Easily Distracted

by Steve Coogan

  I was more au fait with them than most, but even for me they were part of a future that I couldn’t quite imagine. In the late seventies, Dad took us round the IBM headquarters in Sale in south Manchester when there was an open day. You needed a plastic credit card to get from one area to another and the doors slid back electronically. It was as exciting as being in a sci-fi film.

  We were shown a printer that could produce pictures of famous people in binary numbers. Most people were printing pictures of Mickey Mouse, but my older brother Martin chose ‘Eve’. An image of a topless woman in binary numbers slowly appeared. I thought she looked quite sexy. Mum moved us on with a polite smile.

  Mum didn’t pursue a career, because she was raising six children and running the house. She wanted to give us a better life. She effectively had a full-time job looking after us and, later, the children she and Dad fostered. She was suspicious of feminism; it made her feel slighted, as though being a housewife and bringing up a house full of kids wasn’t a proper job. But she always managed the family budget.

  That was the deal: Dad earned the money, she managed it.

  We weren’t on the breadline, but every last penny had to be accounted for. Everything was stretched a long way. As far as my parents are concerned, there are only two types of food: enough and not enough. When you come from a background where things are in short supply, as my parents did, you appreciate things just by virtue of their quantity.

  When my parents were growing up, Britain was still recovering from the war, most people were living hand to mouth and everything was at a premium.

  By the time they started to have kids, they made sure that we had enough food and second helpings were encouraged. Mum would always give us more, even if we’d had enough, because in her mind her greatest achievement was having more food than we wanted.

  By dint of economic necessity we mostly ate fresh food, which was cheaper in the sixties and seventies than processed. Mum cooked food bought fresh from the Co-op, the butcher’s and the greengrocer’s, and most of our meals consisted of meat and two veg. It was a real treat to have Smash, Bird’s Instant Whip or Angel Delight; I used to covet the Findus Crispy Pancakes enjoyed by my more well-off friends.

  The ‘save, make do and mend’ mentality of the ration years was never completely abandoned. My sister, Clare, remembers that Mum used to cut up Dad’s old work shirts and discard the worn bits, to make school shirts for us boys. My brother jokes that we always had fresh bread in the house, but we never ate it; we were always finishing off the slightly stale loaf first, by which time the fresh one was turning.

  What makes me feel wealthy as an adult is not having a nice house or car. It’s stopping at a service station and being able to pay through the nose for overcooked, tasteless food. As kids we used service stations just for the toilet facilities and the car park, where we’d eat frankfurters cooked on a Calor gas stove as part of a makeshift picnic laid out on a tea towel in the boot of our Morris Oxford Estate.

  I might read the latest copy of the Beano on those journeys and it would make me salivate. If my memory serves me correctly, there were two outcomes to most stories involving Roger the Dodger and Dennis the Menace. A negative one in which a series of people had been offended and the final frame of the cartoon strip showed a long line of aggrieved people waiting to give Roger/Dennis a beating. And a positive one in which one of the protagonists had inadvertently – normally through sheer luck – won someone’s approval and was rewarded with a five-pound note. This would be brandished in the air by Roger/Dennis and accompanied with the triumphant words, ‘And now for a feast.’

  The final frame was always a long party table laid out with jelly, trifle and sandwiches, as if the best thing a child could hope for in those days was an abundance of food. Now of course it seems strangely quaint, but as you read the comic you’d look on enviously as you chewed slowly on your halfpenny Fruit Salad sweet or quarter pound of cherry bonbons.

  *

  Culinary treats were so rare in our house that my dad even considered Easter eggs a rip-off. He thought you were overcharged for all that cardboard and fancy foil, and it wasn’t as though you even got that much chocolate. Instead we were given a big bar of Dairy Milk and I was left to dream of breaking into egg-shaped chocolate. To an engineer, it was never about the aesthetic but always about the measurement.

  Sometimes money was tight. Once Dad came home with cream cakes for us all and Mum was furious.

  Mum, horrified: ‘What’s this?’

  Dad, sheepish: ‘I’ve bought us all some cream cakes.’

  Mum, frowning: ‘We haven’t got the money for that kind of thing.’

  Dad, not quite knowing what to do with the box of cakes: ‘I thought it would be a nice treat …’

  Mum, contemptuous: ‘I can’t believe you’re throwing money around like that when I’m counting every last penny.’

  Some periods were financially tougher than others. We would manage to eat out as a family twice a year, mostly at a steak house called Smithills near Bolton. It was a huge outing, with all eight of us crammed into the car, and memorable because it was exceptional.

  Most of the time Mum was very careful with money, and Dad would quickly acquiesce on all things financial. She wrapped plastic bands around money-off coupons from Tesco. I was sent off to Asda for some things and Tesco or Macro for other things. Tea was cheaper at Tesco, coffee cheaper at Asda, and so on.

  Mum’s friend owned a butcher’s shop and had access to a warehouse, so she would often shop there because buying in bulk was cheaper. There might, at any given time, be a dozen boxes of cornflakes in our attic. Not Kellogg’s: buying brand names was an ostentatious, reckless use of money.

  Then, in the middle of all this, when I was thirteen or fourteen, Mum won £1,000 on the St Clare’s lottery. We were all given £50 each or a new bike, Mum’s friends were given sherry and a joint of meat to feed their own big families, then we all went out for a meal with the whole family, including grandparents. In among her altruism she even found £100 to buy my dad a stainless-steel Seiko watch, which I thought was the apotheosis of urbane sophistication.

  It is strange to think that money, and the luxuries it afforded me, became synonymous with memories of my childhood in later years. I bought a Morris Minor Traveller because of the incredible rush of nostalgia that hits me as soon as I sit inside the car. The smell of vinyl seats, petrol and, more subtly, oil. A slight trace of damp that takes me right back to summer holidays in Uncle Johnny’s farmhouse in a sleepy Irish village. I can smell wet turf and even burning peat. It’s the most powerful smell in the world for me.

  Nothing else is so transporting, so evocative. As I sit in the car I experience an overwhelming feeling of warmth, security and extended family. The details of the holidays there flood back. I used a penknife to sharpen sticks and make bows and arrows. I remember walls covered in dark, dank patches. And the absence of hot water. A jug of water was heated up slowly on the fire and we would stand naked in a tub as Mum washed us down with a sponge. The adults would lean over the sink and just do ‘pits and face’, which I believe is known as a ‘Glasgow bath’.

  There was no cooker in the house; food was cooked in a big iron pot hanging over an open fire. We would have boiled bacon, cabbage and potatoes enriched with a big knob of butter, served alongside tea with milk straight from the cow. When we were small, we could stand in the fireplace and stare at the flames, warming our damp bodies as best we could.

  There was a large kitchen table lit by a single naked bulb. Other local families still had oil lamps, so this was progress, of a sort.

  The local pub, just down the road from Uncle Johnny’s house, was also a grocer’s, petrol station and undertaker’s. The publican would give you beer, food and petrol, and eventually he’d bury you. The grown-ups would go off to the pub and come back with Coke and crisps as a treat.

  We’d stay up with our books till all hours, reading The Secret Seven and The Famous Fi
ve in a large old bed that we had to share. The mattress had no springs and sank in the middle; by the morning, we were all in a heap in the dip.

  The working dogs on the farm weren’t friendly. They snapped at us because we were relative strangers. I didn’t mind; I liked the fact that it was a working farm. I’d get up at 6 a.m., while everyone else was still in bed, pull on my wellingtons and go out with Uncle Johnny on the tractor to dig turf.

  I would stand on the footplate – I was still quite small for an eight-or nine-year-old – hanging on to the side of the tractor and watching the big back wheel move swiftly through the thick, wet mud. It was dangerous, but I didn’t care. I was clinging on, just inches from the wheel, trying to make it look as though I was just hovering there. Of course no one was watching, but I felt very manly.

  It was another life, a different world. The antithesis to my safe, suburban life in Middleton.

  It’s a world that has disappeared: old, rural Ireland. It was still James Joyce’s Ireland. I realised sometime later that I was seeing a way of life that was trailing behind our own English one. As recently as the 1960s, women bringing condoms from Northern Ireland into Ireland by train were arrested. It’s the kind of reactionary behaviour that makes me furious with the Church.

  I wasn’t aware of such dogma as a child. Nor did I think it odd that when I first started going to Ireland at the age of around five or six, Uncle Johnny’s only form of transportation was a donkey and a cart. It took him a good couple of hours to get from his farm into town, which was ten miles away.

  I didn’t see it as a peasant way of life. Even at a young age, it seemed romantic to me. The world is much bigger when you’re younger, and my life in Middleton seemed incredibly far away. It felt even bigger in the seventies because travelling generally took so much longer. It felt like a real journey. We spent two days getting to my uncle’s house from Middleton because the ‘motorways’ were really just single-track roads. It took a further eight hours to get across Ireland; now you can do it in under three. We had to break up the journey by staying in Dublin after crossing the Irish Sea.

  A few of my friends still went to Butlins, but package holidays were the new thing and Spain in particular was a very fashionable destination. Friends started coming back from the summer holidays with tans. I, in turn, would return to school looking paler than when I left.

  *

  We didn’t go abroad until I was sixteen, in 1981. My sister, Clare, was working at the L’Arche community in France, and I went to visit her with my parents. L’Arche was set up by Jean Vanier, an aristocratic French Canadian who, in the early sixties, invited two adults with learning difficulties to move into his house in France. At the time it was an incredibly radical thing to do because people with learning difficulties were pretty much institutionalised without question. Vanier was making the point that these people, regardless of their disability, should live among us rather than be ostracised.

  When Vanier set up L’Arche in 1964, he was offered psychiatric treatment by those close to him because they couldn’t believe he had no interest in pursuing a highly remunerative, glittering career. He wanted to devote his life to this not-for-profit organisation in which people with and without disabilities live and work in the same community. There are now L’Arche communities all over the world.

  Clare held Vanier up as a hugely inspirational figure. It was essentially Catholic, but non-denominational. L’Arche encouraged people from all over the world to go and work there for short periods. She worked at the original L’Arche for a couple of years and some of the adults with learning difficulties later came to visit our house.

  My brother Kevin now runs a branch of L’Arche in Manchester with his wife. He’s a much better example of a human being than me: he used to go into school early to do sport, he worked hard, he got good results. He has always been the most intrepid of the six Coogan kids, and went off to Gaza to work with Palestinians with learning disabilities and eventually did the same thing in Calcutta.

  He nearly died after catching hepatitis. When I met him and his future wife at the airport, he was emaciated and in a wheelchair. He made a full recovery, but it still upsets me when I think of my little brother like that.

  Generally speaking, my family have a philanthropic attitude to the world. I feel guilty sometimes that I have never rolled my sleeves up, but I content myself that while they are doing all the good stuff, I am earning money doing what I like and I help them out when I can. A great example of the public and private sector coming together for the common good.

  When we were young, however, I wasn’t envious of my friends’ holidays: I loved the adventure of Ireland. The clang clang as the car drove slowly on to the ferry. Even now, when I occasionally drive on to a ferry going over to Ireland, I still feel a childish fizz of excitement. The other smell that evokes happy childhood memories for me – rather counter-intuitively in this case – is the combination of sea, salt, beer, fags, puke and urine on a ferry. It reminds me of the one we used to get from Liverpool to Dublin, with the promise of two or three weeks’ holiday to come. There might no longer be the stench of fags, but the smell is still pretty foul and it triggers a really strong Proustian response.

  We were allowed one fib as kids. It was free to travel on the ferry over to Ireland if you were under seven, so us younger ones had to be prepared to lie. I used to sit in the back of the car feeling slightly sick, because lying was normally forbidden. But it was also exciting to lie, especially with permission.

  Once we were on the ferry to Dublin, I used to sit there relishing the fact that I had the holiday stretching ahead of me. Heading back to Liverpool at the end of those weeks, I’d be overwhelmed with sadness. It’s odd how bereft I felt given that all we did was run around with the sticks we had sharpened or go to a rain-soaked beach.

  Dad would often join us in Ireland later because he was off on some training course to keep himself updated with new technology. Sometimes, when it was raining, I’d fold down the seats in his Volvo estate, pretend it was an exclusive two-seater sports car and go on an imaginary adventure. I’d be sitting in a respectable car in front of a cottage in the middle of Ryan’s Daughter countryside, pretending to be James Bond.

  I might ask Kevin to come and sit in the passenger seat and, without warning, leap out of the car with my toy gun and shoot an imaginary villain. My fantasies were like very bad films: I’d always be escaping from or chasing baddies.

  I remember being in the kids’ pool at the swimming baths and instead of swimming or splashing around with my brothers, I would imagine I was wading through a car park after an apocalyptic flood. I’d shout at my brothers in an American accent, ‘Follow me! This way!’ – as if I was the only one who could save them.

  Once, in 1971, a Scottish IBM colleague of my dad’s lent us his caravan for a holiday on the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond. When we arrived at his house in Glasgow, he kindly offered to tow it to the campsite. There, hooked to the towbar of his Triumph Herald, was the smallest caravan in the world. And there were eight of us.

  Fortunately, there was a half-tent that could be attached to the side of the caravan and it was here that the three oldest, Clare, Martin and David, slept. They woke up crying because the ground was soaking wet, and had to move into the caravan with the rest of us. There wasn’t an inch of space to be found without a slumbering body.

  One afternoon, I sat in a canoe, unable to swim, the black water lapping at my sides, convinced the lake was bottomless. If I fell in I might well die. I needed my imagination to distract me. While my family trudged around the edges of the lake, my brother Brendan in a child carrier on Dad’s back, I escaped to my fantasy world. I ran up and down the hills, thinking, ‘I’m driving a Jeep!’

  I had nothing at all to play with, not even a fake steering wheel, but I didn’t care. It was enough to amuse me.

  CHAPTER 17

  IN THE SUMMER of 1970, when my mum’s younger brother Bernard got married, my thr
ee cousins came over from Ireland for the wedding. They were all attractive teenage girls.

  I was not yet five, but I sat there slack-jawed. ‘Wow! One, two, three, all in a row.’

  A few summers later, when I was seven, I was in Ireland and my female cousins were now in their late teens and early twenties. They were all beautiful. They were goddesses. I watched as Marion, who was nineteen, got dressed for a night on the town. She put on these huge flared trousers, which she explained were culottes. I sat there, mesmerised. She was so glamorous that she was almost an alien creature.

  I wrote a card, drew a heart on it and gave it to one of the sisters. My brothers found it and mocked me till I cried with humiliation.

  We wanted to go to Ireland every summer. Not only because of the girl cousins growing impossibly beautiful, but also because it was a change from Middleton.

  Mum used to say, ‘Please God, we can afford to go to Ireland. But, if we can’t, we’ll stay in England and have lots of days out.’

  I would hold her to her promise and she would honour it. I recently looked on Google Earth at all the places she used to take us. They look so small now, but they seemed huge then. Rivington Pike. Queen’s Park in Heywood, a cheap day out in a local municipal park. Hollingworth Lake, a reservoir on the other side of Rochdale where I learned to swim.

  We went to the reservoir with a picnic, often with Mum’s best friend, Mrs Knibb, who lived down the road and had six kids and the same Morris Minor Traveller as us. Mrs Knibb didn’t have a phone, so I was forever carrying messages between her and my mum. Like Leo Colston in The Go-Between, but without the scandal.

  Mike Knibb, who was the same age as Brendan, was very interested in electronics. He would often come round to our house and sit with Dad at the kitchen table, chatting and fiddling with electronic equipment. Dad was part of the Meccano generation who had grown up learning to take things apart and put them back together again; that was just what boys did.