LITMIR.BIZ

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size, ‘to be obeyed!’ Oh God, another hard case. Corporal punishment is still with us here in 1980, and it is rumoured that Mr Morgan uses a slipper. Another teacher, Mr Duke, on the other hand, keeps a yellow wooden stick on his desk which he has nicknamed ‘The Yellow Peril’. He seems amiable enough, Mr Duke, telling the class his ‘bad jokes’, although I’m nervous of his Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman jokes because the punchline always seems to be about Irish people being stupid. I think these jokes should be avoided since I consider them the main reason why the IRA on the news are so cross and keep blowing things up. I have no evidence that ‘The Yellow Peril’ is there for deterrent purposes only. For all I know, this guy could at any moment stop telling jokes and just come at me with a fucking stick.

      If that happened, the Guy-Buys couldn’t protect me and neither could Roger. Mark, maybe. If my biggest brother Mark saw someone coming at me with a stick . . . yes, Mark would have an opinion about that.

      *

      Mark pulls up a bar stool and clears his throat. It’s 2009 again, the ‘Let’s Jump Up and Down in a Leotard for Comic Relief’ year, and I’m making a documentary about T. S. Eliot. The BBC have commissioned four vaguely familiar TV faces to make an hour-long programme each about their favourite poems, and how poetry in general has affected their lives. For my episode of My Life in Verse, I’ve chosen ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. I have a brilliant director/producer in Ian McMillan and we’re in the Angel pub in Horncastle, Lincolnshire.

      This was the pub where you could reliably get a pint of ‘snakebite and black’ from about the age of sixteen onwards. This beverage, in case you’ve managed to avoid it, consists of half a pint of cider in the same glass as half a pint of lager, topped off with a squirt of blackcurrant cordial. The cordial is there for people who prefer their vomit purple. Needless to say, I didn’t like snakebite and black. I liked Bacardi and Coke – the alcoholic drink that most approximates to a bag of sweeties.

      The programme has a biographical element and Mark has turned up to be interviewed about my childhood. Ian thanks him for helping me with the film and Mark says lightly, ‘No problem, I’d do anything for him.’ If anyone bats an eyelid at this, I’m not one of them. It’s obviously true. It’s Mark.

      Ian opens with the question, ‘What was Rob like when he was growing up? I mean, if you had to think of one word, then . . .’

      ‘Spoilt.’

      ‘Sorry?’

      ‘Spoilt, I’d say.’ Mark glances at me. I’m looking at a beer mat and have raised two eyebrows in mock innocence. But this rings a loud bell. Ah yes, I think: that was the other one. Not just ‘Robert is shy’ but ‘Robert is spoilt’.

      Nan and Trudy didn’t just cut the crusts off my sandwiches. They also skinned my sausages and took the pips out of grapes. From more distant relations, Mark and Andrew sometimes got joint Christmas cards, while I never had to share so much as an Easter egg, never mind a bedroom. It’s inexplicable to me now that as teenagers my brothers were still sleeping in the same room, while I had one to myself, but that’s the way it was.

      And it feels like I got more treats. The Golf Club days I looked forward to the most were in the holidays when Nan, John and Tru all had a day off. That might mean a trip to the second-best place in the world (after Skegness) – Lincoln! This glittering metropolis was a forty-minute drive away in John’s white Granada and on warm days he would even wind the sun roof open. I would go around the Cash & Carry with him, trying to push the industrial-sized trolley through the transparent plastic curtains into the massive fridge room (the whole room was a fridge) and help (watch) John load up with breeze-block cuboids of cheddar and Red Leicester. Then we’d catch up with ‘the girls’ in Marks and Spencer and Trudy would take me to a bookshop and treat me to a Doctor Who paperback or two. Finally, saving the best till last, we would proceed like kings towards the unsurpassed glamour of lunch at the Berni Inn. A rump steak (fillet was for birthdays) for Little Lord Fauntleroy, followed by another attempt to sip Nan’s extraordinary coffee-with-the-cream-on-top without seriously scorching my whole mouth.

      How did Mum feel about all this ‘spoiling’? She kept an eye on it, but an indulgent one. She would occasionally pick me up on a decline in my manners after a weekend at the Golf Club; or for helping myself to biscuits without asking. But that’s about it.

      In any case, she saved my most outrageous spoiling for herself: from when I was about five up until seven years old, she would read me bedtime stories. With her other boys, she never had the time or freedom. Now she did. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Jungle Book and, my favourite because she did an accent from the American South for the characters, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I don’t know if I grew to love reading because it reminded me of time with Mum, or if I grew closer to Mum because she was the one who read me these great stories.

      It doesn’t matter. We talk a lot about privilege these days and I’m always eager to try to acknowledge my own: an able-bodied white male who has never had any serious brush with physical or mental illness and who is (now) educated, middle class and paid well to do a succession of jobs that I really like. Part of the reluctance to type that last sentence (and I could have gone on) is a reasonable fear of seeming boastful. But the thing is, I’m not boasting because I’m not responsible for virtually any of it. Most of it was luck.

      Privilege is just a posh word for luck. Maybe you remember Martin. Obviously, I do. As we saw, it’s more than likely that, for me to be born in the first place, someone else had to die. So I think I know a thing or two about luck. I could dedicate this book to Martin but that would be the point at which a quiet gratitude turns into posturing sentimentality. There were nights in my late teens, wandering home from the pub when I lived with Dad, when I would look up at the stupefying beauty of a cloudless Lincolnshire night sky and thank the stars . . . thank my luckiest star – Martin.

      But then, I was pissed. Sentimentality is a real emotion, plus something unhealthy: in this case, five pints of Carling Black Label. The truth is I didn’t know the poor kid, and he had no intention of dying. I thank him anyway.

      So – the thing or two I know about luck. Thing number one: you should do your best to notice luck so that you don’t accidentally take credit for it. Thing number two: luck is not your fault.

      And when it comes to colossal strokes of good fortune (and there’s a whopper coming up at the end of this chapter), it starts here – it starts with having a family who loves you and someone who inspires you to read. Not because reading makes you smart, although it helps, but because to involve yourself in a story is to imagine what it’s like to be someone else. Generally, boys aren’t much encouraged to do that.

      Susan and Lucy in grief for their dead king, the great lion; Charlie, eking out his year-long ration of Wonka Bar; Emil, alone on a train (before he meets his detectives), pricking his finger on the safety pin; the Doctor, losing his mind on Castrovalva; his companion Tegan, longing for home; Luke Skywalker, looking for adventure in a twin sunset – together with Mum or alone in my bedroom, stories were a way to reach distant places. But also, and without my noticing, a way to reach distant people. That’s where I really caught a break. I don’t mean I suddenly had miraculous powers of empathy; I just mean that empathy had a chance.

      Martin and stories – my lucky stars, my twin suns.

      *

      I walk to junior school on my own. It’s only about ten minutes and Derek shows me a back way which avoids crossing most of the roads. This suits me because I now get to avoid Derek giving me one of his sloppy kisses when he drops me off. One day, one such car-based farewell was witnessed by a friend (Tellis again, in his pre-Shittylegs pomp). As Derek’s Pacer X departed, Matthew said, ‘I know who your girlfriend is, Robert – y’dad!!!’ This was annoying not just because I knew it was unusual (and shameful) for any dad to be physically affectionate, but also because Derek was not my dad. It never occurred to me to call him anything other than ‘Derek’, or sometimes ‘Des’.

      That’s not exactly what he wanted. I said earlier that Mum had only two cards to play: her charm and beauty.

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