by John Cleese
And the reason for this was not that she was unintelligent, but that she lived her life in such a constant state of high anxiety, bordering on incipient panic, that she could focus only on the things that might directly affect her. So it goes without saying that she suffered from all the usual phobias, along with a few special ones (like albinos and people wearing eye patches). But she also cast her net wider. In fact, I used to joke that she suffered from omniphobia – you name it, she had a morbid dread of it. It’s true that I never saw her alarmed by a loaf of bread or a cardigan or even a chair, but anything above medium size that could move around a bit was a hazard, and any reasonably loud sound startled her beyond reason. I once compiled a list of events that frightened her, and it was quite comprehensive: very loud snoring; low-flying aircraft; church bells; fire engines; trains; buses and lorries; thunder; shouting; large cars; most medium-sized cars; noisy small cars; burglar alarms; fireworks, especially crackers; loud radios; barking dogs; whinnying horses; nearby silent horses; cows in general; megaphones; sheep; corks coming out of sparkling wine bottles; motorcycles, even very small ones; balloons being popped; vacuum cleaners (not being used by her); things being dropped; dinner gongs; parrot houses; whoopee cushions; chiming doorbells; hammering; bombs; hooters; old-fashioned alarm clocks; pneumatic drills; and hairdryers (even those used by her).
In a nutshell, Mother experienced the cosmos as a vast, limitless booby trap.
Consequently, it was never possible for her really to relax, except perhaps for the times when she sat on the sofa knitting while Dad and I watched television. But even then she was active, knitting away against time. I noticed years ago that when people (myself definitely included) are anxious they tend to busy themselves with irrelevant activities, because these distract from and therefore reduce their actual experience of anxiety. To stay perfectly still is to feel the fear at its maximum intensity, so instead you scuttle around doing things as though you are, in some mysterious way, short of time. But although Mother kept herself busy in countless and pointless ways, it did not alleviate her worrying: her pervading sense that she was keeping nameless disasters at bay only by incessantly anticipating them, and that one moment’s lapse in this vigilance would bring them hurtling towards her. I once proposed to Dad that we should purchase a large hamster wheel for her, so that she would find it easy to remain active all day, instead of having continually to invent non-essential activities like polishing cans of peas, or stacking cups, or sewing borders on handkerchiefs, or boiling knitting needles, or weeding the carpet.
Her own approach was to write her worries down on a piece of paper, so that there was no chance she would forget one, thus unleashing it. After Dad died, I would drive down to Weston to visit her and she would greet me with a cup of coffee and a very long list of worries which she had been compiling during the previous weeks, and we would sit down and discuss each worry in turn at some length: what it was about, and why it mattered, and how likely it was to happen, and what she could do to forestall it, and what we could do if it did actually happen, and whether we would know what to do if it didn’t . . . and after we’d processed six or so, she’d make me another cup of coffee and we would continue working till bedtime. And if we hadn’t got through them all by then, we’d leave the rest for breakfast. It took me decades to realise that it was not the analysing of her worries that eased them; it was the continuous contact with another person that gradually calmed her.
Why Mother should have been quite so anxious I simply don’t know, but the net effect was to make her difficult. Actually ‘difficult’ is not quite fair. There was only one thing that she wanted. Just one. But that one thing was her own way. And if she didn’t get it, that upset her. And she was prettily easily upset; in fact I think it’s fair to say she had a real facility for it; and when something did upset her – and there was a very limited supply of things that, in the final analysis, didn’t – she would throw a tantrum, or several tantra, of such inconceivable volume and activity that there must have been times when Dad yearned for the relative tranquillity of the trenches in France.
But Mother would never have seen herself as a tyrant: her trick was to rule through weakness. Whereas Dad might prefer to sleep with a window open, Mother had to have it shut, because she just couldn’t cope with the alternative. Sadly, there was no choice, so negotiation was never an option, although Dad once confided to me that she had been much more flexible before they’d got married.
It was only in later years that I began to see just how alarmed Dad really was by the tantrums. While he talked occasionally about the need ‘to keep the little woman on an even keel’, his faux-amused casualness was intended to conceal his fear, for when Mother lost her temper, she really lost it: her rage filled her skin until there was no room left for the rest of her personality, which had to move over till things calmed down a bit. The phrase ‘beside oneself with anger’ could have been coined in Weston-super-Mare.
Mother could be quite charming and bright and amusing, but that was when we had visitors. Once they had gone, her sociability began to fade. This meant that there was nearly always tension in the Cleese household because when mother was not actually angry it was only because she was not angry yet. Dad and I knew that the slightest thing – almost anything – would set her off, so constant placatory behaviour was the name of the game.
It cannot be coincidence that I spent such a large part of my life in some form of therapy, and that the vast majority of the problems I was dealing with involved relationships with women. And my ingrained habit of walking on eggshells when coping with my mother dominated my romantic liaisons for many years. Until it began to fade, women found me very dull. My own unique cocktail of over-politeness, unending solicitude and the fear of stirring controversy rendered me utterly unsexy. Very, very nice men are no fun. I once wrote a sketch based on my younger self (for the 1968 show How to Irritate People), in which I tried to show just how infuriating this desire to be inoffensive can be:
John Cleese: I’m afraid I’m not very good company tonight.
Connie Booth: No, it’s me. I’m on edge.
JC: No, no, no, you are marvellous, really super! It’s me.
CB: Look, let’s forget it.
JC: I’m not good company.
CB: You are.
JC: I’m not. I’ve been fussing you.
CB: It’s all right.
JC: I have been fussing you. It’s my own fault, you told me last time about fussing you too much.
CB: Please!
JC: Look, am I fussing you too much?
CB: A bit.
Although there was little real emotional communication between us, my mother and I had our moments of closeness, almost all of them when we laughed together. She had quite a sharp sense of humour – and as I got older I discovered to my surprise that she also laughed at jokes that were rather dark, if not quite black. I remember on one occasion listening to her as she methodically itemised all the reasons why she didn’t want to go on living, while I experienced my usual sense of glum failure at my powerlessness to help. Then I heard myself say, ‘Mother, I have an idea.’
‘Oh? What’s that?’
‘I know a little man who lives in Fulham, and if you’re still feeling this way next week, I could have a word with him if you like – but only if you like – and he can come down to Weston and kill you.’
Silence.
‘Oh God, I’ve gone too far,’ I thought. And then she cackled with laughter. I don’t think I ever loved her as much as I did at that moment.
So, anyway . . . there we were in the Raffles’ house, pretty safe from German bombs, with a ringside view of a Somerset farmer’s life, milking cows and fattening pigs and executing chickens. It was a very small farm, and the only surprising thing was that Mr and Mrs Raffle didn’t speak English. I don’t mean that they spoke another language; they didn’t speak anything that could be recognised as a language. They clearly understood each other’s noises, though,
and we sensed that while they didn’t like each other much, their limited vocabularies precluded unnecessary disagreements. How Dad negotiated our rent with Mr Raffle I don’t know. He probably used pebbles, although it’s possible that the Raffles’ young son, who was picking up some English at kindergarten, acted as interpreter.
Mr Raffle owned two sheepdogs, so it was a bit of a surprise when we discovered that he had no sheep. Dad thought he kept the dogs so that people would think he owned sheep; Mother thought they might be cowdogs. I liked them – they were friendlier than the rabbits, although they did spend a lot of time staring into the rabbit hutches. As for the rabbits, I’ve never worked out why the Raffles actually bothered to keep any, since they had ferrets to catch them in the wild. I can only assume that, having caught them, they liked to keep them fresh and close by until a quick snack beckoned. That could explain why my attacker sank its fangs into me: it was not going to go quietly.
Sadly, just as I was beginning to name all the animals, and to get to know the little village of Brent Knoll, the Cleese family moved to Devon, to a little cottage in Totnes. Then, for no apparent reason, we moved back to the Raffles’, then back to Devon (to Horrabridge, where I saw a spider so big I could hear its footsteps), then back to Brent Knoll, and then, immediately after VE Day, to Burnham-on-Sea, where we lived in three different houses in three years, before arriving in Weston-super-Mare (again) in 1948 so that I could attend St Peter’s Preparatory School. In all, we moved eight times in my first eight years.
I was too young to be part of a discussion on the subject, so I can only guess why we moved so often. From a practical point of view, constant relocation caused few problems because it never involved Dad having to change jobs. As an agent (or salesman) with the Guardian Assurance Company, he had been assigned a territory in the West Country which he drove around, selling mainly life insurance, but also a lot of Storm and Tempest cover to farmers. Because he was known to be such a decent chap, a lot of the life insurance came to him via personal recommendations from Somerset bank managers and solicitors: they knew he was competent and honest, and would not try to sell their clients more cover than they needed. This meant he always sold more life insurance than any of the other Guardian agents, but in a rather leisurely way, never driving off before 9.30 a.m., nor returning after 4.30 p.m. His secret was that, because of his contacts, he never needed to make ‘cold calls’; and provided he lived in the middle of Somerset, it didn’t much matter where, as the distances were so small.
If the demands of Dad’s job don’t explain the constant moves, his worries about money might. As an insurance agent, his earnings peaked at £30 a week in the early 50s. Given that miners and most footballers got £10, it was not a bad salary and I certainly never sensed that we lacked for anything. Moreover the Cleese family never contemplated buying ‘expensive things’. They weren’t on our radar. For example, it literally never occurred to me that we might go abroad for our holidays; or that we might buy a car that was new; or that we would have anything for our Christmas lunch other than chicken.
Nevertheless such outlandish thoughts must have occurred to my father, who was kind and generous and would have loved to have provided us with a more gracious lifestyle of the kind he had enjoyed while working in India, Hong Kong and China in the early 20s. £1,500 per annum, however, didn’t stretch very far, and although he hid his financial anxieties very well, I did begin to notice that, now and then, he’d go out of his way to save money on a purchase. Mother noticed, too, and we would look at each other as he extolled ‘surprisingly inexpensive’ stylish Yugoslavian sports jackets, or top-class Libyan shoes, or premier quality Albanian ham that he had bought knowing full well that they would soon lose shape, or prove unwearable, or taste very odd indeed. It’s not unreasonable to assume, therefore, that most of our moves were motivated by the hallucination that they would help cut costs.
Father (right) with small child.
But they may also have had an unintended side effect. Research has shown that constant relocation in childhood is often associated with creativity. It seems that the creative impulse is sparked by the need to reconcile contrasting views of the world. If you move home, you start living a slightly different life, so you compare it with your previous life, note the divergences and the similarities, see what you like better and what you miss, and as you do so, your mind becomes more flexible and capable of combining thoughts and ideas in new and fresh ways. There’s also another way creativity can develop: if important people in your life, especially parents, have different ways of viewing the world, you find yourself trying to understand what they have in common, and how they contrast, in an attempt to make sense of their conflicting views. On the other hand, if your parents have a harmonious relationship and you grow up in one place where people share the same attitudes as those around them, you are unlikely to be innovative, or even to want to be. I doubt whether there’s a special creativity faculty at Iowa State University.
So, creatively, I was doubly blessed: constant relocation and parental disharmony. Add to these two gifts the well-established fact that many of the world’s greatest geniuses, both artistic and scientific, have been the product of serious maternal deprivation, and I am forced to the conclusion that if only my mother had been just a little more emotionally inadequate, I could have been HUGE. I could have been musically gifted, and talented in the visual arts, and an outstanding dancer, and an inventor, and a published poet, instead of being good, within very limited parameters, at writing and acting comedy. Oh well.
Despite these early years spent charging around the West Country, I have only a few scattered memories other than the Raffles’ farm and the Horrabridge spider. I remember, for example, being out on a walk with Dad, and hearing a rumbling sound, and looking up and seeing the sky fill with large planes, flying towards the Continent. This was one of our daytime raids, Dad explained. We were winning the war so we didn’t have to fly at night any more. Once, Dad and I talked to a nice young American airman who let me get up into his Jeep, where I scraped my precious ankle. On another occasion Dad drove us to the hills behind Weston, where we looked at a German plane that had crashed in a field. It was smaller than I expected. There were lots of sightseers, but they were very quiet.
Best of all were the Sundays when Dad would take me to Brent Knoll railway station. Here we were allowed up into the signal box, and the signalman would let me move the big levers that changed the points. Then we would go down on to the platform where there would be a huge wickerwork hamper full of racing pigeons, and the stationmaster would let me open the lid wide, and the pigeons would fly up and away, in a tightly knit flock, high into the sky, where they would circle round and round three times – always three times – before heading north to their homes in Widnes and Warrington and Wigan. It was the most exciting and beautiful experience.
The only direct effect the war had on our lives came when my parents received news that our furniture had been destroyed. The day we first moved to the Raffles’, my parents had moved it into storage in a warehouse owned by Lalonde’s, the well-known Westonian auctioneers, and now an incendiary bomb had overcooked it. It wasn’t very posh furniture, of course, and in a way the Bosch did us a favour, because now we could move house with much greater ease, passing between various kinds of furnished accommodation unencumbered by very much in the way of belongings.
I notice that a lot of my early memories are connected with the war, but this is simply because such moments stood out so starkly from my normal, everyday experience. Months passed in the Somerset and Devon countryside without my being even vaguely aware of the conflict. In fact, I now realise how glad I am that I grew up in small West Country villages, surrounded by verdant foliage and emerald hues. I associate all this with a kind of quiet contentment, of effortless, calm mindfulness that I can seldom recapture in cities. Reading years ago what the psychologist Abraham Maslow had to say about ‘peak experiences’, I recognised that these moments nearly a
lways occur in repose, and in my case are never connected with work. Wordsworth wrote of his favourite flowers:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the chrysanthemums.
When I recall moments of perfect, timeless happiness they include: sitting in a deckchair in the garden of my house in Holland Park, gazing at two Burmese kittens doing cabaret; looking at Vermeer’s painting of Delft in The Hague, and allowing it to affect me; playing with a baby kangaroo in Sydney; listening to John Williams playing the guitar; cruising down the middle Rhine, sipping Moselle; eating fish and chips with my wife at Geales two nights ago; or lying on the grass in the sun, and having my ‘inward’ eye conjure up images of Dick Cheney being waterboarded. Again, none of them seem to be connected with work or, indeed, any kind of striving. Explain that to Terry Gilliam.
* * *
fn1 The most perceptive definition of a coward is Ambrose Bierce’s: ‘One who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.’ This trait seems to me such a wise response to danger that it explains why generals want cowards dead; if they weren’t, the concept of just plain running away would catch on so fast that the top brass would be out of a job overnight – or, at least, would have to do some fighting themselves, which is not part of their job description.
Chapter 2
MY LAST RECOLLECTION of the Brent Knoll era is of being visited by a rather short, quiet and elderly man called John Cheese. He was my dad’s dad, and enjoyed a reputation for being the white sheep of his family: apparently he had disapproved so strongly of his father and brothers that he had left home as soon as he was able, and moved miles away to Bristol to dissociate himself from them. Quite what his family got up to was never spoken of. I believe they were bakers, but that may have been a cover story they used to allow them to be up all hours of the night.
