Back Story

by David Mitchell

  Unlike the school play. I was cast in Much Ado about Nothing. Leo played Benedick, the romantic lead. I wasn’t so fortunate and was cast in the tiny role of Verges, Dogberry’s sidekick. Not even Dogberry. Still, my friend Harry was even worse off than me, playing Third Watchman. At least my character has a name, I thought.

  Creatively there wasn’t much about this production to get my teeth into. I decided to play Verges as very, very old. Humorously old, was the idea. It also occurred to me that, if I was to be noticed by the audience, I would have to make something special out of the few bits I had to do. This, with great solemnity and energy, is what I did. I dread to think how over-the-top, scene-stealing and yet unwatchable I was. I imagine that I drew the eye like a pile-up.

  At one point in rehearsal, Harry did an impression of my exaggeratedly doddering gait and the weird intense expression, with jaw thrust forward, that I’d decided to assemble on my face. Thankfully Harry wasn’t a very popular boy, so this moment of mockery wasn’t picked up on by the group. The fact that I remember it, however, suggests it touched a nerve and that he was making a fair point. So the evidence points to my performance being awful. No one, apart from my parents who were, as always, effusive in their praise, commented at all, either positively or negatively.

  The sad truth is that you can’t triumph with a part like Verges. People tell you that you can – that a small, perfectly formed jewel of a performance will draw the eye and mean you land the lead next time. But that’s only possible if you get at least one moment when you’re supposed to be the centre of attention: one scene, one speech, one pratfall. When you’re just there to say a handful of lines and populate the stage, you won’t be noticed unless you do something incongruous to get attention – and that very incongruity will, almost invariably, be a bad acting choice.

  This is what is so sad for extras (or ‘supporting artists’ as they’re now known) on TV. Most of them want to be actors and for that to happen they think, quite reasonably, that they need to get noticed. But in 99 per cent of situations where extras are used, they’re not supposed to be noticeable – not individually anyway. They’re there to fill the back of the screen, to make it look like there are people at this party/pub/shop/public execution. But if any one of them does something to make you look at them, he or she has already made a mistake. As an extra, if you do your job well, no one will notice.

  The main reason I wanted to be noticed and praised for my performance as Verges was that I had fallen in love. That’s probably a rather grandiose term for a schoolboy crush, but I use it because that’s exactly how I felt about it at the time. It was unlike anything else I’d previously experienced. This was very exciting. The object of my affections was the girl playing Beatrice, the female lead. (She was from one of the two private girls’ schools in Abingdon – they were allowed to come and be in plays with us, which meant that the dancing girl roles such as the one I’d so memorably filled, aged ten, at Mr Fezziwig’s party were no longer open to me.)

  As soon as I spotted her, I was obsessed. I couldn’t stop looking at her, watching her move and listening to her speak. I desperately wanted to get near her and spend time with her. Obviously I knew about sex at this stage, though I was far too innocent to have any organised thoughts in that direction – but I had lots of disorganised ones.

  I quite wrongly thought that these powerful new feelings were a good thing. I was going to be happy forever with a wonderful new girlfriend who I’d probably have sex with quite soon and then marry at some point and just generally everything would now be fine. It never really occurred to me that she wouldn’t fall in love with me. Such was the strength of my sudden feelings that I assumed she would have reciprocal ones about me. I wasn’t hoping for that – I just took it for granted that it would be the case. That’s how I thought the universe was constituted.

  One of the advantages of that assumption was it meant I didn’t have to make any sort of move, or so I thought. This girl, I should explain, was in the year above me and had a reputation for being a bit of a goer. Who knows what that meant she actually got up to – maybe nothing, maybe she was an embodiment of the Kama Sutra – but she certainly usually had a boyfriend. So it was for her, I reasoned, to broach the subject of our colossal mutual attraction and thus officially inaugurate Happily Ever After.

  Consequently, I barely spoke to her. I smiled, I was pleasant but I in no way even courted her company. In fact, I had no idea what she was like, only what she looked like which, from memory, was absolutely fucking terrific. As the weeks of rehearsal wore on, I very gradually became concerned that her attitude, of not really knowing who I was, might not just be a front. I had absolutely no idea what to do about this. I decided that if I went a bit quiet, she might ask me what was wrong. You won’t be surprised to hear that this approach was not blessed with success.

  The school play, it seems to me now, had a different status with boys than it did with girls. The girls who had roles in the boys’ school play were the cool ones – the alpha girls. The boys involved in the play were not their male equivalents. We were much nerdier, much less cool. Some boys in the play had a slightly musical, aesthetey or gothy sort of aura about them and were a bit cool. Leo, for example, played several musical instruments and had an absent-minded aloofness that brought him a measure of cachet. But not like being the captain of the rugby team. That was the sort of boy with whom this sort of girl expected to go out.

  I’m amused by how that problem didn’t occur to me at the time – by how sure I was that this very pretty cool girl, who might even have actually had sex, was going to fall into the arms of a spindly, bespectacled, shy nerd with a sideline in massive over-acting. I wasn’t seeing the bigger picture. Or maybe, to be fair, I was seeing the even bigger picture that we might actually have had a lot in common and found each other fun and got on well and then … who knows? She may have been out of my league at the time, but a few years later she would have been exactly the sort of woman I was much more realistically aspiring to get off with. And failing.

  After that play, I was left with the terrible dark realisation that love, what really felt like genuine love, albeit for someone with whom I’d barely exchanged a dozen sentences, is not guaranteed to be requited. My only consolation was that at least I hadn’t humiliated myself by making my feelings known. And of course I was wrong about that too. For all that it felt impossible at the time, I really wish I’d said something to her. However ridiculous and sad it would have made me feel, I would have learned much earlier that amorous feelings can be addressed and talked about without shame and with only a finite amount of embarrassment. And you never know! I think it extremely unlikely, almost unthinkable, that that girl would have fancied me at all. But my behaviour was such that, even if she had, nothing would have happened. Don’t ask, don’t get.

  - 16 -

  Where Did You Get That Hat?

  The central London parks are the closest thing you get to a civic idyll. They’re splendidly laid out, well maintained and still being used to realise the Victorian vision of good, wholesome, egalitarian recreation (although it’s difficult to read that sentence without imagining a girl in a white lace frock being eagerly beaten by Gladstone).

  Regent’s Park, across which I’m following a broad path through an avenue of trees, is not a deft modern conversion – like a failed pub that’s been turned into flats or a trendy restaurant/bar. It’s not a former coal barge that’s now an adorable second home in Maida Vale, or an old Unitarian chapel that’s now a party venue or a community centre. This has not been creatively reimagined. It’s something that’s as fit now for the purpose for which it was designed as it ever was – and needed just as much.

  There are even a couple of friendly-looking police officers wandering through it to complete the image that all is well with the world. If I were a policeman on the beat, I’d make doubly sure – in fact, I’d triple check – that no crimes were being perpetrated in the Royal Parks before I moved on to
urine-smelling back alleys and started searching skips for clues. But actually, I now realise they’re not both policemen; one of them is a Community Support Officer.

  Robert Webb and I once wrote a slightly unkind series of sketches about a policeman and a Community Support Officer. The two of them are walking along together apparently happily – as you often see, much like this pair in the park – but the policeman is whispering bullying remarks throughout. Here’s a sample:

  POLICEMAN: Is that the theme tune to The Bill you’re humming?

  CSO: Er … yeah. Cos this is a bit like –

  POLICEMAN: How dare you! The old opening credits to The Bill featured the feet of two police officers. Two sets of police officer shoes. Not one set of police shoes and some flippers. Or one set of police shoes and some espadrilles, or wellies or the rear legs of a cat. It was a policeman and a policewoman. And you’re not even a policewoman.

  CSO: I think that’s a bit sexist.

  POLICEMAN: At least it’s institutional sexism. If you said it, it would just be sexism – you haven’t got an institution, or not one that anyone cares about. Did you see Britain’s most senior Community Support Officer on the news last night?

  CSO: No?

  POLICEMAN: Neither did I.

  I have no idea whether this is an accurate depiction of how policemen view CSOs. Actually, I have some idea. A year or so ago, I was standing in the street outside a party (it was a party to which I’d been invited, I hasten to add, and I was with a group of guests smoking outside; some people are surprised to hear that I cadge and smoke the odd cigarette when drunk; of those people a minority are disappointed; people like that need to invest their hopes with more care) when a couple of policemen came up and told me how much they’d enjoyed the sketch and said it was fair comment – so it obviously rang true for them. But I’m sure lots of police have a huge amount of respect for their CSO colleagues. Well, it’s possible.

  The reason I have a problem believing that it’s a harmonious relationship of mutual respect is that I think that both jobs attract the same sort of people. People who are usually well-meaning and want to do good but also want to be in charge of things – they want the overt trapping of authority. In short, both policemen and CSOs are people who want to be policemen. And yet the CSOs aren’t. Why?

  I’m convinced that almost all CSOs would prefer to be proper policemen – I expect there are about two weird contrarians who wouldn’t, like that heterosexual couple who campaigned to be allowed to have a civil partnership instead of a marriage in order to prove a point. But I think basically CSOs want to be in the proper police and aren’t allowed. If I have a certain amount of involuntary disdain for someone who tries to be a policeman and fails, how much more will be felt by an actual policeman? And I’m afraid to say, while I’m sure there are many noble and brilliant officers, one can’t read the newspapers and conclude that police recruitment procedures have excluded all incompetence and dishonesty from their ranks. And the CSOs still couldn’t get in?

  But I know what it’s like to grasp at a tiny and despised amount of authority in order to try and feel better about yourself because, in the Sixth Form at Abingdon, I strove desperately to become a prefect. Looking back, I wish I hadn’t.

  You know how some teenagers, often the arty creative ones, seem to have an attitude of immunity to the outside world – of poise and calm? I’m sure that’s not how they feel, or behave to their families, but it’s how they can come across. I have a sense that they’re often in bands – or maybe they paint or sculpt or something. They seem unselfconsciously artistic and above the usual teenage concerns of friendship and acceptance and dealing with authority.

  Well that wasn’t me. But neither was I conventionally successful, cool or popular. I had no idea that parties were a thing that happened to people my age. I’d been to parties when I was six which involved jelly and Pass the Parcel; I later went to parties as a student which involved £3 bottles of wine and Stella cans full of cigarette ends; and I go to parties now which involve canapés and commissioning editors – but in my teens I was almost completely off the party grid. I went to two, I think. Both were cast parties for plays, at which I awkwardly hung around sipping cider, bored out of my mind and baffled, absolutely baffled, that this could be an environment that anyone would enjoy. And vaguely wondering how long I had to wait before an attractive girl would throw herself at me.

  No, in my teens I fell squarely between the stools of conventional acceptance by my peers and arty indifference to such notions. I knew I couldn’t be a star of the former group but neither did I have a sufficient sense of self-worth to reject a value system that was rejecting me. I was into acting and debating and watching TV comedy – I could have styled myself as left-wing and creative and anti-establishmentarian. I wish I had. But I didn’t have it in me. I wanted to gain official acceptance – I wanted to be a prefect.

  The school authorities, particularly Beak, made a big deal out of the prefects. They were the favoured few. So it really is regrettable that I wasn’t sufficiently contrarian to think, ‘Look, this doesn’t matter. What an absurd way to judge people. Why take a tiny minority of a group of teenagers, put them in charge of supervising the lunch queue and then talk about them as if they’re the next generation of world leaders?’ Some boys did have that insight and, to them, I must have looked like a twat.

  I was made a prefect, by the way – which is marginally less tragic than having wanted it as much as I did and not been. So I was able to swagger around the school as if I was a winner. But I didn’t really feel like it. I didn’t have enough respect for the system that had given me this tiny amount of authority to fully enjoy it. I was probably put off by the institution’s own insecurities – its self-loathing, its wanting to be posher or less posh, the persistent middle-English aura of something mediocre bitterly trying to shake off its own mediocrity. I mean, mediocrity’s fine – if you accept it. Abingdon didn’t and yet seldom seemed to do anything sufficiently distinguished to leave it behind.

  As I approach the drinking fountain in the middle of the park – a small white spike like the top of a buried cathedral – I pass a man wearing a wide-brimmed black trilby. I immediately assume he’s an idiot, which I suppose is unfair. I like hats – I slightly regret that I don’t live in an era when all men still wear them. I’d enjoy wearing one, having different hats for different occasions, taking them off to go indoors, worrying about losing them, putting important slips of paper in the brim, maybe even sporting them at a rakish angle and tipping them to ladies in the park (if I’d completely changed personality). But that’s not the age we live in and I’m wary of those whose hat-wearing seems to be a denial of that. I can’t help thinking they’re exactly the sort of contrarian who would have refused to wear a hat when it was the convention to do so. They wear them now as a sign of disdain for consensus. ‘Why aren’t you wearing a hat, square?’ their hat-wearing proclaims. I’m suspicious of consensus and I wish I’d been a more contrarian teenager, but that doesn’t stop me looking at him with immense annoyance. Or perhaps that’s why I do.

  Also I have a hat exactly like that and it has not brought me happiness. I last wore it five or six years ago when Robert Thorogood, a friend of mine who’s a big fan of John le Carré, was being surprised on his birthday by a sort of espionage day. His wife Katie had organised various spy-themed encounters for him in central London. Friends would sidle up to him in various filmic locations and disguises and give him clues leading to other encounters and it all finished up with a jolly night in the pub. That’s love for you – she actually made him a spy for a day, which is probably the optimum length of time to be a spy, any longer leading to boredom, suicide or a desperate desire to shout ‘Hey, everyone, I’m a spy!’

  Another friend, Tom Hilton, who lives near me in Kilburn, was also involved and we were both supposed to rendezvous with Robert in the National Gallery, in front of a certain painting. We decided to get the Tube together, both wearin
g trilbies which I had provided to make us look, if not like spies, at least as if we’d made an effort to look like spies.

  It was about noon on a Saturday. As we walked up Kilburn High Road towards the station, the traffic was, as usual, terrible – almost stationary. We were feeling slightly self-conscious in our hats, particularly Tom who works in IT and isn’t used to dressing up. ‘Don’t worry,’ I told him. ‘Some people wear hats all the time. It may feel slightly eccentric but it’s basically a conventional, if somewhat outmoded, form of clothing.’ I’d be amazed if I uttered those exact words, but then again I am quite pompous. Anyway, that was my gist.

  All went well for 45 seconds until we walked past a builders’ van, stuck in the traffic, its side door open to reveal four or five men, covered in paint and plaster dust, drinking cans of lager and in general exuding the exhausted high spirits of people who have just knocked off work. They spotted us in our hats. They sensed our self-consciousness. There is piss to be taken here, they intuited.

  They thought we looked like cowboys. That’s what I inferred from their cries of ‘Yee-hah!’ I think they may have mimed shooting guns in the air. Even in the humiliation of the moment, I was irritated that they’d mistaken trilbies for cowboy hats. And we were also wearing long overcoats. Their instinct for mockery may have been bang on but they were pretty ignorant when it came to costume.

  Maybe it was this thought that prevented me from acknowledging them with a friendly, self-mocking smile or wave and defusing the moment. Or maybe I just thought we’d have walked past them in a couple of seconds so we might as well ignore them. Tom’s instinct, it appears, was the same as mine. We did get a short distance ahead of the van and out of mockery range, but then the traffic shunted slightly forwards and they drove past us by a few yards. This was a disaster, as it meant we’d have to walk through their raking broadside of disdain once again. And it was definitely too late for the good-humoured acknowledgement this time. All we could do was pull the brims of our hats down further over our eyes.