The nadir of tedium for the casual visitor to Macc would occur around the second week of June: the Barnaby holiday. The entire town (yes everybody, every shop, every pub, every mill) would shut up shop for two weeks and descend on Blackpool for fun, frolics and warm beer. If you were unfortunate enough to find yourself stuck in Macclesfield during the Barnaby holiday, watching the traffic lights change would have been the sole leisure activity.
Luckily for my father, he lived to work. His only leisure activity was the weekend football match or athletics meeting. He helped organise the Central School Old Boys football team, which would take him away at weekends to matches, occasionally with a reluctant son in tow. Another of his soccer-related duties involved cleaning the team’s dirty strips, a duty he press-ganged my mum into.
My mother, naturally, resented this and, though there were never arguments or rows, there were tense silences and a frosty atmosphere at times.
2
HOME AND ABROAD
Ah, the thirst for knowledge leads to one place and so it was with a great deal of reluctance that I was deposited each weekday at Mrs Berrington’s Preparatory School for Boys and Girls. It’s fair to say that me and education have never really got on. Mrs Berrington had one idea and I had another. I wanted to write with my left hand: this was not allowed. I wanted to write backwards: this apparently was madness. I would run away and hide at playtime and refuse to surrender when called. This was too much for Mrs B.
The school had what you would call a rebrand today, and became Mrs Berrington’s Preparatory School for Girls. Problem solved. I was out. No way was I wearing a skirt.
Mrs Berrington did give me my first go at playing music, though. I fancied the tambourine; it had those jingly things and looked cool. But apparently it was too easily damaged and I was demoted to the sturdier triangle, which I clanged with gusto whether the tune needed it or not.
Amanda went there after me and did very well. She was a girl and didn’t mind wearing a skirt, which fitted right in with Mrs B’s target demographic. She was also bright. She immediately grasped that writing was what the right hand was for, and unlike me had no interest in gluing things together badly.
* * *
I started going to Christ Church Primary School in 1963. I got through Classes 1 and 2 of the infants division without too much heartache. Of course, there was the odd encounter with the slipper but there you go, that was life. No Childline for us then. Getting a hiding from the teacher’s slipper or even worse, the headmaster’s cane, was one of life’s hazards for the boys at my school. The girls were spared and got lines instead. Probably something like ‘Write out 100 times: “I must not talk to Stephen in class.”’
Christ Church was, as you may have gathered, a mixed-sex school. Despite the girls showing little interest in comics and chewing-gum card collecting, we all got on with each other well. I was used to being around girls, having a sister of my own.
As Amanda was excelling and generally being good at Mrs Berrington’s, she didn’t join me at Christ Church. I think I had just as many female friends as boys – I wasn’t shy. I would go to their houses for tea, although they were never allowed to visit mine.
If there was one thing I hated about Christ Church it was the daily compulsory milk-drinking routine. Every morning without fail the small bottles of white fluid would appear complete with tiny paper straws. I am not even sure it was proper milk. The sparrows seem to know something was up and never attacked the bottle tops. The milk certainly didn’t taste like the same stuff you’d put on your Ricicles for breakfast and was more chalky water. I held a deep-seated fear that it might contain tadpoles or some other living organism, which must have come from some classroom rumour.
I would do anything to avoid the milk ration, but the only ploy that would work was to get myself appointed to the post of Milk Monitor on a regular basis. I was always first up with the arm when it was time to volunteer for the task in the morning. I am sure my enthusiasm must have seemed a bit suspicious, but once I had the job it was a simple matter of losing a bottle, either by kindly giving some poor soul an extra dose (there was the odd one who did actually like the stuff) or, more successfully, doing a bit of a switcheroo while counting the stuff out of the crate and making sure I ended up with an empty bottle.
If we didn’t have it, though, we would all die of rickets – anyway, that was the answer I got when I asked casually, ‘So, why do we have this free milk then, miss? Can they not sell it?’ This was literally a schoolboy error. It must have alerted the authorities to the fact that my keenness for milk distribution was a ploy as I was never chosen again.
I was never top of the class. My school reports usually ended with ‘Must try harder.’ I never did. The problem was my lack of patience. I wanted to get to the end of whatever I was doing as quickly as possible. Anything that required thinking about, like maths, bored me – it took too long and I would only get the answer wrong anyway, so why bother? I loved reading, though, comics especially. I’d read anything even if I couldn’t really understand it. I’d always have a go. One book that we had to read at school that I really loved was Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, a really scary story with a local setting. It must have done wonders for the Alderley Edge Tourist Board – this was before the footballers and toffs in Bentleys moved in.
So while I wasn’t brilliant at school, I was doing all right, but I was rubbish at football. My dad could never understand that – surely anyone could play football? That aside, I made a lot of friends and avoided any really serious trouble.
It all went a bit wrong one summer morning. I was in Class 3 juniors so it’d be 1967 or 1968. Every morning we would troop into the hall for assembly. Stand there and sing the hymn with the aid of the words printed on the large flipchart-type crib sheets. Listen to a bit of a reading about how great Jesus was. Then close our eyes for a spot of praying to the Lord above. During the hymn-singing section of the performance my head started feeling a bit odd, kind of buzzy, and the letters on the board started to look a bit unusual, sort of wobblier than before and a bit more colourful. This wasn’t right. I was starting to feel all clammy, there was a funny metallic noise coming from somewhere and it was a bit like the feeling I got when I overdid the gluing with the Airfix.
I got on with the praying, eyes clenched shut in the hope that divine intervention might sort it out. Mr Nichols, the headmaster, spoke the final ‘Amen’ and I opened my eyes, but it was still dark. I closed and opened them again. Still black. The lad on my right, eager to get to class, was nudging me to get a move on so I started shuffling to my left, hoping to follow the next in line. Bit hard when you’re sightless, and somehow I managed to bump into a teacher.
‘Watch where you’re going, Stephen.’
‘I think I’ve gone blind, sir,’ I replied as the metallic ringing noise reached a crescendo. I fell to the floor unconscious.
When I finally came to, I was lying on the floor in the upstairs cloakroom surrounded by worried adults, still feeling very strange. Although my vision was back, there seemed to be odd blue haloes dancing around everything. Well at least I hadn’t thrown up. The ultimate embarrassment. Perhaps the school milk dodging had not been such a good idea and this was a sign of the onset of rickets. I was sent off to the doctor to find out.
‘Probably just a one-off occurrence, growing pains most likely, nothing to worry about.’
But it wasn’t just a one-off. It kept happening, sometimes accompanied by a really strange sensation. It’s hard to describe but it was as if everything was a drawing on a sheet of paper; there was no depth to anything, as though the whole world had gone two-dimensional – like a cartoon but more Captain Pugwash than Tom and Jerry. It still makes me feel weird just thinking about it.
Trying to find the upside to these losses of consciousness led me to suspect that they might in fact be some kind of superpower. A power that, if I could harness it, would give me unlimited time off school and a life of leis
ure. It didn’t quite work. Try as I might, I could not keel over at will. Whenever I blacked out it would be always at the worst possible time or in the worst possible place. Sometimes both.
So I got sent back to the doctor, he sent me to another doctor and then another who sent me to some sort of specialist. He took blood tests, brain tests, all sorts of tests. I popped into Parkside for some of them – that was interesting. But none of this testing was getting anywhere so there would have to be more testing somewhere else.
The upshot of these investigations was that it was probably something brain-related.
‘It’s probably something mental, all in the mind,’ was the doctor’s verdict.
‘Well, he has always been highly strung,’ my mother replied. There was that string again.
As it turned out, I would have these occasional episodes for much of the rest of my childhood. I would eventually end up being sent to see a psychologist, then a hypnotist (honest!), then a psychologist again. This was not good. Seeing a shrink at the age of ten and I hadn’t even started smoking and drinking yet.
The closest I ever came to actually flying a plane.
I looked forward to the summer holidays. Those five weeks that seemed to stretch out forever were a chance to try and escape the inexorable gravitational pull of Macclesfield and Dad’s office, and to spend some time together as a family. What were we thinking? First Blackpool, naturally, then further afield to Torquay. Fawlty Towers had yet to open so we went to inspect the remains of the oil slick from the SS Torrey Canyon and paid a visit to Dartmoor prison. It was grim – both the prison and Dad’s driving. On one excursion I recall Mum threw up on my head. We certainly knew how to have a good time.
Though it has to be said not entirely conventional, travels with my father would frequently involve being taken to inspect a town’s lavatorial workmanship. He was keen on observing the local brass and sanitary ware. At the time, I could see nothing remotely dodgy in this. It was his occupation, after all, and it was a very different age. But a father and son inspecting the latest non-concussive taps and state-of-the-art urinals would in today’s climate be viewed as very dodgy indeed.
For a couple of years our holiday destinations were slightly more exotic, though, before we returned to the safer bets of Paignton, Pwllheli and Llandudno.
One summer in the early sixties we set off from Gawsworth Road on a driving holiday arranged by my father. Our destination was the delightful French town of Dinard. On the roads of England and Wales, he was a reasonably accomplished driver. But once we crossed the Channel on the Brittany ferry things began to come unstuck. His grasp of the French language was about as good as his son’s and my mother’s navigational skills were not exactly on a par with a homing pigeon. The meaning of road signs was a constant worry.
On a typical interaction between driver and navigator, he asked, ‘What’s that sign say, Hilda?’
My mother, consulting the well-thumbed pages of the yellow AA guide to driving on the continent, replied, ‘Chausay Deformay, Cliff.’
‘What? Beware of deformed horses? Are you sure that’s what it says?’
‘Yes, Chausay Deformay, that’s what it says here.’
Time and again we would miss the turning for Dinard as Clifford forgot which side of the road he was meant to be driving on, while me and Amanda then spent the rest of the journey looking from the back seat for evidence of the poor mutated animals. They would, we guessed, most likely have been injured by previous English motorists.
We stayed in a small hotel overlooking the bay. It felt like time had ground to a halt there around about 1921. I was fascinated by the birdcage elevator but I struggled to reach the buttons.
I shared a room with Amanda, which felt very strange. I loved opening and closing the green wooden shutters on the windows with their tiny faux balconies outside and watching the boats going to and fro across the turquoise waves to Saint-Malo.
Our delightful sojourn was short-lived. On the second night my parents returned from their nightly trip to the bar for, they said, a barrel of beer and found Amanda fast asleep and me in a distressed state. I was hysterical. The mothball-scented room, it seemed to me, had been invaded by a swarm of hallucinatory butterflies, fluttering menacingly in flashing colours. I was inconsolable and, as it turned out, running a fever.
The following day my father was dispatched with me in tow to find a doctor. I r emember being dragged groggily about the town as my father asked, ‘Ou est the medicine?’
We were directed through a gate into an open courtyard and there, at one end, was an illuminated green cross above an open door.
Believing his quest was at an end, my father dragged me in. I remember that along one wall there sat a row of women who were very obviously in the later stages of pregnancy. Now, in the course of our walking tour of Dinard, my skin had begun to erupt in virulent red spots. My father, more concerned with quizzing locals and thus locating the local physician, had failed to notice this fact. Unfortunately the large woman who sat behind the wooden desk had not. She took one look at me and shrieked, ‘La rougeole! La rougeole! Allez, allez, allez!’ as she left her seat and bustled me and Clifford back out into the street as swiftly as possible.
The now horrified mothers, understandably alarmed at the spotty, infectious child being dangerously close to them, tried to move as far away from us as possible. We were flung out onto the street and berated with what I can only guess was the French for ‘Are you fucking mad?’ The ante-natal receptionist’s diagnosis, it turned out, was correct. I was suffering from the measles.
This was terrible! Why did I have to get ill on holiday? In the normal course of events measles was a sure-fire two weeks off school. Instead, I was shunned, isolated in the hotel bedroom for days – confined to bed as outside the sun shone. The sound of children playing and laughing on the beach outside my open window mocked me. For entertainment, I resorted to counting how many little boats crossed over to Saint-Malo and back every day. Like chalk marks on the wall marking time. No one from the hotel would enter the room – food was left on a tray outside the door – and the staff wanted me gone. The sooner the better. I was bad for business.
Eventually, and I can only assume after consuming another barrel of beer, my parents came up with a plan. My mother would take up people-smuggling. I was to be disguised, dressed from head to foot in black with my face covered with a cravat, a hat and the largest pair of sunglasses my mother could find. It was a good look, I thought, a bit like the sort of thing Ilya Kuryakin or Napoleon Solo would adopt if they were doing a spot of breaking-and-entering. My mother, Amanda and me were dropped off by Clifford after a marathon drive to Le Touquet and flown back to Lydd on a BUA Bristol Britannia – my first trip on a plane. I have to admit I still wonder how on earth Dad managed to make all the travel arrangements successfully.
Uncle Johnny was waiting at Lydd and drove Mum and her by now two sick children home. My father, meanwhile, sedately motored himself home, stopping over at Mont-Saint-Michel for a couple of days’ sightseeing.
A year or two later, we took the ferry to Jersey in another attempt to have an exotic holiday.
‘It’s like being abroad but everyone speaks English,’ Dad explained.
I liked Jersey instantly. It had been invaded by the Germans during the war and was a cornucopia of bunkers and tunnels and abandoned underground hospitals. It was my sort of place. We stayed in Bouley Bay at the Water’s Edge Hotel, which was also my sort of place. The hotel apparently had no idea of the laws governing the sale of alcohol to young children. Encouraged to no small extent by my slightly giddy parents, Amanda and I would overindulge in the consumption of sickly-sweet wines – La Flora Blanche and Barsac. Now, the more educated among you will of course know that these syrupy beverages are dessert wines to be consumed at the end of a meal. We didn’t care so long as it was cold and started knocking it back with the soup. We usually finished off with a Tia Maria or two. An excellent introduction to the t
orment of the hangover.
It was at the Water’s Edge that I had my first encounter with fame, celebrity and, to be brutally honest, an evil, perverted monstrosity.
The steep winding road on the approach to Bouley Bay is frequently used in the field of motorsport that is hill climbing. The idea, I think, is that the car that gets to the top of the slope in the shortest time is declared the winner. The challenge seems to attract all sorts of vehicles (and people) and on the occasion in question it was an under-eighteens’ go-karting event that was in preparation. The bay’s jetty was crowded with the tiny buzzing buggies and onlookers. Not wanting to miss out, I dragged the rest of the Morrises along the quay for a closer look. The sound and smell of the tiny engines was intoxicating. This holiday was getting better and better.
Like a refugee from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I began to harass my father.
‘Dad, can I have a go? Do you think they’ll let me have a go? Dad! Ask if they’ll give me a go. Go on Dad, pleeeeeze.’
Clifford, never backward in coming forward as they say, struck up a conversation with one of the race stewards. As luck would have it, one of the carts had broken down and needed moving. If I could steer the thing, the steward would push. I jumped in and took the wheel. Life in Jersey must be amazing – I could be a racing driver and a drunk!
As I swerved the little buggy round the corner off the quay, I spotted a small throng of young people gathered around a man with a shock of long white hair. Whatever next? For it was none other than pop celebrity and DJ Jimmy Savile himself dressed in bright turquoise paisley-patterned robes with a large silver crucifix around his neck like some poptastic monk. Now the world knows what an unspeakable bastard Savile was, but in 1967 everyone thought he was some sort of saint. I immediately lost interest in my new-found career as a racing driver and ran off after Amanda to tell her what I’d seen.
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