Dad expanded his empire and purchased a bankrupt petrol station. It was a huge property, an old tram garage with four ancient petrol pumps, no canopy, and workshops full of caked oil and dirt half an inch thick adhering to 50-year-old bricks. The motor trade started to dominate our lives. I pumped petrol in between falling off scaffolding (repurposing buildings), and polished cars and scrubbed wheels with wire wool until my fingers turned blue in winter. I washed windscreens, checked tyres and watched the growing number of cars coming and going as sales picked up.
Dad was an encyclopaedia of motor-car components. He was a natural engineer and would go straight to the heart of the problem. His diagnosis was seldom wrong. He could recount the provenance of the exhaust system of the Fiat whatever-it-was, and why it was superior to the gizmo of the Ford, but anyway, both of them were actually designed by an unknown Hungarian genius. That sort of thing. Get him started, it could go on for hours.
We sold up the hotel as he acquired the dealership for Lancia motor cars, and did rather well until they produced one that rusted faster than you could drive it. I expect money must have been made on the house transactions because there was a property boom, and a house was still an achievable objective for a working family. At one point we made the mistake of selling before we had anywhere else to live. It must have been a very good deal.
In the end we moved back into a terraced house only a hundred yards up from the hotel we’d vacated a year or so earlier. Some people are addicted to crack. We were addicted to moving house.
In the midst of all this I was relocated to a hothouse environment. I was being spirited away from the evil influence of mashed potato, spit and being straight-armed by the locals.
I was on my way to a private school: Birkdale preparatory school, alma mater of, among others, Michael Palin of Monty Python fame. It was one of the strangest, most eccentric educational institutions I have ever encountered and actually, in the end, I quite enjoyed it. I say in the end because in the beginning the bullying was fairly intense. I use the term ‘fairly intense’ only in comparison with what came later, at boarding school.
Bullying happens because weak people need to prop up their ego by beating up or humiliating others. Of course, if you are a new arrival, or just different, you become a prime target. I ticked all the boxes. Break time was the worst, up against the dustbins with 12 kids hitting you, watched over by a female teacher, whom I assume must have got some kind of power trip from not stopping it. In remembrance of both grandfathers I always refused to submit. The odds were ridiculous, but I still fought back. I wasn’t going away.
After a year or so it calmed down, and a year after that it was as if nothing had happened and my very own self was assimilated into the group mind – or so they thought.
I took refuge in books, the library, writing and drama. The angelic wings of yore came back to haunt me, and I got my first namecheck in a review of a school play in the Sheffield Star, no less.
‘Mole, besmudged of face, played by Paul Dickinson.’ (Bruce, of course, is my middle name, but then you knew that.)
I was a bit disappointed that they omitted to mention that I got a good, proper laugh from the audience. Early lessons in comic timing during our school production of The Wind in the Willows also included dropping my wooden sword during a pregnant pause, which corpsed the stalls, and delivering the correct line ‘I say Ratty, this chicken is delicious’ while clearly eating a lemon tart.
Further productions followed and I was sold on the stage, though, truthfully, actors seemed to take it awfully seriously.
Lessons proceeded normally. In other words, I don’t remember a thing, except that the Merino sheep has a spectacular coat, and a rather splendid view of Tolkien from my history teacher, Mr Quiney: ‘One bloody feast after another, a long dreary walk, a battle and some rubbish songs.’ I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when I was 12. Entertaining, but he had a point.
For those wishing to learn French there was Mr White. But Mr White was only interested in playing with his vast train set, which occupied half of the top floor. French lessons consisted of watching the OO-gauge Flying Scotsman whizzing round for 20 minutes.
Classes were streamed in sets A, B, C or D, from the most brilliant to the severely challenged or just plain bored. I yo-yoed from one set to another. I was always just plain bored, but was bribed to do well by the promise of a bike with racing handlebars should I leap up the pecking order.
Towards the end of my time I found myself in a class with only eight people, and we didn’t have lessons as such. We sat around, talked, argued, discussed, wrote things because we wanted to, and played practical jokes that tried to be interesting rather than just cruel. Teachers came and we spoke as equals. It was extraordinary. It felt like my brain was popping with ideas, like popcorn in a pan. Delightful.
Of course, there was a reason. The aim of this whole process was to take a fairly stiff set of exams that took a whole week in order to get into the highly competitive boarding-school system from age 12 or 13 to 18.
Big boys’ stuff.
School wasn’t the only place to get an education, however. I learnt to ride a bike, and hurtled around the neighbourhood. I had a chemistry set, which stubbornly refused to make anything of any entertainment value, and my dad taught me to play chess. We played frequently, until one day I beat him, and then we stopped.
On holidays in Great Yarmouth I spent my time surrounded by zinc buckets full of pennies. The expression ‘bucketloads of money’ was simply work in progress for an amusement arcade on the sea front. It was owned by my cousin Russell’s parents.
Every trip to Great Yarmouth ended up in the flat above the amusement arcade. It was furnished with questionable coffee tables supported by Nubian-slave statues, and a carpet that was more like a white hairy sea of synthetic tendrils that looked like it would eat you if it didn’t like your shoes. There was small talk, and then I was presented with the cast-offs from my cousins: hideous suede-fronted cardigans and other monstrosities designed to make a 10-year-old look like 50 years old.
Buoyancy was a family trait. In order to learn not to drown, my father had simply been thrown in the Norfolk Broads. I learnt to swim under his supervision, but in not quite as abusive a fashion. Somewhere, lurking in the bottom of a mouldy suitcase, is my certificate from Heeley Baths, Sheffield, listing that I, on that day, swam 10 yards in approved style. After ingesting enough chlorine to blind a First World War battalion, I squinted pink-eyed from the sunlight, relieved that the ordeal was over. My dad swam like a fish. He would swim three miles in the ocean as a boy. I, on the other hand, have always regarded swimming as thoroughly hazardous. It is merely preventative drowning. I am one of nature’s sinkers. ‘Relax,’ cry the floaters, but sadly my feet go the way of gravity and the rest follows suit.
Before we venture through the hallowed portals of an English public school, there are a few more pieces of the jigsaw to throw on the table.
I was reasonably solitary. I wasn’t interested in sport. I spent long afternoons at the weekend in the public library, browsing and daydreaming. I had discovered wargaming, and my evenings were spent researching the accuracy of the Brown Bess musket and the tactics of the infantry square, and painting my white-metal Scots Highlanders, shortly to be unleashed on an unsuspecting Napoleon.
My uncle Stewart, a teacher, had been a county table-tennis champion, so, for Christmas, a rather fine table-tennis table appeared. Dad and his brothers batted away and argued over who had won, then went off to the pub. I immediately organised the Battle of Waterloo to be refought on it the next day. It was green and it was flat – perfect. It was one of many small events that caused my father to regard me somewhat strangely, as if subverting a table-tennis table was somehow unmanly.
I had developed a wonderful set of spots as I approached the day I would leave home and take up residence for the next four years at Oundle School