Easily Distracted

by Steve Coogan

  I think Dad hoped that one of his five sons might show an interest in his job, and he was slightly disappointed when we didn’t. Martin understands electronics to an extent, but he’s not very interested in it. So Mike Knibb became, for a while, the son Dad never had. And Mr Knibb had died, so Dad in turn filled a gap.

  When I was in my twenties, I put some shelves up in my London flat. They were straight and attached properly to the wall.

  Dad came to visit and said, ‘Who put those shelves up?’

  I said, ‘I did.’

  Dad was absolutely delighted. ‘Have you seen these shelves, Kath? Stephen put them up.’

  I’d been on television for a while at that point, and he was impressed with that, but the shelves overshadowed any comedy achievement. Dad thought there was some of his DNA in me somewhere.

  Anyway, on these summer-holiday days out, my younger brother Kevin would sit around reading or run off exploring with his best friend, Timmy Knibb. Kevin’s adventurous spirit was evident even then. He was very Lord of the Flies while I, nearly always sitting in my long trousers and shoes, drinking tea and listening to my mum and Mrs Knibb gossip, was salad days without the salad.

  I didn’t want to read or explore. Sometimes I might bring a friend and we’d go for a swim, but I liked sitting there on my own, listening to adult conversation.

  *

  As much as I liked to observe, I wasn’t a lazy kid. I learned from my dad how to make do. He once brought home discarded phones that he’d found in a skip outside a telephone exchange and wired them up so we could use them as home-made walkie talkies. In turn, I learned how to build my own bikes. I would save £3 or £4 for a new wheel, using my paper-round money and maybe some cash from Mum. While I was saving, I’d find an old, buckled wheel and straighten it with a spoke key and a hammer. It wouldn’t be perfect, but you could ride it. When I finally bought the new wheel, its symmetrical smoothness was a luxury.

  I grew reasonably adept at building and mending bikes, and my friends would bring theirs round for me to tinker with. We’d strip down a racer frame, prime it, paint it in hot-rod colours and finish it off with wide handlebars. The satisfaction when the bike was ready was palpable; you could tear off on this thing made out of a box of bits. It almost felt as though you were flying.

  In June 1977, in my last year at primary school, I was knocked off my bike, suffered severe concussion and lost my memory for about six months. I remember waking up in a bed and seeing a high ceiling above me. I looked around the room and realised it was a hospital ward. I brought up my hands, which were cut, and felt my face, which was covered in wounds and scabs.

  I lay there thinking, ‘What happened to me? Have I been knocked down by a car? That’s generally what happens to kids my age when they end up in hospital with cuts and bruises.’

  I had to crawl to the toilet because my body was so badly battered.

  When my mum came in with the doctors, I asked what had happened to me. No one knew. And I couldn’t remember.

  I asked Mum if I had passed the 11-plus.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember, we bought you a camera because you’d passed.’

  A camera? I had no idea.

  Some eyewitnesses came forward and said that I’d been riding my bike with my arms folded, which I could do very well. A lad had swung his bag out, doubtless thinking I looked too cocky, and caught the handlebars. I had flashbacks of tarmac rushing towards my head very quickly for a while afterwards.

  Martin went out looking for the boy, and Mum was worried he would kill him if he ever found him. It was often useful having a big brother. If I was picked on, he would pick on them.

  I stayed in Booth Hall Hospital – the same one I’d been in as a very young child with meningitis, now shut down – for a week. I was fascinated that children on the ward were able to watch Play School at 6 a.m. When I enquired how this was possible, I was told about something called a video recorder. At the time it cost an exorbitant £1,000, just under a quarter of my dad’s annual salary. In those days the NHS had money to spend on a video recorder …

  It was interesting to watch the comings and goings and I liked the attention. At least I forgot, temporarily, about the terrifying prospect of Cardinal Langley, the secondary school I was due to start at.

  My accident didn’t put me off cycling. We would still go to the woodland opposite the house and get lost on our bikes, or cycle to each other’s houses and listen to music.

  We didn’t have Choppers. They were for kids whose parents had Ford Cortinas and thought catalogues were aspirational. I remember looking in a catalogue and thinking, ‘My life will be complete if I can have these kung fu pyjamas.’ They were orange nylon with brown braiding, and a brown belt to tie around the waist. I stared at the catalogue for a long time. ‘Wow, the kid in the pyjamas looks so happy. If I had cool pyjamas like that, I know I wouldn’t want for anything else.’

  In the pre-Internet era, catalogues allowed a glimpse of a possible lifestyle and women in underwear. Some of the bras might be slightly see-through, so there was a good chance of seeing a nipple. The Grattan catalogue was particularly reliable for nipples and it was easy enough to turn to the camping pages if anyone walked in the room.

  *

  We talk about Detroit as this post-industrialist landscape now, but that’s what the north of England was like when I was growing up. Cotton had once been king and Manchester had been at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, boasting over 100 mills at its mid-1850s peak. By the time I was born, the cotton industry had long since vanished but the landscape was still littered with these ghostly cathedrals. Decades before they were redeveloped, those neglected mills – Times Mill, Warwick Mill – became our playground.

  Brendan, Ged and I used to climb up a drainpipe and sneak in through a broken window. The huge spaces inside were dusty and dark and littered with shattered glass. I doubt we even gave a second thought to what the buildings had once been. We didn’t think of them as huge red-brick monuments to industry any more than we thought about the danger of breaking in.

  We walked across steel cross-beams, our arms stretched out wide, our breath held, not daring to look at the 100-foot drop below. Sometimes our youthful fearlessness would recede and we had to shimmy across the beams on our bums. We were unbelievably stupid, in retrospect.

  It was the kind of adventurousness that led to public information films warning children of the perils of unsupervised outdoor activity. A message rendered obsolete now that most children are glued to their iPads. That’s progress.

  We knew that what we were doing could get us into trouble, so we never told our parents what we were up to and they never found out. On Saturdays and Sundays and during the holidays we were free to go out all day, with very few questions asked. We would stay out on our bikes till it was dark, riding for miles and miles.

  If I lost track of the time and came home very late – with no mobile to ring ahead – Mum would be worried out of her mind and Dad would be furious.

  ‘Why have you been out so late? It’s ten thirty, it’s dark and Mum has been worried sick.’

  Dad never drank, so his anger wasn’t fuelled by alcohol, but his temper was nonetheless frightening. Sometimes he would threaten to give me a ‘thick ear’ by clouting me with the flat of his big, leathery hand. When he did, my ear would ring for at least twenty minutes.

  But I was never quite sure of the consequences of staying out late because discipline wasn’t consistent. Sometimes I’d come home to find Dad working on the car and I could breathe a sigh of relief. If he was distracted then I probably wouldn’t get a thick ear.

  As I grew older, so my father became more moderate and less tyrannical. As we all grew older and developed our own personalities, the authoritarian side of his nature visibly receded. Martin and I were even able to mock his awful jokes openly, without fear, especially if our mother was laughing at him at the same time.

  *

  In my
family, discussions about feelings were seen as a bit of an indulgence, a kind of non-essential luxury. As far as they were concerned, getting through life meant putting food on the table and paying the bills. We shared affection with each other by gentle mockery and well-aimed retorts around the dining-room table.

  On occasion we have been forced to have a conversation about feelings. Such as the first time I was involved in a ‘scandal’ – I slept with someone in the wake of winning the Perrier Comedy Award in Edinburgh in 1992 and the tabloids thought it worthy of column inches – and I went home to explain myself.

  I have become inured to people discussing my private life over the years, but the first time it happens it’s a big shock. You feel naked and vulnerable.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ I said. ‘I’ve embarrassed the family.’

  He hugged me. There was a touching moment of awkwardness because Dad is from the handshake generation and has had to learn the modern act of hugging.

  ‘You don’t need to apologise.’ He looked at me. ‘None of us is perfect.’

  It showed his generosity of spirit.

  *

  If Dad was occasionally like a Victorian father, then Mum was the pragmatist. Mum wasn’t touchy-feely or indulgent, nor did she spoil us – I’m not sure it’s possible to spoil six kids – but she was fair. We could talk to her about things, but when we misbehaved all she had to say was ‘I’ll tell your dad’ and we’d beg her not to. We’d immediately get in line. Dad was a disciplinarian and none of us wanted to feel his wrath – though one of my earliest memories is of him grabbing hold of me, growling and tickling me with his whiskers.

  Mum has always been more progressive than Dad.

  After I’d left home, she met James Anderton at some local event. Anderton was the homophobic former chief constable of Greater Manchester who infamously said that everywhere he went he saw ‘evidence of people swirling in the cesspool of their own making’. He also claimed to have heard the voice of God.

  When he leaned across and asked Mum about her children, she mentioned me. He asked what I did.

  She handed him a photo she had in her bag of me dressed as Pauline Calf. ‘This is him.’

  He gave her a thousand-yard stare.

  Mum has a great sense of humour. She enjoyed doing this and relished telling everyone about it afterwards.

  She is, unexpectedly for a woman of her generation, passionate about football. I cherish that about her. She loved Roy Keane when he was at Manchester United and she got cross when people criticised him for being violent. She thought he was picked on for being himself; he might occasionally hit someone, but he was the real deal. She doesn’t like people who are flash and super-slick. Keane was a bit more earthy.

  She loved glamorous stars like Veronica Lake and Elizabeth Taylor and, in the years before television and before we were born, she often went to the cinema with her friends. Dad was less interested because there was nothing technical or factual involved.

  Mum and Dad were different in many ways, and yet there was tenderness in their relationship. When I was a child, Dad used to pick her up, give her a squeeze and spin her round the kitchen. They would bicker too, of course. I would hear them arguing when I was upstairs in my bedroom. And, very occasionally, there was a full-blown row.

  My dad was – and still is – a charmer. He still cuts quite a dashing figure. When he met Judi Dench, he genuflected and kissed her hand. His is an old-school charm that might be considered inappropriate in these more modern times, but he’s not lascivious. He’s courteous, definitely flirtatious and prone to flattery.

  He cut a very striking figure, especially when he was younger and his beard and hair were both midnight black. Kids at school used to say he looked like the devil, and he can’t have been offended because he went to a couple of fancy dress parties as Beelzebub.

  I remember once, on the way back from church, with a car full of kids in the back and my mum beside him in the front, Dad wound down the window of the Morris Minor Traveller, leaned out and wolf-whistled at the primary school teacher, who was walking in the opposite direction.

  He said, in a way that Alan Partridge would have approved of, ‘Where did you get those pins?’

  The teacher laughed and my mum vaguely admonished him by saying, ‘Tony, don’t!’

  In his head he was probably thinking he was the Laughing Cavalier and had momentarily forgotten that his car was crammed with his wife and six kids.

  Despite Dad’s occasionally provocative behaviour, he and my mother have mostly had a calm, loving relationship. They hardly ever had a drink and Dad never went to the pub. They had fewer parties as more children arrived, but often had friends round. There was lots of laughter. Life was about restrained enjoyment. Sex was essentially about making babies; we shouldn’t get too distracted by the fact that it’s enjoyable as well. And yet Dad was romantic. He was always buying my mum anniversary cards, chocolate and flowers. On more than one occasion I remember him buying what must have been the most prestigious cards that John Menzies (a now defunct newsagent and stationery outlet) had to offer – usually padded and covered in satin with a watercolour of a slender woman in floaty chiffon.

  CHAPTER 18

  MY PARENTS MOVED into the large family house in Middleton in December 1963, two weeks after John F. Kennedy was shot.

  They still live in the same house. The drinking tap I reach to get a glass of water now is the same tap I had to stand on a chair to reach some forty years ago. The spare bedroom I sleep in when I visit now is the one in which I was born.

  Barney the dog, who died on Good Friday in 1978, is still buried in the front garden. I wanted to help Dad bury him, but he insisted on doing it alone. I watched through the bedroom window as he wrapped Barney in canvas and placed him in a deep hole in the garden.

  The house is largely unchanged. It still feels like a sanctuary, a reassuring constant in a turbulent, shifting world.

  Middleton is an old town, a little isle of suburbia where people mowed their lawns and washed their cars on a Sunday when I was growing up. Kids rode their bikes round the streets from dawn till dusk, and everyone we knew lived half a mile away. Dad had a car and there was a phone in the house, both of which were still relatively unusual in the 1960s.

  In the early 1950s, people were always popping into my grandad’s house to make calls and eventually he put a bucket under the phone because it was an expensive business. My dad inherited the same generosity coupled with thriftiness; he used to say the phone was only for exchanging information, not for gossiping. He considered extended conversations a waste of money.

  Dad would chat to anyone who would even half listen to him. He can talk endlessly about airships, trams, canals, architecture and anything to do with science and engineering. We used to laugh at him when he said that electric cars were the future.

  Everyone said Mum and Dad were foolish to move from an ordinary detached house to a bigger – but not grand – house with a reasonable back garden and its own drive. But Dad was quite well paid and he often did overtime. He wasn’t interested in being promoted at work and moving to London because he thought it would unsettle the family. Putting the family first meant that he remained a basic engineer.

  The house cost £2,500 – just over £44,000 in today’s money, which seems ridiculously good value. It was built in 1902 and back then banks wouldn’t give mortgages on properties that were more than fifty years old; old houses would inevitably fall down, whereas new houses would last. The slums were cleared away. It was symptomatic of how excited everyone was about the post-war world in which everything was going to be bright, new and modern.

  *

  I was the first to be born in the house, on 14 October 1965. Mum had an early miscarriage before she had me. If she hadn’t miscarried, I might never have been born. I’m the fourth of six: Clare, Martin, David, me, Kevin and Brendan. I was the oldest of the ‘three little ones’. As I’ve said, Kevin was an adventurer who read books; I was
a chatterbox who watched telly. He was often barefoot; I didn’t like getting dirt on my trousers.

  Being one of six seemed normal to me. My friend Brendan Tierney was one of eight, and the Cliffs, another local family, had thirteen kids.

  Ours was a very male house. Clare was the oldest and most sensible sibling. She was head girl at her convent grammar school. She’s seven years older than me and has always been a kind of surrogate mother to me. She was the touchy-feely one. If I was in trouble with Mum or Dad and didn’t know why, I would go straight to Clare, often in tears.

  She would sit me down and say, ‘What’s wrong, Stephen? Mum and Dad might get annoyed, but they do love you. And I love you.’

  Clare was demonstrative, Mum and Dad less so. Clare has told me since that I was like a doll for her. I was definitely malleable and a bit soft.

  Mum and Dad were committed Catholics. My dad is a non-elitist Catholic who is now a minister of the Eucharist. My brother Kevin and I went to a local public speaking event when I was about seventeen and I told Dad that the chairman from the Catenians was going to ask him to join. The Catenian Association was founded in Manchester in 1908 and has around 10,000 lay members, most of whom are wealthy businessmen. Rightly or wrongly, it has a reputation for having an air of elitism.

  Dad chose to decline the invitation in a polite manner, choosing to avoid any derogatories.

  He would conspicuously avoid swearing: ‘balderdash’ replaced ‘bollocks’. Fiddlesticks = bullshit. Upstart = dick. Sling yer hook = fuck off. Bamboozled = fucked over.

  I only heard him say ‘shit’ twice as a child. Once when he was gingerly removing a ceramic tile that he hoped to maintain in one piece. He did so successfully, only to notice a hairline crack just before it broke into two in his hands.

  The second time was when he cracked the front indicator lens of his newly acquired Volvo. It would cost £17.50 to replace and he didn’t have that kind of money to throw around.

  A member of the parish, who lived locally and had a lot of children, was a member of Opus Dei. My mum and dad used to whisper about it. Being a member of an elitist, misogynistic, essentially right-wing Catholic institution didn’t sit well with us. It was sinister and weird. And, frankly, a bit nutty. Why would anyone choose to hold Latin-only Masses? We knew that kind of extremism could only give our more liberal Catholicism a bad name and we distanced ourselves from it.