Authors: Alan Carr
I remember when my father was away at a match, asking my mother how she met him. She says she was sitting in the stands at Dartford Football Club watching a match where Dad was playing. When Dad scored a goal, he ran over to the stand and pulled a moonie at the supporters.
‘What did you think about that?’ I asked her.
‘I thought, “What an idiot!”’
Well, I guess that’s an icebreaker in anyone’s book. Most romances start with a furtive glance across a crowded room, not by exposing yourself to your loved one. Anyway, my mother not only fell in love with that idiot, she married him.
Dad must have been doing something right at Weymouth, because he was asked to become manager of Dartford, so not for the last time in our lives we were on the move. Now when you’re poor, having a beach on your doorstep and bright, delicious sunshine for what felt like 24 hours a day can take the edge off having empty pockets.
Dartford sadly didn’t have any of these things going for it; the tunnel is a wonderful man-made phenomenon, admittedly, and the Thames can be a majestic thing up by the Houses of Parliament, but down near Dartford it looked as grey and weary as the people.
As it happens, we weren’t there for long because Dad became manager of Nuneaton Town Football Club, so yet again we were on the move. Dad, Mum and I journeyed up the M1 in the Mazda. We stayed in Northampton instead of Nuneaton due to the fact Dad had played there in the Sixties and thought it would be a nice place to live.
He was right, it was nice, just nice. Not a little bit naughty, just nice. We moved onto the Moulton Leys estate and lived in a house in a cul-de-sac that overlooked a cornfield. The cul-de-sac was a perfect example of suburbia: young families, pets, people washing their cars every Sunday. We even had our own peeping Tom. He would walk his dog at night and throw a ball up the drives, go to get it and then try to catch a glimpse of a woman through the parted curtains. We knew this because we saw him most nights.
In fact, Mum and the woman across the road, Sue, tried to catch him out one night. Sue left her curtains open and her lights on to lure the pervert while Mum kept our house in darkness and looked out of the window to catch him red-eyed. After a few seductive curtain twitches from Sue had proved fruitless, Mum peered out a bit more closely, but it was only when she looked down that she realised he was actually peeping through her own window. She screamed and he ran off, which left us terrified but strangely excited. Mum quickly
rang up Sue and they laughed about it together nervously, feeling triumphant and yet a little bit dirty.
Those were some of the things that Mum and I would get up to whilst Dad was away – stupid, silly things that would make us laugh. They say the devil makes work for idle hands, but he also dabbles in finding work for skint hands. If we’d been able to afford to go to the cinema, we wouldn’t have had to amuse ourselves by capturing local sex pests like some kind of Hetty Wainthropp. The following Christmas, I got an Atari and that kept Mum and me busy till all hours playing PacMan, Space Invaders and Wizard of War.
I used to support Nuneaton Town Football Club and, believe it or not, I used to look forward to the matches, even though they were an unfashionable non-League side. I even used to go to the training nights, where I would have the whole football ground to myself and sit in whatever seat I wanted. I would even climb up the goal nets and splash about in the huge players’ baths. I could do anything I wanted because Dad was the boss. I would obviously knacker myself out on those nights because I remember lying on the back seat of Dad’s car with his sheepskin over me, driving back to Northampton and feeling very safe drifting off along those country lanes.
Mohammed Ali once came to Nuneaton Town Football Club when I was little. It’s true, it’s true – I’ve got photos and everything. The chairman, by some amazing wheeler dealing, got the boxing legend to officiate the ground. I didn’t know who he was back then. I knew he was a boxer, but his fame had sort of passed me by. What I do remember is that he was
upbeat, said hello to everyone and took the piss out of Dad’s baldness, with Dad laughing along jovially. I remember him shaking slightly, which of course we now know was the beginning of Parkinson’s. I just wish that at the time I’d understood the importance of meeting such an icon. I wonder if he feels the same about me now that I’m on the telly. I guess I’ll never know.
We were getting quite a name for ourselves in our little cul-de-sac, mainly because we had brought a cat with us from Dartford, Big Puss. We were never inventive with names in our house, and if we’re honest, cats don’t do anything anyway, so Big Puss was quite an apt name. He was a big puss, just a big fat puss. And vicious. Ever since he’d moved to Northampton he’d been terrorising people and cats the length and breadth of the estate.
It was a miracle that he was even with us then. By the time we had arrived at Northampton and we were trying to find our house, he had eaten through the cardboard box that had been meant to hold him in and he wasn’t happy. Mad with rage in fact, he pounced claws first onto Mum’s face and in a moment of panic she threw him out of the car window.
I was distraught. Can you imagine first seeing your mum savaged by your own pet cat and then seeing it thrown out of a window? I was only five and could have been traumatised for life. I thought the last I would ever see of Big Puss would be his tail whizzing past the wing mirror, but then guess who stalks, six days later, around the side of the house? Big Puss! Via some amazing tracking system that cats seem to have in their head, he had traced us to our new home. What a clever cat! I shouted
joyously, ‘Big Puss! You’re alive!’ and ran over to cuddle him, and he bit me. That was Big Puss for you – hard as nails.
Big Puss would terrify the other cats in the neighbourhood, but that was too easy for him – it was the humans he loved to hurt. You would see him in the alley opposite, sprawled out against the wall, his fluffy ginger stomach just waiting to be stroked. A little girl or boy on a scooter would come over and touch that fluffy stomach and then he would pounce and a scream would ring out. Five minutes later the parent would be knocking on our door.
‘D’you know what your cat’s done? Look at that bite mark! And that’s after I’ve mopped up the blood. That animal’s a menace. What are you going to do about it?’
Mum’s answer would always be: ‘Well, you shouldn’t have touched it.’
To be fair, she had a point.
Before long the Carrs’ cat was enemy number one. We caught our next-door neighbour hitting him with a broom after he had attacked her Persian, and later he was even shot in the head with an airgun. Needless to say, he survived. If anything, the shooting just made him a bit more mental. It was only a speeding car in our village ten years later that finally killed him off. Big Puss was a nasty piece of work, but I still miss him.
Eventually the time came when I had to go to school. My first school was Booth Lower and it was on top of what then felt like a massive hill. It isn’t a massive hill at all and now I always laugh at how short it is, but walking up it at the age of five it felt like Kilimanjaro.
I wasn’t really ready to go to school. With Dad always being away training or playing the away games, I had bonded too closely with my mother and would start crying hysterically every time she dropped me off. It wasn’t the actual dropping off that did it – it was seeing her pass by the window afterwards on her way back home. It was like watching her in slow motion, and once she’d crossed the window I would just bawl my heart out.
The teacher was quite sympathetic at first, but that soon changed when my tidal wave of tears flooded into the following week. ‘Alan Carr, pull yourself together!’ Mrs Bellinge roared at me – which made me cry even more. It got so bad that the teacher had to have words with my mother, but after a while, when I realised that my mother would actually be coming back to collect me, I stopped crying.
After that, though, I really got into this school lark. Every day seemed to be sunny and we would dress up and play games in the ‘wild area’, which felt like a jungle then but was actually a piece of land that the caretaker couldn’t be bothered to look after.
I had started making friends, lots of friends. Tellingly, they were all girls. I had no interest in mixing or playing with the boys. I can’t remember it being a conscious decision; like now, I just feel comfortable in female company. Sometimes the group of girls would grow and grow, and from afar it must have looked like a proper harem. It must have been alarming for my parents to see this seemingly endless conveyor belt of girls I would invite for tea.
‘Can Sarah come for tea?’
‘Can Kelly come to tea?’
‘Can Justine come to tea?’
‘Is Sarah your girlfriend?’ Mum would ask.
‘No.’
‘Kelly?’
‘No.’
‘Justine?’
‘No. Just friends.’
One of my best friends was Jenny, an intelligent boyish girl, who was teacher’s pet. It was not long before she started coming to tea, like so many girls had. We had the same sense of humour and really got on. Little did I know, we had more in common than I thought. We lost touch when she went to Northampton School for Girls. I did see Jenny again, but it was in very strange circumstances. Unknown to me, she had had a sex change and became a homosexual called Daniel. Obviously, I never heard about that on Friends Reunited, so you can imagine my shock when I spotted her, sorry him, sitting on the Tube opposite me with a beard. I must have shocked the other commuters when I started jumping and pointing excitedly, shouting, ‘Jenny! Jenny! It’s you, isn’t it, Jenny?’ Anyway, that’s what the future held, but back then we were just two innocent seven-year-old misfits enjoying each other’s company in the playground.
Straight after the football season ended, we’d always go on holiday – to shiver on the Norfolk coast, sheltering from the wind and rain on a caravan park in Great Yarmouth. Great Yarmouth was grey, windswept and grim. I lost track of how many Frisbees I lost one ‘summer’. Dad would buy one
from the park shop and pass it to me, I would get ready, all excited, to pass it back to him, and as soon as it left my fingers the gale force wind would whisk it off to Calais.
I will never forget my first night in Great Yarmouth. It’s hard enough to sleep in those bunk beds, especially with the nylon sheets and rough blankets that smell of corned beef. Ugh! I’ll never forget the texture of those scratchy blankets up against my skin – it was like having sex with a leper. (Not that I knew about that then.) And then I was rudely awakened by the caravan rocking.
My indignation was soon replaced by fear, and with my runaway imagination I just knew it was a gang of thugs trying to tip us over into the sea.
I called out to Mum: ‘Someone’s rocking the caravan. Help!’
‘Just go to sleep,’ she said.
‘No, no, it’s rocking even more. Help me! Please, someone!’
‘It’s the wind. Go back to sleep!’ shouted Dad, oblivious to the gang of ne’er-do-wells intent on killing us.
I realised that my parents, normally so vigilant about strange noises and goings-on, really didn’t care. All I could hear from their room was giggling and muffled laughter, as the caravan rocked even more.
I don’t know what finished first, the caravan’s rocking or the commotion from my parents’ room, but at some point I must have drifted off. When I brought it up in the morning, my questioning came up against a wall of silence and I was left contemplating the mystery whilst eating my grapefruit.
Every time I look in the mirror there is a reminder of my holidays in Great Yarmouth, and it’s not my glowing skin and sun-kissed hair, it’s my teeth. I had been mucking about, as most six year olds do when they’re on their holidays. The windswept beach was a no-go area, and with the potential for it to piss it down at a moment’s notice we had stayed close to the caravan. I had climbed up onto the caravan hook, those horrible metal things that you attach to the back of your car, and had slipped off, banging my mouth so hard that I had to be rushed to hospital and have my gums sewn up. I can remember Dad scooping me up in his arms and Mum, pregnant with my brother Gary (all that caravan rocking had taken its toll), running behind me. I can’t remember much more of that night, but I can remember it starting to rain (what a surprise!) and my parents anxiously trying to flag down a car to take me to hospital.
Once the drama was over, the doctor told Mum that when my adult teeth came through they would either come through black or crooked or both. My poor mother was beside herself. But although my teeth do look as though they’re having a party, I always remind myself that it could have been so much worse: they could have been black stumps poking out my mouth. Thank God for small mercies.
My teeth have always been trouble to me, though. They’re my Achilles’ heel. I don’t know if this is possible, but honestly, I’ve started resenting my own teeth. I know you need them to bite and chew, but they don’t half piss me off. Impacted wisdom teeth, extractions, root canal work – I’ve suffered them all. I chipped one piece off a tooth when I was 12, when
someone accidentally turned and whacked a fishing rod in my face.
‘Look,’ I said to my dentist, a lovely man called Lance, ‘why don’t we just cut to the chase and have them all out and fit dentures?’
He smiled sweetly. ‘That won’t be necessary.’
No, of course not. That’s because he knows full well that if I do have dentures his profits will plummet. My crooked white teeth are his pension plan; whenever he sees them coming through the door he thinks, ‘Holiday home!’
The saga of my ill-fated teeth continues. Only last month I was nursing a gaping hole in my gum where a tooth cracked when I was having a crown fitted. The only reason I needed to have the crown fitted in the first place was that after bypassing a Snickers and going for a ‘healthy option’ bag of apricots, I bit into one that hadn’t been pitted and ended up cracking a tooth and killing the nerve. Then I had no choice but to have it extracted. However, Lance is planning to fit me a porcelain crown, an exact copy of my original tooth, he assures me – which I am dreading because when you have teeth as big as mine, it’ll be like sucking on a urinal.