This meant there was extra pressure on me to be sociable. I didn’t have a motto growing up, but had I done it would almost certainly have been ‘I’d love some friends, please’. But maybe in Latin.
I’d look on with longing as I saw my fellow children greedily enjoying their friendships. I remember being especially jealous of a lad called Graham Rigg. Graham was too cool for school (though he did still attend). He’d not only been the winner of the sports day slow bicycle race for three straight years, he was also the first boy in our class to properly kiss a girl. There’d been cheek pecks before, not to mention inter-sex handshakes, but he was the first kid in the playground to ‘go French’. None of the rest of us could figure out where he’d learnt to do this, but the general consensus was ‘from porno films’.
Eight-year-old Jennie Lancashire was the cock-a-hoop recipient, and she was rightly grateful.9 But when I look back I often think how fortunate it was that Graham was the same age as her, because if he’d been 20 years older he would have been up in Crown Court. And quite right too!
I bumped into him for the first time in decades the other week. It was at the returns desk in my local Homebase. We were both taking back kettles (him – faulty filament; me – didn’t like colour).
‘Still French-kissing eight-year-olds?’ I said, pointing an accusing finger at his potentially paedophilic mouth.
‘No,’ he replied.
‘Good,’ I said. Then for extra emphasis I said it again, but slightly more slowly. ‘Gooood.’
I’d made my point. Anyway, after that, talk naturally turned to motor vehicles and I was bowled over to learn that Graham had been the first person in Norwich to own a car with a catalytic converter. From playground lothario to environmental trailblazer in under 50 years. It quickly dawned on me that here was a man whose number I needed to take, but before I had the chance he’d collected his refund, mimed taking his hat off to me and disappeared off into the sunset/down the paint aisle.
Without love (parental or matey) to sustain me, I turned to myself, Alan Partridge, for comfort. Eager to keep myself occupied, I was from a young age deeply inquisitive. Learning was my friend; knowledge, my bosom buddy. Indeed, in my quest for self-education, I once put a bumblebee in the freezer. It was to see if I could freeze it and then bring it back to life. I couldn’t. Of course I couldn’t, it was dead.10 (I put it in a matchbox, like a biodegradable bee casket. Then just chucked it in the bin. I never told my mother.)
And so, this young, neglected but resourceful young man would guzzle down knowledge like other kids would guzzle down fizzy pop. Or full-cream milk. Either works. For a time, I was fixated with butterflies – an interest that my father did much to encourage. We’d go into the garden on a summer’s evening and when we saw the gentle flitter-flutter of a butterfly, he’d smash it to the ground with his tennis racket.
‘Fifteen love!’ he’d roar. Either that or some other tennis-related phrase. (‘Advantage, Dad’ was my favourite.) ‘You know what you need to do now, Alan,’ he’d continue.
‘Yes, father. I’m to collect the remains, piece them back together and do my utmost to identify the genus.’
Sometimes I could actually do it too, but more often than not (particularly when Dad used his textbook backhand slice), you would have needed dental records to identify the dead. Still, world-class interactive learning.
But don’t be deceived by this seemingly intimate tale of fatherliness. (In fact, I probably shouldn’t even have put that bit in.) No, above all else, overriding everything, was the dark heart at the core of my parents’ parenting which meant that, as I think I’ve said, my home life was one of neglect and sadness.
Mother was cold, distant. After school, between the ages of 13 and 14, I would routinely have to let myself into the house, where I’d be on my own, unfended for, for a minimum of 45 minutes, before she came home from working in a shoe shop. She’d console me by gifting me the latest shoe-cleaning merchandise, and to this day I’ve always had an affection for shoe trees and shoe horns.11
And then there was Father. Like most men of his generation he’d returned from war a changed man. He signed up on the day of his 17th birthday. ‘Mum,’ he’d said chirpily, ‘I’m off to save a Jew or two.’
It was April 1943 and he’d had quite enough of the idiots with the swastikas (and they were idiots). I remember asking him once over breakfast what it had been like. But his eyes glazed over and he just took another bite of his boiled egg. It was a bite that seemed to say, ‘Son, I don’t want to talk about war, because I’ve seen soldiers decapitated like in Saving Private Ryan.’
‘The only soldiers I want to talk about are the ones I dip in my boiled egg, which coincidentally has also been decapitated!’ his next bite seemed to add. This was typical of my dad – or would have been if he’d said it – because he’d often have dark thoughts rounded off with a little joke.
He wasn’t an easy man, though. Mum said he came back from the war with a rage that never went away. She said he was still just very angry with Mr Hitler. Yet it was me that suffered the consequences. Let’s just say Poppa had a hand like a leather shovel.
What made it all the more galling was that it wasn’t even me that had carried out the Final Solution. The closest I’d ever got to the extermination of the Jewish race was teasing Jon Malick about his big nose. But (a) I didn’t even know he was Jewish. And (b) it was pretty massive. You could have hung your washing off it. They say your nose is one of the few things that keeps growing throughout your life. Jon will now be 56. Good god.
The only thing that softened the blow (metaphor) was that I was at least being beaten with a degree of excellence. My father was a naturally gifted corporal punisher. The quality of the blows was always the same, whether administering them with his right hand or his left, whether he was alone or had Mum screaming at him to stop, whether we were in the privacy of the home or out at a charity treasure hunt organised by Round Table.
I couldn’t wait for the day when I was big enough to turn round and thump him in the tummy or set fire to an Airfix Messerschmitt and put it behind his bedroom door so he’d be intoxicated by the burning plastic.
You see, it wasn’t just physical abuse. The torment was sometimes psychological. I still bear mental scars from him trimming our privet hedge and then making me go and collect the cuttings in the rain. Well, I’ve got a saying: ‘Be careful what you do, because some day something similar might happen to you.’
And you know what? It did, because financial difficulties in later life meant he ended up as a casual labourer in his 60s. I allowed myself a wry smile at that. You may think it’s cold of me to be glad of his occupational misfortune just because he had me collecting privets, but let me tell you this: he made me do it four times, in as many years. On another occasion, he made me clear out the garage on a sunny day.
But I never have turned round and thumped him in the tummy or set fire to an Airfix Messerschmitt before putting it behind his bedroom door so he’d be intoxicated by the burning plastic. Why? Well, I guess resentment fades with time. Also he’s now dead. And the last thing I’ve got time to do is exhume, and subsequently duff up, the cadaver of a loved one. There’d be a heck of a lot of paperwork, for one. Plus I really need to take the car in for a service. Must do that next week.12
‘Ah, but at least your parents didn’t split up,’ you might be crowing. ‘You’re lucky in that respect, Alan!’