Easily Distracted

by Steve Coogan

  I was separated from Brendan Tierney when I went to Cardinal Langley. Brendan was one of non-identical twins, and while his brother passed the 11-plus and went to grammar school, Brendan failed and went to the local secondary modern.

  I kept my friendship going with Brendan, despite him being at another school and despite my family always mentioning the time he had climbed on top of our TV when he was five. It felt a bit like he’d been given the short straw by going to a school that wasn’t great. But he hasn’t let it hold him back; he’s incredibly well read now, much more than I am.

  I still saw Brendan at weekends. We’d go out on bikes, hang around in the woods, listen to music together. He rang up one day and said he had a question for me.

  ‘Stephen, I’m thinking of becoming a heavy rocker. Do you want to join me?’

  ‘Bren, I can’t do that,’ I said. ‘It would be a betrayal of everything I’ve always loved, which is punk rock. But I’ll still be your friend.’

  Brendan told me recently that when his family had booked a holiday at Pontins in Brean Sands in 1980, he had dreaded telling me. I had been, he said, a terrible closet snob. One day I had asked him if he was going anywhere that summer, and when he told me I apparently let out a huge laugh. ‘For God’s sake, mate, you don’t get people with Jags going there.’

  *

  I have remained lifelong friends with a handful of school friends, including Brendan and Mike Taylor. I met Mike on the first day of secondary school. He wore big National Health glasses and was quite short, but tough. He was from Oldham and had a proper old Lancashire accent. When I first met him, he used to say ‘thee’ instead of ‘you’ and ‘thine’ instead of ‘yours’.

  ‘What’s wrong with thee? That’s thine …’

  It’s a way of talking that has all but disappeared. Mike doesn’t talk like that now, obviously, but I found it a comforting, old-fashioned way of speaking. I love a Lancashire accent. It’s more forgiving and musical than, say, the more guttural Yorkshire or the lazy nasality of central Manchester and Salford.

  I didn’t mess around – I preferred to charm the teachers – but Mike messed around all the time. He would crawl under all the desks until he got to the teacher’s desk right at the front. And there he would sit, under the desk, waving to the rest of the class and pulling faces while the Latin teacher marked books.

  We were both in the school rugby team and played regularly against local public schools. We were frequently thrashed by Manchester Grammar. Little fascists.

  I wasn’t very fit or tough, but I was allowed to join the rugby team because I could entertain everyone with funny voices. I liked the camaraderie of a team game, but I didn’t relish jogging on to the field when it was so cold that the ground was frozen solid. At least when it was muddy you had a soft landing.

  I played flanker, so I had to run off the edge of the scrum. The scrum collapsed on me once and nearly broke my back. And I’ve still got a small scar on my lip from doing a tackle from behind: I was diving through the air and grabbing an opponent’s legs when a stud hit me on the mouth. This lad’s stud hadn’t been properly filed down and it was like a blade. There was blood everywhere.

  I managed to say, ‘I think I need a stitch, my lip has opened right up.’

  The teacher practically laughed at me. ‘Don’t be soft, it’s just a scratch.’

  So on I played, with blood streaming down my shirt. I wasn’t a tough rugby-playing type, but I have fond memories of getting splattered with mud as the adrenalin flowed. It was oddly satisfying.

  Mike remembers me playing out of position and lost in a dream world until I got the ball. Then, suddenly, I would become totally focused and committed to tackling.

  Once we played against Marple Hall School, whose rugby teacher was called Keith Harding. He occasionally appeared in a long-running TV series called Superstars in which famous sportsmen such as Kevin Keegan and James Hunt participated in a range of events. And what did I do? I had a fight in front of this minor celebrity. Ged McBreen wrung his muddy shorts out in my shoes and we started throwing punches at each other.

  I disgraced the school.

  And for that I was given a talking-to and then slippered by Mr McPollen, the games teacher. It wasn’t done in anger; it was a formality, like an execution. I was bad and I had to be punished.

  *

  The conservative brethren wore habits; the more liberal ones wore suits. Others were lay teachers who just happened to work at our school. We were taught some archaic dross, but our school was more progressive than the local convent school, which warned its female pupils not to shine their shoes. After all, they didn’t want boys seeing a reflection of their knickers in the leather. Potty.

  There was always a smart and robust sense of humour at our all-boys’ school.

  Mar Jones was a Russian physics teacher who bore an uncanny resemblance to Rosa Klebb, one of James Bond’s fierce Soviet enemies in From Russia with Love. One afternoon she was performing an experiment with magnets and iron filings on the workbench to demonstrate magnetic fields.

  When the filings didn’t behave as she thought they ought to, she said, ‘That’s strange. I don’t understand why this is happening …’

  One of the boys proffered an explanation: ‘Maybe it’s the knives in your boots, miss.’

  The rest of the class was helpless with laughter.

  She furrowed her brow. ‘Knives in my boots?!’

  Unlike us, she wasn’t a James Bond aficionado.

  I particularly admired David Hennessey, who taught history and religion. He was an intellectual who had come down from Oxford to our school because he was taking up holy orders from someone on their deathbed. I could tell he was punching below his weight. He was about twenty-six, super-smart, provocative and prematurely greying.

  Looking back at my reports, I can see that I must have driven Hennessey to distraction. An early report refers to me as a ‘lively class “theologian”’, the following year my religion exam result is ‘disappointing’, and the year after that I am ‘capable of mature thought on complex subjects’.

  In the third year, my general report for the Christmas term said: ‘This report is rather disturbing. I think Stephen is now old enough to stop playing at this work. His French particularly has slipped steadily downhill since he started. No one doubts his intelligence – the remedy is in his hands.’

  I was, in truth, probably more interested in asking awkward questions than learning fluent French. When we were on our way back from a religious retreat in the fifth form, I kept trying to push Hennessey to engage with various debates.

  ‘Brother David, isn’t it wrong of the Church to teach sex only as an act of procreation and not as something from which to gain pleasure?’

  It was late at night and he was driving the minibus. ‘Oh, please, Stephen, not now.’

  But, when he wasn’t tired and distracted, Brother David – or ‘Bro David’, which now sounds weirdly ghetto – would talk about the Church in Latin America aligning itself with Marxists to fight dictatorships. He wanted us to discuss the moral issues of the Church engaging in armed resistance and he seemed genuinely interested in my thoughts.

  I was more used to conservative Catholics: when General Franco died in 1975, our parish priest held Mass for him. He may have been a fascist dictator who violated human rights, had people tortured and stole babies from socialist women and gave them to right-wing families, but he was a devout Catholic.

  Bro David was a breath of fresh air. In an old religion exercise book I still have, I’ve written: ‘Armed resistance might be justified against a repressive fascist regime.’

  In the margin he has written: ‘Violence begets violence.’ And then, ‘Just underlining my orthodoxy in the hope of landing a sinecure in the Vatican.’

  He had a sense of humour, and he talked to me as an equal. He talked to all of us as adults. He seemed at ease with himself and I looked up to him. I wanted to be like him when I was older: smar
t, laconic and charismatic.

  Martin Wilde taught us maths and games. He gave us extra maths lessons so that we would get the right grades. He was withering and he mocked our incompetence, but he was funny too.

  My English teacher, Miss Lewis, was Jewish. She randomly taught us Jewish songs such as ‘Hava Nagila’ in the middle of English lessons. She used to say Christian prayers with us, always avoiding the word ‘God’.

  I quickly learned that my impressions gave me a certain kudos at school. A few months after I had started Cardinal Langley, my brother Martin, who I hero-worshipped, started dragging me up to the sixth-form common room to do impersonations. He wore effortlessly cool clothes and was the best-looking of us Coogan boys. He wandered around school like he owned the place. I sometimes felt I was walking in his shadow, so I liked being asked to perform in front of six or seven of his mates. It was as though he thought his coolness would be enhanced by showing off his brother.

  ‘Check out my kid brother, he can do all these voices.’

  I stood there and did Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher and James Callaghan, who was prime minister at that time.

  Everyone laughed and said, ‘What a funny little thing he is.’

  And then they’d tell me to bugger off.

  By the time I was fourteen, my housemaster and art teacher, a long-haired, amiable Scouser called P. B. Murphy, was asking to hear my impressions of him.

  One day he said, ‘Why don’t you take house assembly this morning, Coogan?’

  P. B. Murphy was always talking about how precious and precarious life is. He’d mention a fatal accident and go into far too much detail: ‘They were killed terribly, their necks broken, lying dead in the road. Life is so precious.’

  I would stand up in assembly and impersonate him, exaggerating the way he talked: ‘I read something in the news today about a family being completely decimated, chopped up into tiny pieces, blood trickling down the road, bits of their bodies lying everywhere, heads rolling into gutters …’ Pause. ‘How precious is life?’

  I then went around the hall, talking about God and straightening the ties of older boys, because that’s what P. B. Murphy did. He was very laid-back. He gave me a licence to laugh at him.

  He helped me organise two school trips to the Motor Show at the NEC in Birmingham. The first was in October 1978, when I had just turned thirteen, and the second was in 1980.

  I was always the most car-oriented sibling. Whenever I played with my Matchbox Superfast track when I was younger, I would do a car chase really slowly while doing all the voices.

  ‘C’mon Jack! Where are you?’

  ‘He’s over here!’

  ‘Quick! Let’s head him off!’

  My family laughed at me because I’d keep playing and replaying the car chases until they were as I wanted them. Sometimes they weren’t aesthetically right or the drivers said the wrong things.

  While my brother David was into Airfix models, my focus was always on the free Matchbox cars you could send off for after collecting sufficient tokens on cereal packets.

  Cereal packets played a large part in a child’s life in the seventies. I could never quite believe that tokens could translate into a free Matchbox car. Somehow it was like cheating the rules of life. I would sit at the kitchen table, carefully cutting out the tokens and dreaming of the morning I would hear a dull thud on the mat in the hallway.

  Sometimes I was still lying in bed when the post came. As soon as I reached the top of the stairs and saw the brown manila envelope, I knew that a shiny car in a vivid primary colour was waiting for me. Even now, vivid metallic colours remind me of Matchbox cars.

  On the way home from school I would often stop off at John Menzies. I’d go straight to the toy department and stare at the rows of cars in their colourful cardboard boxes. I’d stand there for five, even ten minutes, wondering what it would be like to have enough money to actually buy a toy car. I would also wander through the Arndale Centre, looking at Action Man toys and thinking, ‘This is what rich parents buy their children.’

  I made friends with a boy just because he had some Action Men, which were essentially dolls for boys. My parents never bought us Action Men, partly because of the expense and partly because it was a branded toy. We would have to make do with some cut-price impersonation of an Action Man that didn’t have grippy hands or realistic hair.

  Meanwhile, this boy had all these expensive toys and he was always playing in his garden. Every time I walked past he’d ask if I wanted to play with him. Eventually I agreed and at some point he gave me three Action Men. I couldn’t quite believe it. I thought he was mad.

  *

  P. B. Murphy let me get away with murder and gave me special dispensation when it came to homework. He would call me into his office to talk about what had been on TV the night before. He liked engaging with me and, like Brother David, talked to me as an adult.

  My classmates would say, ‘You jammy bastard, how did you get away with not doing your homework?’

  Murphy would simply say, ‘Bring it in next time.’

  And yet the threat of the slipper always hung over us. There were two brethren at school known by the kids as Batty Bates and Bully Bates. Batty had big ears and was rotund; Bully was stocky and, well, a bully. Both had fought in the Second World War and were much older than my dad. Bully Bates carried a slipper in his inside pocket and if you were running too fast down a corridor he’d hold his arm out, shout at you to bend over and whack your backside with the slipper.

  And then there was P. K. Murphy – not to be confused with P. B. – who had a terrible temper and threw chalk at us. Once he threw the wooden board duster at a kid, missed and hit the kid behind. The kid’s head split open and P. K. Murphy was banned from using a board duster. As a badge of his inadequacy, he was only allowed to use a limp rag.

  Thereafter, he would admonish pupils by defiantly dusting their heads with the rag, as if to say, ‘They can take away my board duster, but they can never take away my ability to annoy pupils at will.’

  CHAPTER 28

  EVERYTHING CHANGED WHEN Cardinal Langley became a co-ed comp in 1979. The best part of girls joining the school was not their nascent sexuality, but the fact that they couldn’t be slippered. And if they couldn’t be slippered, we boys couldn’t be slippered either. The Brothers didn’t think it was right to slipper the girls, I suppose because they recognised the potentially sexual element to it. Whereas slippering a boy couldn’t be titillating at all. Hmmm …

  I don’t remember being slippered after girls started at Cardinal Langley, though I could be wrong. But the strap didn’t entirely disappear. In the fifth year we had a new teacher, an Indian chap called Mr Mohammed. His English was far from fluent and a bunch of us fifth-form boys used to mock him cruelly.

  He came up to me on one occasion and accused me of talking when I hadn’t said a word. He refused to listen.

  ‘Go and get the strap.’

  One of the other boys volunteered to go and get it. ‘I’ll go, sir! You just have to sign for it.’

  Mr Mohammed turned to me. I held my hand out. He clearly hadn’t used the strap before. He looked nervous. The strap whacked my hand and I just stared straight at him, my hand steady. I didn’t flinch at all. I just kept on staring.

  He lost his temper and started hitting my body with the strap.

  ‘You idiot! You cheeky boy!’

  I grabbed the strap from his hand and flung it across the classroom.

  ‘You’re in deep shit, sir. That is assault.’

  He swore at me. He told me to sit down. He wanted it all to stop. Even though my hand was smarting like hell, I felt sorry for him in the end.

  The school’s new comprehensive status also meant, of course, that the 11-plus was dropped. There was a definite feeling that ‘thick kids’ had been let in the school, and merciless teasing went on. An older boy, one of my brother’s friends, walked past a classroom of slow readers, put his head round the door an
d yelled, ‘D-O-G, dog!’ The teacher shouted straight back, ‘O-U-T, out!’

  It wasn’t very PC, but then each incoming year had to put up with teasing of one sort or another. On my very first day at secondary school, a group of thirteen-year-old boys came up to us.

  ‘Do you have periods?’

  ‘Yes,’ we answered.

  They burst out laughing as we stood there, clueless.

  I never smoked at school, but I liked the frisson of getting on with the ne’er-do-well boys who hung around the toilets with cigarettes dangling casually from their mouths. I was slightly friendly with Gregory Mounfield, whose brother Mani is in The Stone Roses and Primal Scream. Gregory was tough, with fingers made yellow by persistent smoking.

  He spoke quietly, as if passing on secret information, like a shady character from a Dick Tracy comic book. I’ll never forget when he sidled up to me in July 1981, looking around furtively as if he might be overheard, and said, ‘There are going to be riots in Moss Side on Wednesday.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Oh, I know.’ He smiled to himself as he strolled off for yet another cigarette in the school toilets.

  Two days later, Moss Side exploded into forty-eight hours of mayhem.

  I was about to turn fourteen when girls started at Cardinal Langley. We had hardly been exposed to any since primary school and suddenly the school was swarming with all these eleven-year-old prepubescent girls. I was scared of them. They were in a school overwhelmingly dominated by boys and they were on the verge of becoming young women. Theirs was a strange kind of power.

  Some of them were mouthy. One girl punched a boy who was four years her senior and he went flying. She was thirteen, scary and had very large breasts. Scary and sexy. She would punch you if you got in her way. In fact, Pauline Calf was based on her: a predatory, tough and fast-speaking female.

  *

  It was also around this time that nuclear reactors melted on Three Mile Island, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, and the previous winter of discontent led to the election of Margaret Thatcher, our first female prime minster. More importantly, I put my hand inside a girl’s bra for the first time.