Jeff wasn’t a real bully, he was a hilarious parody of one. A comic actor. He dressed like a bovver boy in his Crombie coat, sharply creased two-tone trousers and blood-red knee-length boots with bright yellow laces. But he wasn’t violent. The closest to fighting Jeff ever got was tripping up first years at break time. There he was, all six foot of him, flicking his toes gracefully to unbalance these tiny little children who were running around his feet. It was cruel but it was hilarious because he did it with such style and panache. There were plenty of real bullies at Heaton, or ‘hards’ as they preferred to be known. Each had their own hardness rating. The system was a bit like conkers, but instead of smashing someone’s conker to improve your own conker’s rating, you had to ‘kick someone’s fucking heed in’ in order to acquire their points. Hard kids would swagger around the school like gunfighters in a Spaghetti Western, constantly in search of a showdown. The toilet was their saloon where they all hung out, smoking tabs, gambling and discussing the latest hardness rankings. Between the ages of eleven and sixteen I developed phenomenal bladder control, but it wasn’t always possible to avoid trouble. Sometimes if you strayed too far from your pack of friends you’d be picked off by a stray bully and a confrontation would ensue. One second-division hard case called Brian had a very original technique of picking a fight. He’d stand in front of you and block your path by doing an impression of Alvin Stardust singing ‘My Coo-Ca-Choo’. This would involve twisting and turning his fist slowly, right under your nose, in an Alvin Stardust leather glove style, which was strangely hypnotic as his arm looked a bit like a snake slowly rising from a basket. Then at various points in the song – on the words ‘Coo’ and ‘Choo’ I seem to recall – he would punch you lightly on the chin, hoping you would retaliate. He tried it once on me after cornering me above the bicycle sheds, but after a few moments it must have dawned on him how ridiculous he looked, so he made some mumbled excuse and left.
A far more conventional way to start a fight was for a bully to say, ‘Are you lookin’ at me?’ But this gradually became less effective as victims developed clever responses, like ‘No’. You had to watch your eye-line very carefully if you were in the presence of potential aggressors. Any look adjudged to be ‘funny’ could be punishable by a severe kicking. You also had to make sure there was nothing the matter with you. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ they’d ask aggressively. ‘Nothing,’ you’d assure them. Occasionally they’d up the ante by asking the rather ridiculous question, ‘Are you calling me a puff?’ despite the fact you hadn’t said a word. ‘No,’ you’d say. This inane line of questioning would go on and on until your interrogator finally felt he’d received sufficient provocation to hit you, or got bored and let you off with a warning. Over the years the nature of bullying changed as the hard kids developed more sophisticated opening gambits. ‘Do you fancy wor lass?’ for example. This was check, in one move, as the answer ‘Yes’ would be clear justification to hit you, while the answer ‘No’ could be followed up with, ‘Why not like? Is there something the matter with her?’ Checkmate.
My dad worked as an oil salesman and brought home piles of Esso Blue calling cards and invoice pads which I’d turn over and use as drawing material. In the privacy of my bedroom I did a series of pictures featuring ugly monsters – globular piles of fat with tiny arms and big faces – being chopped up on bacon slicers and mutilated in similarly macabre ways. I amassed dozens of these drawings, called them my ‘mut cartoons’, and kept them neatly filed away in a drawer in my bedroom. I never showed them to anyone but Jim. ‘What if somebody saw them?’ he once asked. It was a worrying thought.
Jim studied art O-level at school but I dropped the subject as fast as I possibly could. The art teachers, who both had beards and suede shoes, would scribble a title for a painting on the blackboard and then fuck off out of the room. You wouldn’t see them again until the end of the lesson. In their absence the art class would deteriorate into a massive paint fight and I’d usually spend the last ten minutes or so crouched under my desk sheltering from flying paint. The following week you’d turn up and the title for the painting would still be the same. The idle bastards hadn’t even bothered to think up a new one. It was strange to think that at the same school twenty-five years earlier my mum had produced the most wonderful watercolours, but in her day Heaton had been a grammar school where teachers followed antiquated teaching practices, like wearing capes and mortar boards, caning pupils for misbehaviour, and remaining in the classroom during lessons. I used my other lessons for art practice, scribbling away in the back of my exercise books instead of paying attention to teachers. By 1976 my ‘mut’ drawings had evolved into something that I deemed suitable for a wider audience. Using my dad’s invoice pads, ballpoint pens and coloured pencils, I put together a series of comic books which began circulating around the classroom at school. These starred my old friend Scottie as a dour and boring schoolboy who could transform himself into a caped superhero. Whenever his pals were being bullied the Fat Crusader would appear on the scene, rounding up the troublemakers, cutting them up on bacon slicers or sharpening their heads with giant pencil sharpeners. It was still a tad on the morbid side, but the Fat Crusader books became very popular at school. Each little booklet would first circulate around my classroom and then around neighbouring classes. As soon as I finished one, people would start asking for another, and I got requests from people wanting to appear in the stories. I did thirteen Fat Crusader books in all, each one numbered of course, with titles like The Fat Crusader Takes the Sunderland, The Teds Are in Town and, as a Christmas Special, The Fat Crusader versus the Staff Aggro. That one got as far as the staffroom and was never seen again.
The Fat Crusader
While I was drawing the Fat Crusader Jim was leaving school, aged sixteen, and getting himself a ‘scheme’ job in an architect’s drawing office. I stayed on into the sixth form studying Geography, Biology and Woodwork A-levels. The people around me wanted to be mountaineers, caterers, doctors, dentists, nurses and quantity surveyors, but I hadn’t got a fucking clue what I wanted to do. At my first careers interview I said I wanted to be a train driver. The careers adviser didn’t look too happy and came up with a story about needing three A-levels, including Maths and Physics, and a degree in Engineering, to drive trains. I’d seen plenty of train drivers in my time, and none of them looked like engineering graduates to me. After that I lowered my sights a little. In fact I lowered them about as far as they would go and said I wanted to be a geography teacher. The reasoning behind this hugely important career decision was quite simple. I like drawing maps. Unfortunately I’d never heard of cartography at the time, and neither had my careers adviser, so I was duly lined up to go to Aston or Loughborough University and do a degree in Geography. Fortunately my A-level results weren’t good enough. I hadn’t understood a single word in Biology from day one, and although Woodwork was my best subject I failed the exam on a technicality (using panel pins to hold a panel in place). So I left school in 1978, aged eighteen, with six O-levels, a Geography A-level and a perfectly good but technically incorrect panel desk.
Jim’s work experience job had run out by now so we were both on the dole and spent the summer of 1978 hanging out, playing pool and drawing cartoons. By now I’d got a set of Rotring pens for Christmas and my drawing had been transformed. I undertook my first commercial venture, doing line drawings of local tourist attractions such as Bamburgh Castle and the Tyne Bridge, and selling framed prints to tourists. A sixth-form colleague called Baz was now working behind the bar in a city centre hotel and we’d developed a neat little scam. I drew the pictures and got them printed and framed, and Baz talked drunken Norwegians into buying them for £15 each as he plied them with alcohol. It all went well until Baz left the hotel and a drunken Scottish night porter fucked off with all my money.
Having left school I no longer had an audience for my cartoons, so in July 1978 I suggested Jim and I print a few cartoons in a magazine and sell it to people we knew in the pub. I say ‘magazine’. . . The Daily Pie was actually a single sheet of paper, photocopied on one side only. The miniature cartoons included Tommy’s Birthday, a five-frame strip in which a young boy tries to blow out the candles on his birthday