Authors: Alan Carr
‘Why wasn’t it yours?’ she cried, with genuine grief, staring at me with accusatory eyes as if I’d tunnelled into the kiln personally and smashed up Kelly’s masterpiece.
Despite this, I did like Mrs Wilson. She was a hippy with flame hair and would wear long flowing dresses and scarves and let us listen to music while we ‘created’. She was a good person with a good heart, not like Mrs O’Flaherty who didn’t have a heart, or feelings. They’d been cruelly removed when she’d had that dreadful bowl cut inflicted on her. Mrs Wilson had given up on my art, which frustrated me because I really wanted to be good at it, but some things you have to let go.
In Art and Design and PE, I became one of those kids that parents of the good pupils say ‘holds the others back’. Artistically, I didn’t have IT, whatever IT is. Yes, I was disappointed, but I was also realistic. Yes, they may be able to paint beautiful pictures and sculpt statues, but can they recite verses of Shakespeare and Keats off the top of their heads? I can’t do that either, but you get my point. I was never jealous of the Kelly Hubberts in my class – though someone must have been because a few days before her deadline she had her artwork stolen from the class.
‘There are some sick people out there,’ Mrs Wilson told us. ‘Now if they’d taken Alan’s they would have been really sick in the head.’
I rest my case.
* * *
Dad’s success as manager of Northampton Town Football Club had meant that we could move from the Moulton Leys Estate to the village of Overstone which, although quaint, was miles away from the school and didn’t do much to assuage my feelings of separation. What friends I did make at school all lived miles away, and like every other teenager I always imagined that everyone else was having an amazing time and throwing wild parties while I was stuck in a shitty little village where the only exciting things to do were to water your hanging baskets and moan about ramblers. My parents totally understood this need to feel more integrated, and whenever there was a party at ‘The Farm’, they would faithfully drive me there. I must have had some friends because in my memory between the ages of 14 and 16 I always seemed to be going to parties, but then again there is a big difference between being lonely and feeling lonely.
The Farm was an outbuilding near Weston Favell Upper School that people would hire if they were having a party. From the age of 14 to 16, it seemed every Friday someone would be celebrating something, and so we’d put on our chinos and waistcoats and head on down to sip on a soft drink and listen to the sound of Yazz. The dance-floor was so uneven that when you jumped up as you did during ‘The Only Way is Up’, the floor would jolt, causing the stylus to veer off Yazz onto Big Fun. I don’t think I ever got to hear the ending of that song.
Every parent booked The Farm apart from Michelle Douglas’s, who booked out Danes Camp, which was a leisure
centre with a swimming pool – as it said on the invite, it was going to be ‘A Pool Party’. Everyone was so excited. Michelle told us that there would be a buffet near the pool, but if any food went in the pool it would have to be cleaned out, costing her parents an extra
£
200. As kids, we don’t know we’re born. The Farm was so tedious, week in – week out, and here we were being offered an amazing pool party with food, so how did we repay Michelle Douglas’s parents? We grabbed armfuls of sausage rolls, cocktail sausages, those cheese and pineapple things and jumped in the pool – ensuring that the Douglases were in fact
£
200 out of pocket. Baps, sausage rolls, hot dogs, all bobbed past as we frolicked in the water. It was like swimming in an underwater Greggs.
Obviously, word got round the other parents about the Douglases pool/food fight party, and within weeks we were all back at The Farm. There was a menace there. It wasn’t drink or cigarettes, and it definitely wasn’t drugs, it was … the Bushwhackers. The Bushwhackers would bang on the windows while we were in there, and make threatening gestures and swear at us. Rumours that it was Michelle Douglas’s parents furious about their daughter’s pool party were quickly dispelled.
Only a few details were known about the Bushwhackers. They were allegedly from Northampton School for Boys, they had weapons and they could hide for hours in the long grass waiting for someone to come out of The Farm doors. They used to terrify us. Just one bang on the window with a stick would have had us all fleeing to the other end of the room, girls wailing and boys shouting whilst still running in the
opposite direction. ‘Come on then, I’ll take you on.’ I’m sure that whoever it was found it all terribly hilarious.
At one party they abducted Stacey Higgins. Everyone was in tears. Should we call the police? Should we venture outside and try to find her ourselves? We all waited by the window eagerly hoping to see what the Bushwhackers would do with this innocent girl’s body. Then we spotted her – getting off with a spotty lad behind a wheelie bin. Stacey had used the Bushwhackers as a ruse to sneak out of The Farm and get a groping and a bit of tongue action. We were outraged at her defection.
The attacks by the Bushwhackers, although harrowing at the time, proved a timely distraction for me especially as the sounds of Stock, Aitken and Waterman began to slow and morph into power ballads, and everyone around me paired off to start dancing together. This to me was the death knell of the evening, the excruciating part. Why couldn’t we just dance, dance, dance? I didn’t really want to dance with the girls, but then I didn’t really want to dance with the boys either, so it would leave me at a bit of a loose end, holding my coat at the edge of the dance-floor listening to the sounds of Richard Marx’s ‘Right Here Waiting’.
They never played Gloria Estefan’s ‘Don’t Want to Lose You Now’. That song was so romantic and beautiful – I was such a big Gloria fan. I loved the
Cuts Both Ways
album and used to really crank up the dial when ‘Oy Mi Canto’ came on. I learnt that in English it means ‘Hear My Voice’ and I remember thinking, ‘What a talent! There’s not many pop stars these days who could sing so beautifully in two different languages.’
I went off Gloria when she suffered spinal injuries in that coach crash, not because she was nearly crippled or anything, it’s because I realised she was shit.
It wasn’t just our Gloria pumping out of my stereo, I was also a huge Prince fan. I bought everything, every biography about him, every album, even every awful film that he starred in, I was there on the day of release outside Our Price, full of excitement.
Let’s get this clear, though. I never dressed up as him. I know some Prince fans go the whole hog and impersonate their idol, but I was getting enough stick at school without turning up on Mufti Day in a purple lace all-in-one body-stocking. I was mesmerised by Prince, the amount of times Mum would catch me miming to his songs and practising that bit where he jumps up and does the splits during ‘Housequake’.
My father must have been beside himself: me, football-phobic, girlfriendless, camp and now the final insult – I choose to have a 5-foot transvestite as my Pop Idol. How could he not ‘get’ Prince? Well anyway he just didn’t, and Prince was banned from the car even though I’d created a parent-friendly cassette of Prince’s classic hits. My efforts were futile and instead we had to endure Chris Rea’s
Road to Hell
on every journey, well, until he brought out
Auberge
. Whoopee-doo!
Ever since Dad had got Northampton promoted up from Division Four with a club record of 99 points and 103 goals and then to the heady climes of number six in Division Three, we as a family could afford to leave England and holiday abroad. Naturally, the chance of flying on a plane was so
much more fantastic than the five-hour car journey behind a string of caravans to Beverley Park in Torquay.
Flying by plane meant you’d arrived, and in class you’d drop it into conversation that you would be going abroad, on a plane – yes,
you
heard – on a plane to Spain. The Spain that I had in my head was not the Spain that greeted my eyes when we pulled up at Fuengirola. I’m sure when it was finished being built it would look wonderful. It was to me a bit like Northampton-sur-Mer. Any Spanish culture had been trampled on by English bars promising ‘English food’ and ‘English-speaking staff’ for English customers. Of course this is the snob in me looking back with my fancy ways after sampling the cultural highlights of Barcelona and Madrid. Back then it was amazing. You got proper fish fingers and chips, and you could watch Del Boy on the telly – oh, this was so much better than Torquay.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking Torbay or the neighbouring beauty spots of Paignton or Babbacombe. I have a lot of fond memories of those places, and I for one am over the moon that they are enjoying a revival of fortunes at present, it’s just that we’d holidayed there at the same caravan park for the last five years.
My parents weren’t the sort of people who waited for the designated school holidays, oh no, the Cobblers had their last game and then we were off – ‘Cornwall here we come, lock up your pasties!’ It was even known for Dad to take us out of school to go to the races. We were all in on it. I would not go to school, Dad would drive us to the race track and Mum would write the sick note. Due to her own experiences at
school, my mother’s inherent contempt for teachers would often surface in these sick notes. Sometimes she would just write ‘Alan was ill’, leaving me to do the dirty work and choose an appropriate illness, which would be hard for one day. One day off is too long for a headache, yet too short for ringworm.
Once there, the races were so exciting, especially if you got near the front, and the horses would thunder past you, leaving you windswept and breathless. I enjoyed visiting all the different racetracks. I loved the buzz of the winners’ enclosures, and the flurry of the tic-tacking, but most exhilarating of all was being naughty and missing a whole day of school. Newmarket, Leicester, Ripon – by the age of 13, I’d visited them all. I couldn’t read, but I’d visited them all.
I remember being at York races on a school day, studying the form, binoculars around my neck, and bumping into Mr Knott, a teacher at my school. I don’t know who was more embarrassed, he or I. To be fair, he didn’t have a leg to stand on. I was only jeopardising
my
education by being at the races – he was putting his whole class at risk. Tut tut. We soon got over our awkwardness, especially after I told him about a dead cert in the 2.15, ‘Dancing Lady’, odds-on favourite. He’d be a fool not to bet on it.
* * *
In the summer of 1990, Northampton Town Football Club had fallen out of love with my father and he got the sack. Northampton Town had been relegated back down to the
Fourth Division. My father’s battle to keep them up in the Third Division, struggling with no money to buy new players, ended unsurprisingly in disappointment.
The problem with having a job in the public eye, as I am learning now, is that everyone knows your business and wants to let you know their opinion on your business whether you want to hear it or not. When Dad’s sacking was on the front page of the
Chronicle and Echo
, the taunts of ‘Your dad’s shit’ were replaced with ‘Your dad’s been sacked’ – which is more of a statement than a put-down really, but each to their own. In fact they used to shout ‘Your dad’s shit’ even when he was top of the Fourth Division, so in the end these insults proved more exasperating than anything.
One neighbour knocked on our door saying that she thought it was a shame that we would be moving so suddenly. She had mistakenly assumed that our house in Overstone had been bought by the club and that we would be evicted now Dad was unemployed. This woman hadn’t said a word to us all through Dad’s years of success but somehow Dad’s sacking had awoken some kind of malice in her and she had come round to gloat. Cheeky bint.
However, much to our neighbour’s disappointment, my father wasn’t out of a job for long. Within days he was being wooed by Blackpool City Football Club and in a matter of weeks he was the new manager. Dad informed the family that we would be relocating up north to Blackpool. I would finish my schooling in seagull-shitting distance of the Golden Mile. I really had mixed feelings about this move. The excitement of living by the seaside, the Pleasure Beach just down the road,
the dodgems, the Illuminations was undermined by a sense of ‘Here we go again!’ At least in Northampton it was better the devil you know. It was only the diehard bullies who still shouted ‘Faggot!’ and ‘Poof!’ – all the others had given up, bored that I never fought back. All they would get in retaliation was a ‘tut’ or at the most I’d twat them with my copy of
Murder on the Orient Express
.
The thought of joining a whole new school, friendless, looking as I did with this voice was simply terrifying. But Dad was unemployed, and so we had to go where the work was and that just happened to be the Vegas of the North – Blackpool.
E
veryone has a place that seems to draw them back to it, whatever life choices they make, whatever they do. After a few years they can bet their bottom dollar they end up back there. My place is Blackpool. Like a piece of foil to a filling, I end up attached to it, which inevitably turns out to be a painful experience. Our move to Blackpool wasn’t my first time up there: Gary, Mum, Nan and I had gone on a weekend break with Dad’s friend Ted who, with some of his friends, drove us up in a minibus. The weekend was pretty uneventful. It was only a few years later, when Ted got arrested for running an unlicensed brothel in the next village and we recalled that all our fellow holidaymakers had been ropy women, that it dawned on us we’d had a weekend break with a minibus full of hookers.
It was a great weekend, to be fair. We had gone up to see the Christmas Illuminations. We had a fantastic view of them at the front of our hotel, and it was a real novelty to have the lights flashing outside our window. I suppose some of the girls would have been used to that.
The one thing that does spoil the whole Blackpool experience – apart from the architecture, food, cleanliness and quality of entertainment – is the weather. The wind is so merciless
and bitter, it’s almost frightening. We had a jolly Santa swinging outside our window one night; he was shaking so violently in the wind that I thought his sack was going to come through the window and electrocute Nan.