so boys from Reigate Grammar School all went. I had recently been given a Walkman by my Auntie Janet for my birthday, and had one tape to play on it, Paul Young’s No Parlez. As I had never been to a disco before I took my Walkman.
‘There’ll be music at the disco, Williams,’ pronounced one of the boys sharing my dormitory.
‘I know,’ I said, although I wasn’t sure. ‘But I might want to dance to my own music.’
‘Prick.’
He was right. But I thought having headphones on made me look cool. So after tiring of No Parlez, I attempted to dance to the records that the DJ was playing, Phil Collins’s ‘Sussudio’, Jan Hammer’s ‘Miami Vice Theme’ and a-ha’s ‘Take on Me’. I was wearing moon boots, and my Walkman repeatedly slipped off my belt and fell on the dance floor. Two French teenagers spent the entire five hours we were at the disco snogging. I was utterly spellbound. It was the most erotic thing I had ever seen in my life. Just like staring at the sun, you want to look but also know you have to keep looking away or you will go blind. You glimpse. I glimpsed for most of the five hours. I had never seen kissing like that, and it would be another seven years until I would experience it for myself.
If Bogs’s advice about how to evade a detention didn’t turn out to be useful in the long term, the nickname he gave me was.
‘I do like your digital watch’ was the first thing I said to him. He laughed at my voice because he thought I sounded posh and called me Cuthbert. Cuthbert Cringeworthy was the name of the teacher’s pet in ‘The Bash Street Kids’ in The Beano. The name stuck and I would use it as the name of my first comedy character (who was utter
ly unfunny), Cuthbert Hogsbottom III. I was only twelve so I hope you can forgive me.
In addition to the twice-yearly plays, once a term each class had to host an assembly. It could be anything really – a short reading from a book, a talk about coin collecting – and was normally boring. It was a drudge to organize, and everyone in my class hated doing it. Not me. I had big plans. I wanted to use the assemblies to stage my own comedy sketches. So I started writing spoofs of TV programmes for me to star in, with other boys from my class in supporting roles. It was reassuring finding something I could enjoy after the ritual humiliations of the cross-country runs.
The first of these spoofs was based on Game for a Laugh, a long-running TV prank series of the time. I dragged up and also blacked up to play Rusty Lee, who was then one of the presenters. Years later I would do both of these again to play Bubbles’ nemesis Desiree in the third series of Little Britain. The spoof culminated in me putting a custard pie in the PE teacher Mr Nicholson’s face, which made me the most popular boy in the school. Until break time. When everyone went back to calling me gay.
Then I moved on to Secrets Out, a short-lived Mike Smith-presented TV game show for children. I recorded the theme music by putting a tape recorder next to the television. As this was played to the 200 boys in the second and third years, I entered as Cuthbert Hogsbottom III. In my dad’s old flares and adorned with a little blonde toupee I had found in another jumble sale for 15p (there must have been a lot of wig wearers in the Banstead area at the time), I entered waving to everyone, pretending to be some big TV star. The music stopped and I ran towards the stage, not quite making it in time, and falling back onto the floor as I did so, my jumble-sale toupee ending up on the floor. It wasn’t sophisticated humour, but it got laughs from thirteen-year-old boys and some of the PE teachers.
Camp David Page 4
