Easily Distracted

by Steve Coogan

  I HAVE BEEN pathologically late all my life. My school reports often drew attention to my lack of punctuality: in the summer term of my third year, the general report states that my punctuality record is ‘appalling. It is easily the worst in the class.’

  I’m amazed I ever got to school on time. School started at 9 a.m. and the bus left at 8.40 a.m. I used to get up at 8.30 a.m., pull on my uniform, comb my hair, maybe brush my teeth, and run down the stairs two at a time. My cornflakes were always soggy because they’d been laid out in a bowl with milk at 8 a.m. Mum didn’t have time to feed each child individually, so getting to the table on time was up to us.

  If I was lucky, I would make the bus. Otherwise I knew that if I ran fast enough I could catch it three stops on because it slowed down as it drove through the shopping centre. I had to climb over a wall and run across two bus lanes to catch it. I would do that with alarming regularity.

  Clare, as the eldest, was sometimes called into the garden to help Dad out with some project or another at one in the morning, and she often fell asleep on the sofa. But she had a different childhood from me. I was one of the three little ones and we had to be in bed by 10 p.m. at weekends. Probably at 9 p.m. on a school night. Although I sometimes sneaked out of bed and crawled under the sofa to watch television, bedtime was regulated for us little ones, especially when we were younger.

  I would overhear my parents saying, ‘What are we going to do with the three little ones? Have they gone upstairs yet?’

  If they could hear us making a noise, Mum would stand at the bottom of the stairs and shout up to us, ‘If I hear one more peep from you, I’m going to come up and give you a damn good hiding.’

  If we carried on making a noise, Mum or Dad – mostly it was Mum – would come upstairs.

  As soon as we heard her coming up the stairs, one of us would turn the light off and all three of us would leap into bed, pull our duvets up and pretend to be asleep.

  Mum would burst into the room, turn the light back on, grab a piece of Matchbox Superfast track, pull the blankets off and whack us in our beds. Sometimes we’d start laughing and maybe Mum would end up laughing too. Then she’d get annoyed with us for making her laugh, whack us some more and go back downstairs.

  The yellow plastic track was bendy rather than rigid, but it hurt, even through our pyjamas. It wasn’t nice, but it didn’t feel barbaric. Corporal punishment was the fabric of life back then. It was legal and widely used. It was just bad luck that you’d been caught.

  ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child’ was the received wisdom; if you don’t discipline your child properly, you’ll end up with an unpleasant human being.

  I can’t imagine hitting my daughter, but we live in very different times.

  Besides, the Superfast track wasn’t nearly as painful as my school’s preferred punishment of either the slipper or the strap.

  *

  We could never be sure what would tip Mum or Dad over the edge. Sometimes I expected to be in real trouble and for some reason I got away with my bad behaviour.

  In the early eighties, when we were making one of our regular trips to see my rich uncle Peter in Ireland, my brother Brendan trapped his finger in a highly sprung, heavy deck door on the ferry. As soon as the ferry had docked, Peter sent a marine engineer on board to investigate and Brendan was consequently awarded £5,000 in compensation.

  He goaded me in the dining room one day: ‘You haven’t got any money. You’re broke and I’ve got £5,000.’

  I was furious. I pulled the pin out of the fire extinguisher and sprayed it at him across the room. He hid under the table and begged me to stop, but I carried on covering him with foam.

  Mum came in and asked what I’d done. I explained that Brendan had goaded me and so I had let the fire extinguisher off. She tried to reproach us both, but she kept laughing.

  Dad came home and heard about the fire extinguisher. He didn’t reprimand me for letting it off on Brendan; instead his response was practical.

  ‘If there was a fire straight after you’d let it off, there wouldn’t have been an extinguisher available to put it out.’

  *

  I spent the first ten years of my life deifying my father. As a child you could ask him why the sky was blue and he invariably had a satisfying answer, because as well as being a devout Catholic, he also read the New Scientist every week. For a long time I thought everything Dad said was the law. He wasn’t to be questioned. It took me a long time to realise that he was fallible and that there were people out there with very different but equally legitimate points of view.

  People who know our family always say that you can tell a Coogan, but you can’t tell him much. Or, ‘Something you’ll never hear a Coogan say: “Oh, that’s interesting. I didn’t know that. Please tell me more.”’

  The men in the Coogan family are very assertive in terms of knowledge. If we don’t know it, it’s probably not worth knowing.

  It was from my father that I learned how to be oppositional and question received wisdom. Probably to the point of insanity, certainly to the point of irritation. It’s healthy to have that mindset to an extent, but for a while I took it too far. It’s a very British trait; everyone has a negative opinion to share. If you ask someone to extrapolate on something they love, they inevitably become tongue-tied. Everyone is eloquent in their criticism and ineloquent in their praise.

  And, like everyone, Dad was full of contradictions. He could be wrong about things. Although he knew why the sky was blue, he was a terrible teacher. When Martin was learning the clarinet, Dad, who could play the sax, would offer to help. But he quickly lost patience and often ended up giving him a ‘clout’.

  As much as he was a Victorian-style dad, he was also human. The first and only time I saw him burst into tears was in June 1979, when there was a fire in the house. Most of us were oblivious to the fire raging upstairs, as we were downstairs watching Nancy Drew on television; we had stored a pile of mattresses and pillows in a cupboard, and a hot pipe melted through a wire, causing it to spark.

  Brendan, who was nearly nine, ran into the living room. ‘There’s smoke upstairs!’

  The girls’ bedroom, which Gerry and Tina shared now that Clare had left for university, was a raging inferno. The heat had even blistered the paint on the living-room door.

  We phoned the fire brigade.

  Dad, in his boiler suit from doing DIY, told us to form a chain with buckets to try to put the fire out. The polystyrene tiles on the ceiling were fizzing as they melted. White plastic stalactites decorated the hallway above us.

  The air smelled bad and we couldn’t stop coughing. Dad was in such a panic that he opened the bedroom door, hoping to flush the fire out with water. Instead the influx of oxygen into the room shot the flames right out into the hallway and set fire to his hair and beard.

  He slammed the door shut and extinguished his burning hair.

  ‘Everyone! Out of the house now!’

  We all stood in the back garden, watching flames shooting out of the top of the house.

  The first fire brigade arrived, pushed a ladder up to the bedroom window, smashed the window and drenched the room.

  My dad had spent the best part of two decades rebuilding the house from the inside out. And now he was slumped against the wall in his boiler suit. He burst into tears.

  As Dad cried, Mum kept on saying, ‘Everyone is safe and that is all that matters.’

  I wasn’t upset by the fire, but when I saw my dad weeping I started to cry.

  He was a mere mortal after all.

  *

  Dad wasn’t very sociable in the traditional sense. He never went to the pub. Before wine arrived in suburbia, Dad might have the occasional half-pint of shandy or a sweet sherry at Christmas.

  And yet he was a member of Round Table, a social organisation for young families that also raised money for charity. One of the more admirable rules stated that you had to leave at the age of forty. It scares me to think I’d h
ave been kicked out ten years ago.

  It now sells itself as ‘The Original Social Network’, and I suppose in a way it was. It’s not, as people often think, anything to do with the Freemasons – thankfully. Fraternal organisations or any groups that help their own above all else bring out the rage in me, as well as in my dad.

  Round Table was a non-elitist, fairly egalitarian and slightly patriarchal organisation that gave young family men the chance to socialise, raise money for charity and help the community. It was patriarchal in the sense that only men could join, but the focus was very much on family days out. Dad would often organise a fair with coconut shies and treasure hunts – I remember having butterflies in my tummy as we searched for clues.

  One of my earliest memories was going to a Round Table fair in 1969, when I was three and a half, and hearing Peter Sarstedt’s ‘Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?’ through the speakers as a hovercraft floated around the field. It stopped and two children were picked out of the audience to take a short trip. They randomly picked me and my brother Martin. We climbed into the gull-wing door of the hovercraft and took off across the field. The world felt full of possibility in that moment.

  My dad has a sister who is twenty years younger than he is; my grandma had her when she was forty-seven. In 1969, Patricia was sixteen years old. For the fair my dad – and this seems unbelievable when I think about it – built a platform so that she could sit on it in her bikini. In front of Aunt Patricia was a pool of water. You had to throw a ball at a plate and if you hit the plate dead on, it would release a mechanism and kung!, she would tip into the water. Naturally, these being the days preceding political correctness, men were queuing up all afternoon to throw a ball at the plate.

  Occasionally Mum and Dad would go to a Round Table dinner. My dad is always late – I’ve inherited it from him – and at some point in 1973 they were so late for the bus that they missed the dinner altogether and ended up going to the cinema instead. They came home telling us all about Roger Moore in Live and Let Die. I felt jealous and betrayed. I didn’t care that it was a last-minute decision.

  ‘You know how much I like James Bond,’ I said, petulantly. ‘You don’t even share my enthusiasm for 007 and yet you’ve gone to see Live and Let Die on a whim and all you can do is talk about it in great detail and laugh about it and say how enjoyable it was, and I haven’t seen it.’

  Which just made them laugh more.

  CHAPTER 31

  I USED TO run all the way home from school at lunchtime just so I could sit and watch the news with my mum while everyone else was at school. I wanted her all to myself. One lunchtime in March 1976, we watched Harold Wilson announce his resignation. Shirley Williams, who was still a Labour MP at the time, was mentioned as a contender and Mum was excited. She’d always liked her style, her straight-talking nature and her strong sense of social justice. Mum thought we might have a female prime minister, and the fact that she was a Catholic was the icing on the cake.

  Two years earlier, Mum had walked into the bedroom and pulled back the curtains.

  ‘Harold Wilson is prime minister for a second term!’

  I blearily said, ‘Hurray!’

  But I was nine and only vaguely aware of the general importance of politics, rather than the specifics of each political party. By the time he resigned, I was far more au fait with which party was ‘good’ and which was ‘bad’, even though my dislike of the Tories at that point did, to some extent, mirror my slightly dim view of Protestants.

  There were endless conversations in our house about the Irish being bullied by the English. For all my parents’ conservatism, they didn’t embrace the establishment. They were never flag wavers and only had time for the Queen because she handled herself with dignity and did things for charity.

  My parents used to say, ‘We think there should be a united Ireland, but what the IRA do is wrong. Violence is wrong.’

  I was aware of the Black and Tans as I was growing up. The way those former soldiers were sent to Ireland by the English government to assist the Royal Irish Constabulary was terrible. We were never to forget what murdering thugs the British had been towards the Irish.

  By the time a woman made it to Number 10, three years after Wilson’s resignation, I was thirteen and fully politicised. My family loathed Thatcher even before she was elected. There was no delight in her being the first female prime minister, because she wasn’t about community, which my parents believed in, and she didn’t back the unions, and the unions protected working-class people. My siblings and I knew that the Industrial Revolution had started in the north and we were proud of being northern, of industry, of the unions. It was all tied up with supporting Labour.

  Dad, who left Labour to join the SDP at a certain point, was never anything short of furious with Maggie. ‘Thatcher and her cronies have this appalling “I’m all right, Jack” mentality, which means they only care about themselves.’

  On 4 May 1979, Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first female prime minister. The previous week, Brother David Hennessey had talked to us about the election.

  ‘Mrs Thatcher will be prime minister this time next week, boys.’

  I was incensed. How could he say such a thing? I wanted Labour to stay in power.

  Somebody in the class said, ‘I think it’s good there’s going to be a female prime minister.’

  There were lots of little Tories in my class. In fact, I was in the minority. My parents, as liberals, were also in the minority in their parish. My dad, despite his passion for decency, can be very damning about politicians. Before William Hague stood down as foreign secretary, Dad said, almost with pity, ‘The poor chap. He is a bit of an Aunt Sally.’ It’s an economical but devastating criticism of the man.

  *

  When we went to Ireland in the school holidays, Dad would argue about politics with his younger brother, Peter. In the seventies, Uncle Peter was found on a list of potential IRA targets. A panic button was fitted in his house and he had to vary his routes to work. But he was a successful entrepreneur who ended up as the head of a bank, and I couldn’t help but think, ‘Uncle Peter has got the life I want. He’s got a big house, nice cars, land, a mischievous sense of humour.’ He always made me laugh. He was cheeky and a bit cocky. Not like my dad at all.

  Uncle Peter would drink whiskey and go on about how awful the Labour Party was. The drunker he got, the more he’d infuriate Dad by saying things like, ‘You should kneel down and pray to Margaret Thatcher every morning and thank her for saving your country.’

  We’d often hear raised voices as we were drifting off to sleep.

  I found out when I was making The Look of Love in 2013 that Thatcher had invited Paul Raymond to Downing Street. She was willing to overlook the fact that he was a tawdry porn baron, simply because he was generating so much wealth.

  I felt slightly – only slightly – sorry for Thatcher in her old age. She was detached from any kind of reality, even before dementia fully set in. Denis Oliver, her chauffeur of fourteen years, revealed something really telling after her death: whenever he made a joke, it would go straight over her head. She had no sense of humour at all.

  There was a real sense of impending apocalypse in the 1980s. Before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, I think we all felt that nuclear war might really happen. Dad marched with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and took me to a meeting with Bruce Kent, who was the general secretary. Dad thought nuclear weapons were immoral. He was very clear on what was moral and what was immoral. He often held up the Geneva Convention as a measure of decency in a brutal world.

  When I was about twelve, I used to sit up with my dad into the early hours having rigorous intellectual conversations about morality.

  There is a fine line between imbuing your children with the values you hold to be true and indoctrination. Perhaps it’s inevitable that you can’t have one without the other.

  But I liked having those kinds of moral maze discussions. They helped me to un
derstand that while there are plenty of people who take all their views off a political shelf, as though they were buying a job lot of them, life is actually more complicated than that.

  I always had time for the late Tory MP Alan Clark because although he was a right-wing xenophobe, he also cared passionately about animal rights and would hang out on the docks in Dover with all the animal-loving crusties and hippies. I loathed his politics, but I admired the fact that he thought independently.

  Duality is, I think, generally a good thing. Otherwise – and this is to simplify hugely – you’re in danger of sounding like George Bush when he said, ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.’

  CHAPTER 32

  I STAYED ON at Cardinal Langley for my A levels. Although I had done well at religious studies, maths and physics at O level, I decided to study English, British government and politics, art and design, and general studies.

  Despite taking three attempts to pass O-level English language before I finally got a B, I got a B first time for my O-level English literature and actually enjoyed A-level English. Shakespeare immediately made more sense to me than almost anything in the Bible.

  Every Sunday I would listen to this supposed wisdom from the Bible and the Gospel, and so very little of it had resonance for me. Occasionally I’d hear a passage from the Bible that was illuminating or had wisdom, but there wasn’t much in the way of enlightenment for me. Shakespeare, meanwhile, embraced ambiguity, nuance and contradiction in his writing.

  And I fell in love with William Blake. He seemed to think differently about the world, and in doing so gave me permission to think differently, in much the same way as Monty Python. When I read ‘The Garden of Love’ in the sixth form, I was surprised that someone as spiritual as Blake was so openly disenchanted with the Church.

  Because I admired my parents and everything they stood for, it always felt churlish and disrespectful to disagree with them. But Blake was criticising the institution for being bereft of spirituality and, in doing so, legitimised the distrust I was beginning to feel. I was shocked that a revered poet had articulated my point of view so perfectly.