by Simon Pegg
Which means it can only be Wellington. Who’d have thought that little pipsqueak would be capable of boning such a hot French chick? I’m amazed. Actually, I’m not, it’s always the nerdy-looking guy who whips his pants off in the changing rooms to reveal what appears to be a German sausage in a bird’s nest. I see it all the time in the showers after rugby. One week the guy next to you is a fly half, a week later he’s a prop forward. Not that I’m looking . . . oh, who am I kidding? Of course I’m looking. It’s like a vintage-car rally in the boys’ changing room. Everyone’s checking out each other’s junk and pretending not to be impressed.
It just seems to me the change happens so quickly. But when? I’d like to know, because right now mine still looks like something you’d find on top of a seafood cocktail (close your ears, Laura). Do you wake up in the morning like David Banner in the woods, to discover your shredded pants next to you? I mean, puberty’s insane, isn’t it? Am I right, guys? Girls, I can’t speak for you, I’ve never even seen a vagina. Well, I have but it was about five years ago and I don’t really want to get into that now. Which is coincidentally what I said at the time . . .
What I mean is, I don’t get to see what goes on in the girls’ changing room. Not since they blocked up that hole in the boiler-room wall. I’m kidding, I’m kidding . . . It’s still there!
Waiting for puberty is like waiting for the postman to bring you something fun. Every morning you leap out of bed and check if it’s there, only to be disappointed. Difference is, it’s not the Incredible Hulk Weekly you’re waiting for, it’s body hair, a deeper voice and a hairy little monster, and no, I’m not still talking about the Wombles.
You’ve been a great audience, thanks so much for listening, we’ve got a great show lined up for you this afternoon. Next up, Erica and Meredith will be singing ‘Frère Jacques’.
I’ve been Simon Pegg, thanks for listening . . . goodnight!
Mr Calway would have removed me from the makeshift stage and exacted swift justice before I’d even got into the stuff about Tomsk’s tiny cock, and he read the Guardian (Mr Calway, not Tomsk. Tomsk would probably have read a tabloid. I should tour this stuff round schools, it’s golden!).
Despite the lack of any substance, my nostalgia routine played well with my peers, probably due to the cocksure delivery and the fact that the mere mention of Wombles brings a smile to anyone’s face. In fact, we were so pleased with our little revue, we decided to transfer it to the sports hall where it would be performed for the rest of the school.
The Monday after we returned from the wilds of Welsh Bicknor, all bonded and different as if from combat, the school assembled in two shifts to witness our variety show. First up were the second- and third-years (or Years 8 and 9 as I believe they are called now). This was what comics often refer to as a ‘tough crowd’. The second-years had just advanced into a position of power, having spent an entire year as the most vulnerable and disrespected group in the school’s social infrastructure. It’s the way of every school and no doubt always will be. No longer the weakest in (micro)society, the newly promoted second-years, empowered by their status, replicate the disdain heaped upon them as first-years and inflict it on those who have replaced them.
This would actually later backfire on me in a karmic fashion once I had made it to the heady heights of the second-year, when I selected the wrong whelp to push around in the corridor. While lined up outside a classroom, a caterpillar of sheepish-looking first-years filed past us, clearly worried and uncomfortable, much to our smug, old-hand amusement. I singled out one skinny little candidate and shoved him against the wall as he shuffled past. He resisted me slightly, which I didn’t expect. First-years were supposed to automatically kowtow to their superiors – it was the law of the blackboard jungle and resistance was rare. I laughed it off and just about hung on to my dignity as my victim stalked away, scowling.
Over the next few years, puberty hit this boy like a freight train. He literally doubled in size, and not just in terms of height. A time-lapse film of his physical development over just twelve months would have been a ghastly spectacle, reminiscent of Jekyll and Hyde. He became muscular, almost misshapen, and sprouted so much hair, it looked as though he had been covered in glue and rolled in the dog basket. Even more worryingly, he grew in status. He became one of the hardest boys in the school.
It was only a matter of time before my former victim decided to act out his revenge on his one-time tormentor. It started quietly enough in the corridors between lessons, where he would often go out of his way to shoulder me into the wall, pretending he hadn’t seen me but making it very obvious that it had been intentional. His recollection of my unprovoked shove had not been lost amid the swelling folds of his brain as I had hoped. I was clearly being dished up a revenge that, after three years, was still being served ice cold.
The shoves soon became more and more frequent and I began to plan my passage between classrooms specifically to avoid him. In the end, he exacted his final vengeance under the fabricated pretext that I was hanging around with his girlfriend. It’s true, I was friendly with the older girl he was dating, but there was nothing going on. I had hoped her friendship might have eased the tension between Bigfoot and me, but in the end it was used as an excuse for violence.
I was sat in the cloak bay at lunchtime with a couple of friends when he rounded the corner, immediately cutting off my escape from the cul-de-sac of hooks in which I had trapped myself. He asked me if I had been having it away with his missus, to which I responded in a panicky negative. He then walloped me, rebounding my skull off the wall behind me. I remember feeling a vague sense of disappointment that he had initiated his assault with such a flimsy accusation, even as his fist slammed into my forehead. A furtive little henchman encouraged his boss to finish me off, but the big kid said it was pointless because I wouldn’t fight back. He was absolutely right, there was no way I was going to enter into physical combat with this behemoth – it would have been suicide.
I’d only had one fight before and that was when I was nine, with the boy who turned out to be my second cousin, and it had thoroughly traumatised me. I had called him out after a dispute over a game of rounders and met him on ‘the green’ after school. During the scrappy struggle, it occurred to me that we weren’t just trading blows in some noble pugilistic ceremony, this boy was actually trying to hurt me, any way he could. My eyes filled with tears at the sudden horror of it all and I called a halt to proceedings, conceding defeat.
He was tougher than me, from a more physically oppressive background (his mother had once punched the headmaster), so he was more equipped to deal with the situation, although I think he was as relieved as me to see the skirmish end. Four years later, there was no way I was about to reprise the experience with somebody twice my size, so my long-time persecutor stalked off scowling, leaving me humiliated but relieved that it was over. He met me outside a classroom later that afternoon and asked if I was going to report him. I mustered up courage enough to say ‘no’, even managing to add a grumpy disdain, although in truth I just wanted the trouble to end.
A few months later he got into an altercation with Martin (the other school nutter) about who was the hardest in the school and found himself on the end of a punch so forceful, it dislodged his eyeball. I experienced only a glimmer of Schadenfreude. Eventually, relations between us thawed, although we never became friends. I was walking towards the sports hall in my fifth year and felt a hockey stick slide between my legs, threatening to pull back against my plums. I spun round with a tremendous ‘fuck off’ and found myself face to face with my old enemy. He laughed and didn’t take offence. By the time I left Brockworth Comprehensive, we had even exchanged semi cordialities, something of a relief, since the threat of his physical presence had never fully gone away.
Anyhow, I had all this to come as I stood before the daunting audience of second- and third-years about to deliver my children’s TV routine that had had them rolling in the aisles at We
lsh Bicknor. The routine was met with a bemused silence from the audience who regarded me as if I was nuts. The biggest laugh I got was when I panicked and activated my new digital watch so that ‘Scotland the Brave’ rang out from behind my back, signalling it was time for me to leave the stage.
Only slightly disheartened, I stepped out before an even more intimidating audience of fourth- and fifth-year students but luckily found them to be far more appreciative. The social gulf between us was such that I appeared small and cute and eligible for the sort of affectionate patronising that children are so quick to level at their juniors. Their appreciation spurred me on and the performance went really well – I even improvised a little and scored extra laughs. As a result I found an ‘in’ with a group of fourth-year boys for whom I became a sort of humorous pet.
I would find them at their hang-out spot during lunch break and make them laugh with various impressions and silly improvisations. One of them in particular seemed to relish our comic sparring sessions and would set me up and encourage me. He became a friend who I later missed; he seemed to get me, where the others just found me a bit weird and annoying.
The faint disdain I had experienced from the second- and third-years stayed with me for a while. I decided to reinvent myself as a cool, stand-offish type who didn’t get involved in school drama productions and pushed younger kids around in corridors, a decision I eventually regretted on both counts. The annual school production rolled around a few months into my first year at Brockworth and, rather than sign up, I decided to contemptuously dismiss it as the stuff of poofters and girls and hang out with other boys for whom disdain was a badge of honour. Lee Beard didn’t. Lee had finally shaken off his Perthes’ and burst from his calipers like Forrest Gump, becoming one of the most enthusiastic and active boys in the school.
Lee and I had been separated by the house system at Brockworth Comp and didn’t hang out as much as we used to. I had retained Sean Jeffries and a few other boys from Castle Hill in the sorting and made new friends who had come from other schools in the area, like Nick May, who eventually became my best friend after we had both left Brockworth behind, and Darius Pocha, a curiously androgynous, highly intelligent boy who professed to being bisexual and was given to rampant fantasism. Darius and I had bonded over a love of cinema at Welsh Bicknor and it wasn’t until a few years later that I realised he hadn’t seen half the films he had claimed to have seen. He did, however, elaborately reinvent the plot lines of films such as Mad Max and Mad Max 2, piecing together details he had read from various magazines and the back of VHS boxes. I seem to recall being suspicious of his knowledge and matching him with a made-up film of my own, which featured a werewolf squashing a human eyeball between finger and thumb. I thought it sounded pretty cool.
In our third year, Darius sombrely informed me that he had a month to live, having swallowed some toxic waste which was slowly poisoning him. It sounds outlandish but I’d actually been with him at the time. We were playing near my home on one of those legendary rope swings that inhabit almost every young boy’s childhood. The rope was originally suspended by some brave soul on a thick branch, ten or so feet above a brook, in an area referred to by the local children as ‘the bunker’. The area was so called because of a large brick structure, with sealed iron doors, engaged in some purpose that remained ever a mystery to us. A thick concrete wall extended from its side, tall enough to step on to from one side, a sheer drop to the brook on the other. The rope hung just within reach where the wall crumbled away down the bank, so that a swinger could launch himself off at speed into a fifty-foot arc, with the option of letting go at three points of differing difficulty. The buzz was particularly keen when the waters of the brook rose and churned with great force after a heavy rainfall, and it was on one such occasion that Darius fell off.
It happened in the sort of slo-mo with which one can so often recall misfortune. It is similar to the acute presence of mind that slows time during the actual event; allowing you to comprehend what is about to happen, to brace for impact, to duck, to reach out. Unfortunately, I was unable to help for two good reasons. Firstly, I was on the opposite bank to Darius so there was simply nothing I could do, and secondly, I was laughing my arse off.
Now, I wouldn’t say Darius was dyspraxic at that age, but he was definitely very gangly. He had that teenage physicality of someone not entirely adept at inhabiting his own shape. As if put in charge of a vehicle he wasn’t qualified to drive, Darius was plainly still getting used to his new, taller, fuller form and did not yet have all the controls down pat. He let go of the rope at the most treacherous point, where only seasoned swingers were able to negotiate the awkward drop on to the small bank. Inevitably, he landed badly and, with an expression of extraordinary concern, toppled into the brook, disappearing beneath the swirling currents. I was spastic with laughter on the other bank; doubled up with helplessness.
I wanted to assist in his rescue, I genuinely did, but I was worried that if I uncrossed my legs I would wet myself. He surfaced almost immediately, gasping for air, and scrambled up on to the bank. Meanwhile, I was still rolling around on the floor in fits of hysterical giggles, my throat hoarse, my vision blurred by tears. It was by far the funniest thing I had seen since Mr Miller fartsploded the table in Class 5, and I felt awful. I actually kicked myself, physically drove one foot into the side of the other leg to try and curb my mirth in the face of Darius’s misfortune.
Later that day, having got Darius dried, dressed in some ill-fitting clothing and sent home, I cried, unable to contain my guilt at finding my friend’s misfortune so funny. I felt genuine and heartfelt remorse and in retrospect could not locate the ‘funny’ in his extreme panic and discomfort. A few weeks later Darius summoned myself and Nick May into the boys’ toilets and delivered the news of his impending death. He told us that the water he had ingested as a result of his fall had contained a number of lethal toxic chemicals that were to be his undoing.
A month passed and Darius remained chipper, and for some reason we never asked why he wasn’t dead. He still remains chipper as far as I know. I’m sure he contracted some sort of parasite or stomach upset, the possible conclusion of which may have been terminal, in the same way that flu or asthma are terminal, but I don’t think his life was ever really in any danger. Given to the occasional Walter Mittyesque tales, I’m pretty sure Darius was just exacting revenge on me for the humiliation he felt in the face of my cackling hysteria, and I don’t blame him. We remained close until I left school. He was excellent company, and a shared love of modern music nourished our friendship through hours of sitting in his bedroom reading Smash Hits and playing his Casio VL-Tone keyboard.
He possessed an acute natural intelligence, which informed his undeniable wit and inspired me to try and match him. He wrote the word ‘coitus’ in biro on the wall next to his desk as a sly dig at the crass graffiti that adorned the desks, walls and textbooks, and in a moment of uncharacteristic laddishness had once impressed me no end with this exchange with an attractive female teacher, attempting to shoo us out of the cloak bays.
Attractive Teacher: Can I have you outside please?
Darius: You can have me anywhere you like, Miss.
Crude, I know, but he was thirteen and political correctness was barely even fashionable in the early eighties, let alone common practice. It was the speed at which he processed the comeback that impressed me. Also, and importantly, it was Darius who introduced me to the comic 2000 AD, for which I will always love him.
So it was that I developed new friendships away from those I had cultivated at junior school, and although Lee Beard and I would end up being friends into our forties, I didn’t see him much that first year. I heard about him though. Lee, being the outgoing and confident young boy that he was, had auditioned for the school play in our first year and won the part of a band conductor, which he apparently performed to much appreciation all round. Lee’s glory pricked at the impulses I had attempted to suppress with my reinven
ted cool and I resolved to give apathy the heave-ho and audition for the next production. This turned out to be in the inter-house drama competition, which was an annual event, pitting house against house in a one-act-play festival, staged over the course of a school day and adjudicated by a local luminary.
Coopers’ effort that year was a reworking of the Greek myth concerning Telemachus and his search for a family. A third-year boy called Wayne (who eventually became known for being able to execute a particularly difficult break-dancing move called the helicopter) played the eponymous hero. The story revolved around a young man on a quest, trying out various possible families along the way. I played one of the parental suitors, a sort of upper-class military type with a comically plummy voice. The role required me to wear a fake moustache, which I ended up having to hold on with my finger when the spirit gum I had borrowed from my mum’s theatrical make-up kit proved ineffective.
The character got a laugh and I had fun with the role, but when the adjudicator made his comments at the end of the competition, he focused on the failure of my moustache to remain on my face rather than on my efforts as an actor, which was hardly constructive, I mean, come on, tell it to Screen Face.12 Nevertheless, it was a heady time for me, and the thrill of the extra-curricular activity was made all the more intense by the presence of my sixth-form crush, Laura Bot, who as luck would have it was playing my wife.
There was something so exhilarating about hanging out with my fellow pupils in the dining halls, getting ready to perform. The buzz was palpable and the usual barriers that separate the year groups, creating the traditional social hierarchies, were non-existent. Theatrical types often wax lyrical about the familial nature of theatre but there’s definitely something in that hackneyed gush. Even the hard kids who had opted for the drama competition as a skive became approachable, almost affectionate, as we pulled together in the name of our designated local hill. Just to be hanging out with Laura again was reason enough to participate for me. She had vanished back into the impenetrable sixth-form block on our return from Welsh Bicknor and I only saw her now and again, between lessons or during breaks, when sometimes she would blow me heart-stopping kisses or administer sweet-smelling hugs. To her I was the little first-year boy/puppy who offered her limitless adoration and loyalty; to me she was a woman, an exotic goddess to be worshipped and desired. That is, until she did something that shattered my opinion of her forever and gave me a sensation I understood to be something like heartbreak.
