by John Cleese
It strikes me that laughter was at the very heart of these closest relationships: the bonhomie and fun bonded us together, and allowed me to grow in confidence as I experienced acceptance and support and camaraderie. Of course, as young males we never talked about our feelings, but we discussed the insanity of the world, and at long last my personality was developing free of the influence of Dad and Mum, and indeed of any other grown-ups, including the teachers. In retrospect I can see I was on the way to being almost normal.
In my view, ordinary everyday sanity is harder for ‘only children’ to achieve: they have nothing to moderate or dilute a parent’s influence. It must be very liberating to be able to share your parents’ attention, and indeed to have fellow offspring with whom you can actually discuss parental behaviour. I’m sure I could have dramatically cut the hours I spent in therapy if I had had a brother (or, better still, a sister) to whom I could have turned and asked, ‘What the hell has got into her today?’
Of course, I had gone to Clifton primarily to work, which meant to study for exams, and since O (or ‘ordinary’) levels were coming up in two years, and it seemed undeniably important that I should pass them, I settled down to study the standard subjects: maths, Latin, English, French, history, chemistry, physics and something else.
Now I found some of the work, like maths and Latin, moderately interesting: as involving, say, as a good crossword. In physics I found myself intrigued by optics and in chemistry by atomic theory; and I quite liked studying Macbeth and Henry V. But the rest of the time (in other words, ninety per cent of it) I was completely uninterested in anything I was being taught. This meant that I always had to make a conscious effort to concentrate. If I relaxed even for a few moments, I was away with the fairies.
My education, in other words, was a test of my willpower; and I accepted the challenge – to such an extent, indeed, that I think at some level of my teenage consciousness I truly believed that the whole point of going to school was to learn how to focus attention on subject matter that was of no consequence to me. The message I received at Clifton was: education is not primarily about understanding the world; its real purpose is character-building. As a corollary, I inferred that to study anything in which you had a real interest was, if not exactly cheating, certainly missing the point.
I probably had thirty teachers while I was at Clifton and I liked twenty-eight of them, although few made a real impression on me. One exception, though, was the diminutive ‘Jumper’ Gee. He had fought in both world wars and was supposed to teach us English, but he would go off track a lot and tell us great stories, including one particular anecdote that was to assume a much later significance for me. Apparently in ancient Rome, he said, wrestling matches were sometimes held after dinner to entertain the guests, and on one occasion the two combatants fought so closely that they became completely enmeshed with one another. The sound of a loud crack followed, at which point one of the wrestlers revealed that his arm had been broken. The referee stepped in to disentangle the two men, told the other he had won – and discovered he was dead. The moral of the story, according to ‘Jumper’, was ‘If you don’t give up you can’t be beaten.’ I was less than convinced but the tale stuck in my mind, and fourteen years later inspired me to write the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the Black Knight refuses to submit even when all his limbs have been severed.
There was also a very amusing history master called Whitmarsh, who was unable to pronounce the letter ‘r’ if it came near the beginning of a word. Perhaps that wouldn’t have mattered so much if he hadn’t made a career decision to specialise in seventeenth-century English history. As it was, he spent all his time wrestling with Rrroundheads and Rrroyalists, Oliver Crrromwell and Rrrichard Crrromwell, Prrrince Rrrupert of the Rrrhine, the Rrrump Parliament and Prrride’s Purrrge, and the Rrrestoration, the Rrrye House Plot and the Rrroyal Society. Each ‘r’ required a strange sideways twist of the lips followed by a facial tic and a head twitch; we were therefore careful to construct questions that would give him a good workout. It seemed almost perverse he was not teaching us the eighteenth century: he would only have had to mention the Rrregency, and all the rest would have been plain sailing. Mr Whitmarsh had my number, though. At the end of one term, he wrote in my history report the single sentence ‘Cleese indulges in subversive activities at the back of the room.’
But perhaps the finest all-round entertainer we had was a tall, stooping old dotard with a mass of white hair called Sammy Beachcroft who, when he spoke, produced a strange buzzing noise, as though a bumblebee had become lodged at the back of his nose. Fortunately Sammy taught us about the Old Testament, a topic that involved no exams, so we were free to amuse ourselves to the limit; he must have been the oldest British teacher in captivity because when he talked about biblical events he seemed to have personal memories of them. Nobody could understand why at his age he was still on the staff: it was assumed he had something on the headmaster. He moved very carefully around the classroom like an arthritic gecko, but what was funniest about him was the slowness with which he responded to stimuli. It was as though his whole nervous system had been switched to ‘Proceed with care’, so that his neurons moved very warily, eyeing each synapse for some time before daring to jump.
Sammy’s reaction speed was best illustrated the time that a classmate named Cleave decided to hide behind the blackboard. This was a large affair in one corner of the room, which could be slid upwards after the teacher had written on it, so that it could be more easily seen at the back of the classroom. Cleave squeezed behind it before Sammy arrived, and we pulled it down to writing height so that only his legs were visible. Now, Sammy came in and, failing to notice anything unusual, walked straight to the board, pulled out a piece of chalk and started to list prophets, his writing hand never moving more than a foot or so from Cleave’s nose on the other side. This kept the class beguiled for about half an hour. Finally Sammy finished and slid the board smoothly upwards to find himself standing about eighteen inches away from the motionless Cleave. What was so funny now was not that he jumped a foot in the air (higher than he had been for several decades) but that THREE SECONDS elapsed between his first seeing Cleave and his jump. In comedic terms, it was the classic ‘single-take’, the finest I’ve ever seen.
My own contributions to the ‘Let’s surprise Sammy B’ competition were comparatively low-key. At this time I had a pair of National Health glasses which were contained in a hard spectacle case that made a vaguely metallic ringing noise when it was closed. I would open it, hold it behind my back, open my mouth, and when Sammy looked at me I would shut my mouth and the spectacle case simultaneously, creating the impression that closing my mouth caused a weird clanging noise. He would stare each time, but never pursued the matter.
Early on I took to wearing my glasses upside down. The first time I did this, the effect was sufficiently remarkable to stop him in his tracks mid-sentence. He stared at me for a full five seconds, and then went on as though nothing had happened. Thereafter I wore my glasses upside down on a regular basis, twice a week, until near the end of term when he glanced at me and said quite casually, ‘Cleese, put your glasses on the right way up.’ It had taken him about ten weeks to react.
There were only two Clifton masters I did not care for: ‘Billy’ Williams, the joyless dwarf who ran my house, and a physics teacher I had in my second year called Hazelton. He was a largeish, rather shaggy man, who spoke in a strange, very deliberate way, while whistling slightly through his lower teeth. After I’d been in his class a few weeks he looked at me thoughtfully and said:
‘Ah . . . Cleeeese . . .’
‘Sir?’
‘Your housssemaster ssays you’re intelligent.’
‘Oh!’
‘. . . I don’t sssee it mysssself . . .’
I wasn’t hurt or surprised. I took his remark as pure information. It was only when I recalled this many years later that I found myself thinking, ‘What was he intendin
g to achieve with this remark?’ And I came to the conclusion that it made him feel better about himself – the same reason people read snide gossip columns. Of course, the relief experienced when anyone (anyone) is put down is very transient, but for people like Hazelton it’s probably better than nothing. His persona seemed very odd to me: it was as though he’d once seen an intellectual, and had spent the rest of his life impersonating him.
Since the tiny scholarship I had won to Clifton was in maths, it was assumed by the authorities from day one that I would specialise in science, so I assumed so, too (Dad had told me that the country was crying out for scientists). There was one subject that would have interested me, had I known it existed, but it wasn’t on the Clifton syllabus, and that was psychology. After all, why waste good schooling time on studying the workings of the human mind, when there were crucial life skills to acquire like trigonometrical calculation or Old Testament history or how to ask a question in Latin if you expected the answer ‘No’? Let’s keep a sense of proportion here. So my introduction to psychology had to come from other sources, notably the BBC, who during my time at Clifton showed a number of thoughtful programmes on the subject. One that I remember particularly vividly showed a volunteer being hypnotised to pour water from a vase of flowers on to the floor. The thing that intrigued me about this was not that he followed orders but that when the hypnotist asked him why he’d done it, he started ‘rationalising’ his behaviour, claiming that he thought he’d seen smoke rising from an unextinguished cigarette stub and had therefore felt he had to take action to extinguish a possible fire. I was also interested by B. F. Skinner and his conditioning of the behaviour of rats and pigeons, and Solomon Asch’s experiments about the need to conform, and later by Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience tests.
Because the workings of the mind seemed to me to be associated with laboratories and experiments, I formed an almost subconscious plan to head towards biology, and once O levels were safely out of the way I asked the science school if I could move to the biology stream for my A levels. They said yes and proceeded to put me in the care of Dr Davie, who allegedly taught botany, and Dr Stubbs, who made the same claim about zoology. Both were believed to be largely nocturnal, but they had been known to appear in the classroom during the day, moving around a little and even making talking noises, though so quietly that you could never be sure that they weren’t just breathing harder than usual. Whoever thought they could control a class should have asked for his money back: the two of them working in tandem couldn’t have kept a class of teddy bears in order if they’d both been given revolvers. From the beginning my classmates and I were mystified about what we were supposed to do: ignore them, try to encourage them to greater efforts, or just to feed them now and again.
Our third main A levels teacher, who took the physics classes, was better – not a lot, but very slightly. He was called Lindsay-Jones (or Flimsy-Bones) and we liked him. No one, however, paid much attention to him, so when, after a few weeks, he gave us an exam, and I saw that I had come fourth, with only twenty-eight per cent, in quite a large class, the writing was on the blackboard.
In a way, I’m quite proud of what I did next. I had enough self-knowledge to know around my sixteenth birthday that I had nowhere near the capacity to direct my own studies and that what I needed if I was to pass my A levels was good teachers. So I went to the authorities and asked to switch to the maths, physics and chemistry stream, and I was then safe, because I had three really good teachers, Mr Liddell for maths, Peter ‘Stinker’ Davies for chemistry and Freddie Mee for physics. The latter two were rather good fun as well, even if Freddie had a touch of the Dolmans about him. And the three of them got me through my A levels by making their subjects clear, and providing discipline and structure – everything that you need when you’re not remotely interested. Bless them!
If work is best defined as ‘What you have to do, but would rather not’, there were two other Clifton activities that qualified: going to chapel and Officer Training Corps (i.e. soldiering for teenagers).
Chapel took up a lot of time. Just as at St Peter’s, there was a Church of England service every workday morning, a fifteen-minute affair which took place in Clifton’s remarkably beautiful chapel. Then, on Sunday, there was a full one-hour marathon, with a proper sermon, and hymn-singing, and crab racing, and fire-eating, and a trampoline act.
To look back on these religious practices from the peak of spiritual perfection that I have now achieved is to wonder, ‘What the fuck did we think we were doing?’ We had all been taught how to behave: to walk more slowly than usual, looking downwards; to sit, fresh-faced and attentive and slightly awed, as we repeated well-known catchphrases of uncertain meaning (‘Lord of hosts’, ‘Son of God’, ‘paschal lamb’, ‘life everlasting’), none of which had ever been explained but which, if spoken with sufficient sincerity, would apparently keep the bogeyman away; then to stand and sing obscure lyrics about the hosts of Gilead creeping around after dark, or rousing military marches like ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ that were contrary to the idea ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’; and then to ask God to do us favours, even though the Lord’s Prayer taught by Jesus specifically says, ‘Thy will be done on earth’, which clearly indicates it isn’t.
Yes, I know it’s easy to make fun of the organised churches, but has it occurred to anyone to wonder why it’s so easy?
What gets my goat is that ‘Religion’ should be the most exciting topic of all. Is there an afterlife? Can we have a real purpose to our lives? How can we love our enemy, when it seems about as easy as levitating? To what extent is self-interest moral? Is there an experience of the divine that we can achieve? All the vital questions have been dumped in favour of half-baked, po-faced rituals which are basically a form of middle-class rain dance. Still, it did give me the chapel scene in The Meaning of Life.
The other ‘work’ took place on Monday afternoons when we dressed up as soldiers and marched around, trying to look enthusiastic that we’d been given the opportunity to exhibit dog-like obedience. But it was useful to me because I realised after about thirty minutes of this that a military life is not an examined one, and so, according to Socrates, is not worth living, especially if you are a fraidy-cat. My sole aims in life have since become: not to fight in a war; not to have to give birth; and not to work in finance. So I deem my life a success (even allowing for Fierce Creatures and my third marriage).
After work there was play. Sports and the arts. God, I loved sports (except for rugby)! They were my raison d’être. If I could have played cricket for Somerset, football for Bristol City and squash for fun, I would have died a happy man at thirty-five. And, although Clifton was very much a rugby-playing school, in my last year, with the help of two friends, John Phillips and Robert Hill, we got soccer started at Clifton by persuading the head groundsman to give us a pitch, out at the playing fields beyond Clifton Suspension Bridge. I’m proud of this achievement.
And in the same year my cricket skills improved: I became quite a good off-spin bowler and got into the First XI team and played at Lord’s in our annual two-day match against Tonbridge. I scored 13 not out in both innings. And . . . Clifton won, for the first time in umpteen years.
As for the arts, the best way to give you an idea of the Clifton College perspective is to present you with a single fact: the painting and drawing teacher was a former Scottish rugby football international. (For a Christmas present one year I bought him a painting-by-numbers set and delivered it by hand.) I missed out on music (too many games to be played), and so I have gone through life utterly ignorant of its grammar. When Sir Thomas Beecham said, ‘The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes’, I know exactly what he meant.
Not that all my life was a total cultural desert. Every Easter term, there was a house play competition, and in my third year, right out of the blue, I was asked to play a small role in the North Town production of a recent hit, Seagulls Over Sorrento. Quite
why I was asked, I don’t know: perhaps it was because my character was called ‘Lofty’. I’ve always remembered the play as a comedy, but apparently it was about a research project concerning a high-explosive torpedo, so perhaps the audience were laughing for the wrong reasons. The following year, North Town put on a production of Doctor Faustus. Two of the boys were ‘interested in acting’ so they got the big parts, Faustus and Mephistopheles. I was given the smaller but crucial role of Lucifer: the Prince of Darkness, the Embodiment of Evil, the Antichrist himself!
I realised, right from the start, that playing Satan gave me a chance to prove myself as a serious, straight actor, but I’m afraid it was a Devil too far. Part of the problem was my tights. Somebody had decided that in order to make my first entrance as terrifying as possible, I should be dressed in starkest black, with a scarlet cloak . . . and tights. Now you know how unmuscular I was, right? My legs were so thin I could have played a flamingo. And yet the director’s vision involved putting me, of all people, in black tights. (It was clear to me, even at that young age, that this was a disastrous choice, but what did I know of the theatrical arts? I left it to the experts.)
On the day of the dress rehearsal, I stood in pitch darkness behind some black drapes, waiting for the cue for my entrance, accompanied by a junior boy whose job was to show me where the gap in the drapes was to be found. Then I heard my cue, the boy parted the curtains, and I strode forward to announce:
‘I am . . . Lu . . . cifer!’
Before I had time to open my mouth, however, I was hit by a wall of laughter that shook the building. It wasn’t just the tights, of course: it was the idea that this spindly twerp could strike terror into people’s hearts, when, instead of frightening the shit out of them, he was more likely to cause them to wet their pants. I’d created an alternative but unintended form of waste disposal.
