Tim, a friend at school, and his elder brother Nick had a very enthusiastic father. He drove a massive Cadillac and had a huge trailer, in which was a miniature racing team for his sons. As far as I could gather, he owned a nightclub and drank a great deal of barley wine.
The karts were 100cc rotary valve, and they were very fast. I had never even turned a wheel before, but I just got in the seat, got my bump start and hurtled off towards the first corner down the long straight at Lindholme, the former RAF base.
I turned the wheel, did a 360-degree spin and stalled the engine. I did the same thing at just about every corner round the circuit before I got back to the trailer, followed by two very sweaty brothers gasping their last after chasing me round the circuit and restarting me half-a-dozen times.
We debriefed. Clearly I needed more information as to what was going on.
By the end of the day I thought I was flying: foot flat to the floor, down the straight, braking as hard and as late as I dared, the adrenalin shooting through my hands and heart. The truth is, I probably just about made it round without spinning off, but bugger that, steam engine driver, fighter pilot and astronaut – add racing-car driver to the list.
Before we go to boarding school, with all that entails, can I just have a word about religion? Something I experienced, and experimented with and had experimented upon me at four, too early an age. The outcome, though, was totally unexpected, and if God ever moved in a mysterious way, here was proof positive.
I don’t recall my baptism, but apparently I somehow managed to ingest quite a quantity of holy water. I could have drowned in the font. I am not sure that swallowing God’s special sauce caused any sort of aura to appear, but it might have been an influence on my early interest in angel wings.
School had the usual harvest festival and a bit of dreary carol singing, but it was only when I arrived at Birkdale that I was exposed to evangelical religion, bible black and fighting Satan on all fronts.
There was a cabal of zealous teachers and, by chance or design, they were the same teachers that ran school expeditions, including one to Fort William in Scotland. It consisted of 10 days’ camping, playing robust semi-military games, climbing mountains, bridging rivers, leaping from tree to tree (‘The Lumberjack Song’, anyone?) and religious brainwashing. Think Bear Grylls with no possibility of escape.
There were prayers and lectures, and every evening there was a group assembly in which 10-year-olds were encouraged to stand up and identify sins, and would be rewarded for their folly by rapturous praise, hugs and applause. I stood up and identified a fly on the wall, which was clearly a servant of Satan, because it had been distracting me from the balderdash being spouted by the part-time messiahs and full-time school teachers.
With no sense of irony at the age of 10, I was welcomed into the fold, and told that I was now evangelised. My purpose in life was to go and convert people to Christ.
Well, being a mission-oriented sort of chap, I sallied forth into the town and set about converting a couple of Highland girls by handing them a leaflet and inviting them to the campsite for a fun evangelical evening of happy-clappy hymns accompanied by bad guitar-playing and Aran sweaters.
‘Fuck off, you twat,’ was the robust response.
At home in Sheffield I was enrolled in the Christian Union, where I wore a little badge and was encouraged to read The Screwtape Letters and lots of other rather less inventive tracts, some of which covered subjects like masturbation and marriage. Confused, I thought, Did they go hand in hand?
My parents were a bit bemused, having seldom been near a church since I half-swallowed one when I was nine months old. However, they tolerated it on the basis that it seemed harmless enough and gave me something to do on Sunday mornings.
Not too long after this, hormones kicked in, and I began to look at girls in a rather different light. I no longer wanted only to convert them; there was something more that you could diddle about with. I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
My school friend Tim was discussing the subject of exactly where to put fingers. Incredibly, it was the only time anybody had spoken about sex thus far, other than being told it was, by and large, sinful, except for making babies. Further in-depth enquiries about what this fairly sexually advanced chap got up to revealed that he did something on his own time involving a sock and his pyjamas.
‘Then what happens?’ I asked, trying to picture the scene.
So he told me.
‘Really?’ This was all news to me. Well, God hates a coward, as the expression goes, and my monastic existence turned into an onanistic one. As for Sunday school, given a choice between wanking yourself silly and Christian Union, there was a clear winner. It was masturbation and libraries that saved my soul from the narrow-minded proselytising and a stifling, evangelical straitjacket, and thank God for that.
But I never got around to telling you the good bit about God and his mysterious ways.
The official custodian of our spiritual health at Birkdale was the Reverend B.S. Sharp, at the time the vicar of Gleadless at the splendidly dark Victorian Millstone Grit church. Unlike the part-time evangelical types, ‘Batty’, as his nickname suggested, was more than a little eccentric, and he was stone deaf. As reverends go, he was regarded as being harmless.
Batty would conduct hymn practice, and the entire school would traipse into his church and commence singing while he walked up and down the aisle waving his arms about, seemingly oblivious to the out-of-time, out-of-tune and smirking schoolboys (no girls, of course). As he passed me – I was standing at the end of a pew – singing, or rather mumbling, he paused; he cocked his head, rather like a parrot, and peered round at me. I suspect he was positioning his good ear.
‘Sing up, lad,’ he said.
So I sang a bit louder. He brought his entire face close to my mouth. I realised he was missing a lot of teeth and I tried hard not to laugh.
‘Sing up, lad.’
Well, I like a challenge, so I yelled at the top of my lungs, and once I started I didn’t stop. The embarrassment left me and I carried on to the end of whatever verse it was in whatever hymn. I confess that it felt wonderful – not that I would admit it at the time.
He stood up and waved his arms about a bit more, then leaned back over to me.
‘You have a very fine voice, boy,’ he said. And then he strode off down the aisle and I never saw him again.
Like I say, nothing in childhood is ever wasted, and if there is a God, he or she is full of mischief.
Sadly, the choirmaster at Oundle didn’t share Batty’s enthusiasm for my dulcet tones. It became clear that singing, as in singing in church, was very undesirable, although to describe the school chapel as a church would be to do it an injustice.
Oundle’s chapel had pretensions of being a cathedral at the very least. It had a choir and the usual, and possibly verifiable, rumours about choirboys and choirmasters. The school choir dressed in frocks and had their free time spirited away from them in fruitless praising of the ineffable one until their voices broke.
There was a singing test, which was compulsory. I was very proud to say that I failed in spectacular fashion. Every note that was white on a keyboard was black when I returned the favour. I was given a chit – a piece of paper – to deliver to my housemaster. On it was written: ‘Dickinson – Sidney House, NON-SINGER’.