Nerd Do Well (11 page)

It became obvious that he hadn’t got the joke at all, assuming one of us was just having a bit of fun. He singled out a boy in the class who looked the guiltiest and asked him to step to the front. I could see I was going to have to do a little of the work myself, so I raised my hand and confessed, at which point Mr Skinner feigned outrage. I can’t remember exactly how things transpired at this point but I seem to remember him threatening me with some sort of corporal or even capital punishment before asking me if I had any last requests. I asked if he would permit me to sing ‘One Million Green Bottles’; he accepted and sent me down to the hall, where I stood in the corner singing for about an hour.

Eventually he came to see me and I explained the specificities of the joke and what had inspired me to perpetrate the prank, which he found amusing if perplexingly detailed. Term was coming to an end at this point and the relaxed atmosphere inspired him to push the joke a little further, suggesting I make an impassioned public confession in front of the whole school. He played the stern teacher, while I played the penitent villain as he wheeled me from class to class to make my plea.

I’m not entirely sure why I was being painted as the bad guy; I had after all bought him a Mars bar with my own money and gone to the trouble of elaborately wrapping it up; but I played along because it was fun and because it was Mr Skinner. After the confession in front of my class, we had a little confab in the corridor and came up with the next part of our charade. He told me to wait a few minutes, then burst into his classroom and beg for forgiveness, like a prisoner begging a hanging judge for clemency. This was more nerve-racking than messing around in front of the younger children. Class 7 was the top class and was full of really ancient kids, some as old as eleven. They were aloof and wise and slightly taller and barely ever paid any attention to the juniors, unless it was to belittle them or else send them hurtling into a corridor wall.

Everyone in Class 7 was infinitely cooler than me, just by being in Class 7. Standing outside Mr Skinner’s classroom, waiting nervously to perform my little improvisation in front of the high council of cool kids at Castle Hill Primary School, I was suddenly infused with an unexpected and enormous sense of excitement and pride.

I burst in with a thespian wail and threw myself on Mr Skinner’s mercy, in a performance which included fake tears and dramatic supplication, much to the one part bemusement, two parts amusement of the assembled class. Even Mr Skinner was at a slight loss in the face of my histrionics. When I had finished my act, I flung the door open with a dramatic flourish, unaware that my own classmates were outside pressing their ears against the door. A huge heap of them fell into the room, much to the further amusement of the class, although I seem to remember Mr Skinner shouting at them angrily, signalling an end to the frivolities.

For a time afterwards I was adopted by some of the older kids, like an amusing puppy; I was famous for being the funny kid and I relished it enormously. My enjoyment of the attention wasn’t motivated by insecurity or a deficit of affection at home. I’m sure psychoanalysis would probably identify some sort of desire for approval in the light, or rather darkness, of my father’s departure, but I think I was always like that, even before I could possibly comprehend the abstractions of my own ego. In wordy psychoanalytical terms, my parents’ divorce and my attempts to rationalise a degree of abandonment may have exacerbated an existing compulsion to perform but does it really matter? And what the hell does exacerbate mean anyway?

The point is, this incident remains firm in my memory as a key moment in the evolution of my interest in performance and comedy. Having won over a tough crowd – a potentially very tough crowd – the success of the impromptu show left me with a sense of accomplishment and confidence that compelled me to do more. I felt confident and assured. Swimming pools? I shit ’em.

Not in them obviously, that’s against the rules.

Now that you know all about me and my once toxic relationship with chlorinated H2O, let’s return to Gloucester and the business of my mother and father – literally. Shortly after Pendulum broke up, Mum and Dad let the music shop on St Aldate Street go. We moved in with Dad’s parents (lovingly referred to as Mama and Pop-Pop) and lived with them for a year.

At some point towards the end of that year, Mum and I moved to Nan’s house (Mum’s mum) on Clegram Road in south Gloucester. My grandfather Albert (Grampy) had died a few months earlier and Nan was alone in the house for the first time in forty years. I don’t remember the process of uprooting from Mama and Pop-Pop’s to Nan’s; I didn’t even notice that my dad didn’t come with us. I remember waking up one morning, going into the middle bedroom where Mum slept and asking her where Dad was, to which she replied, ‘He’s gone away for a bit.’ The truth was, for various reasons, they had decided to separate. I took it pretty well, considering.

A few weeks later, Dad walked up the side passage to Nan’s back door wearing a check shirt and I ran into his open arms. We saw each other regularly from then on, thanks to my mum’s typically selfless goodwill, and developed a relationship closer to friends than father and son. In that respect, I look back on my parents’ divorce as a good thing, at least for me. It galvanised my relationship with both of them, forming a powerful bond with my mother and facilitating the removal of the kind of male tension that causes rival stags to lock antlers.

Shortly after that, Mum embarked upon a relationship with a man called Richard Pegg, whom she knew from the
GODS
. His father, John Pegg, another regular at the Olympus Theatre, worked in the Lloyds Bank on Westgate Street, central Gloucester. Whenever my mum and I went into this austere establishment, which was deathly quiet but for the echoing thump of rubber stamps, I would shout at the top of my voice. ‘Where’s John Pegg?’, completely unaware that a few years later, I would call him Grandpa.

Pegg Junior worked in Terry Warner Sports, some five doors down from what used to be John’s Music on St Aldate Street. While living at Mama and Pop-Pop’s, I had become obsessed with
The Six Million Dollar Man
⁴
and, subsequently,
The Bionic Woman
(although my love of the latter was mainly because Lindsay Wagner’s Jaime Sommers gave me a funny feeling in my tummy). In a pre-
Star Wars
world, Steve Austin was my ultimate hero; a cool, handsome, cyborg astronaut, everything I was looking for in a friend at the time. I was actually slightly jealous when Barney Miller, the Seven Million Dollar Man, appeared in one of the show’s story arcs and distinctly recall feeling a certain amount of
Schadenfreude
when Barney found himself emotionally incapable of accepting his new super-strong prosthetic limbs and went rogue, only to be apprehended by Steve in a thrilling bionic showdown. Eat that, Barney, I thought to myself as his bionic arms and legs were conveniently dialled down to a ‘normal’ setting, Steve’s my friend, not yours.

The Christmas of 1976 was a clear material reflection of my love for Colonel Austin. It was the first Christmas we had spent at Nan’s without Dad, and perhaps out of some unnecessary sense of guilt, Mum really pushed the sleigh out. Presumably through a combination of credit cards and self-deprivation, she made sure I didn’t want for anything that Christmas morning and woke to a plethora of
Six Million Dollar
goodies. A Steve Austin rocket ship, for the Steve Austin action figure I already owned, which transformed into a bionic repair station, complete with magnifying window and multiple pipes and switches. I also received a Maskatron action figure, the multiple-faced, bionic nemesis and mad scientist I had never heard of but really wanted.

It’s fair to say I was Austined up to the bionic eyeball(s). It’s interesting to note that two years later, my main Christmas present was a
Doctor Who
action figure, complete with Tardis and talking Dalek. I was a huge fan of the show, and in 1978 I was lucky enough to meet the fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, at a book signing at Merrits newsagent in Gloucester city centre. He gave me a jelly baby and inscribed my copy of the
The Talons of Weng Chiang
, a novelisation of one of the television stories. His inscription read:
To Simon 8, from Tom Baker, 888
.

I still remember drifting away from the signing table, staring at the ink drying on the page and attempting to process the experience of seeing my hero in the flesh. Before the next person could step up to the table, I cut back in line and proudly informed Tom that I been given an effigy of his likeness for Christmas. I recall our conversation clearly.

Me: I’ve got an action man of you.

Tom: That’s marvellous. Have another jelly baby.

I accepted the extra helping of character-based confectionery and walked away a very happy little boy. Twenty-five years later, in the guise of the Editor, evil human nuncio to a bizarre creature called the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe, I faced off against the ninth Doctor, Christopher Eccleston, in a moment of circularity that would have floored my eight-year-old self, had I appeared with the news from the electro-static time ball (
ESTB
), or perhaps more appropriately a Time And Relative Dimension In Space (Tardis).

Getting back to
The Six Million Dollar Man
, it was my love for this earlier sci-fi hero that in some respects led to my mother and Richard Pegg getting together. Having already been bought a Steve Austin-style red tracksuit, I asked Mum if I could have a pair of red-and-white Adidas trainers to complete the look. She knew there was a sports shop near where we used to live, and that John Pegg’s son Richard worked there, so we’d have a friendly face to help us locate the correct pair of bionic shoes. In the summer of 1976, we dropped in to make the purchase. The style was in stock but the size was not. Richard promised to order them in and bring them round to my nan’s house, which, a few weeks later, he did. He also asked Mum out on a date. They got married six months later. We moved out of Nan’s house and into 10 Castle Hill Drive, a small semi-detached house in Abbotswood, Brockworth, directly opposite Castle Hill Primary School. Wait, divorce, marriage, emotional turmoil . . . Minnie, come back with my sock!

Castle Hill Primary School in Brockworth, Gloucester, was (and probably still is) separated into seven classes, handily referred to as Class 1, Class 2, etc. Back when I was there, each class had a teacher with whom you would spend a year of your school life. I joined Class 4, halfway through the spring term of 1977. I liked the school immediately. It was bright, clean and exciting. In my recollection, the colours seem more vivid, the light brighter, the air somehow sweeter. It may have been the contrast between my new environment and the grim urbanity of Calton Road Juniors that I had left behind, but I attribute the sensation of freshness associated with those memories to the emotional experience of starting a new life in a slightly more rural setting.

My Class 4 teacher, Mrs Hortop, was a wonderfully maternal and skilled teacher who possessed a killer stare if you were naughty but offered endless encouragement and praise if you applied yourself. Her style of teaching was a far cry from the grim, mean-spirited instruction of my previous teacher; a stern woman with a cloud of dry grey hair who had once blankly informed my mum that I had no academic potential and was somehow at fault arriving at the school with an existing knowledge of cursive handwriting, thanks to my previous place of education. I think she childishly resented me for being something of a smarty-pants, just because I had transplanted from the slightly posher King’s School. Her bitter resentment towards me had actually reduced my mother to tears after one parents’ evening. Mum already felt guilty for removing me from a school I enjoyed attending and suffered deeper insecurities that her divorce may have affected me more than had first been thought. I disliked this teacher almost instantly and consequently had little motivation to meet her twisted standards, sinking into a cycle of insubordination. Fortunately I had an impeccable taste in ‘old school’ trainers (although at the time, they were just ‘school’) and my bionic red-and-white shoes initiated a chain of events that would facilitate the much-needed change of lifestyle.

I made friends quickly in my new environment. I wasn’t particularly shy as a child and had always done well when it came to integrating with other youngsters in parks or on holiday.

As the new boy, I was briefly a point of interest and palled up with two of the more naughty boys, one of whom I later discovered was my second cousin. That happened twice during my time at Castle Hill; both occasions I was already friendly with the person before I found out. Small towns are like that. Occasionally you will discover a person you have known socially for years is your uncle or your cousin. Sometimes they’re both.

Eventually I forged the lasting friendships I would sustain throughout my school career and indeed into my adult life. A boy called Lee Beard caught my interest on my very first day. When I arrived that morning, I was late into the class, having spent time with Mum and the headmaster, getting welcomed and orientated. I walked into Mrs Hortop’s classroom and was introduced to my classmates, who greeted me with that slow, mechanical voice children collectively employ when saying ‘good morning’ or ‘hello’ or ‘join us’. I sat down at my new desk, noticing Meredith Catsanus’s attractive fringe, and got on with whatever fun task we had been set that morning.

Presently, Mrs Hortop asked for a volunteer to go down to the headmaster’s office. Before I could raise an overeager hand, Lee Beard leapt up, causing my stomach to perform a small involuntary somersault. Lee’s right leg was encased in a complex caliper splint made of metal and thick leather, which forced the limb into permanent, enforced extension at an obtuse angle to his body. The shoe at the end of the apparatus had an oddly angled sole, enabling Lee’s foot to make even contact with the ground when he walked, which he did awkwardly but at great speed. I later learned that Lee had a condition called Perthes’ disease, which softens the femoral head of the thigh-bone due to an interruption in the flow of blood to the hip joint. I was extremely shocked that first time I saw Lee’s bionic leg. Half thrilled, half appalled, he seemed to me the living embodiment of those little boy charity recepticles often seen outside supermarkets.