Nerd Do Well (12 page)

Despite this initial shock, I felt an immediate affinity with Lee. For the first six weeks of my life I had worn a splint to restrict movement in my legs due to my hip joints not being properly formed. This, combined with Lee’s infectious exuberance and obvious sense of humour, inspired me to make a friend of him. I regularly volunteered to carry a chair down to the assembly hall for Lee to sit on (essential, since Lee could not sit on the floor with his mad robot leg) and we developed a closeness that has kept us in contact to this day.

Why is this relevant to my journey towards becoming an actor? Well, Lee and I took two key roles in the first school production I participated in that didn’t involve shepherds. Two years before I performed my Dicky Bird news report with a grazed face, Mrs Hortop cast me as the eponymous and indeed ambiguous hero of Robert Browning’s version of ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ (the same version my nan had committed to memory so many years before), which we performed in front of the school as part of an assembly in 1977. Lee played the little ‘lame’ boy, who cannot keep up with the rest of the village children, as they are led away by the disgruntled Pied Piper, and fails to enter the wondrous portal in the mountain. I remember watching Lee playing out his disappointment at being left alone, eliciting a huge wave of sympathy from the assembled children, and being aware that he had somewhat stolen the show.

By this time Lee’s condition had improved and he no longer wore the rigid brace. Instead his heel was attached to a leather strap around his waist that kept his leg bent up behind him at all times, necessitating the use of crutches. It was the last phase of his treatment before he dispensed with the corrective contraptions completely and embarked upon a mad spurt of energy that lasted about a year before he finally settled down to being a normal little boy.

At the time of the ‘Pied Piper’, he was perfectly cast and cut an affectively poignant figure as he limped away from the closed cave entrance/sports utility cupboard. I remember feeling a little jealous as the audience hung on his every step, but I also felt admiration for his skilful portrayal of rejection and isolation and couldn’t help feeling it was coming from the heart, even then at the tender age of seven, and I never once thought him to be a jammy little fucker.

Performing the show and seeing how it affected the audience made me want to act more, to do something that would make an audience vocalise their emotions the way they did at Lee Beard’s lost little boy – jammy little fucker.

Moving up to Class 5 in my second year at Castle Hill Primary, we graduated into the combined tutelage of Mr Miller and Mrs Harvey, the latter having only recently joined. She was younger than Mrs Hortop and for this reason alone she seemed very cool. Whereas Mrs Hortop was the very embodiment of the wise, authoritative schoolteacher, Mrs Harvey possessed a distinct, summery laid-backness, which hinted at the possibility that a teacher could be as much a friend as an educator. She wasn’t the only such teacher at Castle Hill.

Another young, female teacher called Miss Eglise, who taught us music, possessed a similar casual amiability. I had the unsettling experience of seeing Miss Eglise out of school once, playing Tuptim, in a production of
The King and I
staged by the
CODS
in their native Cheltenham. In the show, Tuptim is given to the King of Siam as a gift and potential wife, but Tuptim is in love with Lun Tha, the young man who delivers her to the palace, and (
SPOILER
ALERT
) eventually tragedy ensues. It was strange seeing Miss Eglise in a non-school setting, let alone portraying a beautiful young woman with frailties and desires. Towards the end of the show, Tuptim is severely reprimanded for staging a play, which plainly reflects her dismay at being forced to marry someone she doesn’t love. She escapes with her lover but is captured and faces corporal punishment administered by the King himself.

Seeing Miss Eglise play out these emotions, in silky oriental garb, was fairly intoxicating for me. I was fascinated to see her after the show socialising in the bar. She came over to say hello to my mum (and me) and I told her how much I had enjoyed the show, at which point she gave me a playful hug (an act that was still legal back then). She was glowing with post-performance exhilaration and I remember she smelled lovely. The emotion of the play and the unusual interaction with this suddenly exotic and attractive teacher left me with something of a crush on her and I spent the following Sunday sighing heavily and dreaming of Siam.

When I walked into the assembly hall on the Monday, my heart was racing, I felt as though I knew her better than any of the other children in the school; it was as if we had had some kind of an affair, not that I knew what an affair was. I hadn’t enjoyed any masturbatory fantasies about showering together in a bed and breakfast just off the A40, Shurdington Road. I was pre-masturbatory at the time, although I did regularly pore over the pages of a
Lovebirds
magazine that I kept under a caravan in an alley near my house (pore over was perhaps the wrong choice of words there).

I saw her across the room standing by her piano in a cream cardigan and blue dress and walked towards her, hoping she would notice me. Sure enough, she glanced across and spotted me, smiling broadly back at her. I placed my hands together as if in prayer and bowed to her like a Siamese prince, at which point all my dreams came true as she reciprocated with a bow that turned into a curtsey. This little in-joke meant the world to me in that moment, it was an acknowledgement of a connection we had forged outside school and as such made us more than teacher and student: we were sort of friends. She married that year, which vaguely disappointed me, I think. She changed her name to something I don’t remember, my lack of recall in this matter being significant perhaps since my strongest memories are as a single woman with an exotic French-sounding name.

I didn’t have quite the same feelings towards Mrs Harvey, although I liked her enormously and looked forward to seeing her every day. She was the first teacher I ever accidentally called ‘Mum’, much to my enormous embarrassment, but I think this was due to the relaxed, informal atmosphere she engendered in the classroom. She was also a slightly softer touch than Mrs Hortop, and the rowdier boys, the ones that befriended me on the first day, pushed their luck a little more forcefully with her, trying to look up her skirt and asking asinine questions like ‘What’s love juice, Miss?’

One of the key factors in my appreciation of Mrs Harvey was that she was something of a nerd. She didn’t look like one particularly. She was pretty with a fuzz of curly black hair and dressed in loose blouses and flowing skirts that you had to lie on the floor to look up. Not that I did, nor in fact needed to. I have a vague memory of being able to see her legs through the material when the sun shone through the classroom window and giggling breathlessly about it to whoever was next to me, probably Sean or Lee or Matthew Bunting, a boy I eventually drifted apart from due to conflicting feelings about sport (he liked it, I didn’t).

Mrs Harvey’s nerdiness extended mainly from her fascination with the paranormal. She had a grandmother who was reputedly psychic and Mrs Harvey would regale us with stories of how her granny participated in regular conversations with dead relatives. These stories would simultaneously thrill and terrify us and inspired us to sit at her feet (trying not to look up her skirt) or gather round her desk at any given opportunity.

It wasn’t just the spirit world that fascinated Mrs Harvey; we had long discussions about Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster as well as other aspects of parapsychology. She particularly nurtured in me a fascination with UFOs and even gave me a book on the subject called
Mysterious Visitors
by Brinsley Le Poer Trench, which featured a pictorial supplement, illustrating how certain biblical conceits, such as the luminous cloud/pillar of fire that accompanied the Israelites, or the ‘wheel’ witnessed by the prophet Ezekiel, may have actually been visiting spacecraft. I still believed in God at the time, as children tend to do, and this made stuffy old religion ten times more interesting.

We discussed how the immense geoglyphs carved into the Nazca Desert floor, which can be seen only from a great height, could be messages intended for extraterrestrial visitors. I loved talking about this kind of thing. I had been fascinated by unexplained phenomena from a very early age. I avidly watched television shows such as Arthur C. Clarke’s
Mysterious World
and
In Search of
 . . . presented by Leonard Nimoy (a man I would eventually meet on an ice planet called Vega 4). I subscribed to
The Unexplained
⁵
, a monthly magazine about the paranormal, which could be collected into volumes and housed in an attractive binder, available gratis if you purchased all twelve issues.

Looking back, this fascination was formative in my journey towards geekdom, further inspiring an existing love of all things alien and unknown that compelled me to close the curtains whenever I watched
The Clangers
⁶
, or enjoy spending time underwater. Thirty-five years after Mrs Harvey handed me
Mysterious Visitors
, I found myself in the deserts of New Mexico with my best friend Nick, making a film about an alien called Paul, who enlists two British nerds to help get him back to his spaceship, idly wishing I could fizz off back to 1978 and let me know.

Around this time of fantastic, inspiring teachers, we were lucky enough to also be taught by the limping, storytelling genius that was Mr Miller. Stern yet avuncular, he inspired a similar desire for approval as his predecessors but somehow made that approval even more of a mission to attain. Maybe male approval was more important to me because of latent abandonment issues brought on by the creeping realisation that my father had walked out on me as well as my mother, although I never really thought of their divorce in those terms, at least not until I was older and even then I didn’t regard it in such a self-pitying, egocentric way.

Still, these experiences do manifest themselves in our behaviours and it’s fair to say I looked for fathers for a while, despite having a brand-new step model at home. But perhaps the desire to please Mr Miller was keener, simply because he was enormous fun when he was pleased and quite scary when he was cross. He was the first teacher to make me stand in the corner and it made me cry with shame and disappointment. For some reason the whole class had collectively decided to make the popping sound achieved by putting your index finger in your mouth and firing it out against the inside of your cheek. We’ve all done it to demonstrate how the weasel goes at the end of that bizarre nursery rhyme. The Class 5 popspasm inevitably got out of hand and Mr Miller sternly proclaimed that the next person to emit a finger-assisted explosive would be in big trouble. Without thinking, I called his bluff. He wasn’t bluffing.

I realised I had been quite literally cheeky, the moment I felt the air on my wet finger. Mr Miller ignored the wave of suppressed tittering that skidded across the room, and zeroed in on the transgressor, me. The order to stand in the corner was given with what I can only describe as disappointed indifference, as if in that one second he had given up on me completely. I sobbed remorsefully in the corner until he took pity on me and relieved me from my position of shame. I can’t remember exactly what he said to me (something like ‘try not to be such a silly billy’), but he said it comically from the corner of his mouth and accompanied every other syllable with a painless kick up the backside, which was harmless and affectionate but today he would be fired for.

I remember Mr Miller with great fondness; his natural air of authority was gently undermined by the pronounced limp, which gave him an appealing vulnerability. He had a wonderful way with words, regularly using antiquated phrases such as ‘by jove’ and ‘by jingo’, and referred to our schoolbooks as ‘goods and chattels’.

He was undoubtedly the best storyteller I had ever encountered (perhaps second to my dad who I still recall reading me
The Hobbit
when I was just four). At the end of each day, we would all put our heads down on our folded arms and listen to Mr Miller read from a variety of books which continue to exist in my memory because they were all read to us with such passion and vigour.
Tom’s Midnight Garden
,
The Little Captain and the Seven Towers
were delivered in daily, nail-biting instalments, and I attribute any understanding I have of the importance of drama in narrative storytelling to Mr Miller and what was clearly his and our favourite part of the school day.

The other significant recollection I have of him is far less salubrious but remains fixed in my memory as one of those occasions where laughter segues into great heaving sobs, indistinguishable from hysterical crying and emotionally not that dissimilar.

There are two more occasions on which I recall this happening during early childhood. The first occurred while watching
Morecambe and Wise
perform a sketch in which Eric, dressed as a Cossack, was repeatedly pulled off the front of the carriage he was driving by a disobedient horse, while Ernie sang a love song to a female guest. With each successive ‘giddy up’, Eric would leap out of shot and the level of my hysteria would increase, until I was helpless on the living room floor.

The other transpired as a result of a game I was playing with Sean Jeffries, which involved running towards one another in the dark at high speed, wearing vampire fangs, illuminated only by torchlight, presumably to try to elicit some sort of visceral scare. On the fourth or fifth iteration of the ‘my turn/your turn’ cycle, Sean came haring round the corner of his house and fell over on his arse. It doesn’t sound particularly funny in the recounting but it crippled me with laughter at the time. I folded up into a breathless heap on the floor for about five minutes and howled uncontrollably at the night sky. I wrote about the event in my schoolbook the following week, as part of an essay about my weekend activity, complete with a drawing of Sean, bearing his fangs, mid-skid.